Explaining to Israelis Why the Overwhelming Majority of American Jews Identify as Democrats and Traditional Progressives

A recurring source of friction between Israeli Jews and their American counterparts is political. Israelis, who have watched the Democratic Party grow increasingly uncomfortable on Israel, and who see a Republican Party that offers loud, unconditional support, find it genuinely baffling that roughly 70% of American Jews consistently vote Democratic. The question gets asked with mounting frustration: how can American Jews support a party that seems to tolerate hostility toward the Jewish state, when the alternative offers such enthusiastic embrace?

The question deserves a serious answer — not a defensive one. Because the alignment is not irrational, not tribal inertia, and not simple ignorance of Israeli interests. It is rooted in something deeper: a coherent, values-grounded political identity that most American Jews would recognize, if asked to name it honestly, as Traditional Progressive. Understanding why requires understanding what that means — and why it has proven so durable across generations of enormous change.

What “Traditional Progressive” Actually Means

First, let us be clear about what we are not describing. We are not describing the progressive left’s identitarian wing — the campus movements that have made “anti-Zionism” a progressive credential, the Squad’s casual tolerance of antisemitic framing, the ideological maximalism that has made some Democratic spaces hostile to Jewish particularity. American Jews who remain in the Democratic coalition are not blind to these developments. They find them genuinely alarming.

What most American Jews identify with is something older, prouder, and more substantive: the tradition of the New Deal, the civil rights coalition, the labor movement, the Marshall Plan Democrats. A politics rooted not in ideological performance but in the prophetic Jewish demand for structural justice — dignity of labor, care for the vulnerable, protection of the stranger, accountability of the powerful. A politics aimed not at dependency but at opportunity — enabling self-sufficiency rather than permanent assistance, which is precisely Maimonides’ highest rung of tzedakah.

This is Traditional Progressive politics: rooted in enduring values, applied forward to present conditions. It is, in ways most American Jews feel instinctively even when they cannot articulate theologically, Judaism expressed in the available civic vocabulary.

The Prophets Were Political

Israelis who know their Tanakh well should find the political connection less surprising than they do. Amos did not merely counsel private charity. He thundered against rigged economic systems: “They sell the righteous for silver, and the poor for a pair of sandals.” Isaiah did not merely comfort the afflicted. He indicted the powerful who “grind the faces of the poor.” The Torah’s commandment to care for the ger — the stranger — appears 36 times, more than any other ethical injunction. Its grounding is explicitly experiential and political: “You know the soul of the stranger, for you were strangers in Egypt.”

This is not a private ethic. It is a demand for the structuring of society — for legal systems, economic arrangements, and........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)