Republican Jews Alarmed at the Prospect of a Void in the House and Senate.
Jewish Republicans know they are not many in number. But at a recent gathering at the St. Regis Hotel in downtown Washington, they pondered the meaning of an especially alarming figure: zilch. As in zip, bupkis, zero.
The stinging defeat last month of Eric Cantor, the House majority leader and the highest-ranking Jewish politician in American history, has created the possibility of Republicans having no Jewish representation in the House or Senate for the first time in more than a half-century.
“Sometimes, a Jewish person just wants to be able to go to Congress and speak with a Jewish person,” Beverly Goldstein, a Republican donor from Beachwood, Ohio, explained in the hotel lobby after a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition.
“And Chuck Schumer is not it for us,” she added, referring to the Democratic senator from New York.
Excluding the soon-to-be-retired Mr. Cantor, there are now 31 Jewish members of Congress — 30 of them Democrats and an independent senator from Vermont, Bernard Sanders, who generally votes with Democrats.
Decades after a Reagan era that was relatively rich in Jewish representation on the Republican side of both the House and the Senate, Republican Jews are grappling with what it means for a party that casts itself as the protector of Israel to potentially not have a single one of its children in Congress.
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