Russian and American Jews: A Growing Political Divide

There is a divide brewing in American politics. It is a divide over values, priorities, and perceptions of interest. It has split one of the most politically uniform voting blocs in the country and may impact the face of the entire community for generations to come. What I am speaking of is the growing rift in the American Jewish community, between American born Jews and their immigrant Russian counterparts. Between these groups, there is a stark divide over what constitutes “Jewish” interests in America: does the future lie in the modern liberal camp, with a universalist ideal? Or should the lives, economic prosperity, and political power of Jews come before the liberal flagship issues? Across the gamut of the day’s hot-button questions, from affirmative action to social values, and especially on issues concerning national security and Israel, the two communities are growing further and further apart. In this article, I argue that such a divide is not only beneficial for the Jewish community politically, as it creates greater inter-party competition for the Jewish vote and weakens the solid Jewish Democratic wall, but also that it allows for a renewed debate as to what the “Jewish interest” really is.

In a commentary published in the Opinion Journal, writer Tony Carnes describes a vivid example of how the Jewish political divide is starting to play out. He describes a clash between Larry Lowenthal, the Executive Director of the Boston Branch of the American Jewish Committee, and its growing Russian membership:

“His job…includes finding and training leaders from among the 700,000 Russian Jews who have immigrated to the U.S. in the last 30 years. Mr. Lowenthal’s idea of a faithful Jew is someone who opposes

the nomination of Judge John Roberts to the U.S. Supreme Court, supports gay rights, abortion and euthanasia, and demands a strong separation of church and state. After all, as Mr. Lowenthal concluded approvingly in a July oped for the Jewish Advocate, Jews are ‘the most liberal’ and ‘the least religious people in America.’ Imagine his consternation when an avalanche of emails from Russian Jews began to pour in to the Web site of the Jewish Russian Telegraph…about 100 people wrote to say that Mr. Lowenthal needed to stop making ‘outrageous statements’ on behalf of people whom he doesn’t represent” (Carnes, 2005).

Lowenthal’s attacks on a Hassidic Jewish organization for putting up a menorah on public property, and his praise for the Islamic Society of Boston, which distributed literature of a number of clerics supporting suicide bombings, only aggravated the tension with the Russian-Jewish community.

Jonathan Sarna, Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis, wrote in the Boston Globe on October 10, 2004, the eve of the last Presidential election: “Jews from the former Soviet Union prefer the Republicans to the Democrats. Some 400,000 of these Jews have emigrated to the United States over the past 30 years, and many of them cast their first votes for Ronald Reagan, whose anticommunism they admired. They then continued to vote for his Republican successors. In New York, these Jews have consistently supported candidates known to be tough on crime and conservative on moral issues, notably New York’s Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. A recent poll of 789 Russian Jews in New York has them supporting Bush by a margin of 54 to 14 percent, with the rest undecided” (Sarna, 2004). Walter Ruby of the Jewish Week also confirms the Russian shift: his research analyzing survey responses to a randomly sampled group of 2,300 Russian Jews in New York’s Metropolitan Area shows that the community is mostly secular and continues to suffer from starkly high unemployment rates. Nevertheless, despite having a partisan split leaning toward the Democrats throughout the 1990s, social conservatism and a hawkish stance on Israel has moved the community further right. As he describes: