Upper West Side Ruth
| 📢 | |
| Era | The Seventies |
|---|---|
| Age | 32-37 |
| Home | Upper West Side, New York, NY |
| Demographic | urban, Jewish-American, professional left |
| Lean | Strong Democrat |
| Race | white |
A social worker in Manhattan, raised in a Conservative Jewish family in Queens and now secular, who volunteers for the National Organization for Women and an anti-war committee. She represents the Jewish professional left, a small group active in every liberal cause of the 1970s.
Who they stand for
Secular Jewish liberals were a small group of voters, but they supplied a large share of the activists, lawyers and organisers of the 1970s. In 1970 Manhattan's West Side elected Bella Abzug to Congress on a platform opposing the Vietnam War and supporting women's rights. Three events at the start of the decade matter most to Ruth, the Women's Strike for Equality in August 1970, the Equal Rights Amendment's passage through Congress in March 1972, and New York's 1970 law legalising abortion, three years before Roe v. Wade.
Her group voted overwhelmingly for Humphrey in 1968 and less strongly for McGovern in 1972, because Nixon won some Jewish votes on his support for Israel and his position on crime. In 1980 many of these voters left Carter for John Anderson or Reagan. Two disputes separated this group from the rest of the left. The first was affirmative action, which the DeFunis and Bakke cases turned into a Jewish-Black liberal dispute. The second was Israel, which the New Left turned against after the 1967 war; in 1975 the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling Zionism a form of racism. Ruth remains on the left through both disputes.
Playing to them
Ruth supports the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion rights, an end to the Vietnam War and the draft, and a president who defends civil liberties against his own FBI. She rewards a president who appoints women to serious positions and takes their advice, and notices when an appointment is made only for appearance. She does not forgive a president who tolerates antisemitism on the left or the right, who leaves Israel without support, or who introduces racial quotas. The quota question sets her against Motor City Moses over union apprenticeship lists, although she agrees with him on most other issues. She is divided between support for Israel and support for the New Left, so a president who forces her to choose loses part of her support whichever side he takes.
The positions that win her support also win Berkeley Bruce and Japantown June, who share her causes. Those same positions tend to lose the Catholic and rural voters in the cast. Concordia Hilda, Nonna Concetta and Delta Earl are lost over abortion. Southie Sean is lost over the draft and the campus protests. Sheboygan Walt is lost over any aid to Israel.
Where they live
The five states where Upper West Side Ruth makes up the largest share of the electorate in the seventies:
- New York
- California
- Massachusetts
- Maryland
- New Jersey