I am glad the support ot conservatives is providing an opening wedge for students to question their knee-jerk liberalism. No political alignment should be automatic, for liberals, conservatives, or anyone else.

However, I still don't think this presages a wholesale shift to a conservative POV. In the 80s, at the height of the Gingrich era, and then in the 90s, at the height of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, when conservatives trumpeted a national shift to the right, it didn't happen. Observers of the political scene noticed that most Americans (especially the newly-influential "knowledge workers") identified themselves as "socially liberal and fiscally conservative." They refused to be pigeon-holed by ideology.

I don't think that has changed, on or off campus. Jews, as a minority which has been scapegoated by both left and right for several centuries, and was a pawn of warring European factions for centuries before that, have always viewed whatever government they were living under with pragmatism, while trying to perform tikkun olam under the circumstances.

Judaism has such a strong drive for social justice (heck, the Hebrew word that is usually translated as "charity" - tzedakah - actually means social justice and is a quite different concept from the Christian one) that we will always appear in ideological movements out of proportion to our numbers (and not just on the right - almost all the early Objectivists were Jews, including Rand herself). For the same reason we will also - as an aggregate - always vote more liberal than the rest of the population in our socio-economic categories, although as a people we will make alliances on issues of mutual interest as needed.

For example, under Jewish law the life of the mother is more important than that of the fetus, and abortion is legal under certain circumstances. It is simply not part of our culture to be knee-jerk anti-abortionists. Under Jewish law, those with more resources are obligated to support those in the community with less, and in a way that does not humiliate the recipient - that's what tzedakah means. So we will continue to be predisposed toward government social programs. Since Jews have frequently experienced religious persecution from state religions, we are very sensitive to separation of church and state. Etc.

What I se happening is that the rest of the US population has been becoming more like us: pragmatic, tolerant of other lifestyles, philanthropic, entrepreneurial. Some of this is aligned with Republicanism, and some of it isn't.

The line in paragraph #4 should read "(and not just on the left....)"

I also want to expand on the last paragraph to say that as the US (and maybe the world, who knows?) becomes more a "knowledge-worker" culture, it will become more aligned with Jewish culture as it already exists.

After all, we were the original knowledge workers: mobile, literate, highly educated in the sciences and professions, urban, multi-lingual, and politically sophisticated in eras - say, during the Middle Ages - when most of the population was more isolated and illiterate and brutalized by their rulers than Saudis or Africans are today. Jews have always done well in cosmopolitan societies which appreciate knowledge work and the arts (such as Rembrandt's Amsterdam, Ottoman Turkey, Babylonia and pre-Nazi Germany) and badly in authoritarian societies which demand intellectual conformity (such as Nazi Germany and most of medieval Europe).

If the Republicans really want the Jews for keeps, they have to promote those values, which means keeping on a tight leash the types who want to teach creationism, ban Judy Blume books, assassinate abortion providers, teach abstinence-only sex-ed, cut funding for social services and the arts, and take kids away from their gay parents.