In the nearly eighty years since President Franklin Roosevelt launched the New Deal with a pledge to “help the forgotten man,” relations between American Jews and the Democratic Party have been as close as lips and teeth. Even as Jews prospered and assimilated into the mainstream of American life, most of them remained loyal to FDR’s liberal vision and refrained from following the pattern of other affluent groups by shifting to the Republican Party. Over the course of the past twenty elections, a stunning 75 percent of the Jewish vote has on average gone to the Democratic presidential candidate. As the old saying goes: “Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.”
