I spent the first 15 years of my life under communism, the next 15 years in Israel, and since the end of 1976 had an accidental career on the North American continent. However, I wanted to grasp American Jews’ political alignments, their continued support for the Democratic party, puzzling many. These are the observations that I put together to solve this mystery.
Jews arrived in the U.S. in large numbers during the great migrations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Having faced vicious antisemitism in Tsarist Russia, the even more barbaric, savage one in Western Europe, and yet to encounter Stalin’s version, they remained suspicious of “right-wing” movements. By the second generation, a high proportion of militants on the “left” in the U.S. came from well-to-do Jewish families. Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer, and Kenneth Keniston, prominent social scientists, highlighting this fact, called it the “red diaper baby” syndrome.
This second generation did not heed Winston Churchill’s prescient warning, who, in a 1920 piece “Zionism versus Bolshevism,” stated that “Bolshevism,” as the “left” was then called, is a “world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence,” and “it is particularly important in these circumstances that the national Jew in every country who are loyal to the land of their adoption should come forward on every occasion … and take a prominent part in every measure for combating the Bolshevik conspiracy.” Churchill’s observations came when some European Jews supported their Bundist “workers of the world unite” Bolshevik ideology, stating that class is the stronger glue to unite people than nationalism and religion. The Bundists were viciously anti-Zionist, as Zionists believed that a defensible national home was necessary against permanent antisemitism.
However, until the Nazis came to power, most Jews still believed that their future lay in being “National Jews,” identifying themselves with countries where, they hoped, antisemitism, if not eradicated, would be mitigated, though it was unclear which political party would offer them a home. American Jews, even wealthy ones, having been denied acceptance that Gentiles of comparable wealth and achievement had, and facing antisemitism openly, continued to support left-wing political parties, though searching for association with a less ideological centrist party. During the New Deal, they believed the Democratic party fit the bill.
50-60% of Jews were still “working class” in the 1930s, prominent in the garment industry whose labor unions FDR supported. As with other U.S. workers, they saw the legislations and federal programs of the New Deal as the hope to escape poverty. FDR also appointed Jews to prominent positions, such as Justices Felix Frankfurter and Louis Brandeis, and Henry Morgenthau at the Treasury. Most important: the Republican party opposed the U.S. entering the war, perceiving it as a European affair, whereas FDR did commit himself – eventually - to defeat Germany and its allies.
These facts weighed more than FDR’s antisemitism. In 1922 and 1923, serving on Harvard's Board of Overseers, FDR voted for a quota of 15% on Jewish students. The enrollment of Jewish students dropped from 28% in 1925 to 15% in 1926 – and it stayed there until the early 1940s – these facts were no secret.
Also, FDR made no secret of his belief in maintaining the “purity of the American blood,” was against both Jewish and Asian migration, and in 1939 bragged that there is “no Jewish blood” in his veins. In 1939 too, his administration refused entry to the MS St. Louis, a German ocean liner carrying 937 Jewish refugees, though the travelers had valid landing permits. The ship sailed back to Europe, where 254 of the travelers were murdered during the Holocaust.
On January 17, 1943, in Casablanca, in a ‘Foreign Relations of the United States’ series of documents, Roosevelt advised North African countries' leaders that the number of Jews engaged in various professions (law, medicine) should be limited to the percentage that the Jewish population in North Africa bears to the whole of the North African population. And in 1944, President Roosevelt’s War Department refused Jewish leaders’ requests to bomb the railways leading to the concentration camps, though military rationale not to do so does not stand up to scrutiny.
By the 1970s, a generation after the war, American Jews lived the American Dream. Both the Democratic and Republican party were “centrist,” antisemitism seceded, and there were no strong reasons to shift traditional loyalties. Despite Israel’s spectacular success in the 6-Day War, when Israel’s population was just 2.8 million, the country remained well into the late 1980s a centralized, relatively poor country, being no alternative to “National American Jews.”
By the 21st century, each new Jewish generation became more alienated from religious tradition. In a 2020 Pew Poll, 40% of those aged 18-29, and 33% of those aged 30-49, declared themselves to be “Jews without religion.” In the same poll, 59% of American Jews said not to be associated with any of the three Jewish religious movements (Orthodox, Conservative, Reform), answered that they have nothing in common with Israeli Jews. Based on recent Jewish votes in New York, it also appears that a fraction of Jews departed from the centrist part of the Democratic party, and are behind Bundist ideas of “workers of a – borderless – world unite,” and a wide range of centralizing policies and regulations, the latter being nationalizations in practice, if not principle. These Jewish votes reflect the changing Democratic party’s constituents: Back in the 2016 Democratic primaries Bernie Sanders won 23 contests out of 57 total primary and caucus ballots, Hillary Clinton 34. Whether “non-Bundist” Jews will vote with their feet and depart the now increasingly “Bundist Democratic Party,” will be better known this year.
Israelis and perceptions of Zionism changed too in the early 1990s. With one million Russian immigrants arriving at the end of the 1980s adding 25% to the country’s population, a third of them technicians, engineers and scientists, all having experienced communism rather than reading about it selectively in the U.S. educational system, Israel abandoned its centralized past, becoming rapidly a “start-up nation.” These facts on the ground, and the spiking antisemitism around the world after the 10/7 events, shattered the utopian belief in Israel that all cultures, and all humans are the same.
History appears to rhyme both with Churchill’s century-old observations about “National Jews,” “Bolshevik” ones, and “Zionists” – and also with American Jews looking for a new political home. Though there are crucial distinctions.
One is that Israel is no longer the “too small a place,” as Churchill put it, and it has been giving options to realize ambitions to millions more than in its centralized past. As such, it represents a different option for escaping daily antisemitism than a century ago. At the same time Democratic party, historically the home to the “National Jew,” has been increasingly adopting an ideologically strident, uncompromisingly antisemitic, and anti-Israel view. The Republican party, though, has its own violently antisemitic voices and its isolationist fractions, surprisingly believing that one can take the latter stand in a potentially mobile world with 8 billion people with access to instant communication and cheap military technologies shrinking the globe. Where will “American National Jews” find their political home now?
The 2026 elections will show how American National Jews will solve the resurfaced centuries’ old dilemma.
