Where is the New Jewish conservatism?

Abstract

W 'hoever speaks of Jewish liberalism is accounted an historian or someone out of touch with the contemporary Jewish world. One prevalent recent assumption by observers of the Jewish community--at least those within--has been the growing conservatism of American Jews. By the late 1970s, Jewish liberalism is vestigial. This motif has become so dominant that it is no longer necessary to document the change. Observers either seek to explain Jewish conservatism or they state it simply as a fact taken for granted like the breakdown of the family. No one feels obligated to demonstrate that Jews have indeed become conservative. Although there is a body of literature, some of it quite sophisticated, dealing with Jewish conservatism, little attention is given to documentation. Systematic evidence is replaced by reference to the obvious nature of the phenomenon or to a small number of oft-cited examples, particularly to racial incidents in New York, especially in the late 1960s, and to perceptions of the presidential vote in 1972. Harold Schulweis' insightful article on "The New Jewish Right," published in the first volume of Moment, addresses conservatism among the intellectual Jewish right, but it contains an assumption about the spread of attitudes among the masses.