Why Are So Many Jews Democrats?

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from Batya Ungar-Sargon’s The Jews and the Left. It is reprinted here with permission from Broadside, an imprint of HarperCollins.

T he liberalism of American Jews is, after support for Israel, the most dependable of its features. As the sociologist Steven M. Cohen wrote in 1983, “Many American Jews were raised with the understanding that liberalism or political radicalism constituted the very essence of Judaism, that all the rest — the rituals, liturgy, communal organizations — were outdated, vestigial trappings for a religion with a great moral and political message embodied in liberalism. By and large, American Jews are less religious than are Americans more generally. Just 21 percent of American Jews say religion is very important to them, compared to 41 percent of Americans, whereas 53 percent of American Jews say religion is not important to them, compared to 34 percent of all American adults. Just 26 percent of American Jews say they believe in the God of the Bible, compared to 56 percent of American adults. And indeed, when compared to other secular urbanites, American Jews’ attachment to the Democratic Party is less of an outlier.

Instead of religious fervor, American Jews are deeply connected to the idea of Jewish peoplehood — to a connection between themselves and other Jews. For many Jews, the idea of being part of the Jewish people performs the same role as religion does: It binds them to their ancestors and tethers them to the spiritual fabric of the universe. They give generously to Jewish causes and to Israel. They march for their fellow Jews. Their sense of themselves as Jews runs deep, even if, for most Jews, it’s not consciously related to God or the religious practice that defined Judaism for their great-grandparents. Other American Jews are religious and feel a deep sense of attachment to Jewish rituals, community, and texts, and many more feel a deep connection to the land of Israel and its inhabitants.

The Jewish religion in America breaks down into three major streams. Jews who identify as Orthodox are the most fervently attached to the religion and its rituals as they have been practiced historically, whereas Jews who identify as Reform have abandoned most religious rituals in favor of a commitment to social justice. Conservative Jews split the difference, with a more modern view of Jewish law and ritual. The political affiliations of American Jews map closely onto their religious affiliations: 71 percent of American Jews identify as Democrats, including 80 percent of Reform Jews and 70 percent of Conservative Jews, but only 20 percent of Orthodox Jews; 75 percent of Orthodox Jews are now Republicans, and while the Orthodox make up a minority of American Jews, they are the fastest growing part of the Jewish community. Meanwhile, 72 percent of non-Orthodox American Jews who have gotten married since 2010 are married to non-Jews, and just 28 percent of them are raising their children as “Jewish by religion,” compared to 93 percent of Jews married to Jews. Even before October 7 revealed to many Jews that their attachment to each other and to Israel was a liability on the left, the community was in flux; in two or three more generations, there will be many fewer Jews who are Democrats, if not a solid majority who are Republicans.

But those days are far in the future. As of now, the profile of your average American Jew in the first quarter of the 21st century is someone who goes to synagogue on the High Holy Days, feels a deep connection to Israel, and votes for the Democrats. The top three things American Jews ranked as important to being Jewish in a recent survey were remembering the Holocaust, leading an ethical and moral life, and working for justice and equality in society. These were all significantly more important to American Jews than observing Jewish law or following Jewish traditions. “Working for justice and equality in society” is particularly interesting, given how similar it sounds to the decidedly left-wing-coded goals of social justice and given that nearly 60 percent of American Jews ranked it as one of the top three components of their Jewish identity. The Reform branch of Judaism, for now still the largest one, has explicitly joined its philosophical outlook to Democratic Party politics, particularly the social-justice wing, advocating for things such as abortion access, climate-change prevention, LGBTQ rights, mass immigration, and other left-wing agenda items as though they were “Jewish values.”

Yet the affinity American Jews feel for the left and for the Democratic Party goes far beyond the Reform movement — and it’s not a new phenomenon. For a hundred years, American Jews have voted for Democrats — and in return, they were seen as cherished partners in the fight for left-wing causes. Their consistent liberalism was especially notable due to other demographic features; for most of the 20th century, the educational attainment and financial success of American Jews were traits more associated with Republican voters. “Political allegiance in the United States is affected most strongly by economic status — but Jews break the pattern,” Jewish sociologist Nathan Glazer explained in 1995. “The most prosperous of all religious groups, they are also the most liberal, by the use of the crude measure of how many vote Democratic and how many vote Republican.” For most of the 20th century, American Jews were the only major demographic group whose liberalism did not decline as their income went up, journalist J. J. Goldberg noted in his book Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment. Writing in 1969, the great American Jewish sociologist and essayist Milton Himmelfarb famously pointed out that Jews share a demographic with more affluent, educated Americans, which should make them more likely to vote Republican; yet they continue to vote for Democrats, along with America’s poorer citizens, union members, and racial minorities. A quote frequently attributed to Himmelfarb sums it up nicely: “Jews earn like Episcopalians yet vote like Puerto Ricans.”

So what made Jews vote for Democrats when everything else about them would have predicted the opposite?

The most popular explanation for Jewish American liberalism, the one most frequently mentioned by scholars but also the view most liberal Jews would themselves probably give you if you stopped them on the street and asked them why they vote for Democrats, is that the liberalism of American Jews comes from the liberalism of Jewish tradition. Liberal Jews will tell you that being compassionate, welcoming the stranger, bestowing charity, and taking responsibility for the indigent are all values embedded in the Jewish tradition and espoused in the Bible, and they are also values held by Democrats. But despite the popularity of this explanation, it is easily dismissed when you consider the fact that the most-observant Jews are the most likely to be conservatives and vote overwhelmingly Republican. Meanwhile, polls routinely show that it is the Jews least likely to say being Jewish is a meaningful part of their lives who are most likely to describe themselves as “very liberal.”

The second explanation one encounters is the view that Jewish tradition values skepticism and questioning and prizes individual argumentation over traditional authority, all of which are more consistent with liberalism than with conservatism. As Michael Walzer puts it: “The style of liberal politics is also a Jewish style: skeptical, questioning, inconclusive. Only liberalism guarantees the continuing openness necessary to arguments about, and now to differing versions of, a common Jewishness. While the Jewish tradition was not liberal in substance, it was (sometimes) close to liberal in cast of mind.” But here again, reality intervenes: Can anyone truly look at the left today and see the skepticism, the willingness to question, and the orientation to debate that used to define liberalism? Young leftists have completely repudiated free speech as a value, espousing instead a clear preference for imposing speech codes and punishing thought crimes. Conversely, the most-religious Jews today are hardly immune from an attachment to authority.

A third popular explanation for why Jews are Democrats sees in Jewish history proof positive that the right has been more dangerous to the Jews than has the left. Hitler’s decimation of European Jewry, combined with other violent antisemitic trends on the right, left a deep and enduring impression that causes American Jews to associate today’s right with those same historical antisemitic impulses. As a minority in a Christian majority country, American Jews see themselves as vulnerable to the vicissitudes of political extremism, the argument goes, and they choose the political party most likely to consistently side with protecting minority rights.

This account, too, would resonate with how many liberal Jews explain their liberalism. As the sociologists Steven M. Cohen and Charles S. Liebman noted in a 1997 essay on the different explanations for American Jewish liberalism: “Most Jews believe that the types of people who make up the Republican Party and the conservative camp are more anti-Semitic and less pro-Israel than those who comprise the Democratic Party and the liberal camp. In the New Deal era, if not before, most Jews associated the Republican Party with big business and the social elite (at one time a symbol of anti- Semitism and exclusionary policies toward the Jews), and more recently with the Christian Coalition.” American Jews see themselves “as a minority with a historical memory of a collective struggle against discrimination,” and as a result, they gravitate to the party they view as friendly to their narrow interests. In summary, “Jews have historically seen themselves as a vulnerable minority group and have seen the Democratic Party as the party more favorable to their group interests.”

This explanation has the most historic heft to it. For most of American history, where antisemitism cropped up in the United States, it was much more pronounced on the right, and it’s certainly not completely gone in the 21st century. Over the past decade and especially the past few years, there has been an alarming rise of antisemitism on the right, with big-name influencers and commentators engaging in and platforming outright Holocaust denial and admiration for Hitler, as well as blaming Israel for all the world’s ills and malefactors. But this phenomenon is still regarded with distaste by the mainstream on the right. Conservative leaders are proud of their pro-Israel bona fides and of standing up for Jews against antisemitism. Meanwhile, on the left, an open skepticism toward Jewish interests and a hostility to Jewish perspectives have very quickly become mainstream, underwriting even what were until recently the more reliably moderate corners of the Democratic Party of late. Apologists on the left will claim that these are expressions not of antisemitism but merely of anti-Zionism; the left doesn’t hate Jews — just the state of Israel, they will say. And yet the vast majority of American Jews are Zionists. Israel is a central component of their identity. For many, it’s the main component of their Jewish identity. A 2024 study of American Jews under forty found that 76 percent felt connected to Israel and fully 90 percent care about what happens there. And in the party that Jews have made their home for a hundred years, they now feel welcome only if they check their Zionism at the door. In order to remain members in good standing on the left, Jews are asked to suspend what the vast majority view as their interests as a people — a litmus test that Jews alone must pass. To understand what a betrayal this has been, imagine a counterfactual scenario for a moment: One can easily picture the left recognizing how central Jews have been historically to their movement and thus rejecting an ideology that would make Jews feel no longer welcome. Instead, the left, and by now the Democratic Party writ large, has embraced that ideology, turning on the Jews who have for so long been a mainstay of their coalition.