What We’re Reading: Election Edition
by Sarah Breger
The Highlights
The new issue of the Jewish journal Sh’ma, which focuses on “the Jewish electorate in 2012,” is full of interesting pieces worth checking out. Of note is an essay by historian Jonathan Sarna on the role of the Jewish vote in past presidential elections. Sarna writes that the 1868 election was the first election that saw a focus on the Jewish vote; Republican candidate and Civil War hero General Ulysses S. Grant worried that his 1862 order expelling all Jews from Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi—his military district—would come back to haunt him.
On the contrary, Sarna writes:
In fact, a number of prominent Jews supported Grant, preferring his message of unity and peace to the openly racist message of his Democratic opponents, who opposed Reconstruction and promised to abolish black suffrage. Jews in that...
