Feelings towards Jews by region

After ruminating on Dinah Shore (yeah, I read everything Steve Sailer writes because Steve Sailer wrote it, not because it necessarily piques my interest), Steve concludes:

One might think, from things like Philip Roth's alternative history The Plot Against America, that the South is teeming with anti-Semites, but that seems to be more the cherished belief of Northern Jews than the bitter experience of Southern Jews.

The GSS has queried respondents on their feelings towards four times in its history, most recently in 2004. It asked them to use a "feeling thermometer", for which ratings between 0-49 indicate unfavorable feelings towards Jews and ratings from 51-100 indicating favorable feelings towards them, the higher the score, the more favorable the perception. The following table ranks the nine geographic divisions (as identified by the US census) by their average feelings towards Jews:

Region	Jews
New England	68.21
South Atlantic	62.38
West North Central	62.08
Mountain	61.54
East North Central	61.25
Middle Atlantic	61.22
Pacific	60.30
West South Central	58.69
East South Central	57.50

New England is especially positively predisposed towards Jews, which might make the rest of the country look like fertile ground for the fourth reich to an identity-obsessed Jew like Philip Roth, but warm feelings are the norm across the country, with little difference between the mid-Atlantic states such as Roth's own New Jersey and, say, the southern seaboard which is comprised of states including South Carolina and Georgia.

To the extent that there is any relative hostility towards Jews detectable here (and it's stretching prodigiously to even speculate as much--one SD is 20 points on the scale), it shows up in heavily NAM regions of the South and West. Foreign-born Hispanics' opinions on Jews are notoriously 'embarrassing', and there has historically been a lot of tension between blacks and Jews over who is America's most victimized group. Indeed, whites express warmer feelings towards Jews than blacks, Hispanics, or Asians do.

GSS variables used: REGION, JEWTEMP

Holocaust? Beaver never heard of it

Writes Steve in a recent Taki's column:

A more general discovery was the wide usefulness of Israel’s strategy in 1967: Go on the offensive. This military triumph infused American Jews with new confidence. Before the Six-Day War, the Holocaust was only occasionally mentioned. It was depressing and alarming to admit that your people had recently been the victims of the worst massacre ever. But after Israel’s show of force, the Holocaust became a staple in American media.

What to do when one of your intellectual heroes utters something oh so controversial, and about Jews of all groups? Prove he's correct, that's what:

Not afraid to die, just don't want to be there when it happens

++Addition++Initially, I forgot to include Italians because I was asleep at the wheel. Looking through all the GSS categories for sample sizes sufficient to include, I apparently just missed them, and though people of Italian descent are on the low end (n = 81), it's still worth including them, for suggestive reasons if nothing else. Thanks to St. Louis for pointing it out.

---

Commenting on an article by Daniel Smith in the NYT about the putative nervousness of Jews, Steve Sailer brings up the collective angst associated with Germans, in contrast to say, Slavs, and discusses what distinguishes inward-looking Teutonic anxiety from entertaining, professionalized contemporary Jewish-branded anxiety. That Smith concedes without objection to the notion that Jews are "the only ethnic group I know of that members of other ethnic groups will unabashedly declare to be suffering from collective neurosis," (never mind the veracity of the claim, which is more about accentuating Jewish victim status than representing reality. You know, reality, that place where non-NAMs are terrified of saying anything negative about Jews and only Jews like Daniel Smith are allowed to write articles discussing Jewish tendencies), shows that it's a stereotype elite Jews are more proud than ashamed of, a point Smith makes explicit later in the piece. Our minds are always racing, juggling all the concerns of the world, that we can't ever just relax in the backyard on the hammock on a lazy summer afternoon. How horrible that we must suffer so!

The archetypal Woody Allen character (not the actual man, as Steve points out) didn't just fashion a stereotype out of thin air, though, it constructed the golem's traits based on real life attributes. Perceptions usually persist because there is at least some element of truth to them. The GSS posed a couple of questions relevant to the topic in 1996, on anxiety, and 1998, on nervousness, to survey participants. The following table shows the average number of days respondents, grouped by religious affiliation, reported feeling "anxious and tense" over the last week and also shows how they assessed their own levels of nervousness over the previous month*:

Anxious	Days	Nervousness	Score
Jewish	2.59	Jewish	2.30
Catholic	2.40	Catholic	2.25
No affiliation	2.40	Other	2.26
Protestant	2.11	Protestant	2.18
Other	2.04	No affiliation	2.01

There's justification for Woody Allen's character. One standard deviation is 2.21 days and 1.02 points, respectively, so we're looking at differences of less than one-fourth a SD between Jews and Protestants on both measures, however. Political differences between Jews and Gentiles are a lot more pronounced, for example, than differences in anxiety levels are.

Since we're here, let's do the same, this time by ancestry:

Anxious	Days	Nervousness	Score
Italian	3.03	Native American	2.36
Native American	2.58	Italian	2.31
Irish	2.48	Mexican	2.30
German	2.27	Scottish	2.26
French	2.14	Irish	2.22
Scottish	2.11	French	2.13
English/Welsh	2.06	German	2.12
Mexican	2.01	English/Welsh	2.09
African	1.75	African	1.93

That Native Americans collectively show nearly the highest levels of angst doesn't surprise me. Taciturn, yes, and in my experience also demure, insecure, and always up for a sedative.

I don't have much intelligent to say regarding the high Italian numbers. Sample sizes aren't large enough for any other Mediterranean groups. Would we expect Greeks and the Turks to be similarly high on the anxiety scale?
Excepting Italians, it's difficult to distinguish much between people of European stock, other than English oppressors tending less towards neuroticism than the oppressed Irish do.

While blacks often play the leading role when SWPLs talk about things like diversity and minorities, Jews, with whom they often compete for most oppressed status, are capable of willfully forgetting them. After all, other than conceived distinctness from the white majority, Jews and blacks don't have much in common. Case in point, Smith, in attempting to universalize Jewish tendencies as the tendencies expressed by minorities of all stripes, writes:

As Jewish-Americans, the participants were highly susceptible to the kind of ironic, self-deprecatory ethnic pride that many American minorities — not just Jews — like to indulge in. ... Ask a Korean-American or a Greek-American or an Italian-American or an Arab-American who the nuttiest, most nervous, most irreparably self-conflicted people in the world are, and he will invariably point to the members of his own tribe.

Blacks are notably absent. As the preceding table shows, they aren't anxious or nervous, and they aren't self-deprecating, either. When blacks do poke fun of themselves, other blacks are the intended recipients, as even the audience of a Chris Rock (who's about as racially self-deprecating as blacks get) stand up routine illustrates.

GSS variables used: ETHNIC, RELIG, ANXIOUS, NERVOUS

* Scores, on a 5-point scale, are inverted for ease of viewing. The higher the mean value, the more collectively nervous the group is.

Jews and abortion

As has been reported here (and iterated elsewhere), Jews in the US--including Orthodox--are, on the whole, further to the left politically than white Democrats are. There are lots of varying explanations for this--Jews being yoked to the American left wing because "it represented the closest American counterpart to the forces on the left that had favored Jewish emancipation in Europe", a consequence of several centuries of urban concentration, as a vehicle for successfully pursuing a "group evolutionary strategy", and a long history of working with and for the state, just to run through a few.

Despite at least being aware of all of this, I was surprised to find how hostile Jews are towards restrictions on abortion. A recent Pew report headlined for cataloging increasing support for gun rights and same-sex marriage contains a seemingly orthogonal table at the end that tracks percentages of people who think abortion should be legal in all or most cases and those who think it should be illegal in all or most cases. Splitting 86%-11% in favor of legality, Jews are the most pro-choice of the 33 groups Pew breaks out; more so than those who have no religious affiliation, than liberal Democrats, and than those who seldom or never attend religious services.

Why? Perhaps it's as difficult for a gentile to understand this particular aspect of Jewish liberalism as it is for him to truly comprehend why the Jewish affinity for leftism generally is so strong, but the possibilities that crop up in my mind--that setting parameters on reproductive rights smacks of 'Nazism' (notwithstanding how odd a way this would be to express that), that Jewish fertility is in the toilet even though Jewish abortions are rare means that more abortions leads to a larger Jewish population share, or that the pro-life movement is preponderantly a white southern evangelical one and therefore something Jews instinctively oppose--feel kind of kooky.

That Jew won't hunt

After OneSTDV articulated his hypothesis that Jews are to blame for the spread of vegetarianism, Half Sigma angrily rejected it, asserting as unlikely that Jews are anymore disproportionately atop the vegetarian movement than they are at the tops of virtually every other movement on account of enjoying an average IQ advantage of nearly one standard deviation over white gentiles.

Half Sigma insinuates that Jews are basically no less carnivorous than the rest of the population is by referencing the GSS and pointing to a woman he guesses to be Jewish who writes about hunting (the latter being an odd single data point to refer to, since it is already serves as a sort of "exception that proves the rule" since the writer is female).

For what it's worth, IHTG pithily relays the impression I have:

Contemporary vegetarianism probably comes from the same place as environmentalism and hippie culture, the roots of which are not Jewish.

But Half Sigma's utilization of the GSS to bolster his view is suspect by way of omission. He writes:

In 1993 and 1994, the General Social Survey asked the question “And how often do you refuse to eat meat for moral or environmental reasons?” The majority of Jews responded “Never.”

That's accurate. However, it doesn't really address OneSTDV's point. By this metric, no group can be considered to have taken the lead so-to-speak in pushing any particular behavior or belief that is not undertaken by at least a sizable minority if not a majority of the larger population. Similarly specious arguments are made on behalf of protecting the blank-slate egalitarian myth on other fronts--most blacks don't commit violent crimes so criminality has nothing to do with race; most illegal immigrants aren't members of violent drug gangs, so immigration has nothing to do with the spread of gangs and drugs in the US, etc.

So let's consider the GSS more objectively. The following table shows the percentages of respondents who either "always" or "often" avoid eating meat for environmental or moral reasons by broad religious affiliation:

Religion	Avoids meat
Protestant	7.0%
Catholic	11.5%
Jewish	19.6%
None	14.9%
Other	20.5%

As of the mid-nineties, one-in-five Jews regularly avoided eating meat, compared to about one-in-nine Catholics and one-in-fourteen Protestants. There are undoubtedly some irreligious ethnically Jewish people who are classified here under "none" or "other" as well, but the proportions of those groups who avoid meat is similar to that of religiously affiliated Jews. The percentages by political orientation are 13.0% for liberals, 8.3% for moderates, and 8.6% for conservatives. While liberals are more apt to avoid meat than moderates and conservatives are, they are less likely to do so than Jews are. Judge for yourselves.

The GSS also asks respondents whether they or their spouses hunt. The survey has done this since its inception and continues to do so into the present. The following table shows the percentages of respondents who either hunt or have a spouse who does, again by broad religious affiliation:

Religion	Hunts
Protestant	22.6%
Catholic	18.9%
Jewish	2.6%
None	18.2%
Other	16.8%

Wow. Sample sizes are enormous here (n = 28,681).

Jews are more heavily concentrated in large cities than non-Jews are, but two-thirds live outside them in suburbs or in small towns (compared to four-fifths of the rest of the population), so that's only a partial explanation that still leaves a lot of ground to cover. OneSTDV is not far off the mark when he flatly states that "Jews do not hunt".

GSS variables used: RELIG, NOMEAT(1-2)(3-4), HUNT(1-3)(4), COMTYPE, POLVIEWS(1-3)(4)(5-7)

The protocols of religious Jewish advocacy groups in the US

In a recent report on religious advocacy groups in the US, Pew lists the top 40 organizations by advocacy expenditures and policy makers and other government agencies and officials. Unsurprisingly, AIPAC comes in at number one.

The top 40 groups account for 85% of all dollars spent by religious groups for the purpose of influence peddling. Because I tend to use the term "neocon" disparagingly, it follows that I must harbor an envious hatred of Jews and consequently am wondering what percentage of the $330 million spent came out of the coffers of explicitly Jewish advocacy groups!

As it turns out, just over one-third (34.1%) of it. For constituting less than 2% of the nation's total population, with a constituency that is notoriously secular to boot, it would sure seem that 'religious' Jewish groups carry a lot of sway!

And yes, I realize I'm not the first person to make this observation. To those with that reaction, I kindly direct you to the blog's header.

Tracing the growth of "Judeo Christian"

Reacting to Lawrence Auster's visceral reactions towards anyone on the right who is not viewed as sufficiently supportive of Israel, Dennis Mangan remarks that it was not so-called "Judeo-Christian" morality that shaped Western civilization, but simply Christian morality that did.

While Dennis' assertion would have gone undisputed in the fifties when he was a toddling around, time has steadily chipped away at its veracity, and there is no sign of a slow down. The following graph created via Google's Ngram viewer from books published in the US traces the ascension of the phrase over close to the last six decades. Prior to 1955, it was almost non-existent (click on the images for better resolution):


Unlike the hybridization that yokes Christianity to Judaism and American interests to those of Israel, plain old "Christian" is old hat, as it floats along sideways:


Look, both religions' moral foundations are found in the first five books of the Old Testament, and where would Americans be today without the admonition against coveting a neighbor's things? That American Jews concerned with Israel's well being have an enormous amount to gain by marrying the cultural and political aims of white Christian centrists and rightists in the US to their own is merely incidental! Similarly, that mainstream white Christians like Bill O'Reilly and Richard Land are able to pitch for "traditional" (ie, Christian) morality with only blunted disapproval from media gatekeepers who reserve far less vitriol for the promotion of Judeo-Christian morality than they ever could for Christian morality is just an unintended byproduct of the firm biblical basis for the phrase's essential invention in the sixties!

Young Jews as conservative immigration restrictionists?

Referencing Stephen Steinlight in a column on the perceived loneliness of immigration restrictionism, the Derb noted that younger Jews are more politically conservative and inclined towards restrictionism than their elders are. The Derb reports that at a function organized by the Center for Immigration Studies, Steinlight "quoted a wealth of surveys and studies to support his case".

In Steinlight's originating article, though, he doesn't present anything relating to a generational divide among American Jews, emphasizing instead the gap between the mainstream Jewish majority and the self-styled Jewish leaders who putatively misrepresent them. Steinlight's article, however, was written nearly a year ago, and he could have presented new material in the talk the Derb attended.

Whatever the case, it would be interesting to see evidence confirming or contradicting the claim that younger Jews are more restrictionist (and thus more in line with broader public opinion) than older Jews are.

Unfortunately, the GSS does not provide a large enough sample to be directly informative on the immigration issue. Questions on immigration were posed in 2000, of which responses from a whopping 34 Jews (of all ages) were recorded. The GSS does, however, consistently query respondents on their political orientations. Those who self-describe as politically conservative tend to be more restrictionist than those who call themselves liberals, so if younger Jews are more conservative than older Jews are, it's reasonable to assume they are similarly more restrictionist.

The following table divides Jewish respondents (n = 262) into three age categories and compares them politically. For broader comparative purposes, it also includes the same for all white respondents (n = 11,034). To strike a balance between adequate sample size and contemporary relevance, the last ten years of GSS surveys are consulted:

Jews
Ages	Liberal	Moderate	Conservative
18-34	46.1%	36.6%	17.3%
35-59	47.2%	29.0%	23.9%
60+	45.4%	32.2%	22.5%
Whites
Ages	Liberal	Moderate	Conservative
18-34	30.3%	38.8%	30.9%
35-59	24.1%	36.7%	39.2%
60+	18.5%	38.8%	42.6%

Not much evincing Steinlight's contention. Younger Jews are slightly less conservative and correspondingly more moderate than their parents and grandparents are, but the differences are marginal.

It is noteworthy, though, that in contrast to the pattern observed among all whites, younger Jews are no more liberal than middle-aged and older Jews. If young Jews are not, as Steinlight puts it, "decidedly more conservative than their elders", they are not more liberal than those elders, either. If Jews tend to experience the same rightward shift throughout the course of their lives that whites do, the GSS provides reason to suspect that today's young Jews are more conservative than older Jews were at the same age. That said, Jews of all ages are, on average, considerably more liberal than the rest of white America is.

To the potential objection that Steinlight is describing Jews based on religious affiliation, not ethnicity, the GSS item used to determine the political orientations of Jews is worded as follows: "What is your religous preference? Is it Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, some other religion, or no religion?" Only 1.9% of respondents indicated Judaism, compared to 14.7% of respondents who choose no religion. The latter figure is undoubtedly comprised in part of those who are ancestrally Jewish but who are themselves irreligious. There is not an apples-to-oranges problem here.

As to the potential objection that the GSS too generalist and wide-ranging to definitively contradict Steinlight's assertion, that is correct. It is merely suggestive. As is so often the case, though, the GSS is an enormous mine of information about the US population, and consequently is surely worth taking a look at.

GSS variables used: RELIG(3), RACE(1), YEAR(1998-2008), POLVIEWS(1-3)(4)(5-7), AGE(18-34)(35-59)(60-89)