Sarah Silverman should STFU.
Sarah has organized “The Great Schlep” to encourage Jewish grandchildren to visit their grandparents in Florida and urge them to vote for Barack Obama.
Sarah's video has more than one million views, but she knows bupkis about politics. According to a Gallup poll, 75 percent of Jewish Americans plan to vote for Obama.
During a public forum on American Jews and the 2008 presidential election, Prof. Steven Cohen, director of the Berman Jewish Policy Archive at NYU Wagner, said:
Older Jews are more likely to vote for Obama than younger ones…Jews are voting for Obama in the same percentage as they voted for past Democratic presidential candidates.
Cohen said younger Jews are more likely to intermarry and tend to be less ethnically Jewish in their political identity. Also, a higher percentage of Jews aged 18-29 are Orthodox. While non-Orthodox Jews favor Obama, 80 percent of Orthodox Jews support John McCain.
Cohen noted his survey found that Jewish support for Obama is not about his policy positions; rather, it's about their political identity:
With the possible exception of their concerns for Israel’s security and Iran, Jews’ political values incline them to support Obama. However, multivariate analysis demonstrates that the Jewish/white gap in vote intentions cannot be well-explained by their differences in political values, by such demographic factors as education and income, or by religiosity-secularity, a factor that has been shown to influence the vote even more than economic standing.
Only one factor substantially explains the Jewish/non-Jewish white gap in vote intentions: “Political identity,” the tendency for Jews to identify as liberals and as Democrats rather than conservatives and Republicans.
The bottom line: Jewish grandmothers—Sarah's bubbes—should schlep to swing states and tell their grandchildren to vote for Obama.
