The Politics of American Jews examines the familiar puzzle of Jewish attachment to the Democratic Party. In explaining why Jews vote in ways that appear to contradict their economic self-interest, Herbert Weisberg brings empirical data to bear on questions that other scholars have largely overlooked: Why are Jews less Republican than their ideological preferences would predict? To what extent do Jews synchronize their ideological and partisan self-images? Do Jews actually “over-participate” in elections? Does Israel truly matter to Jews’ political decision-making and, if so, how? What latent cleavages may undermine the electoral cohesion of what has been a reliably Democratic constituency for nearly a century?

The two chapters in Part I introduce the reader to contemporary American Jewry, emphasizing Judaism today as both a set of religious values and a source of ethnic identification, sometimes in tension, sometimes in combination. He also profiles the major religious differences among Jewish denominations, stressing the gap in observance between Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jewry.

Part II summarizes prior research on the sources of Jewish political orientations. The author formulates a theory about how self-interest, values, and minority consciousness combine to drive Jewish political orientations today. He makes the case that rather than voting irrationally, as many critics of Jewish liberalism allege, Jews remain distinctive but no less rational for that. The “politics of tradition” operates to imbue their social identity with a liberal/Democratic component and to remind them of their status as a persecuted minority with a strong stake in pluralism and multiculturalism.

The core of the book, Part III, offers six chapters that confront directly the extent to which Jews are politically distinctive and in what manner. Weisberg drills down deeply into his data to test various claims about the level of Jewish political participation, the relationship between ideology and partisanship among them, the nature of Jews’ issue-based voting, and the role of Israel in Jewish voting choices. More than any other section, the chapters in this part confront “the paradoxes, puzzles, and myths associated with Jewish voting” (2). All these individual chapters are careful to control for potentially spurious correlations between Judaism and political orientations. In some cases, like electoral participation, Jewish distinctiveness disappears with a fully-specified model but the same type of analysis shows that Jews stand out from other voters on most moral and cultural issues.

In the final part of The Politics of American Jews, he presents a comprehensive model of Jewish presidential voting. The other chapters in this section address the potential for electoral realignment among American Jews and how this prospect has been affected by the election and administration of Donald Trump in 2016 and after.

The book bears the characteristic traits of Herbert Weisberg's scholarly works: careful, painstaking, and nuanced analysis of survey data, clarifications of key concepts, clear recognition of the strengths and limitations of the data available for analysis. Many results are displayed graphically to make them comprehensible to non-technical readers.

Despite the challenges of highlighting one or two arguments in such a rich book, I find most original and interesting the author's discussion of factors with the potential to undermine Jewish political unity.

Weisberg is very attuned to the fragility of Jewish loyalty to the Democratic Party. As American Jews have developed increasingly diverse political attitudes, he argues, the fit between their ideology and the Democratic Party has weakened. About a third of the Jewish public, a group Weisberg describes as libertarians, objects to what it considers excessive governmental regulation of business (170). Roughly the same percentage (which may overlap the libertarians) embraces the conservative ideological label but does not identify with the GOP (159). Both discrepant categories contain Jews who are candidates for a Republican realignment.

Despite its potential to disrupt the pro-Democratic bias of Jews, this disjuncture between ideological self-definition and political identity has not yet seriously undermined long-time Jewish political tendencies. Jews remain disproportionately Democratic as measured by partisan identification and vote choice in national elections. The reason for this inconsistency, he demonstrates, lies mostly in the Republican embrace of moral regulation as part of its alliance with Christian conservatism.

Jews who think government over-regulates the economy also reject state-imposed morality. The self-described Jewish conservatives who do not identify as Republicans keep their distance from the GOP both because they do not share the party's positions on moral issues and they reject Republican positions on taxes and health care. Both groups could be detached from their partisan moorings by internal and external influences, rendering Jews at least potentially open to political realignment. The author is aware of how many times this prediction has been made and falsified, most recently by the 2016 presidential election and the 2018 midterms when Jews decisively turned away from Republican candidates.

The Politics of American Jews has another conspicuous strength worthy of emulation. Years ago, Alan Zuckerman bemoaned in the American Political Science Review the “intellectual distance” between research on Jews and the social sciences. He argued that case studies of Jews, framed properly, had the potential to address fundamental questions about political and social behavior. Weisberg has heeded that call. His book draws on major theories and concepts from contemporary social science—social identity, issue-based voting, group attachment, minority consciousness—to make sense of the findings and demonstrate how work on Jewish political behavior contributes to the larger scholarly literature. It is securely located in the study of voting behavior.

This paired review was composed by two authors who have been colleagues and admirers of each other's work. We kept in touch while conceptualizing, researching and writing our books. We had considered working together on a single book but discovered that we had somewhat different perspectives. The differences were mostly matters of emphasis and degree.

As we both recognize, my recent book The Foundations of American Jewish Liberalism takes a more macro perspective, trying to understand how American Jews came to develop a liberal political culture that remains strong today despite the political differences among Jews. Although there is a lot of survey data and multivariate analysis in Foundations, much of the book rests on qualitative material collected from major archives. Weisberg does not ignore Jewish history but his book gives much more attention to survey data collected at the individual level. His aim is to identify potential political divisions among Jews, mine to account for the sources of their cohesion. In that sense, the two volumes are complementary.

In terms of research design, Weisberg displays his deep knowledge of American political behavior. As a comparativist, I give more attention to the unique political opportunity structure of the United States, drawing heavily on contextual theories of political behavior and contrasting the politics of American Jewry with Jews in other countries. Given our different backgrounds, mine as a student of religion and politics and Weisberg as a descendant of the Michigan school, these variations are not surprising.

Substantively, we do have some differences over the relative power of partisanship and ideology in Jewish political behavior. Weisberg argues that American Jews are more Democratic than liberal. I think the root of our disagreement is what we mean by “liberal” as a concept and a variable. While I accept the evidence that Jews are imperfectly “sorted” by both ideological and partisan identification, I do not think the evidence supports meaningful claims about the relative impact of the two dispositions on electoral choice.

I became persuaded by Conover and Feldman's 1981 Journal of Politics article and subsequent research by other scholars including Green, Palmquist, and Schickler that ideological self-definition is heavily freighted with group affect and overlaps considerably with partisanship. To “control” for one while testing the other strikes me as conceptually and empirically problematic.

Moreover, American Jews are liberal in two senses of that term: as classic liberals, drawing on an 18th century tradition, Jews believe that the state has no competence in religion and should not distribute benefits or costs on the basis of affiliation. But Jews have also become liberal in the post-World War II sense of supporting a welfare state even if they disagree with particular public policies. Indeed, the commitment to traditional (pre-welfare state) liberalism is so strong that it contributes in a major way to Jewish partisanship. That makes it difficult to assess the impact of partisanship and ideology as separate dimensions in a multivariate equation.

These differences of emphasis notwithstanding, readers who consume both volumes will find that the authors agree far more than they disagree. They both believe the other's work is worth reading and digesting. Happily, despite the Jewish penchant for debate and confrontation, there is no academic feud dividing the authors of these two books.