Though Jewish Americans represent just 2% of the population, politicians — and would-be politicians — have long considered the “Jewish vote” a prize worth pursuing. That’s actually not irrational. Jews contribute a disproportionate amount of money to political candidates and causes; many Jews live in the swing states of Florida (846,700 of 19.9 million), Pennsylvania (324,700 of 12.8 million), Ohio (173,700 of 11.6 million), and Michigan (105,200 of 9.9 million); and Jews tout a stellar turnout record of 80%, according to multiple sources.
“Israel was the 'most important' voting issue for a mere 4% of respondents in the Public Religion Research Institute’s 2012 Jewish Values survey.”
It sometimes feels, nonetheless, like many campaigns are stuck in a time warp, or rather an alternate universe. They’re spending thousands of dollars — and in some cases millions — to sway Jewish voters chiefly based on the false notion that Israel is terribly important to a majority of Jewish Americans.
Israel was the “most important” voting issue for a mere 4% of respondents in the Public Religion Research Institute’s 2012 Jewish Values survey. Israel was one of two top “voting issue priorities” for just 10% in a J Street poll conducted around the same time. More recently, “U.S.-Israel relations” was the most important issue for only 7.2% in the American Jewish Committee’s 2015 study of Jewish American opinion, ranking fifth behind “economy” (41.7%), “national security” (12.3%), “healthcare” (12%), and “income inequality” (11.6%). It was the second and the third-most important issue for only 7.6% and 11.1%, respectively.
The relevance of Israel to mainstream Jewish Americans will further diminish due to various secularizing factors. Recent years have seen profound assimilation and a high rate of marriage outside the faith among non-Orthodox Jews. (Since 2000, the rate has been more than 70%.) Additionally, the donor generations of Jewish Americans, those who remember the existential crises of the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War and who chiefly fund Zionist institutions, are growing old. They were the last Jewish Americans raised when Israel was widely viewed as a David, a valiant democratic-socialist experiment, rather than a Goliath, a repressive neo-imperialist undertaking.
Indeed, the Pew Research Center’s landmark 2013 survey “A Portrait of Jewish Americans” found that caring about Israel was...
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Jonathan Bronitsky is a political historian writing a biography of Irving Kristol, to be published by Oxford University Press.
This piece was adapted from City Journal Online
This piece originally appeared in Los Angeles Times