Why Don’t American Jews Vote for Israel?

One would have thought that concern for Israel’s security would feature uppermost in American Jewish voting patterns, yet this has not been the case.

As a writer who provides news and opinion from an Israeli point of view, I can attest that nothing arouses more passion and controversy among American Jews than a comment on how they should or shouldn’t vote.

Any discussion of Democratic versus Republican platforms in my weekly e-mail column elicits an outcry and a number of “unsubscribes” from my 10,000-member mailing list. Even though I am a taxpaying American citizen who votes in U.S. elections, the most popular response is: “You live in Israel. We live here. We have to vote in our own interests.”

This might seem like a new phenomenon for Jews but it isn’t. At the height of the Inquisition, a similar disagreement arose during the Ancona Boycott. Ancona, on Italy’s Adriatic coast, enjoyed special status as a free port from Pope Paul III who, in 1547, assured converso merchants—Jews forced to convert to Christianity, some of whom continued to practice Judaism secretly—that they could live unmolested. Accordingly, as many as 100 families from Portugal flocked there, established their own synagogue and helped turn Ancona into a bustling, prosperous port.

With the 1555 accession of the reactionary pontiff, Paul IV, new persecution of conversos was unleashed. Without warning and contrary to past assurances, they were rounded up and 24 of them were burned at the stake. One was an employee of Gracia Mendes Nasi, an astute Portuguese-born businesswoman, a converso and a devout Jew who inherited the family banking and trading empire after the deaths of her husband and brother-and-law. She moved to Constantinople, where she lived openly as a Jew and exercised a powerful voice in community affairs throughout the Ottoman Empire, building synagogues and yeshivas.

Outraged by the betrayal at Ancona, Nasi brought together the Empire’s Jewish notables and convinced them to transfer their shipping from Ancona to nearby Pesaro, where the Duke of Urbino offered the conversos protection from Papal persecution in exchange for the increased trade.

At first, Ancona’s docks lay empty, and the boycott seemed to work. As British historian Cecil Roth wrote, “It appeared, for the moment, as though the Jews were about to carry out with success something which had been hardly known hitherto in the history of the Diaspora—a response to physical outrage not only by fasting and prayer, nor by the turning of the other cheek…but by a vigorous, systematic, calculated exercise of pressure in the only field in which they had the slightest power.”

Eventually, however, the boycott failed. Citing the economic burden, the inadequacy of the Pesaro port and doubts about the Duke of Urbino, more and more Jewish merchants began to ignore it. Significantly, there was Jewish resistance from within Ancona itself. The local rabbi, Moses Bassola, feared that the Pope would avenge the boycott by persecuting the non-converso Jews and pleaded for its end.

And so Ancona regained its lost Jewish trade. The angry Duke of Urbino responded by expelling the conversos from Pesaro and the Pope continued persecuting Jews until his death. “Jewish solidarity was shown in the eyes of all the world to be a figment, and political action by Jews to improve their position to be utterly ludicrous,” Roth wrote.

The Ancona Boycott failed for the same reason that international Jewish opposition to terrorism is now failing: Jewish inability to unite. The American Jewish community’s power to promote anti-terrorism policies is arguably Jewry’s greatest tool in safeguarding Western democratic values—values that have allowed post-Holocaust Jews to live and prosper and have assured the survival of the tiny, embattled Jewish state.

While Jews comprise only two percent of the U.S. electorate, they are concentrated in states like New York, Florida and California, where their high turnout can be decisive. One would have thought that concern for Israel’s security would feature uppermost in their voting patterns, yet this has not been the case.

In their analysis of Jewish voting patterns in the 2004 election, Eric M. Uslaner and Mark Lichbach of the University of Maryland found that only 15 percent of Jews, most of them Orthodox, named Israel as their key voting issue. “A Jewish voter who felt Israel was a critical issue was 18 percent less likely to vote Democratic,” wrote Uslaner and Lichbach. But the Orthodox are only 10 percent of the United States’ five million-plus Jews. In most recent congressional races, their support for pro-Israel candidates failed to tip the scales, most notably in the Senatorial losses of Republican candidates Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania and Tom Kean, Jr. in New Jersey.

Eighty percent of American Jews voted for Democrat John Kerry for president in 2004 despite wooing from an American president who removed an existential threat to Israel by bringing down Saddam Hussein.

Jewish voters have proven again and again that, come what may, they will vote Democratic. As a result, they may soon find themselves marginalized. Secure in their support from the Jewish community, Democratic politicians increasingly turn their back on Jewish interests. Take the crucial Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act of 2006, which banned U.S. government funding and contacts with the newly elected Hamas government until it renounces terrorism or recognizes Israel’s right to exist. The House bill passed resoundingly with 361 votes; of the 37 congressmen opposing, 31 were Democrats. Or take House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s recent trip to meet Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and pass him an apparently fictional message from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert about Israel’s willingness to relinquish the Golan Heights.

As in the Ancona Boycott, if American Jews can’t tell friends from enemies by 2008 and forge greater political solidarity, the “Jewish vote” will lose any influence it still has. The consequences will be disastrous for America’s Jews—and the world’s.

Naomi Ragen is a novelist and playwright. She lives in Jerusalem.