"As people do better, they start voting like Republicans -- unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing." -- Karl Rove

Maybe that's the answer -- Jews are generally more educated.

I think Medved is at least partially correct. In my experience, Jews don't have a "distaste for Christianity," but they certainly have a strong reaction to any whiff of state religion - since, of course, Jews faced historical persecution in so many places for failing to observe the state religion. So they're hardly going to support a party that wants prayer in schools, etc.

McCain is, of course, just dissembling about the link between the GOP and the Religious Right, so no argument there.

This is a great piece. Very thought provoking. I like the sort of ending that leaves it opn to personal input. Makes it work for just about everyone I think. Nicely done! I’ll subscribe.

The whole idea of "real Americans" would sure get me nervous if I was a Jew. They're usually about the first group to be declared "not real [nation]", and have been for centuries. The First and Fourteenth Amendments are reassuring, but only until you know about Republican habits of ignoring laws they don't like.

Liberals support protection from discrimination for minorities. Conservatives don't. Jews are a minority that has historically been a victim of discrimination. I don't think the conclusion is hard.

Then again, maybe we shouldn't assume that everything is about Jewishness. What kind of ethics do most Jews have? Maybe they just don't like the "I got mine" nature of modern conservatism, and are actually liberal on the substantial issues.

"A guy with a gun rack in the back window of his four-wheel drive truck may occasionally vote Democrat, but he’s extremely unlikely to be an out-and-out liberal."

Ha Ha Ha!

He should meet some of the guys from Texas I hung out with when I was doing some work down there last winter.

Four wheel drive pic-up truck. Check
Gun rack. Check
Obama supporter. Check

Kind of blew me away, actually.

Also, I know Jews from small towns in the "heartland." They tend to be the town liberals.

Conservatives activists are just as clueless about what Americans are really like as every Other DC type.

But Medved blames Jews' alleged distaste for Christianity for their liberalism. "Jewish voters don’t embrace candidates based on their support for the state of Israel as much as they passionately oppose candidates based on their identification with Christianity—especially the fervent evangelicalism of the dreaded 'Christian Right.'"

This, of course, begs the question of why Jews were liberal before the conservative political party got hijacked by the religious right.

There are really two reasons.

First, it was under the Democrats FDR and JFK that the mass of Jews really emerged into the mainstream. That's when Jews were able to enter the civil service and many professions from which the were informally restricted. There's a feeling that American conservative stood for maintaining an Anglo-Saxon elite, something that still exists in attenuated form today. Oh, sure, the right will tolerate a few Jews in high places or the learned professions or corporate boardrooms, but I think they would really prefer we all go back to owning small businesses.

The other thing is that the vast majority of American Jews are descendants of what could be considered the "trailer trash" of the shtetl. Arthur Hertzberg, in his book :The Jews in America," (http://books.google.com/books?id=uCCtp22xKlwC&dq=The+Jews+in+America&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=QXNLBcm6Zm&sig=9W7VrBtchevXyhC_zBYKiOHx4Kg&hl=en&ei=bmaqSvzwLMLhlAe92ojMBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5#v=onepage&q=&f=false) notes that the vast majority of the eastern European Jews who immigrated between 1880-1920 were the poor, uneducated, and unemployed. And even if they ended up being self-employed small businessmen in the US, they still saw themselves as having more in common with the poor workers than they did with the corporate overlords.

Plus, guess which party and political ideology slammed the door shut to immigration in the 1920's just in time to keep Jews from escaping Hitler (check out Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924), and guess which party supported liberalizing immigration in the 1960's (Check out the Hart-Cellar Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965) just in time to offer refuge for Soviet Jews? (Thank you Ted Kennedy!)

Basically, US Conservative have long been nativist plutocrats even before they added bible thumping to the mix. Why should Jews support such an ideology?

Sorry, but I think one factor is a distaste for religion as such--Judaism as well as Christianity. Fewer than half of Americans who self-identify as "Jewish" profess to believe in God. And that isn't even counting Americans of Jewish ancestry who don't self-identify as Jewish but just answer "no religious preference" because they aren't religious.

This shouldn't be surprising. If the ghetto door was locked from the outside it was locked from the inside by religious Jews. Immigrants from Eastern Europe to the US a century ago were self-selected from amongst those who didn't like this system. It was precisely the secular Enlightenment that was "good for the Jews" and they haven't forgotten that.

I'd be curious whether you see Jews in other countries, where you don't have the same history of mass immigration of self-selected secularists, being so overwhelmingly liberal.