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Friday November 15, 1996

Election throws dim light on face of Jewish liberalism

Earl Raab

A standard post-election question is: "Are the Jews still as liberal as advertised?"

It all depends on what you mean by "liberal." Opposition to Proposition 209, the anti-affirmative action measure, was considered by many to be the ultimate test of the liberal. And Jews were the only white group in California to vote against Prop. 209. However, they voted against it by a slim margin, according to reputable and professional exit polls commissioned by the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Examiner.

Although only about 40 percent of the white population voted against Prop. 209, 58 percent of Jews voted against it in one exit poll, 53 in another. But that's a pretty far cry from the three-quarters of blacks, Latinos and self-described Democrats who voted against Prop. 209.

Does that make the Jews half-liberal or half-conservative?

According to a recent study of attitudes over many years -- by Professors Steven Cohen and Charles Liebman -- Jews tend to be more liberal than non-Jews as a whole. But it also reveals that on most social issues, Jews have roughly the same attitudes as those non-Jews with about the same education. Sure enough, the only other white group that voted against Prop. 209 was those with postgraduate college education.

In other words, so-called liberalism often may be a function of education, not ethnic or religious values. And sometimes the difference between a liberal and a conservative on a given issue may be no deeper than a difference in pragmatic judgment about what will work. That was often the case in the matter of Prop. 209.

The split Jewish vote on Prop. 209 largely reflected strategic differences among people who agreed about quotas and the like but disagreed about whether the specific measure was strategically good for democracy -- and therefore protected Jews. It was often that consideration, rather than liberal sympathies or the differential flow of the milk of human kindness, that determined how Jews voted.

Self-protection is a factor in the liberalism of Jews and others. The Cohen-Liebman study says that Jews have a more liberal attitude than even highly educated non-Jews on church-state and "Christianizing" issues, which today so touch the Jewish nerve for self-protection.

Nor is the element of self-protection absent in the persistent Jewish addiction to the Democratic Party. Between 75 to 80 percent of the nation's Jews voted for Bill Clinton and for Democratic congressional candidates. For more than 60 years, the Jewish vote for Democratic candidates has usually been, as it was this time, about 25 percentage points higher than that of the general population. The black vote for Democrats was just a few points higher and the Latino vote a few points lower than the Jewish vote.

But it would be a mistake to equate "Democrat" with "liberal." Studies have showed that many Jews who vote Democratic have a number of political attitudes that are normally considered more conservative than liberal. That has been found to be true on welfare issues, for example.

However, some Jews who have "Republican" attitudes on some issues will continue to vote Democratic, partly because extremist Christian influences in the Republican Party jar them. Their Jewish nerves have also been jangled by occasional signs of extremism in the Democratic Party. But Clinton's apparent centrism, his call or a "vital center," have resonated with Jews, and they are not likely to change their party allegiance in the foreseeable future.

However, individual issues are another matter. While there is plenty of evidence that the Jews continue to be an unusually compassionate lot, the liberal-conservative battle on many issues is increasingly about which policies would best make that compassion effective.

On those issues, as Prop. 209 suggests, the Jews have become less consensual -- and less automatically liberal.

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