Andres Kudacki/AP Photo
Muslim and Jewish women gather at an interfaith workshop on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at Rutgers University, November 19, 2023, in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Last week, the Pew Center came out with the latest in its periodic reports on Americans’ partisan leanings, finding an almost even division of the populace between Democrats and Republicans. What makes the 75-page report invaluable is its breakdown of those alignments by every subgroup imaginable. Of particular interest to me was its data on the partisan alignments of different religions.
Some of that data told us what we already knew: that regular churchgoers are a lot more Republican than the occasionals, and hugely more Republican than the nevers. In the realm of the not-surprising, we also learn that 85 percent of white evangelicals are or tilt Republican, and 84 percent of Black Protestants are or tilt Democratic. What’s notable about all the groups of respondents who gave themselves a particular religious identity (as opposed to those who said they didn’t belong to any particular faith) is that almost none of those groups (Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, and all their racial and class subgroups) had remotely similar partisan alignments (though none were so radically dissimilar as the white evangelicals and the Black Protestants, whose alignments differed by a cool 169 percentage points).
Except, that is, for two religious groups, both rather small, that had nearly identical rates of partisan alignment. Sixty-nine percent of Jews described themselves as either Democrats or Democratic leaners. So did 66 percent of Muslims.
As most of the polling took place in 2023, you could think, as I initially did, that the Muslim rate of alignment had declined since then due to President Biden’s persistence in providing unconditional aid to Israel throughout its war on Gaza. But in fact, the polling of Muslims was conducted in February of this year, by which time northern Gaza had been reduced to rubble and well over 20,000 Palestinians had been killed in the process.
So let’s try to unpack this. To begin, the opposition to Biden’s policy of unconditional aid comes entirely from Democrats—and not just from the Democratic left. Virginia’s center-left Sen. Tim Kaine has been trying to force the administration to get congressional approval for its continuing incremental shipments of military equipment to Israel. Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi has signed on to a letter calling for a cessation of aid so long as Israel violates international laws requiring humanitarian assistance (like food) to civilian populations. And even on the left of this debate, Michigan Democrat Rashida Tlaib—the only Palestinian American in Congress—has not uttered even a syllable about leaving the Democratic Party, even as she has excoriated Biden for persisting in his policy of unconditional aid.
I suspect, too, that Muslim Americans remember that almost as soon as he assumed the presidency in 2017, Donald Trump sought to ban immigration from seven largely Muslim countries, on the grounds that they were, well, largely Muslim. I also suspect that that is seared into most Muslim Americans’ memories, to a far greater degree than it is to the non-Muslim college students and other young people who are raging against Biden, Israel, and, among some of them, Jews.
But there are other, deeper reasons why the political inclinations of Jews and Muslims are similar—save, of course, on the issues of Israel-Palestine. Each has experienced, and continues to experience, bigotry rising to the level of murderous violence. Each has felt the need to join larger coalitions—often, the same coalitions—that defend minorities and minority rights. Each has benefited from the work of civil libertarians.
One such civil libertarian is the dean of UC Berkeley’s law school, who has infuriated right-wingers by refusing to sanction or punish on free-speech grounds the law students who have attacked, sometimes blindly, every institution and person they claim to be perpetuating the war in Gaza. Erwin Chemerinsky believes freedom of speech extends to those who make even the most wrongheaded claims, and he’s taken a good deal of right-wing abuse for doing so. Yet despite his decades-long support for creating a viable Palestinian state and his concurrent criticisms of Israeli governments, not to mention his national leadership in progressive interpretations of the Constitution (if you want to read how the 14th Amendment’s affirmation of equal justice calls into question the existence of the Senate, check out Chemerinsky), he’s been subjected to antisemitic vilification for supporting the existence of Israel. It was only when the students whose rights he’d defended took over a party he was giving for law students at his home that he thought those students had gone beyond the broad boundaries of the First Amendment.
Palestinians have real enemies. It doesn’t help their cause when their advocates relabel their defenders as their foes. Wars engender fury, but there’s a deep reason why the nation’s two most prominent religious minorities—Jews and Muslims—poll alike.
