Author Meets Critics: The Foundations of American Jewish Liberalism

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

We propose an author meets critics session devoted to a new book by Kenneth D. Wald. The significance of the book in an era of resurgent right-wing populism and the author’s stature in the study of religion and politics warrants the session. We have identified a diverse list of potential critics comprising scholars of religion and politics, academic experts on Jewish political life, leaders of Jewish communal and political organizations, and Jewish elected officials in the DC-area.

The Foundations of American Jewish Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 2019) offers a new take on the perennial puzzle of American Jews’ persistent attachment to liberalism and the Democratic Party. For more than seventy years, scholars have tried to explain why a group with traits that predict Republicanism among other voters—high levels of education, income, and occupational status—is collectively the most pro-Democratic white ethnoreligious bloc in the American electorate.

Wald expands the puzzle by noting two other anomalies in American Jewish political behavior: American Jews are today the only national Jewish community that exhibits a left/liberal political identity and their attachment to the Democrats, while higher than most other electoral blocs, has varied over time. None of the theories meant to explain American Jewish liberalism addresses these other mysteries.

Foundations argues that extant theories of Jewish liberalism, based on theological, historical and psychological variables, have a common flaw: They are “Judaic” in the sense that they identify values and experiences common to Jews around the world to account for what is a uniquely American experience.

To better connect the study of Jewish politics with research on ethnoreligious political behavior, Wald draws on theories of political context, political opportunity structure, social identity, and threat perception. He emphasizes the importance of the American context where citizenship was defined in liberal terms and the national state was secular in the sense that neither benefits nor costs could be imposed based on religious criteria.

These norms—established without much input from American Jewry—nonetheless gave Jews an “ownership” share in the national polity that they had never experienced before. From the outset of the national period, Jews gradually developed a political culture centered on preserving their rights by defending equal citizenship in a secular state. As Wald shows with both quantitative and qualitative data, this bedrock commitment has been the community’s core political priority since the late 18th century.

Until the 1930s, when Jews joined the Roosevelt coalition, their attachment to liberalism had not exhibited a partisan cast. Even then, their realignment into the Democratic Party was driven more by economic issues than concern for the liberal regime of religion and state. Although Jewish Democratic attachment declined in the late 1960s and 1970s, when the party appeared to embrace a new form of liberalism based on group rights, the relationship was restored when the Republican Party embraced the Christian Right in the 1980s. In response to their new base, Republicans became advocates of accommodationism in the church-state debate, favoring a religious definition of citizenship that Jews heartily rejected. The Jewish//Democratic axis was further strengthened in 2016 when Donald Trump’s flirtation with the Alt-Right raised fears that “blood and soil” conceptions of citizenship would displace civic nationalism, a doctrine essential to the liberal regime of religion and state.

This approach addresses the three puzzles that underlie the book. Jews in America are politically distinctive when compared to Americans of comparable socioeconomic status because of their concern for maintaining the liberal regime and they differ from Jewish diasporas in other countries where classic liberalism has less influence. (In such places, Jews do not seek to efface religion from national identity but to obtain for their community whatever benefits the state provides to other religions.) American Jews vary temporally in their attachment to the Democratic Party because the party appears at times to champion policies perceived as inconsistent with the liberal regime.

By approaching Jewish political attitudes as a case study of minority political behavior in a democratic state, Foundations brings the Jewish example into conversation with research on the politics of other ethnoreligious minorities. Religious values may be critical in stoking public antipathy to such minority groups, he concludes, but it is often incidental to the way these groups respond to such hostility. Context and political opportunity structure are more important. Such arguments have important implications for research on minority politics generally.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 33: Religion and Politics

Chair

• David E. Campbell University of Notre Dame

Presenters

• Kenneth D. Wald University of Florida

• Gerald Gamm University of Rochester

• Eric M. Uslaner University of Maryland

• Lauren B. Strauss American University