I’ve been promising for ages to blog about why American Jews tend to be so liberal, but I’ve consistently put it off because it’s a daunting topic. So instead of one big post, or even a series of concurrent posts, I’ve decided to post occasionally on different aspects of the subject, and will link them all as I go along via Powerblogs links feature.
For my first post, I’m going to address the common assertion, which I’ve seen in many emails addressed to me when I blog about related topics, that American Jews should logically be more conservative on economics because Jews have been such successful entrepreneurs, and the government is widely perceived as an enemy of entrepreneurship.
It’s certainly true that many Jews have been successful entrepreneurs–everyone from famous businessmen such Julius Rosenwald, founder of Sears, and Michael Dell, to small-time tailors and shopkeepers. But what isn’t often recognized is that a huge, almost certainly much larger number of Jews made their way to the middle class via government.
First, the Jewish population was concentrated in New York City, and until the 1970s the City had an excellent, free, public university system, with CCNY known as the “Jewish Harvard”. Many Jews (including my mom) took advantage of this system, often at a time when major private universities had anti-Jewish quotas, and feel they therefore owe some of their success to the government.
Second, and relatedly, huge numbers of Jews over the decades found employment with government, especially as teachers. I recall a statistic to the effect that in 1968, when controversy erupted over African American demands for “local control” of New York public schools, about 80% of New York City schoolteachers were Jewish. In the days when whole white-collar industries such as banking, insurance, and more were closed to Jews, civil service desk jobs were open, and Jews vestigially remember the relative lack of discrimination in government with fondness.
Nor is Jewish attachment to the civil service completely a thing of the past. When I was still on the dating market, I was amazed to notice on JDATE that an extremely large percentage of Jewish women (at least in the D.C. area) work for the government as either teachers or social workers. Jewish friends of mine who also have recently participated the dating market have confirmed this observation. [Update: What this means for the overall percentage of Jews in the civil service I’m not sure; sociologist Gabriel Rossman writes in to point out that at least in L.A. as of 1990, Jews were slightly less likely than other whites to be civil servants. But the point is that there are still a lot moroe Jewish mid-level civil servants than all the talk of Jewish entrepreneurialism would suggest.]
Thus, for every story of a Jewish family that made its way to the middle class and beyond through entrepreneurship, there are likely several, even many, who would attribute their success rather directly to the government. And that doesn’t make for an economically conservative political culture.
Note to Orin (see post above): I’ll address your point about the left-wing Eastern European influences in due time; as I wrote, this is an occasional series, and I’m not going in any particular chronological or other order. Nor am I arguing that propensity to work for the civil service [or to benefit from government educational largesse] is the most important cause [edit: or even an important cause] of American Jews’ liberalism. Rather, I’m simply responding to the suggestion I’ve heard so often that Jews should “naturally” be economically libertarian because of their success as entrepreneurs. As discussed, the overall Jewish economic experience in American may actually influence things in the opposite direction, [i.e., if Jews’ overall economic experience with government affects their political views, it may more likely be in the direction of statism than libertarianism. Perhaps I confused matters by throwing in a family anecdote suggesting more of a causal relationship than I meant to, and which I’ve now removed.]
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