Politich Jews (Politik Yahudi)

             Politich Jews

               The Jews of New York City have had for the past thirty years a kind of split political personality that can be matched only in such areas as the Southern cities that now vote Republican nationally and Democratic locally. No group in the city supports national Democratic candidates as strongly and consistently as the Jews; none except perhaps the white Protestants has been as uncomfortable about voting Democratic locally. The American Labor Party and the Liberal Party have developed in New York City partly in response to this Jewish dilemma.

                Jews are not alone in their partisan irregularity in a city where the local machines have often been poor representatives of national Democratic administrations. But no other group is quite so irregular. The white Protestant old stock generally votes for Republicans locally and nationally. The Irish and Italians are torn between a traditional attachment to local Democratic organizations and an attraction, as a result of their own increased social mobility and the Democrats' interventionism in World War II, to the Republicans. The Negroes and Puerto Ricans, following in the path of other new immigrant groups, are solidly committed to the Democrats, both locally and nationally.

                What attracts Jews is liberalism, using the term to refer to the entire range of lefitist positions, from  the mildest to the most extreme. The Jewish vote is primarily an "ideological" rather than a party or even an ethnic one. There is little question that Jews are moved, as other groups are, by issues that affect them alone, such as policy toward Israel. But it is impossible to test the effect of pro-Israel feeling on voting, for political candidates in New York City all profess an enthusiasm for Israel. Nor is it easy to test the pull of a Jewish versus a non-Jewish name in the city. In cases where the non-Jew is clearly identified with the "more liberal" position? as in the i960 primary between Ludwig Teller, regular organization Democrat, and William Fitts Ryan, Reform Democrat, in the 20th Congressional District on the West Side? there has been little question that the Jewish name helped hardly at all with Jewish voters. The races between Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., and Jacob Javits for Attorney General in 1954, and between Robert F. Wagner and Javits for U.S. Senator in 1956, are not as simple to analyze, for in both cases there was some question as to who was more liberal. It was hard in either case to demonstrate a "Jewish" vote for Javits. In 1932, when three liberal heroes, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Herbert Lehman, and Robert Wagner, Sr., were running for President, Governor, and Senator, Wagner pulled a higher vote in some Jewish districts than Roosevelt or Lehman even though he ran against a Jewish Republican candidate, George Z. Medalie.

                The Jewish liberal voting pattern has been of great persistence. The transformation of Jews from a working-class group (as they were in the time of Al Smith) to a middle-class group (as they are in the time of John F. Kennedy) has affected hardly at all their tendency to vote for liberal Democratic candidates. The Jewish vote for a national Democratic candidate has dropped only once in thirty years?  in 1948, when Truman ran against Dewey. But then Jews defected not to Dewey, as one might expect of a business and professional community, but to Henry Wallace. The Jewish vote for Truman and Wallace was almost everywhere equal to the Jewish vote for Roosevelt in 1944.

                At the same time, the candidates of the local Democratic organization have generally been unappealing. The same Jewish voters who turned out enthusiastically for Roosevelt in 1940 and 1944 were cold to O'Dwyer, running against La Guardia, in 1941, and they hardly warmed up by 1945, even though O'Dwyer, campaigning in uniform, no longer appeared to Jews to be clearly the favored choice of isolationists and Christian Frontiers.

                Upper-income Jews do not seem to be importantly differentiated from lower-income ones in voting habits. All economic levels were enthusiastically for Roosevelt, Lehman, and La Guardia in the 1930's and 1940's. If enthusiasm for Truman was considerably less, it was hardly a class matter? both upper- and lower-income Jews voted heavily for Wallace. Again, both upper- and lower-income Jews were fervently for Stevenson, and both, emerging from their Stevenson mania, decided that Kennedy was perhaps the heir of Roosevelt, and they voted for him more heavily than did the Irish Catholics!

                The voting of ethnic groups, as Samuel Lubell pointed out long ago, is not simply a function of ethnic issues or candidates, though it is true that a group wants representatives, and almost any Jewish candidate gets some Jewish votes running against a non-Jew. Rather, ethnic tendencies in voting express the entire culture and traditions of the group. As Lubell said:

Ethnic groups do not now?  if they ever did? act simply as cohesive voting blocs. Rather, their influence is exerted through common group consciousness, through the effect of common antecedents and cultural traditions which enable them to view developing issues from a common point of view.

The Jewish commitment to the Democratic party is virtually complete today because the Democrats, since 1928, have nominated liberal candidates for the Presidency. East European Jews found the Democratic party much less attractive in the period from the Civil War to Alfred E. Smith, when its candidates were as likely to be conservatives like Alton Parker and John Davis as to be crusaders like William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson. Indeed, German  Jews, coming to political maturity and consciousness in the period of the Civil War, were perhaps predominantly Re- publican. Their preference for the Republicans on the national level coincided with their local interests, since the Democratic party, in the hands of the Irish, had no room for them. Instead, Jews held office in the Republican party organization. In the 1870's and i88o's Greenpoint had Jewish Republican leaders, and there were Jewish Republican county leaders in Brooklyn before the end of the century. In the 1920's Meier Steinbrink and Samuel Koenig were Republican county leaders in Brooklyn and Manhattan.

                Some East European Jews followed the German Jews into the Republican party, and some, like other immigrants, went into the Democratic party. But at least as many became strong Socialists. It was for this reason, as well as because the Irish held tenaciously to their posts, that Jewish progress in the Democratic party was slow.

                Woodrow Wilson aroused some enthusiasm among Jews in 1912 and 1916. Henry Morgenthau, Sr., was chairman of the Democratic Financial Committee in 1912, Bernard Baruch was one of the President's advisers, Louis D. Brandeis became the first Jew to serve on the Supreme Court. But it was Al Smith who challenged the power of the Socialists on the East Side and taught Jews to vote for Democratic state and national candidates. In 1922, with Smith heading the Democratic ticket for Governor, four Jews?  three Democrats and a Republican?  went to Congress from New York City. Two years before, six Jews were elected to Congress from the city, but all except one were Republicans, and the sixth was a Socialist. It was in 1922 that Sol Bloom, Nathaniel Dickstein, and Emanuel Celler began their long service in Congress, in seats that became as safe as any in the South.

                If many Jews had entered the Democratic party, it is very likely that they could have dominated it. They formed, after all, one-quarter of the population from the early twenties on. In addition, Jews became citizens rapidly? much more rapidly, for example, than Italians?they were politically conscious, and they had a high rate of voting participation. But so much of their energy was devoted to the Socialist party that it was not difficult for the Irish to maintain control of the Democratic party. Between 1933 and 1945, when Jews were drawn away from sociaHsm by the New Deal, they still did not enter the local Democratic party on a massive scale, for this was the age of La Guardia, and Jews preferred the American Labor Party and Liberal Party and good government groups to the Democratic party clubs. But since the middle forties there has been less and less to keep Jews from becoming Democrats locally as well as nationally. Many have become active as Reform Democrats in the struggle against the regular party organization. In this conflict. Democrats who are identified closely with the liberal Northern wing of the party have sought to take over and reform the party organization in the city, so as to end the power of the old regular party leaders. Control is being shifted from the Irish and their junior partners, the Italians, who organized masses of regular voters from immigrant groups, to professionals and in- tellectuals who appeal to independent voters. The elections of the past ten years in New York have shown the greater effectiveness of their approach as compared to that of the traditional machine. The college man is taking over in politics as in business; inevitably many Jews are included. With white Protestants, they dominate the reform movement.

                This newer generation of Jews in politics has of course very little in common with the Jews who were in the old Democratic machine. These did very well indeed with the old politics. They have received a high proportion of the judicial posts and nominations for the past thirty years. One-third of the Congressmen from the city, and rather more of the judges. State Senators, and Assemblymen are Jewish. Jews have in fact held more judicial and elective offices than their numerical strength in the organization would seem to warrant. Their prominence in this respect reflects their financial contributions to electoral campaigns, the large number of lawyers among them, and their high rate of voting participation, rather than strength on the clubhouse floor. Still, Jews do have an important place in the organization, and in the struggle between the organization and the Reform Democrats we see  manifested the same social change that separates the Jewish businessman father from his college-trained son. The fathers are slow to realize that in the rich America of today the material reward of the job (in business or politics) is not as important as personal fulfillment. And in defending itself the organization has failed to see that its attackers are not merely a new wave of seekers after jobs but rather a group that hopes to change the nature of local politics.

                How successful this new group will be in transforming the politics of the city, which has resisted many such movements in the past, we shall discover in the next few years.

                But the reform movement in politics has already become one of those areas in city life in which people of different backgrounds, from different groups, come together not as representatives of groups, not to bargain for group rights and positions, but to work in a common task, as individuals. This happens often enough in New York business, but there the common end is gain. The fact that it happens in politics, where the common end is a general good, is a cause for satisfaction. This is after all the only real basis of "integration"? common work in which one's group characteristics are not primary and therefore of no great account. Another great area of New York life in which this kind of integration proceeds is in the fields of

cultural activity.