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Quarter of U.S. Blames Jews

For financial crisis.

by
Allison Hoffman
June 16, 2009
Former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, speaking to the National Association of Realtors last month.(Getty Images)
Former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, speaking to the National Association of Realtors last month.(Getty Images)

A pair of political scientists has managed to prove what ADL head Abe Foxman was simply able to intuit months ago: thirty-eight percent of non-Jewish Americans hold “the Jews” to some degree responsible for the financial crisis, and almost a full quarter blame “the Jews” a moderate amount or more. The surprising part, as reported in the current Boston Review, is that those who chose to assign somewhere between a “moderate” amount and a “great deal” of blame were much more likely to be Democrats (32 percent) than Republicans (18.4 percent), particularly given the prominence of Jews in the Democratic Party and the presumed big-tent tolerance of Democratic voters.

Bill Kristol, on his Weekly Standard blog, chose to see the results as more evidence that American Jewry is “foolishly” maintaining “allegiance to a party that includes lots of people who don’t like them much (and who certainly don’t like Israel much).” But, Bill, doesn’t that argument, if it’s true, work against the whole country?

State of the Nation [Boston Review]
Democrats, Republicans and Jews [Weekly Standard]

Allison Hoffman is a senior editor at Tablet Magazine. Her Twitter feed is @allisont_dc.