REAL CLEAR BOOKS
The New Jew: The Beginning of a Jewish Political Realignment
Karol Markowicz
January 11, 2023

…For so long, Jews were seen as a political monolith. This was never exactly so. My own ex-Soviet-Jewish community in Brooklyn was always very conservative yet still rarely represented by Republicans. The so-called “ultra” Orthodox Jews of Boro Park and Williamsburg were also, of course, very conservative, but often voted Democrat anyway. Israeli-Americans, Syrian Jews, so many small pockets of Jews in America actually always leaned right. The type of Jew that was a reliable liberal in the last 50 years was rarely an immigrant. Sometimes their families had been here since the turn of the century, missing the pograms in Russia, the oppression of the Soviet Union, the camps of World War II. American Jews have been the luckiest Jews in history but the Jews whose families had been here for a hundred years were something else beyond that. They did not know struggle or pain or true ostracism because of a faith you often couldn’t practice but also were not allowed to discard. READ MORE