From The Jewish Week:
President George W. Bush will do better among Jewish voters in November than he did in 2000, even though Jews are much less supportive of his Iraq and anti-terror policies than other Americans.
And former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who hopes to be his Democratic opponent, will do better than some Jewish leaders predict.
The statistical portrait came in the yearly American Jewish Committee survey of Jewish public opinion, released this week at the start of what could be a watershed year in Jewish politics.
The 2003 survey also offered a slap at Christian conservatives, who are still seen as major propagators of anti-Semitism, and it pointed to continued Jewish resistance to government funding of religious schools.
There were hints of change, but also of a streak of political stubbornness in the Jewish community: For all the talk of a Jewish shift to the right, the community remains heavily Democratic, strongly liberal and deeply distrustful of some of the most conservative forces in American society.
David Harris, the AJCommittee executive director, said the most surprising statistic was the weak Jewish support for Bush’s war on terrorism in general and the U.S. effort in Iraq in particular.
Asked about Bush’s handling of the U.S. campaign against terrorism, 54 percent of respondents said they disapproved and 41 percent approved. The same proportion said they disapproved of the war with Iraq.
So a large majority of American Jews do not support Bush foreign policy, just as many of the Iraq war’s most vocal critics have been Jewish. The poll’s respondents also have some interesting thoughts on the sources of real anti-Semitism:
The poll also represented very bad news for a new ally of the pro-Israel community. In recent years Christian conservatives have become outspoken supporters of the current Israeli government, and many have railed against the rise of anti-Semitism around the world.
But in the AJCommittee poll, 20 percent of the Jewish respondents said that “most” members of the “religious right” are anti-Semitic, and another 21 percent selected “many.”
That puts religious conservatives second only to Muslims and far behind African Americans in being regarded as sources of anti-Semitism in this country.
I suspect the “religious conservatives” referenced here are primarily the Protestant fundamentalist, pro-Sharon, pro-Armageddon types who make up Dubya’s core constituency.
[Side note: Please excuse the confusing all-italics script that begins a few posts down. There seems to be some sort of technical problem at the moment.]