Jewish Americans Overwhelmingly Cold Toward Tea Party

June 16, 2011

In response to reports of a new non-scientific sampling of Jewish American attitudes toward the Tea Party, J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami issued the following statement, drawing on the findings of J Street’s Election Night 2010 poll of 1,000 randomly-selected Jewish Americans: “Contrary to claims that Jews are ‘warming’ to the Tea Party, actual scientific opinion research has shown that Jews hold deeply negative views of the Tea Party Movement and there is no evidence of any shift in the basic ideological positions or attitudes in the community as a whole,” Ben-Ami said. “Despite the wishful thinking of Republican political operatives and hard-line conservatives in the Jewish community, American Jews remain a fundamentally liberal constituency, voting in 2010 as they have for decades by roughly 2-1 for the Democratic Party,” he said. “They continue to identify overwhelmingly as liberal or progressive and to hold favorable views of Barack Obama.” In J Street’s own poll last November, the Tea Party was viewed favorably by 19 percent of American Jews and unfavorably by 71 percent. In addition, a survey by the Pew Research Center in September 2010 confirmed that only 15 percent of Jews agree with the Tea Party. “Wouldn’t a more appropriate headline for the real research be ‘American Jews overwhelmingly cold toward Tea Party?’” said Ben-Ami.