Why are most Jews Democrats?

[ag]

There's a difference between Orthodox Jews and what NY Jew is talking about, who are called Hasids or Haredi (sometimes "ultra-Orthodox" but that's kind of a silly term.) These are the those guys in the beards and black hats who live in their own segregated communes, speak Yiddish or Hebrew at home and aren't very integrated into society at all. Standard Orthodox are Jews that might be serious about keeping fast days and kosher laws and might even be socially conservative, but are still fairly integrated into society, don't dress any different than most people (at least out of synagogue) and don't vote in bloc 90+% for the candidate their rabbi tells them to. Joe Lieberman is actually one of these Orthodox. The types NY Jew is always talking about I'd be surprised if they were much more than 1% of the American Jewish population.

You are, sort of, right on everything, except the last - they are A LOT more than 1% of US Jewish population - and growing fast. NY City has a lot of them, as do certain other parts of the country - in Rockland county there are whole communities, where 2nd and 3rd generation US Jews speak English haltingly and with a heavy Yiddish accent. That you don't see them as much is because they are, normally, content to stay within their own ghettos. But they are quite numerous there.

Though, of course, you should not confuse the Hassid and the Haredi - these are not synonims. Well, Hassids are Haredi, but the other way around is not true.

The Haredi is a general lable for the ultra-Orthodox, but these are highly diverse. There are a bunch of Hassidic movements, each following a historical rabbincial dynasty (or a memory of a great rabbi, as the case may be w/ the Bratslaver and, these days, in part w/ the Lubavicher). Hassidim, of course, are heirs to a raidcal mystical movement that emerged in the 18th century, mostly in what's now Ukraine, Poland and Romania (the "Lithuanian"-origin Lubavicher are an exception - they are, historically, from what's now Belarus) , and for decades was considered quit UNorthodox.  There are quite a few Lithuanian yeshivas, which follow the anti-Hassidic Orthodox "misnaged" tradition. There are the Haredi Sephardic and other Oriental communities, that have their own distinct traditions. It cannot be assumed that on every given issue even the Bobover, Satmar and Lubavicher hassids would be in agreement between themselves - though, of course, on most "All-American" issues they are pretty much the same sort of the "Amish". But, to the extent there is a block voting, it is not an "all-Haredi" block vote - it is a matter of a given rabbi or a given Hassid community coordinating w/ the others.

[ag]

There are several reasons why Jews are historically Dem. But these two are the most important, in my view:

1. Most US Jews are heirs to the secular tradition that emerged w/ the Jewish enlightenment in the 19th century Europe and flourished between the World Wars in and around Poland. When this was transplanted to the US soil, it was far to the left of the American mainstream. In the 1950s New York Jewish community being a "rightwinger" meant being a socialist - proper leftwingers were communist (or, may be, even card-carying Communist) ) Even when the kids of the earstwhile "right-" and "left-wingers" moderated their views, they stayed, generally, within the truly and sincerely leftwing political discourse. Even a moderate Republican, such as Giuliani, in this discourse is frequently described as a "fascist" - and a good Jew simply doesn't vote for a fascist. Mainstream Republicans are simply too much in league w/ the Devil even to be considered.

2. Of course, American Jews have always been archetypal outsiders in a Christian nation. Even today, they are the largest community in the US that does not claim to be Christian. This has always made them a thorn in the eyes of the mainstream. And, of course, the Democratic Party has always had an outsider wing. To put it bluntly, one reason the Jews have always voted Dem are the BigSkyBobs of this world - as long as there are a lot of people around who believe that if you don't celebrate Christmas you are somehow evil, Jews have every reason to stay w/ the outsider party.  

[ag]

The ultra-Orthodox are very unlikely to be responsible for most Jewish kids in the "NY metro". At least, if we think of the NY metro as the Tri-State area, which includes the Long Island and big chunks of New Jersey and Connecticut. With certain exceptions (e.g., Rockland), most suburban Jews are secular (even if they are Orthodox). Yes, they do have fewer kids, on average, but there are simply much too many of them.

Of course, if one starts to be more rigorous in the definition of who's a Jew, this might be viewed differently. There is quite a bit of intermarriage, many kids in secular families are not Halakhikally Jewish, so, by defining the Jewish community sufficiently narrowly, you might make the ultras the majority.

However, there is a reason why doing this is not very consistent w/ asking for any sort of government protection. If you go to the government, you have to follow the governmental definition of who's a Jew, whatever it might be. Halakha is NOT part of the US law - not any more than its Muslim equivalent, the Sharia (or, for that matter, than the cannons of the Catholic Church). I remember that case in the UK, when a government-supported Jewish school was forced to accept as a Jew somebody, who was not Jewish by the Halakhic tradition. That's what happens if you breach the wall between the Church and State: the Church (or, for that matter, the Synagogue) looses the ability to apply its own doctrine. It's a very dangerous path, which, if I were a believer (still more so, if I were a believer of a minority faith), I would have been very much afraid to take.   

[ag]

They wouldn't necessarily, though. I don't see where a brace of Orthodox Jewish immigrants from, say, the Pinsk Marshes (where my ancestors on that side came from) a hundred years ago would be more 'conservative' on what would now or then be considered 'social issues' than most other groups in America, immigrant or otherwise, at that time.

If we magically brought back everyone who's able to vote in America's today's ancestors who were voting age in 1850 I doubt there would be more 1 issue voters then the 1850 Eastern European Jewish vote.

If we were to do the same based on the time of the first vote in the United States, it would have been the opposite. You chose the date before the massive secular cultural explosion that created modern secular Jewry. If you really want to base yourself on 1850 and isisted on people voting as their ancestor then, most Jews would simply not have voted in a goyisher election. Back at the time they would have considered it treason to go to a state-sponsored rabbinical academy to study Torah under the goyishe-approved teachers.

[ag]

They wouldn't necessarily, though. I don't see where a brace of Orthodox Jewish immigrants from, say, the Pinsk Marshes (where my ancestors on that side came from) a hundred years ago would be more 'conservative' on what would now or then be considered 'social issues' than most other groups in America, immigrant or otherwise, at that time.

If we magically brought back everyone who's able to vote in America's today's ancestors who were voting age in 1850 I doubt there would be more 1 issue voters then the 1850 Eastern European Jewish vote.

If we were to do the same based on the time of the first vote in the United States, it would have been the opposite. You chose the date before the massive secular cultural explosion that created modern secular Jewry. If you really want to base yourself on 1850 and isisted on people voting as their ancestor then, most Jews would simply not have voted in a goyisher election. Back at the time they would have considered it treason to go to a state-sponsored rabbinical academy to study Torah under the goyishe-approved teachers.

actually most jews who came to this country from 1880-1900 were Orthodox it was their children that went off the deep end.  There is no reason to assume that 1850 jews wouldn't have voted in American elections.  (anybody who doesn't know that Brooklyn had many sefardiem's opinion on many things is worthless anyway)

Well, an opinion of anybody, who does not know that many Jews came to the United States long past 1900 on matters of US Jewry is even more worthless, my dearest Anti-American Jew (I believe that sobriquet fits you better - in the sense that you hate American Jews, not that you hate Americans or Jews ) ).

As for the Jews in 1850... Well, you seem to be truly unaware of the life of the Jews in Russian empire in the 1850s. Yes, European Jews had been the archetypal cultural separatists in Europe for a 1000 years. Compared to them today's Haredim or Amish in the US or ultra-conservative Arabs in Europe (or even in Saudi Arabia) are paragons of assimilationism into the general European culture. There would have been no Jews left in Europe otherwisem, our ancestors would have completely assimilated - that much I'd grant you.

However, that degree of cultural separatism has consequences .There is a reason those people did not migrate en masse during the 1850s (back then most Jewish migrants into the US were from the much more assimilated communities; they were German Jews, not Russian Jews, and they were economic, not cultural conservatives, if they were conservative at all). Most Russian Jews would have had trouble migrating. Many of them were completely out of the civilization around them - much more so than today's ultra-Orthodox. They had no common language with the surrounding population - they spoke neither Russian, nor Polish, nor Ukrainian, nor Lithuanian (I guess, they could get by w/ the German-speakers by speaking Yiddish). If one of them had a Jewish newspaper from Germany delivered, he was viewed as a dangerous radical. If Russia were to hold elections at the time (which, of course, was something completely impossible for reasons unrelated), they would not have been able to participate: they would not have been able to file for such an election, or read a ballot. In some places they would, probably, only learn that it was happening from that same German Jewish newspaper - the news would have traveled via Berlin (and the secular newspaper office there )

Now, of course, there were other Jews in Russia as well. But the bulk of those, whose offsrping would later migrate were that way - completely, utterly separated from the contemporary civilization, except through an occasional beating by a police officer and an extortion by the tax collector.  Without the initial secularization that started, albeit tentatively, back in Russia, they would not have gotten  to the coast, still less to America: they wouldn't have known how to board a train.

Of course, secularization did not necessarily mean abandonment of the (somewhat relaxed) Orthodoxy, but in many cases it did lead to it. And, of course, the resettlement across the ocean reinforced it. True, they might still arrive to Ellis island with a full beard, but that beard would be cut fairly short some time after arrival, and their children would never let it grow in the first place. And they would become not merely leftist, but radical leftist. As community representatives in San Francisco told a visiting Russian Jewish terrorist leader (Gershuni), "All Jews are ready for the Revolution" - this was not a mere figure of speach, but a true reflection of the sentiment in a substantial part of the Jewish community in the US.

But this secularization was continuing back in the old countries as well - that was the period of the great secular outburst in the Jewish community. The Nazis would later take care of that society so well, that it is hard to imagine today that it ever existed, but there was real secular Yiddishland back then, a non-Medieval Jewish world and a modern (non-Zionist) Jewish civilization. Remants of this civilization would also find its refuge across the ocean.

Where you are VERY WRONG, is in that the Jews moved left because they were clueless about the origins of the socialist concerns among them. Unlike you, they were back then very well aware what they were doing: they personally and deliberately struggled against the Orthodox barbarism. Some of them retained sentimental attachment to the old rituals and mores, albeit loyal more in their breach than in their execution; others (and there were many of them) sincerely and wholeheartedly hated and despised them. Some attached themselves to the new secular (often socialist) Yiddishkeit, which had grown from the abandonment of the Orthodoxy; others followed the Jewish Renaissance ideal of becoming Jewish citizens of America (or Poland, or Germany - Mendelssohn's old ideal of the "German citizens of the Mossaic faith" was more than a catchy slogan); still others went for the new Zionist (back then also mostly socialist) idea. Their political ideals commonly developed in the conscious opposition to the barbarism of the previous century. They became socialists and communists not because they forgot how their ancestors lived their lives - but because they remembered it all too well.

In any case, claimng that modern American Jewish political ideas should follow those of their ancestors from 1850 is like claiming that German Americans should follow the political ideas of their pre-Reformation ancestors from the 1500.

[ag]

Ok. Let's figure out what do we call Orthodox. Because there seems to be a HUGE confusion.

1. "Orthodox" may mean following the more traditional interpretation of Judaism. There is one sense in which most Jews in the world (though not in the US) are Orthodox - i.e., they are neither Conservative, Reform, or (god forbid ) ) Reconstructionist. This is, basically, what pretty much all Israeli Jews are (with a few well-defined exceptions) - they might not go to a synagogue, but the synagogue they don't go to is Orthodox, as they don't even think of the existence of the others. If, for any reason, they need a rabbinical ruling, they'd go to an Orthodox rabbi.

2. In the US it is more common for religious Jews to follow Conservative (this movement first surged in Germany already quite a long time ago) or a Reform interpretation of the faith. These are all those modernist Jews who have women for rabbis, etc. Obviously, these aren't Orthodox in any definition. On the other hand, some truly secular Jews (including many Russians) don't even much think in those terms - they don't care enough about religion to try to modernize it. In that sense they stay Orthodox - the only rabbis they'd recognize as such are the Orthodox (not that they care much about the rabbis in the first place).

3. Then there are the Modern Orthodox, of varying degree of Orthodoxy. These are the Joe Liebermans of this world - though there is quite a bit of variety among them, both in terms of religiousity and in terms of integration into the modern world. There are also some fairly Orthodox non-European communities, that are traditional, but still non-Haredi. This is what a lot of the Bukharans, Georgians, etc. are - I presume it's also true of many Iranians, though I don't know them that well. They are provincial, very culturally conservative, to a degree isolated in a small-town provincial way, they follow their rabbis, who are, most definitely Orthodox, but they don't isolate themselves from the outside world more deliberately than, say, Catholic migrants from small-town Poland would.

4. Finally there are the Haredim, whom I've talked about: Hassidim, non-Hassidic "Lithuanians" (they don't like the word "misnaged", I believe, but that's what they, historically, are ) ), some (not all) Sephardim and other Orientals (I prefer to keep the word "Serphard" for those, whose ancestors had been expelled from the Iberian peninsula; the rest, properly speaking, are Orientals). These are, basically, the Jewish Amish. Actually, given the numbers, I should, probably, say, the Amish are the Christian Haredim )

[ag]

since you seem to think you know what your talking about what would you call the jewish shtetel of teaneck?
how come you leave out oberlanders and Yekkis for example

Hey, who cares about the Hungarians ) You also could say I forgot the Tat-speaking "Mountain Jews" - I am sure, there is some community of them somewhere in NY area (I've only seen them in the old country, but NY has everything ) ).  And, yes, I'll fess up, I've never heard of the Yekkes (ok, I googled it now - seems like I've seen quite a few when I lived on Fort Washington, just never knew the name), nor do I care about Teaneck: you, probably, have to drive to get there, like you have to get to most Jersey sh**tholes, and I do not drive, so I never went West from Washington Heights.

Listen, I am not claiming to be a specialist on every obscure subset of the ultra-Orthodox community in NY, with which I am not associated in any way (nor would I want to) - not any more than you claim to be a specialist on every branch of Jewish socialism, of which you seem to know quite little (not that I am a great authority on that either ) ). I am, merely, a reasonably educated secular Russian Jew, who hasn't lived in NY in 10 years, who loves his Sholom Aleykhem and has read some other good books ) You know, I didn't know about Yekkes, and you, probably, don't know about Gershuni and what he did in the US - in my view, it's as much a gap in your Jewish education as not knowing about Yekkes is in mine ))

In any case, I wasn't writing the background stories for you - I am sure you have better knowledge of the "intra-ultra" intricacies than I would ever care to have. But we aren't the only ones talking here, and you weren't sharing any of this knowledge w/ the other posters here, which created confusion among the rest. So, I took it upon myself to elucidate a few points to our goyisher companions here, mostly so that everyone knows what means what. I was provoked by the post in which someone confused the Hassids and the Haredim - I never had any doubts that you were aware of the difference, but you chose not to correct the guy, and I did.  I would have more doubts about your knowledge of the secular Jewry - you seem to think it was just one big nasty error not worth learning about ) - but on the Ultra-Orthodox in today's New York I will happily acknowledge your intellectual supremacy ) It's just you seem to think of your knowledge as something esoteric, that you are unwilling to share, except in making bold but unclear statements that you hope nobody will ever be able to verify )

[ag]

One last point. 100% of Jews alive today (except, may be recent converts) descended from the Orthodox - there were no other Jews back 400 years ago (ok, let's forget the Karaites and other similar tangents, as they are not ancestors of the modern Jews). This also includes 100% of Socialist Jews today, or back in the 1930s. This is absolutely irrelevant to their views - as irrelevant as the observation that around year 1400 pretty much all other Europeans were Catholic or that the last pagans in Europe were the now uber-Catholic Lithuanians (they actually only converted around 1400). But that does not negate the fact, that later ancestors of most US Jews became secular (even if they formally remained Orthodox in some cases).  Nor does it negate the fact of an overwhelming popularity of left-wing ideas among, at least, Eastern European Jews in the US during the last century. Of course, the ultra-Orthodox were always there - locked in their self-established ghetto and their cultural barbarity. That Jews, both in the past and now (78% in 2010 voted for Obama, according to the only data there is), vote overwhelmingly for the Democratic party is NOT an error: it's a VERY conscious decision.

BTW, a disclaimer: As my ancestors never migrated to the US, I, actually, have no legacy of leftism, only of secularism. When I talk of American Jewish socialism I feel almost as much ironic sadness, as I feel when talking of the behatted Jewish Amish you seem to consider the only real Jews ))

[ag]

ag, if I haven't said this lately, you're a consistently fantastic poster.  Thanks for hanging around

I have to blush )

[ag]

They wouldn't necessarily, though. I don't see where a brace of Orthodox Jewish immigrants from, say, the Pinsk Marshes (where my ancestors on that side came from) a hundred years ago would be more 'conservative' on what would now or then be considered 'social issues' than most other groups in America, immigrant or otherwise, at that time.

If you look at Kinsey's report Orthodox jews were the least likley group to have homosexual relations and non Orthodox Jews (remember this was in the pre sexual revaluation days) were the least likley to have them then other non religious people.

Have you ever heard of the word "anachronism"? It's surprisingly reach in meaning. Google it.

[ag]

They wouldn't necessarily, though. I don't see where a brace of Orthodox Jewish immigrants from, say, the Pinsk Marshes (where my ancestors on that side came from) a hundred years ago would be more 'conservative' on what would now or then be considered 'social issues' than most other groups in America, immigrant or otherwise, at that time.

If you look at Kinsey's report Orthodox jews were the least likley group to have homosexual relations and non Orthodox Jews (remember this was in the pre sexual revaluation days) were the least likley to have them then other non religious people.

Have you ever heard of the word "anachronism"? It's surprisingly reach in meaning. Google it.

what's your point Judaism's been an "anachronism" for the past 2,300 years?

Judaism has varied a lot during the past 2,300 years - so, with some notable exceptions, it hasn't been that anachronistic (hey, Hasidim didn't even exist 400 years ago - it's very much an 18th century phenomenon).

My point has more to do w/ your reasoning.

[ag]

They wouldn't necessarily, though. I don't see where a brace of Orthodox Jewish immigrants from, say, the Pinsk Marshes (where my ancestors on that side came from) a hundred years ago would be more 'conservative' on what would now or then be considered 'social issues' than most other groups in America, immigrant or otherwise, at that time.

If you look at Kinsey's report Orthodox jews were the least likley group to have homosexual relations and non Orthodox Jews (remember this was in the pre sexual revaluation days) were the least likley to have them then other non religious people.

Have you ever heard of the word "anachronism"? It's surprisingly reach in meaning. Google it.

what's your point Judaism's been an "anachronism" for the past 2,300 years?

Judaism has varied a lot during the past 2,300 years - so, with some notable exceptions, it hasn't been that anachronistic (hey, Hasidim didn't even exist 400 years ago - it's very much an 18th century phenomenon).

My point has more to do w/ your reasoning.

the difference between a hasidic jew and and the avg Jew in Babylonia in 300 ACE is much smaller then the difference between the avg Orthodox Jew and the avg non Orthodox Jew today.  I doubt you could even know the reasons why Hasidiem were put in cherem with out looking it up.

Well, given how little we really know about life in Babylonia this is a very brave statement, based, primarily, on reconstruction of life in Babylonia from the present-day models )) Which brings me back to the idea of anachronism )

BTW, if you insist on using anachronistic arguments, you should recall that "traditional Jewish orthodox values" (circa 1800) involve what, according to the modern secular law, is pedophilia, child abuse and statutory rape. You are still arguing, these haven't changed? ))