Measuring “Who is a Jew?” Why It Matters in Jewish Political Behavior

Studies of American Jewish preferences in the 2020 US presidential election reveal striking variability in partisan choices from one survey to the next. We believe this variability is due in part to different approaches to the measurement of Jewishness across surveys and survey research firms. Drawing principally on social identity theory, we argue that surveys that classify respondents as Jewish only by their religious preference suffer both sample bias and coverage error. These problems arise when surveys omit persons of Jewish heritage who do not select “Jewish” as their religious preference but who still define themselves as Jewish by ethnicity, culture, and/or heritage. Analysis of nine surveys conducted between 2012 and 2021 show that omitting “Jews of no religion” has, as hypothesized, underestimated the liberal/Democratic political orientation of American Jews, with the bias growing increasingly powerful once Donald Trump entered the presidential contests. When considering the electoral behavior of the American Jews, we recommend conceptualizing Jews as members of an ethnoreligious community not defined solely by religious preference. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.