If There Was No Religious Right Would More Jews Be Republican

Color me skeptical of the premise that is developed here at Margaret Thatcher and the Jews that if not for the "religious right " more Jews would be voting GOP.

I think it is far more complicated and I thought this comment at the post shows the bigger cause :

I’d suggest a lot of it is geographic isolation and the resulting effect. Of America’s 6.5 million Jews, a full third are in the New York metro area, and another sixth are in the retiree zone of Miami and the affuent parts of L.A. These are all extremely left wing cities culturally.

From personal anecdote, I was raised in Cleveland’s Jewish community, my mother’s family is from Georgia’s, and my father’s is from LA and NY. Everyone on my mother’s side is some degree of Republican, with my maternal grandfather being somewhat right of Rush Limbaugh.

My father’s family is moderate to left. The Cleveland Jewish community appears reasonably divided politically–my conservative movement synagogue seemed about evenly divided. On the other hand, the Jewish girl I dated in college, from Livingston, NJ, had never met a Republican Jew before college, nor had she met a non-New York area Jew.

This matches my observation from working as an intern at the Republican Jewish Coalition, where support came disproportionally from non-New York Jewish communities. And now that I’m in New York, and looking for a non-Orthodox congregation to join, they all feature sermons positioned on the extreme left–I heard one lay member explain how a passage from Deuteronomy required us all to actively fight global warming.

In other words, Jews vote primarily on the left in the United States because Jews primarily live in insular, leftist communities.

I think there is a lot too that. Again it's not the only cause but it's a big one. People forget but there was considerable rural Jewry in the South at one time before the migration to the BIG CITIES. Further many decent sized town in the South had a sizable and influential Jewish population. Now this presence is a ghost of it's former self. For the Jews that remain I find a lot more diverse population as too political views than I sense elsewhere .

If this migration had not happened I expect the natural interplay of interacting with your neighbors would have have caused a more Bi Parisian ethos as to Jewish politics.