ABSTRACT
One of the most puzzling features of modern American politics has been the eccentricity of American Jews. The policies that Jews support and the causes that they champion, the values that they cherish and the appeals that charm or alarm them do not correspond with the political profile of any other group. In 1902, after the Roumanian government intensified economic discrimination against its Jewish population, co-religionists in the United States persuaded the Department of State to send a diplomatic note that would chastise such oppression as "repugnant to the moral sense of liberal modern peoples". In such races the liberal Democratic candidates may well have been able to project the social concern that engendered the welfare state itself, but that explanation may no longer be sufficient. Not all liberals have appreciated the full value of a democratic Jewish homeland, and not all the champions of Israel have been liberals.
