Last month, the comedian and talk-show host Whoopi Goldberg found herself at the center of the controversy-of-the-week when she described the Holocaust as disconnected from racism, since, she said, it involved “two white groups of people.” Jason Greenblatt, head of Anti-Defamation League (ADL), came on her television program the next day and patiently clarified her misunderstandings. But the incident, Seth Mandel notes, highlights the direction in which Greenblatt has taken this venerable, and once avidly nonpartisan, organization:

In the 1930s, a Republic Jewish judge, observing his coreligionists’ commitment to the Democratic party, quipped, in Yiddish, that Jews have three velt (worlds): di velt (this world), yene velt (the next world), and Roosevelt. Since then, Jewish devotion has attenuated somewhat, although Jews still overwhelmingly lean Democratic. Most American Jews, however, are unfamiliar with the terms “this world” or “the next world” in any language. Carefully examining a wealth of statistical data, Samuel J. Abrams and Jack Wertheimer argue that the sort of robust Jewish liberalism that characterized U.S. Jewry a few decades ago is in steep decline. Jews, they explain, are undergoing their own version of what political scientists call the “great sort,” whereby politics, religion, and place of residence increasingly align: