Jewish Week reports that “Liberalism Still Rules.”
If American Jews are tacking to the right, nobody told them.
That is the finding of a national public opinion study released last week.
According to the National Survey on Race Relations and Changing Ethnic Demographics in the United States of America, commissioned by the New York-based Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, Jews in this country align themselves more with African-Americans on attitudes toward race and poverty, and with Hispanic-Americans on attitudes about immigration, than do other whites.
This contradicts the assertion made in recent years by conservative members of the Jewish community that American Jews had adopted more conservative views and started to drift away from their long tradition of liberalism.
Alas, there’s one fly in the ointment of this paen to perserverance of liberlism among Jews, although casual readers might never see it; it’s about three quarters of the way into the article whose main point is that the Jewish community, still,
“… is more sensitized and more realistic than is white America about the realities of racism and discrimination,
The question in question was:
“Do you support or oppose Affirmative Action to address racial discrimination?”
This wording is bad for a number of different reasons. For example, I thought affirmative action was intended to address lack of diversity.
The complete survey can be found here:
http://www.ffeu.org/
‘Forty-six percent of Jews said they supported affirmative action
actus,
It is unconstitutional in that formulation for public universities at which no pattern of racial discrimination has been found. It has not been found unconstitutional where there has been a showing of deliberate discrimination by a public entity.
Unless we know that the question was specifically about public universities — and I have to say it doesn’t look like it — your comment is a little askew.
If the more descriptive term, “racial preferences,” had been used, you can be sure that the percentages of both “whites” and Jews in opposition would have been much higher, which is to say in line with other national polls on the subject.
Well, to be fair, if the more descriptive term, “racial preferences,” had been used, the percentages of blacks and hispanics in opposition would also have been much higher.
Racial preferences to support the children of upper class blacks is fine with me. My kids need all the help they can get. I worked hard all my life and earned what I have, but my children feel entitled to everything I give them. So I don’t feel bad when taxpayers are tapped to give them things I can’t give them. Someday they might have to face the reality of tit for tat, but I’ll be long gone by then, I hope.
The wording is irrelevant if what you’re interested in is the differences between groups rather than the absolute level. As my doktorvater always said, measurement error can change the mean but not the covariance. In other words, the true rate of support for AA/preferences may be lower, but you can trust the finding that Jews and other whites have similar low levels of support and blacks and hispanics have similar high levels, regardless of what exactly high and low might mean.
“The wording is irrelevant if what you’re interested in is the differences between groups rather than the absolute level. As my doktorvater always said, measurement error can change the mean but not the covariance.”
Bad wording is not measurement error. Also, I can easily imagine an interaction between wording and race.
Dom
“is more sensitized and more realistic than is white America about the realities of racism and discrimination”
Hmmm, I wonder if a poll on illegal immigration that found whites less supportive (and probably blacks too) would be acceptable if it phrased those views as whites “are more sensitized and more realistic than Hispanics about the realities of the costs illegal immigrants bring to this country.”
These results aren’t that surprising, I wouldn’t think. Jews are less likely to think immigrants take jobs away from Americans while African-Americans do–who do immigrants generally take jobs from, blacks or Jews? Jews benefited from immigration in a dramatic way in that many were saved from Hitler or pogroms in Russia or elsewhere. But with affirmative action, they’re going to be harmed, I assume even more so than gentile whites, which makes that similarity with other whites not surprising.
Besides, I thought it was younger Jews that were becoming less liberal, so I’d want to see a survey breaking Jews, and others, down by age. For one thing, I think Orthodox Jews are a greater share of the younger population (higher birth rates), which I would think would mean they’re generally more conservative. For another, they’re less likely to have heard immigration tales or tales of Jews kept out of Harvard because of anti-semitism. They’ll, I assume, know it happened, but it won’t be such an immediate issue. But if they’re on a college campus they might very well hear of anti-Israel, anti-Jewish beliefs from leftists and Middle Eastern students and occasionally Hispanic groups.
Those numbers (46%) for that question are consistent with other data. The inverse of 46 is 54 (meaning 54 oppose “a.a” because the media has so badly conflated it with race preference). 54% is exactly the percentage of the overall pop, asked the most misleading question possible using the vaguest words, that still oppose “a.a”, according to other work. So the Jewish demographic is exactly what the median population trend is.
Amazingly, despite our opposition’s assertion about the “impossibility” of even a single black person signing MCRI without being “deceived”, I’ve seen cross-tabs where 40% of blacks oppose “a.a.” when the term “a.a.” is explicitly used.
Someone above asked about age. As age decreases, opposition to preferences and “a.a” increases. High school juniors nationwide are against 80%, with blacks against (YES) 70%. Apparently cynicism and idealism has an age relationship – no surprise there.
Way above, Actus says:
‘Forty-six percent of Jews said they supported affirmative action
dom,
actually, poor wording is a form of measurement error, to the extent that you’re using the question as a measure of some more abstract concept (in this case, support for AA). also, you’re right in theory that there could be group specific biases to wording, but this is an interaction effect and these tend to be pretty weak.
chetly,
two minor mathematical points.
first, 0.54 is not the “inverse” of 0.46, it’s the “complement.” (the inverse of 0.46 is 2.18).
second, you should never take the complement in an opinion poll because you don’t know how many people gave no opinion. if about 10% of jews expressed no opinion, then jews would be evenly split. (i don’t know how many expressed no opinion here, but 5-10% is common in opinion polls).
Anon,
Yes, you are correct on both counts. But that number (the complement I was guessing at) is consistent with other numbers I’ve seen. Yes, there could be an undecided and I shouldn’t have extrapolated it.
Chet