…HOW did so many Jews become Liberals?

I would hazard the guess that they take their religous education as lightly as most Christians.

Great diary! Thanks!

best I have ever read on this sight. Thank-you.

I question all the time about all faiths. That God has given man the ability to think for himself and for man to turn that over to Government is insane! That is why the statists have worked so hard to remove Religion from the public square and to demean and debase EVERYONE’S God!

and has the staying power of Skinnerian conditioning with intermittent reinforcement.

The roots go back to the era of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe, the Askenazi component of the American Jewish community. (I’m not familiar with the Sephardim, except that they historically have little public visibility/participation in the political arena and thus tend to be ignored in political discussions of the Jewish community.)

Too long to go into in a comment, but through a combination of leftist ideology (e.g. the kibbutz movement), good intentions, guilt and projection, this dominant element of American Jewish community became allied with the Democratic party as the best guarantor of survival and prosperity against a Right that became imputed as being the antisemitic WASP Establishment that hated Jews.

This paragraph, of course, is woefully inadequate – but the take-home point is that this aversion to Republicans and conservatism is not intellectual or rational but rather a gut-level, deeply emotional response that is self-reinforcing within the community – and we know that such conditioning is EXTREMELY difficult to break in the face of intermittent reinforcement.

As the Exodus story tells us, it’s ultimately going to be up to the new generation to break free of this conditioning – and it’s going to take a dramatic shock, I’m afraid, to start the unraveling of the conditioning. Plus a critical mass of Jewish Conservativesso that conservatives are
not viewed as the Other = hostile outsiders. Conservatives are not trusted by instinct, and that is difficult to overcome

I’m guessing it’s not all that ok, because most of my relatives and many of my Jewish friends haven’t talked to me in awhile.

My parents are lifelong Democrats, but there’s no way, not a chance in a billion, that they’d have voted ‘D’ in ’08. My Dad, God bless the man, hit hard with Dementia, saw something wrong from the git-go with our Dictator In Training Pants and my Mom, on first sight of Teh Won, said he was evil.

I will say one thing about all of my Jewish friends….they know Biblical history better than anyone. It is apparent that they are taught this from an early age. That being said, it baffles me that they know so little about modern history. If Jewish people were indeed well versed on modern history, they would only look at the Obama camp and see visions of a man who rose to power in Germany by using many of the same political tactics the Obama camp is employing. If I were a Jewish man and had relatives that experienced the horrors of WW2 Germany, I’d be afraid….very afraid…of what I am witnessing in American politics today. The liberals are no less than facists, and we are all no less than their next victims.

Not Jewish, but been wondering, waiting, hoping when the American Jewish electorate and my socially conservative friends therein, going to start seeing & dealing with the cold, hard reality of this man and his backers. Obama and his crew are, in calculating fashion and from a cruel distance, dismantling the State of Israel about as fast as they can do it. There is no other way to put it for what is going on before our eyes.

And BHO ain’t no Harry S Truman, no way. Spread the word.

You can also get yourself educated and licensed (if necessary) and own a firearm. What you’ll find, if you really look, is that it’s not a silly thing or a crazy thing or an evil thing, or a hick thing, or a paleolithic thing, or any other thing — it’s an intelligent thing and an act of self-preservation. I can help if you’re interested — I live in one of the most restrictive states in the US (Massachusetts) and I have quite a bit of life experience working (in New Jersey) with Jews who also own guns. I was captain of my high school rifle team and several of my teammates and still best friends after all these years are Jewish men and women.

And believe me, they’re always a lot of fun to be with at the range, and in my experience they also shoot very well.

I own one of these, and I can tell you that it works really, really well. Made in Israel, and it’s the best magazine loader I would ever want to have.

In this position because I believe — as strange as it may sound, having cascaded through the entire political spectrum in my lifetime personally — that liberals should want their 2nd Amendment rights defended vigorously, also.

I tell my liberal friends: “You can try to make the State as big as you want, but when you really have to defend yourself, do you really believe it will be there for you? It never has been so far. In fact just the opposite.”

There seems to be a disconnect here.
Although I am a conservative, I am not a Jew.

In Israel, I am told, there are a lot of Jew, and many are ‘conservative.’

More think American ‘liberal’ Jews are in need of an oil change, so to speak…

ESPECIALLY after what they back this last election!!!

For whatever reason, Jews seem to gravitate towards supporting economically liberal policies. The kibbutzim project h as already been mentioned, but even today, the state of Israel is easily the least free (economically speaking) of the Western states. (Mind you, that’s still better than any of the surrounding Arab states.)

Jews have not migrated to the GOP and conservatism is fear of conservative Christians. I don’t know why, but there appears to be just a great deal of fear and paranoia among Jews I know towards conservative Christians in politics.

It might have made sense why Jews were Dems 40 years ago. It doesn’t today.