THE VOTERS: The Jewish Swing to Nixon

DETROIT Millionaire Max Fisher has finally learned to like his job.

After years of trying, he now has no trouble raising funds for Richard Nixon from wealthy Jewish sources. Appearing before groups of top Jewish leaders in as many as four cities a week, he makes a quiet approach, scarcely even mentioning money. Sometimes Henry Kissinger has been in tow to give a briefing on the summits, but he insists on leaving before there is talk of money. At the end of each session, Fisher raises amounts that surprise even him. Already, $3,000,000 has been collected toward a goal of $5,000,000. Says Fisher: “My work has never been easier.”

The Republicans are making the most of it. The tears were hardly dry after the Miami Democratic Convention before they approached Jewish supporters of Humphrey and Jackson and urged them to switch to the President. While George McGovern neglected these contributors in their defeat, the President showed that he cared.

There are literally dozens of lifetime Democratic fat cats who are now backing the Republican ticket. Last week one of the most serious defections occurred. Eugene Klein, chairman of the board of National General, an insurance and entertainment company based in Los Angeles, announced that he was supporting the President for reelection. His decision sent shock waves through the already demoralized Democratic Party, since Klein has considerable clout with other Jews. “I used to have trouble finding any supporters when I walked into the Hillcrest Country Club,” says Taft Schreiber, executive vice president of show-biz conglomerate MCA and a major Nixon fund raiser. “Now it’s like everyone has had a revelation. People come rushing up to me and say: ‘I just want to tell you how I’m going to vote.’ ”

Nor is it only wealthy Jews who are deserting the Democrats. Republicans as well as many Democrats say that they expect the President to get better than 30% of the Jewish vote in the country, a dramatic improvement over the 15% he won in the 1968 election. A recent Cambridge Opinion survey showed Nixon trailing McGovern among New York Jews by 36% to 56% (Nixon got only some 20% in 1968), enough of a gain to offer the President a landslide victory in a state that is usually considered safe for Democrats. In other key industrial states, Republican operatives are working hard to batten down the Jewish vote; in a close election, a slight switch among these voters could mean the difference between victory and defeat. In 14 states, “Jewish Youth for Nixon” are scheduled to make a door-to-door canvas. Rabbi David Luchins, who traveled 65,000 miles as director of “Jewish Youth for Humphrey,” plans to trudge with equal energy for Nixon.

The shift in Jewish opinion could be fateful for Democrats. Over the years, no ethnic group has been more closely identified with the affairs of the Democratic Party than the Jews. They have provided it with funds, brains, polemics and spirit. They felt that as the party prospered, so did they. Now they are having second thoughts precipitated by the nomination of McGovern. For many of them, the Democratic Party —and, for that matter, left-wing politics —is no longer perceived as being necessarily good for Jews.

The reason most frequently given for this change of heart is Israel. “As an issue, Israel is primordial,” says Rita Hauser, a Nixon campaign director in New York City. On that issue, the President has proved himself. He has provided as much economic and military assistance to Israel as all the White House predecessors combined; in times of crisis he has stood up to the Soviet Union in the Middle East. McGovern is more of a mystery. At first he was too dovish: he wanted the Israelis to return just about all the territories they had conquered from the Arabs in the Six-Day War, and he urged the internationalization of Jerusalem. Under pressure, he abandoned these positions and even went so far as to promise to supply U.S. troops if Israel were threatened with annihilation.

But Jews are only partially reassured. They do not like the idea that McGovern’s youthful Western campaign chief, Rick Stearns, signed pro-Arab newspaper ads a few years ago. They also worry that McGovern’s proposed defense cutbacks will ultimately jeopardize Israel. Unilateral troop withdrawals from Europe, as McGovern recommends, might encourage the Russians to be more aggressive in the Middie East. Recently, McGovern pledged to end all aid to the Greek colonels; the Nixon Administration, on the other hand, is planning to build a home port for the Sixth Fleet near Athens. American Jews who visit Israel read papers singing the praise of Nixon.

Jewish attachment to Israel may be occasionally overemotional and overwrought, but then Israel is only one of the issues troubling Jews. Social change in America has proved as disquieting to Jews as it has to other ethnic groups. Like Italians and Irish, blacks and Chicanos, Poles and Czechs, Jews are turning inward, trying to re-establish an identity that seems threatened in contemporary America. All the talk of a

Jewish vote is an expression of a renewed ethnic consciousness, a defense erected against forces that appear to be menacing. Crime, in particular, has disrupted Jewish life in the cities, where most Jews continue to live. When they demand law and order, they are not speaking in code but citing sheer need. Always sensitive to outside slights and attacks, Jews are now more vehement in their own defense. As White House Aide Pat Buchanan rather bluntly put it: “The Jews have started to react to social engineering the way other ethnics have. They’re protective of their turf.”

While threatened, many Jews no longer feel they are protected by the political left, represented by McGovern. On the contrary, the Democratic nominee was a chief instigator of the quota system at the Miami convention. Making up only 3% of the American population, Jews are represented beyond their national percentage in the schools and the civil service, areas where quotas are sometimes now being vigorously applied. If blacks and other groups are given jobs on the basis of their weight in the population rather than making it on merit, it is the Jews who stand to lose the most. Historically, the political left has stood for greater liberalization; now many Jews feel that the left has become illiberal. The democratic institutions so frequently attacked by the left have served as the best avenue for Jewish advancement. Jews do not want them tampered with.

Some Jewish opposition to McGovern can be explained, of course, by simple materialism. Like other people, many Jews have prospered, and they want to hang on to what they have got. McGovern’s tax and welfare programs seem to them to threaten to take away some of their gains. The Democrats hope that the traditional Jewish party loyalty—and sympathy for the have-nots—will eventually surface. In past elections Jews have threatened to vote what they perceived as their interests but have ended up voting what they regarded as their conscience. While Nixon will make inroads with the more conservative, lower-income groups, McGovern is expected to outdistance his rival with younger, better-educated Jews, who are hostile to Nixon because of the Viet Nam War.

Still, McGovern will have no more difficult campaign chore than to persuade Jews to vote for him. Once a dirty word among Jews, Nixon has decidedly spruced up. If Jews have become less liberal, the President has become more so. Somewhere along the way, they may have met. “Did you ever think you’d live to see Richard Nixon having dinner with Chou En-lai?” asks Lawrence Goldberg, director of the Jewish division of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President. “This isn’t the Nixon of the ’50s. Jews have heard Hubert Humphrey talking about arms reductions for 20 years. But who gets the SALT talks going? Richard Nixon.” If Richard Nixon can also win a solid chunk of the Jewish vote, it will be a feat scarcely less audacious—or less significant for American politics—than meeting Chou for dinner.