Barack Obama’s stunning victory on Tuesday opened a new chapter in American history, redrawing the electoral map and signaling that whatever concerns voters had about his inexperience and race were dwarfed by a sweeping desire for change and a comfort with his leadership.
Sporadic exit polls of Jewish voters indicated that Jews voted for Obama for president in the same numbers they gave to the Democratic candidate in 2004, dashing Republican hopes to make major inroads into a political alignment that hasn’t shifted for decades.
“The early exits look tremendous,” said Ira Forman, executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council. “We’ll have to wait for the final numbers.”
Forman and other Democrats who gathered at Eli’s Restaurant in Washington, where the latkes flowed as freely as the liquor, cheered when MSNBC predicted that Obama won 77 percent of the Jewish vote.
At Obama parties across the nation, ebullient supporters said they hoped the strong Jewish turnout for the first African American elected president would rekindle the black-Jewish alliance of the civil rights movement.
“I think the appeal of Obama to Jewish voters is the hope that he can mend the rift between the black community and the Jewish community that’s been going on for more than 40 years,” said David Sax, 29, of Brooklyn, as he celebrated at Mansion, a club on West 28th Street in Manhattan.
“It’s the first time that Jews have seen a black leader the way they saw Martin Luther King,” Sax added.
Elsewhere, as Democrats gained seats in the House of Representatives and Senate, Jewish candidates had mixed results in contested congressional races. Dennis Shulman was denied his chance to become the first rabbi elected to the House, losing to Republican incumbent Rep. Scott Garrett in New Jersey. Another incumbent, Rep. Allyson Schwartz, a Pennsylvania Democrat, handily beat Republican Marina Kats in a contest notable because both candidates are Jewish women.
And in one of the most closely watched Senate races in the country – this one between two Jewish men – Democrat Al Franken was running neck-in-neck against Republican Senator Norm Coleman in Minnesota.
With reporting from Brett Lieberman in Washington and Lana Gersten in New York.
