Italians and Jews in NY/NJ
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  Italians and Jews in NY/NJ
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Author Topic: Italians and Jews in NY/NJ  (Read 3511 times)
King of Kensington
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« on: November 10, 2015, 11:50:16 AM »

I'm guessing that the Italian vote went around 60/40 R and the Jewish vote 60/40 D in these two states in the last presidential election.

Less Democratic than in the US as a whole.  Larger Orthodox/traditional/immigrant Jewish populations and it seems like less assimilated Italian American voters (more common in the NYC metro than anywhere else) are also more Republican.
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RINO Tom
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« Reply #1 on: November 10, 2015, 01:53:11 PM »

Why do you think LESS assimilated Italian-Americans are more Republican?  If anything, I'd assume the opposite.
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Sprouts Farmers Market ✘
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« Reply #2 on: November 10, 2015, 02:14:25 PM »

Why do you think LESS assimilated Italian-Americans are more Republican?  If anything, I'd assume the opposite.

Tbh, I think op is on to something with that, but the only support I have is anecdotal evidence. Small-time entrepreneurs wishing to be left alone?
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King of Kensington
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« Reply #3 on: November 10, 2015, 04:05:04 PM »
« Edited: November 10, 2015, 05:09:48 PM by King of Kensington »

Why do you think LESS assimilated Italian-Americans are more Republican?  If anything, I'd assume the opposite.

Here's how I see it.  A lot of people think Italian immigration to the US basically stopped in 1920.  And yes, when you're talking about Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Providence, New Orleans and Youngstown the postwar Italians are inconsequential statistically speaking.  But there was a modest but not insignificant wave of Italian immigration from 1950-1970 as well that was heavily skewed towards New York.  Many settled in outer borough Italian neighborhoods (and reinforced Italian culture in those enclaves among Italian Americans) and a good number of Italian Americans in NYC are descended from the postwar wave.

For example Bensonhurst is thought of as the classic Italian American neighborhood.  But I believe it was actually more Jewish than Italian until about 1960 (Glazer and Moynihan neglected to mention it in their chapter on Italians when they referred to the city's Italian neighborhoods in their classic book Beyond the Melting Pot).  It received an influx of Italian immigrants after the war and the Italian American population probably peaked there around 1980 or so.  In other words, it's the postwar immigrants that really give southern Brooklyn its Italian character .

Don't the Italians of Bensonhurst/Dyker Heights (although it's been declined significantly in the last two decades, it's still the biggest concentration of Italian speakers in the USA) vote massively Republican?  

It also seems to me that Italians in metro New York (where they're less "melted") are more Republican than elsewhere in the US.
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Classic Conservative
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« Reply #4 on: November 10, 2015, 04:27:32 PM »

I know a lot of Italians especially Sicillians around the Boston Metro are Republican mostly Trump supporters.
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King of Kensington
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« Reply #5 on: November 10, 2015, 08:10:02 PM »

I had forgotten about this thread:

Why are New York Italians more Republican?

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Asian Nazi
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« Reply #6 on: November 10, 2015, 08:39:03 PM »


Oh, fascinating.  Thanks for posting that link.

Out here in the PNW, I can probably count on one hand the amount of people I've met who had Italian surnames.  So the fact that there are apparently nearly 250,000 people in New York who still speak Italian at home is pretty shocking/cool to me. 
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shua
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« Reply #7 on: November 10, 2015, 08:50:44 PM »

LaGuardia's district in Congress way back in the 1920s was among the lower income Italians and Jews of East Harlem, and was represented by a Jewish Republican before him.   
https://books.google.com/books?id=2hNdePcjrdUC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA67#v=onepage&q=twentieth&f=false
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traininthedistance
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« Reply #8 on: November 10, 2015, 11:53:48 PM »


In addition to the various theories posted in that thread (most of which probably have something to do with it), "less assimilated" may also mean "more religious" for the area's Italians just as that correlation holds with our Jewish populations.

Dyker Heights is still quite Republican, as it is still heavily Italian and also fairly wealthy.  In Bensonhurst, now, the old generation of Italians is being slowly replaced by a mostly Chinese immigrant (/"moving on up" from Sunset Park/Chinatown) population, and they've voted about 50/50 for Obama, more Republican downballot.  Presumably with those numbers, the Italians in Bensonhurst are strongly Republican.

But less strong than another Italian stronghold, the South Shore of Staten Island.

...

As for NJ, 60/40 seems like a good guess.  The heavily Italian inner suburbs seemed to be better McCain territory than the non-Italian inner suburbs, even after controlling for the non-white vote.  (I don't know enough about fine-grained ethnic patterns in further-out rings to pass judgment.)  Though it's not like Tammany where there's no space in Dem politics for Italian names– plenty of those around too.  Including, unsurprisingly, the current mayor of my hometown, where Italians are a sizable but falling chunk of a population that has been getting slowly less white over the decades.
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Thunderbird is the word
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« Reply #9 on: November 11, 2015, 01:16:13 AM »

I think that Italians always tended to lean more Republican then Irish and Jews. The historic GOP coalition in NYC is basically outer borough Germans, rich WASPs and Italians.
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King of Kensington
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« Reply #10 on: November 11, 2015, 01:37:33 AM »
« Edited: November 11, 2015, 02:20:49 PM by King of Kensington »

An interesting blog post on Italian American culture in NY/NJ vs. California

http://www.iitaly.org/bloggers/1761/californian-goes-east

Basically she argues that Italian culture stayed alive longer in NY/NJ because of sheer numbers and postwar immigration: that is, Italians created new enclaves in the suburbs and postwar immigration had enough of an impact in Italian neighborhoods to reinforce Italian culture.  In contrast, in California there was no concentrated movement to the suburbs and Italians became more or less "generic white people."

If anything I would guess California Italian Americans are quite a bit more liberal than the typical white Californian, just because they're more urban and the transplants would be less socially conservative than Italians in the Northeast (plus Southern California for a long time was largely made up of conservative Midwestern Protestants and their descendants).

And California Jews are almost certainly a lot more liberal than in the New York area, for obvious reasons.
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traininthedistance
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« Reply #11 on: November 11, 2015, 01:42:42 AM »

Also, speaking of Italian-American culture- my old hometown has a Christopher Columbus statue downtown. Tongue
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King of Kensington
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« Reply #12 on: November 11, 2015, 01:50:38 AM »
« Edited: November 11, 2015, 02:13:37 PM by King of Kensington »

Also, there are a lot of autopilot white Catholic Democrats in New England and Chicago and I doubt that Italian Americans in those places would be immune to that phenomenon - in other words they're more Democratic than in NY/NJ.  
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King of Kensington
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« Reply #13 on: November 11, 2015, 03:57:59 PM »
« Edited: November 11, 2015, 05:16:54 PM by King of Kensington »

Thinking of the Jewish vote in the New York area, here's my stab in the dark guess:  it's probably about 80% Democrat in Manhattan, Brooklyn is probably about 60-70% GOP (Orthodox and Russians outnumber the Park Slope/Brooklyn Heights urban liberals who are probably even more Democratic than in Manhattan), Queens I'm not sure (probably pretty evenly split), Long Island maybe 60/40 Democrat (there's the the wealthy suburban liberals of the North Shore but also the Orthodox Five Towns), Westchester it probably matches the 70/30 figure nationally and Rockland must be overwhelmingly GOP.  

New Jersey I'm less familiar with, but I'll say it's about 60-65% D: obviously there's a lot of affluent suburban liberals, but observant Jews likely make up a larger proportion of the state than the US average (i.e. Lakewood, Teaneck).

ETA:  Another thing to take into account is that Conservative Judaism is relatively stronger among non-Orthodox Jews in the New York area than in a lot of the US where Reform is by far the biggest movement.  Conservative Jews overall are closer to Reform ideologically and politically than Orthodox, and thus somewhat less Democratic.
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traininthedistance
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« Reply #14 on: November 12, 2015, 11:31:40 AM »

New Jersey I'm less familiar with, but I'll say it's about 60-65% D: obviously there's a lot of affluent suburban liberals, but observant Jews likely make up a larger proportion of the state than the US average (i.e. Lakewood, Teaneck).

Also Passaic Park, which is a Republican area in otherwise heavily-Dem and heavily-Latino Passaic, spilling over into Clifton a little bit.
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King of Kensington
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« Reply #15 on: November 12, 2015, 12:55:35 PM »

And the little Sephardic enclave of Deal, although only a drop in the bucket in terms of the overall Jewish population.  Romney and McCain both received 71% of the vote there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deal,_New_Jersey
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King of Kensington
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« Reply #16 on: November 12, 2015, 06:51:00 PM »
« Edited: November 12, 2015, 08:10:24 PM by King of Kensington »

Dyker Heights is still quite Republican, as it is still heavily Italian and also fairly wealthy.  In Bensonhurst, now, the old generation of Italians is being slowly replaced by a mostly Chinese immigrant (/"moving on up" from Sunset Park/Chinatown) population, and they've voted about 50/50 for Obama, more Republican downballot.  Presumably with those numbers, the Italians in Bensonhurst are strongly Republican.

But less strong than another Italian stronghold, the South Shore of Staten Island.

If Howard Beach is a pretty representative NYC Italian neighborhood my 60/40 R estimate seems about right, according to this NYT graphic.

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Also the Westchester towns of Eastchester and Harrison both went around 55% R.  Long Island towns are unfortunately too big to break down meaningfully.
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All Along The Watchtower
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« Reply #17 on: November 12, 2015, 09:50:46 PM »

And the little Sephardic enclave of Deal, although only a drop in the bucket in terms of the overall Jewish population.  Romney and McCain both received 71% of the vote there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deal,_New_Jersey

Out of curiosity, what are some other Sephardic enclaves in the US?
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King of Kensington
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« Reply #18 on: November 13, 2015, 01:08:23 PM »

There's some Syrian enclaves in Brooklyn and Iranian Jews in Beverly Hills and Long Island.
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King of Kensington
Junior Chimp
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« Reply #19 on: November 14, 2015, 03:15:54 PM »

Looking at Upstate New York, it seems like the Italian American vote was pretty evenly split.

For instance, Obama won the heavily Italian Rochester suburb of Gates (56-43).  The most Italian town is Frankfort outside Utica and it went 52% Republican (though it only has  a population of 3,000).
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Oldiesfreak1854
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« Reply #20 on: November 18, 2015, 01:10:10 PM »

I thought Italian-Americans were pretty solidly Democrat.  Did something change?
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SATW
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« Reply #21 on: November 18, 2015, 01:19:56 PM »

Bukharian, Mountain and Georgian Jews (those who live in America) are also more likely to vote Republican (they are classfied by many as Mizrahi/Sephardic Jews but are more complex to label, but thats a discussion for another day...).
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« Reply #22 on: November 18, 2015, 02:17:00 PM »

I thought Italian-Americans were pretty solidly Democrat.  Did something change?

Dude, Staten Island.
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Thunderbird is the word
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« Reply #23 on: November 18, 2015, 03:30:22 PM »

I thought Italian-Americans were pretty solidly Democrat.  Did something change?


I don't think that's ever been the case.
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Sprouts Farmers Market ✘
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« Reply #24 on: November 18, 2015, 03:32:05 PM »
« Edited: November 18, 2015, 03:36:58 PM by France is still terrible »

I thought Italian-Americans were pretty solidly Democrat.  Did something change?

They were, but then they had children, and those children collectively "broke through" for the large part.

I thought Italian-Americans were pretty solidly Democrat.  Did something change?


I don't think that's ever been the case.

In the 20s and 30s they were overwhelmingly D until LaGuardia came along (and that honestly wasn't the end of it). They were certainly voting majority Democratic federally well into the 60s.
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