What African American Politics Illuminates about Jewish American Politics

Since the middle of the last century, blacks in the U.S. have been consistently loyal in their support of the Democratic party—loyalty that, as the recent study Steadfast Democrats shows—cuts across economic, religious, and even political divides. Michael Weingrad notes that many of the book’s observations can be applied to the political lives of American Jews:

What I find most intriguing about Steadfast Democrats and . . . why I think it is a book with relevance for observers of Jewish political behavior, is that the authors recognize that politics can become a key component of group identity. It is not that black political solidarity has not historically had crucial benefits for black Americans but that, whether or not those benefits still exist or are cost-effective today, they have become associated over time with black identity itself.

Although Steadfast Democrats mentions Jews but once in passing, they are second only to blacks in the extent to which they similarly defy factors that would in most cases tilt their political identification away from the Democratic party.

Also, as with blacks, explanations for Jewish political behavior are plentiful if not terribly convincing. Liberal Jews are frequently wont to cite religious tradition to explain their politics, as in the catchphrase tikkun olam (about which I have written). Some Jewish progressives do engage seriously with Jewish tradition as they articulate their social-justice politics, yet many invocations of religious tradition by Jewish liberals tend to be misinformed and opportunistic.

Other analyses of American Jewish political behavior, Weingrad argues, are more convincing—but fail “to explain either Jewish identification with the Democratic party today or why Jews in other Western countries today do not have the same loyalty to their liberal and left-wing parties as American Jews do for the Democrats.” The simple truth is that American Jewish group identity has come to include an enduring loyalty to the Democratic party.

Read more at Federalist

More about: African Americans, American Jewry, Democrats, U.S. Politics

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society