JustASC

Eric Alterman addresses the old saw that major American Jewish organizations don’t speak for the liberal Jewish majority:

An examination of past AJC surveys as well as a number of other polls of American Jews demonstrates that Jews have remained remarkably faithful to the values of liberal humanism. These views, however, have been obscured in our political discourse by an unholy alliance between conservative-dominated professional Jewish organizations and neoconservative Jewish pundits, aided by pliant and frequently clueless mainstream media that empower these right-wingers to speak for a people with values diametrically opposed to theirs.

And he suggests why: 

Major Jewish groups respond to the demands of their top funders and best-organized constituencies. Most American Jews, however, have little or nothing to do with these groups. According to the AJC survey, while 90 percent of Jews say being Jewish is either “very important” (61 percent) or “fairly important” (29 percent) in their lives, exactly half say they belong to a synagogue or temple. A fraction of this number belong to Jewish political organizations, and the number of major funders is but a tiny percentage of that. As with so much of American life, the far-right minority is better funded and better disciplined than the liberal majority.

There’s a ghost of a question lurking here: What does it mean to say something is “very important” in your life, but not to express that impulse with a gesture toward communal belonging, either to a synagogue or organization? “Better disciplined” might be another way of saying “more committed.” And if that’s the case, perhaps it’s not the “pliant” mainstream media’s fault that liberal Jewish views are under-represented, but liberal Jews’.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 at 2:12 pm and is filed under JustASC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.