Is he good for us? To this traditional question, ritually asked in their families, American Jews answered massively yes: Barack Obama obtained 78 percent of the Jewish vote on 4 November 2008. The support of the Jewish electorate, like that of the electorate in general, grew in the final weeks of the campaign, when, against the backdrop of the crisis, the Democratic candidate managed to reassure Americans in the grip of anxiety. He restored confidence to the middle classes, disoriented in the face of mounting perils; reconquered the abandoned proletariat in the country’s great industrial centers; and embodied the values of the Democratic Party. He campaigned on health coverage for all, the restoration of social dialogue, the defense of liberties, the fight against terrorism. In plain terms, on 4 November 2008, Barack Obama had a new form of progressivism ratified by 53 percent of the electorate, but — and this is too often forgotten — with only 45 percent of white voters. The vote of the Black and Latino minorities was therefore decisive, while that of the Jews had no influence on the final result. But politics is not only a matter of numbers. Barack Obama owes his victory first of all to the construction of a new grand alliance, comparable to the one that made the electoral fortune of his distant predecessor: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In the 1930s, the great Democratic president managed to impose the revolution of the New Deal on a bourgeois, reactionary, and racist WASP America, by federating the different components of the America on the move. On the social level first, by bringing about the alliance of blue collars and white collars, of workers and intellectuals. He also managed to federate the minorities — Catholic, Jewish, and Black — around a project based on the values of equality. Sixty-two years and eighteen elections later, Barack Obama renewed the feat. And American Jews answered the call. This attitude may come as a surprise on this side of the Atlantic: whereas in Europe and in Israel, where the left has virtually disappeared, the Jews have massively swung to the right,1 their American coreligionists continue massively to vote Democratic. This is the first American exception. It is not the only one: American Jews are, as much as others, attached to the State of Israel… but not necessarily to the policy of its government. Already in 1977, during the Mahapakh (upheaval) that saw Menachem Begin’s right triumph over forty years of Labor supremacy, the American community had distanced itself. It took the patience of leaders such as Rabbi Schindler2 to avoid a rupture and to engage in a rapprochement that was completed only after the Camp David Accords. For, unlike their French coreligionists, American Jews are fervent partisans of a peace based on a territorial compromise, on the coexistence of two states. This is the second American exception. Even though this community in decline no longer exercises its former political influence, the originality of its political positioning largely explains the support Barack Obama enjoyed among the Jewish electorate, and the backing he still finds there for conducting a Middle Eastern policy that is no longer a carbon copy of the Likud’s.

*

JEWS FOR OBAMA

Traditionally, American Jews vote Democratic in proportions that are sometimes overwhelming. Franklin D. Roosevelt, over the course of his four elections, obtained between 82 percent and 90 percent of the Jewish vote. Harry Truman gathered 75 percent of it, John F. Kennedy 82 percent, Lyndon Johnson 90 percent.3 More recently, the Jewish vote remained massively Democratic. Bill Clinton received 76 percent of the Jewish vote in 1992, and 80 percent in 1996. Al Gore (with Joe Lieberman as candidate for the vice-presidency), in 2000, obtained 79 percent of it, and John Kerry, 76 percent in 2004.

Seventy-eight percent

For Barack Obama, the Jewish electorate was not a foregone conclusion, unlike that of the other minorities. Assured of 90 percent of the Black vote, he also conquered the Latino electorate, initially won over to Hillary Clinton as well, which would end up supporting him at 70 percent.4 And on 4 November 2008, as we have seen, 78 percent of American Jews rallied to the candidate of the movement, after many vicissitudes rich in lessons. Contrary to the hopes of the Republican Party, American Jews remained faithful to their political tradition. The reasons for this affectio societatis between the Democratic Party and American Jews are of a historical, ideological, and affective order. To confine ourselves to recent history: in the 1950s, the Jews were in the front ranks of the struggle for civil rights. In the following decade, young Jews steeped in the reading of Marcuse and Allen Ginsberg and the songs of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen were, on the campuses, the pioneers of flower power, of the counterculture. American feminism also owes much to militants such as Betty Friedan, founder of NOW (National Organization for Women). Once the movement of revolt subsided, this new wave furnished the American left with many of its cadres and with battalions of voters. On the ideological level, American Jews share, with the Democrats, the concern for a greater social justice in a climate of liberty. Even when their social interests, and above all their fiscal interests, ought to lead the wealthiest among them to vote Republican, many rich and famous Jews campaign and vote for the Democratic Party.5 Finally, on a more affective level, Democratic support for the State of Israel never having flagged, American Jews display without qualms their closeness to the Party of Lyndon Johnson, of Bill Clinton, and of so many other Israelophile political leaders situated on this side of the political chessboard. But this advantage nearly escaped Barack Obama. During the primaries, the Jewish voters of the Democratic Party had preferred Hillary Clinton, perceived, rightly or wrongly, as the worthy successor of her husband, a charismatic, philosemitic, and pro-Israeli president, adored in the American Jewish community and in Israel.6 To conquer the Jewish electorate, Barack Obama had to combat rumors of a markedly racist flavor.

Barack Hussein

A vicious campaign waged against him by the right within the Jewish community and beyond sought to confine him within his identity as a Black man, the son of a Muslim, weighed down by a heavily connotated middle name: Hussein. Every blow seemed permitted. Thus, people presenting themselves as pollsters telephoned Jewish voters in Florida and Pennsylvania to ask them whether they would be willing to vote for Obama knowing that he had given money to the PLO, or that “the Hamas leader, Ahmed Youssef, supports Obama and says he hopes for his victory,” or even that he “had in the past been close to a Palestinian university professor.” In the end, the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) admitted to having financed this poll, published in the magazine Politico, intended to influence Jewish voters.

Such crude maneuvers were quickly thwarted. But this was without reckoning on a more general campaign aimed at discrediting Barack Obama with, for example, the account of the friendly relations he once maintained with Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian professor at the University of Chicago, or, still more, the tendentious interpretation of his relations with his pastor — who had helped Obama find faith, even though he had often asserted in his interviews and his sermons that Zionism was a racism. More generally, the question of the links between this church and Louis Farrakhan, the disreputable leader of the openly antisemitic Nation of Islam, was posed. Despite the denials of the Democratic candidate, doubt seized the Jewish voters, a doubt that a Washington Post columnist, Richard Cohen, expressed well: “We know little about him and, despite the admiration I have for him, I have questions about his character.” At the same time, this campaign that targeted Jewish voters was countered by nine community leaders, among them Abraham Foxman, of the Anti-Defamation League, and Marvin Hier, of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. For these men, it was nothing but a “repugnant smear campaign.” It was time for Barack Obama to clarify his vision of the racial question, which he did in his famous speech delivered on 18 March 2008 in Philadelphia.7 The candidate, accused of complacency toward Black extremists, had to escape from above the trap in which they wanted to confine him. His whole strength lay in owning himself as Black, but without being alienated by that belonging. Anxious not to cut himself off from his community, he managed to be of it while freeing himself from the prison of identity. In fact, he affirmed his negritude, but by refusing to be only that. He managed also to lay claim to his white origins, and above all to inscribe his personal history within the framework of the American epic. For Barack Obama proposes a new myth, constructed in the country each day of the long march that was to lead him to the Capitol: that of a new America, which can elect, in spite of everything, a Black man to the presidency. But dreams are not enough. In order to go beyond a motley anti-Bush coalition that would not have lasted, it was necessary to find a federating concept. The prodigy jurist of Harvard University went to look for it quite simply in the American Constitution, drafted 221 years before his election: it is the promise of creating a “more perfect union.” In other words, he proposes to carry the Union through to the end, to give new life to the American dream: “We cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together, unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but that we hold common hopes.”

With the Jews, this union already had a long history.

The other Chicago school8

From his arrival in the capital of Illinois, where this wandering student was to put down roots on the personal, professional, and familial levels, Barack Obama frequented progressive circles, where Jews and Blacks were numerous. That is his true political and cultural background. Since then, he has maintained close ties with many Jews of Chicago — and not the least of them — who supported him from the very beginning. As he expressed it in 2004 to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “Some of my first and most ardent supporters came from the Jewish community of Chicago.” He was not exaggerating. As early as 1985, Gerald Kellman guided his first steps in social work in Chicago, where he put into practice the precepts of the sociologist Saul Alinsky9: listen, discern the proper interests of each person, federate them into an organized community, train the voiceless so that they in turn become actors of change. This lesson would serve him during the campaign. At law school, too, Martha Minow, his professor at Harvard, recommended him to her father, Newton Minow, an important member of the Democratic Party. When Obama ran for the United States Senate, in 2004, one of his first supporters was James Crown, who, with his father Lester — known at once as a billionaire, a philanthropist, and a member of the Democratic Party — is one of the great figures of the Jewish community of Chicago. It was apparently during this electoral campaign that Obama used for the first time a formula of which he was to make use thereafter: visiting a Jewish center for the elderly, he underscored that his first name Barack, which means blessed in Swahili (an African language with Arabic influences), is etymologically linked to the Hebrew first name Baruch. One of Barack Obama’s campaign themes was the call to reconstitute the Black-Jewish coalition that had formed four decades earlier, in the time of the struggle for civil rights. Blacks and Jews “have in common a set of principles as to the demand that the State put an end to injustices.” In October 2004, shortly before the senatorial election, Barack Obama returned, in a long interview with the Chicago Jewish News, to the alliance of Jews and Blacks: “The civil rights movement,” he recalled, “would not have succeeded as it did without the enormous contribution of the Jewish community.”

We must also mention Ira Silverstein, an Orthodox Jew, with whom Obama shared his office between 1997 and 2004, when he sat in the Senate of the State of Illinois. With him, the young senator expressed himself in a very warm manner toward Israel, and he actively supported the resolutions condemning Palestinian suicide attacks, and even pushed through a law authorizing the State of Illinois pension funds to purchase Israeli Treasury bonds (Israel Bonds). Rahm Emanuel, named White House chief of staff, also belongs to this Chicago school. Israeli through his father, speaking Hebrew perfectly, he serves Barack Obama faithfully, after having been part of the Bill Clinton administration, where he forged his reputation for toughness that earned him the nickname Rambo Emanuel. Other Jews of Chicago, such as Bettylou Saltzman, who was to help him forge his political image, or again Jack Levin, his colleague from the law school, played a role in his career. But it was with David Axelrod that Barack Obama’s relations with a Jew were, and still are, the closest. A former journalist who became an expert in media strategy, David Axelrod met Obama as early as 1992 and organized his campaign for the 2004 senatorial election. In the 2008 presidential campaign, David Axelrod played a decisive role as chief strategist. When Jews expressed doubts about the political attitudes of his candidate, David Axelrod declared that “as the son of two Jews who escaped antisemitic persecutions in Eastern Europe, he would not devote his life to getting Obama elected if he were not certain of Barack’s positions on the subject of Israel.”

These supports played a role in lifting the last hesitations of American Jews about supporting Barack Obama. It remained to translate all of this into the ballot boxes.

Jewish vote

Jews constitute a little less than 2 percent of the population of the United States. But, as they are older than the average, the percentage of Jews is higher within the adult population. And, above all, they are known to participate in elections more than Americans in general. All in all, it is reckoned that within the effective electorate, the share of Jews is rather on the order of 3 percent, even 4 percent. But on 4 November 2008, with a turnout clearly higher than the average for presidential elections (66 percent, that is, 10 points more than usual), this rule did not apply.

The voting system in force for the American presidential election gives the minorities an important weight. Four American states — the states of New York, New Jersey, California, and Florida — together contain more than half of American Jews. It is there that the Jewish minority has the greatest chance of influencing matters on the electoral level. At the level of the Democratic primaries first. Hillary Clinton had no difficulty obtaining the votes of the majority of the Jewish voters of these states, but this influence was counterbalanced by the strong participation of other minorities, Blacks in particular. It remained for Barack Obama to recover this preference of the Jewish voters for Hillary Clinton. This was done in two stages. The first, in August 2008, during the Democratic convention, which saw the reconciliation between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and the choice of Joe Biden, much appreciated by American Jews, as candidate for the vice-presidency. The second, when, after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September, the Jewish voters, like the others, rallied en masse to the Democratic candidate judged more capable of overcoming this crisis. This reconquest had no consequence for the first three states mentioned above, which were considered safe for the Democratic Party. The Jewish vote was therefore not to have a determining effect there. The case of Florida, on the other hand, was more uncertain. In that state, Jews represent nearly 4 percent of the population and at least 5 percent of the voters. It is therefore no accident that, in order to address themselves directly to this sector of the electorate, the Jewish partisans of Barack Obama created groups such as Bubbes for Obama (Grandmothers for Obama) or The Great Schlep (a mixture of English and Yiddish, meaning roughly the great trek, with an ironic tonality), whose objective was to encourage young Jews to pressure their elders into voting for Obama. All this organizing finally paid off, since the Jews of Florida supported the Democratic candidate in the same proportion as at the national level, doubtless playing a decisive role in carrying this swing state and its 27 electors. The shift of the Latino electorate (particularly that of the second-generation Cubans of Miami) also contributed to this revenge of the Democratic Party in the state where Al Gore had ended up failing in 2000. In any case, even without Florida, Barack Obama would have won. A few signs among others of the decline of the influence of American Jews.

A community in decline

According to the estimates, depending on the definition one adopts (with the problem of whether or not to take into account non-Jewish spouses and the children of mixed marriages), the American population would count 5 to 7 million Jews. The figure of 6 million is generally retained.10 But everything contributes to a diminution in absolute value. The rate of exogamous marriages keeps increasing: it has gone from 13 percent before 1970 to 47 percent today. Furthermore, the fertility rate of Jewish women is not enough to ensure the renewal of this population (it is now no more than 1.93 percent).11 At this rate, in the next generation, the Jewish population of all of North America (Canada included) would count 2.7 to 5.9 million members.

In relative value, the decline is even more striking. The Jewish population accounted for 3.7 percent of the American population in 1937. It is today below 2 percent. The alarm bell was rung long ago. The academic Alan Dershowitz titled his 1997 work devoted to the subject The Vanishing American Jew. This decline is also relative with respect to the other minorities that play an ever more important role in American life. This is first the case of Blacks. In their immense majority, the 40 million American Blacks are integrated into society. A not insignificant portion of them have even managed to insert themselves within the middle classes: about 30 percent, that is, 12 million individuals, would thus belong to this Black middle class, very well embodied by Michelle Obama. But it is the Latinos who today constitute the strongest American minority. The Hispanics are nearly 45 million in the United States, that is, 15 percent of the total population. A strong Asian immigration further complicates the picture. It is among them that one finds the majority of the 8 million Muslims. For Arab Americans — first among them the Lebanese — that is, about 3.5 million people, are Christian in their majority. All in all, it is known that in 2050, the descendants of white Europeans will be a minority in the population of the United States. The decline of the Jewish community is also that of white America. This decline is not only quantitative. It is also political.

THE END OF THE FIFTY-FIRST STATE

From the outset, Barack Obama sought to reassure the Jewish electorate, or rather the fraction of that electorate privileging the relationship with Israel, that special relationship that has often led to the Jewish State being described as the 51st state of the Federation. To this end, he did not hesitate to make commitments before the AIPAC convention on 4 June 2008. Barack Obama there recalled his attachment to the sacrosanct cause of Israel’s security, without ever once mentioning the green line of 1967, and declaring that Jerusalem would remain the indivisible capital of the Jewish State. A few weeks later, on a trip to Israel, he managed to find the right words at Sderot: “If someone were firing rockets at the house where my daughters sleep, I would do everything in my power to stop them. I encourage Israel to do the same.”

In plain terms, nothing pointed to an evolution in American policy, at least officially, for in Jerusalem it had been well understood that the election of Barack Obama would mark a turning point in relations with Washington. Moreover, the leaders and the press in Israel did not seek to conceal their hope for a victory by John McCain… even when such a victory was becoming highly improbable. This displayed mistrust toward the future winner showed a regrettable lack of political sense that was not to escape the candidate. Once he became President, could he forget these bad manners? In any case, change, the watchword of his campaign, was also to be translated into Israeli-American relations. But without offending American Jews, who maintain with Israel a relationship less simple than one believes.

The contested lobby

Contrary to the legend, AIPAC is not the Jewish lobby in the United States. The American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, or the Anti-Defamation League could also lay claim to that title. They are, moreover, lobbies that act in all the domains that concern the Jews. AIPAC is the pro-Israeli lobby, which is not the same thing. But where it is a matter of the political influence of the Jews and of their relations with Obama, that is what we shall treat.

AIPAC — the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — created more than half a century ago, is one of the numerous interest groups registered with Congress. It is also one of the most powerful, with a budget of 60 million dollars and 150 full-time staff. AIPAC deploys its activities in two domains: support for Israel (particularly in the area of military aid) and American diplomacy in the Near East, notably with regard to Iran. This influence explains the interest taken in its activities, all the more so as AIPAC had in recent years adopted a hard line close to the Likud. The ground was ready for a challenge to this influence. Two academics were to take it on. In an article in the London Review of Books of 23 March 2006, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt denounced this influence, contrary to the interest of the United States, in that it would favor Arab extremism. Above all, the two academics attributed to AIPAC practices and a power it does not have. No matter; even though this challenge was not new, it had consequences, at a time when the American Jewish community, in its majority, is more dove than hawk. The polls are categorical: American Jews are, on the whole, favorable to the creation of a viable Palestinian state. They share Barack Obama’s conviction that the long-term security of Israel — like that of America — passes through a just peace in the Near East. To attain it, they are not hostile to Washington, if necessary, exerting pressure on Israel — within certain limits, in any case.12 But until a recent date, this sentiment was hardly expressed in an organized fashion. The creation of the association J Street in April 2008 changed the situation. For its initiators, figures of the Peace Movement, it is indeed a matter — without saying so — of creating a lobby rival to AIPAC, of making heard another voice of the friends of Israel. Like 69 percent of American Jews, J Street would describe the Gaza operation of December 2008 as disproportionate and counterproductive. On its support committee one finds the former number two of the Mossad as well as Shlomo Ben-Ami, former foreign minister under Ehud Barak, a former American ambassador to Tel Aviv, and Yitzhak Rabin’s daughter, Dalia. In a few months, the new lobby managed to recruit more than 100,000 members, as many as AIPAC.

To this challenge internal to the community is added an external challenge exercised by an ever more influential lobby in the service of the Palestinian cause, whose figurehead is the Arab American Institute, and its founding president, the very active James Zogby.

Thus, everything converges to open up to Barack Obama a new political space, at a time when he intends to impose his peace plan on the Near East.

Pressures

The objective pursued by Obama is clear: a bilateral agreement on a two-state solution involving concessions on both sides, with an important regional dimension. All the pressures exerted on Israel aim to put an end to a conflict interpreted, rightly or wrongly, as feeding extremism. And the ultimate goal of the new administration in the region is limpid: to defeat Al Qaeda. In this regard, Washington considers that its interests may be divergent from those of Israel. The new deterioration of the security situation in Iraq, the progress of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the dramatic situation in Pakistan — three countries where the American army is engaged — and, finally, the question of Iran, make necessary and even urgent a global approach to the problems, and a rapprochement between Washington and its Arab allies. Barack Obama is not alone in having this new approach. At the end of May 2009, more than 400 members of the House of Representatives and the American Senate signed a letter calling on him to intensify his efforts in favor of peace in the Near East. Until then, Congress had rather had the image of a chamber that rubber-stamped the wishes of the Jewish State.

Now, beyond the diplomatic precautions with regard to Israel, this message appears as clear support for the American president at a time when he is multiplying pressures on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “While each obstacle is immense, we agree with you that every effort must be made to try to reach peace as quickly as possible.” The letter also evokes a viable Palestinian state. A sign that the times have changed, even AIPAC applauded the initiative of the 400 parliamentarians. Moreover, the largest Jewish organizations, represented by the Conference of Presidents (the equivalent of the CRIF), received in July 2009 in Washington by a Barack Obama anxious to explain his Near East policy, hardly contested it. More than the change of administration in Washington, it is doubtless the multiplication of these signs that led Benjamin Netanyahu to judge that the international situation had changed. After Barack Obama’s speech to the Muslim world in Cairo on 4 June 2009, the Israeli Prime Minister declared in his speech at Bar-Ilan University on 14 June that he accepted the principle of a demilitarized Palestinian state. But this does not put an end to the confrontation. The latter crystallized on the question of construction in the settlements. The Israeli government defends the principle of construction responding to the natural growth of the existing settlements, while, a few days before the Bar-Ilan speech, the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, had formulated unambiguously the American position: Obama “wants the end of settlement: no settlements, no outposts, no exceptions linked to natural growth.”

These pressures had an effect. The Netanyahu government decided in November 2009 to freeze for ten months construction in the settlements of the West Bank, but not in Jerusalem. Two other elements mark the limits of this concession: the construction of public buildings could be continued, and the government reinstated in December 2009 the settlements on the list of priority zones in matters of investment. This shows the limits of an exercise that sees Benjamin Netanyahu subjected to two sets of pressures: on the one hand, those of the Obama administration, which appreciated the first gesture of the Israeli government; on the other, those of the settlers, who have many relays within the Israeli right. Suffice it to say that the year 2010 will be fertile in twists and turns.

We must also mention an unspoken thing: that of the link between this situation on the ground and the Iranian threat. The year 2009 was marked by the renewed threats of the Iranian regime against Israel, by revelations about the strengthening of its efforts at enriched-uranium production, by the perfecting of the missiles of its army, which, with a range of 2,000 kilometers, are capable of reaching Israel. There is no doubt that, faced with this threat, the reactions of the American administration will be scrutinized closely in Jerusalem and will determine in part the level of concessions the Netanyahu government is prepared to admit.

*

The election of Barack Obama shows, to anyone who might still doubt it, that the World has changed. And first of all the United States. On the domestic level, America has become the America of minorities… who will soon be the majority. In this renewed melting pot, the Jewish community plays and will play a less important role than before. In any case, its electoral influence is becoming negligible, and the pressures of the lobby seriously countered by other organizations and by an administration fortified by the convictions and commitments of its president. On the external level, American policy in the Near East has changed, and this change will in all likelihood endure after the Obama presidency. Henceforth, it is with the moderate Arab countries that Washington wishes to establish privileged relations. American Jews have understood this change and accompany it. Israel has understood it too, but a little late, with a mere agreement in principle by the Israeli right on the creation of a Palestinian state. The difficulty will be to make the change concrete, all the more so as other parameters could interfere, notably that of the response to the Iranian threat.

At the hour when these lines are written, Barack Obama has not yet made known his peace plan for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But its principles are known (supra). Let us wager that nothing in it will be opposed to the vital interests of Israel: its recognition as a Jewish State, the guarantee of its security, the end of the hostility of the Arab world. But let us wager too that divergences will not be lacking, in particular over a question whose scope is not limited to a question of dividing up territory: Jerusalem.

Notes

  1. See our article in this same review, Les Juifs de France et l’élection présidentielle de 2007 (The Jews of France and the 2007 Presidential Election), Plurielles No. 14, 2009, pp. 150-159.↩︎

  2. At the time the leader of the principal movement of American liberal Judaism, attached to the World Union for Progressive Judaism.↩︎

  3. See the inquiry by the editorial staff of l’Arche no. 605, October 2008, Obama, McCain et les Juifs (Obama, McCain and the Jews).↩︎

  4. Le réveil du sleeping giant (The Awakening of the Sleeping Giant), interview with Mark Lopez in the Journal du Dimanche, 27 October 2008.↩︎

  5. A Jewish joke says it very well. A Yiddishe Mame is talking with her son, who asks her why she keeps voting Democratic. The mother explains: “Because the Democrats defend the poor.” And the son retorts: “But Mama, we’re rich now!”↩︎

  6. A poll conducted for the Israeli press in 1996 revealed that, if the inhabitants of the Jewish State had been able to vote, they would have endorsed the reelection of Bill Clinton by 91 percent.↩︎

  7. Published under the title De la Race en Amérique (On Race in America), Grasset, Paris, 2008.↩︎

  8. Usually, the expression Chicago school designates the monetarist, ultraliberal economists trained by Milton Friedman at the city’s university.↩︎

  9. Saul Alinsky, American sociologist (1909-1972), considered the father of community organizing, developing in particular the idea of participatory democracy. Author of Reveille for Radicals, his influence was considerable in these circles (see the article by Corinne Lesnes, Barack Obama : la leçon des ghettos (Barack Obama: The Lesson of the Ghettos), Le Monde, 6 October 2007).↩︎

  10. On these calculations, and more generally for a very complete exposition of the current situation of the community in the United States, see André Kaspi, Les Juifs Américains (American Jews), Plon, Paris, 2008.↩︎

  11. The National Jewish Population Survey 2000-01: Strength, Challenge and Diversity in the American Jewish Population (demographic survey conducted in 2003 by Jewish United Communities).↩︎

  12. A poll published in August 2009 shows that 58 percent of Barack Obama’s Jewish voters were favorable to his Near East policy.↩︎

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