Book review by Lloyd Green @ TheGuardian.com, Sept. 2

On election day 2016, Hillary Clinton won more than 70% of the Jewish vote. But that number tells only part of a story. In some predominately Orthodox Jewish precincts, Donald Trump’s numbers were straight out of the rust belt or the deep south.

As in the rest of the electorate, religious commitment and educational attainment shaped how Jews voted. In the overwhelmingly religious Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, Trump took 68% of the vote. In New Jersey’s Lakewood Township, he won with a 50-point margin. By contrast, the island of Manhattan was a sea of Democratic blue.

The political cleavages that mark the broader American landscape exist among America’s Jews. Just as Jews were to be found on both sides of slavery, secession and the civil war, they are again combatants in a political skirmish [....]

Welcome to The Chosen Wars, a narrative of the Jewish journey across the American landscape. Steven Weisman, who covered politics and economics at the New York Times for a quarter of a century, marshals an impressive array of facts to argue that the competing tugs of separatism and assimilation have been present ever since Jews landed in the New World in the 17th century [.....\]