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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   26065 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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The British Jews have been solidly conservative since like, forever. Continental European Jews also tend to be right wing.

Is that correct? If so, it would be pretty remarkable. As much as I hate it, the educated class tends to be left wing pretty much everywhere, and Jews are highly educated.

Would be interested in a source.

I'm pretty sure American Jews vote left wing because the American right has a history of racial discrimination, which Jews pattern match to Nazism.

This doesn't seem to parse. Surely the German right wing has a much stronger history of racial discrimination?

American Jews vote the way they do because it matches their identity and status signalling, just like everyone else.

'Since forever' was hyperbole on my part, but this article suggests that Jews have been conservative for most of the post-war period. While they started off as poor, Eastern European immigrants (and voted left), they moved up the class pyramid and switched to voting right. This report suggests that the preference for Conservative voting was well established by 1995 but I couldn't find any data from earlier.

Plus the Victorian Britains elected the extremely Jewish-sounding Benjamin Disraeli as Conservative Prime Minister in 1874, although he had converted to the Church of England as a child so his Jewishness was ethnic if not religious. The end of (limited) legal discrimination against Jews is usually dated to 1858, when they were allowed to become members of Parliament without taking a Christian oath of office.

The big difference between British and American Jews is religion. Per Wikipedia, 46% of American Jews are synagogue members, but only 22% of the 46% are Orthodox. 56% of British Jews are synagogue members, and 69% of the 56% are some flavour of Orthodox. (The difference appears to be even higher based on survey data, but I think the synagogue membership numbers are more reliable because maintaining synagogue membership is a costly signal).

British secular (and Reform, although there are not enough regular synagogue-going Reform Jews in the UK to matter) Jews are as left-wing as American ones - the most significant secular Jewish family in the UK at the moment is probably the Milibands, where Ralph was a WW2-era Polish Jewish refugee who became a famous communist academic, and his sons David and Edward were respectively the leading centrist and left-wing candidates for the Labour leadership after the 2010 election defeat. (Both are also visibly happier living in the US - this is consistent with my experience of my school/university social circle where secular Jews who had the opportunity mostly moved to the US.) But Orthodox Jews are much higher percentage of the Jewish population, and they are right-wing for the obvious reasons.

Both are also visibly happier living in the US

Ed Miliband doesn't live in the US, he's still an MP! He will likely be energy minister when Labour wins.

this is consistent with my experience of my school/university social circle where secular Jews who had the opportunity mostly moved to the US.

I would put it differently. Secular American Jews often retain some aspects of their particular ethnic identity because we don't live in a society with as much of a monoculture as the UK. The same was historically true of other groups in the diverse East Coast cities, like the Irish and Italians.

Secular British Jews assimilate very rapidly (even though the overall intermarriage rate is lower because of the higher level of Orthodoxy as you note). Those great Anglo-Jewish families of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Rothschilds, the Goldsmiths and so on, are pretty much entirely gentile now - the younger Rothschilds were raised and baptised in the CofE. Even the 20th century secular Jews of more recent shtetl heritage assimilate quickly - look at how quickly Gerald Ronson's and Philip Green's (who himself married a gentile iirc) children have deserted the faith. And Ronson is a committed Jew! He donates to charities, sat on the board of various things and so on. But even then, it wasn't enough.

There is almost a kind of standard assimilatory narrative for British Jews who make some money. The parents send them to Eton or Harrow or Cheltenham and then Oxbridge, they do well in the city (perhaps in a Jewish firm, perhaps not) or in the arts or something else, then they marry a gentile Sloane Ranger (or a male aristo in the case of the women). In two generations, any residual Jewishness is a family memory, they celebrate Christmas, they have essentially fully assimilated into the British upper-middle or upper class.

The same happened in a different way with working class secular Jews, who largely joined the white exodus out of East London and headed toward Essex. Those who remained religious still exist in large numbers in places like Gants Hill, but many who weren't had within one generation fully assimilated into normal southeastern working class English culture. An example of that is Katie Price's family, or even Stacey Solomon's to some degree. The secular Jewish intellectual culture that exists in the US doesn't exist in Britain. Jews who stay Jewish are overwhelmingly Orthodox, those who don't become English very quickly.

From 2019:

In the 2017 election, 67% of Jewish voters backed the Tories and 11% supported Labour, according to figures supplied by JPR. A poll this autumn suggested that Jewish support for Labour in next week’s election could fall to 6%.

The first and as yet only Jewish Prime Minister was Disraeli in the 1860s and 1870s.

I would think the 2017 result is an outlier due to Corbyn's antisemitism.

But that is indeed remarkable. American Jews have been thoroughly captured by the Democrats. I expect Jews will continue to be big supporters in 2024 despite the vibe shift.

I suppose this speaks to class differences between the UK and the US. In the US, the Democrats are the "posh" party whereas the Republicans are for the proles. In the UK, it's more complicated.

Doesn’t that likely have something to do with the Labour Party under Corbin being pretty openly antisemitic? The numbers might have been different otherwise.

Even in 2015 the Tories won the Jewish vote 50-29, and that was when the Labour candidate for Prime Minister was Jewish.

Jews voted more for Labour in the mid-20th century because many were poor recent immigrants from Eastern Europe and voting at that time in England was still very class-and-region based.

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