Dan - Even if one took CNN's exit polls from a midterm election as showing a true Jewish turnout (and if you talk to the experts, they'll explain why you shouldn't), there's still 13%, and just like the roughly 25% who voted for Bush in '04, those 13% are overwhelmingly represented by what would often be characterized as the most "engaged" Jews -- those who do the most on a daily basis to explicitly engage and express their Judaism.

I'd never suggest that any Jew, or any person, is misperceiving their own identity. If they want to feel that social justice is the soul of their Judaism, that's perfectly fine. But that's a very subjective thing, and something not necessarily rooted in any historical notions.

Take you as a voter. Do you want to work on antidiscrimination lawsuits because you're Jewish, or because you feel it's a good thing? I'm betting the latter. And once that's the case, if you weren't Jewish would you still do it? And do you think it has value outside Judaism? If so, why do you need Judaism at all to inform that decision? I imagine you don't. Now, you might find greater inspiration for those decisions from the Jewish tradition and verses like "Justice, justice, shall you pursue." I don't have a problem with your using that to inspire you. But to suggest that the correct meaning of it was to inform your pursuit of antidiscrimination lawsuits is a stretch, and not one that could reasonably be applied to an objective notion of Judaism.

As to the early history of the Jewish left, a driving principle of the Forward was to acculturate Jews to American culture and away from Judaism. It happened not to do an overwhelmingly good job at that, but it certainly tried hard, throwing Yom Kippur balls and the like. It's not arguing in circles to simply assert the historical reality of these groups. And in any respect, the reality of what these groups represent has no bearing on my overall argument; it's a severe tangent raised to respond to your question of why the Jewish left in America started.

Now, there are countless reasons why Jews vote various ways, just as with so many other groups, and I wouldn't begin to assume that that's the whole of the answer to Jewish voting affiliations; there's a ton of material there. You've clearly got your institutional talking-points down right when you say that "Jews are the only group in America to so consistently vote against their economic interest." There are so many reasons and ways to vote, and so many complexities to "economic interest," and so many groups, that I don't know how one would begin to justify such a claim.

As to the difference between a rule and a norm, don't worry, I've got it. And it just so happens that classic halacha not only delineates a number of rules for slaughter, but has an explicit invocation against harming animals (<i>tzaar ba'alai chayim</i>). The thing is, a lot of times those desired norms are expressed in early Jewish texts, and the underlying principle of so many verses cited by Sieradski and others on this point can't be taken to objectively endorse their political positions. To assert that they could is to ignore millenia of interpretation -- including a wide range of contemporary opinions -- that present different readings.

 I'm not sure what question you're saying I didn't answer, and I don't know what you mean by "You never answered my quesiton of whether than is solely 'follow the word of G-d.'" I think you may be referencing this point of yours from the first day: ***

At the bottom must lie something. Or more precisely some things, many of them evolving norms rather than fixed principals. And one of them is social justice.

***

My response to that is that I don't know why you'd assume that whatever principles underlied a bunch of millenia-old statements and cultures would have to match up with any set of contemporary American political philosophies.

The Judaic tradition contains vast literature on countless tiny statements of philosophy and law. If asked to state what Judaism as a whole teaches us, looking through the tradition, I'd say there's no universal element to Judaism other than the constant of disagreement.