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 |  Subject: Why right-leaning Jews are leaving Commiefornia for redder pastures  Sat Jan 09, 2021 2:57 am | |
| Lance and Wendy Feldman have been slowly cutting ties with their native California for the last two decades.
The process began in the early 2000s when they sold their teacher supply stores, which had been battered by rising property taxes in the Bay Area and competition from the internet. Then, after a lifetime of voting, they skipped the 2018 elections, believing that their support for Republican candidates didn’t matter in such a blue state. Finally, in August 2020, they put their Danville house on the market and moved away.
“There’s a sense of peace up here,” Wendy said from the couple’s new home in Eagle, Idaho, a suburb of Boise. “It’s comforting not to feel like a Martian. Living in California felt like living on a different planet.”
Asked what he misses about life in the Bay Area, Lance replied, “Not a whole hell of a lot. The weather’s a little bit better [in Danville], but we couldn’t enjoy the weather anyway [lately] because we were locked down” due to the pandemic. In Idaho, “it’s a lot more friendly and a lot less expensive.” For example, he said, a gallon of gas costs about $2.20 there, well below Bay Area prices.
The Feldmans are among a growing number of well-to-do, right-leaning California Jews who have moved to more conservative states in recent months, lured by lower taxes (and lower cost of living in general) and a more congenial political atmosphere. In addition to Idaho, popular destinations include Nevada, Arizona, Texas and Florida.
Of course, conservative California Jews are not unique in their search for greener — or, in this case, redder — pastures. The number of Californians who migrate out has risen every year since 2011, per Census Bureau statistics, while overall population growth has stagnated.
For many conservatives, though, the turbulence of 2020 — marked by what they consider draconian stay-at-home orders, violent social justice protests amid reckless calls to “defund the police” and another devastating wildfire season, on top of a growing homelessness crisis — reinforced their belief that the state is beset by numerous systemic problems, and that its political leaders are either doing nothing to solve them or actively making them worse.
So they are looking for the exit.
“While there’s been a long flow of people in and out of California over generations, I do think we’re seeing something a little bit more urgent now,” said Larry Greenfield, a columnist for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal and the California director of the Republican Jewish Coalition from 2004 to 2008. “This isn’t just a trend. It’s a tsunami.”
He noted that several high-profile conservative Jews, including entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale, venture capitalist David Blumberg, and conservative podcast host Ben Shapiro, recently left the state.
Shapiro announced in September that he planned to move his family and media company, the Daily Wire, from Los Angeles to Nashville. He tweeted: “I’ve lived my entire life in California. Within weeks, we’ll be taking our 75 jobs and leaving. We’re not the first. And we certainly won’t be the last. Terrible governance has consequences.” (In an article explaining his decision to leave, he cited high taxes, spikes in crime and homelessness, “public ire” for the police and a public education system “burdened by the stupidities of political correctness.”)
Greenfield, who himself decamped from L.A. to the Las Vegas area in 2019, said natives are painfully aware of what they are leaving behind. “California is gorgeous,” he said. “This is not done quixotically or out of pure political pique. It’s a loss of hope.”
This article is based on interviews with several families from the Bay Area who recently moved out of the state or are planning to do so imminently. They waxed nostalgic about the California they once knew — a more sane and tolerant place, to hear them tell it, where conservatives like themselves were not ostracized simply for thinking differently from other Californians — and expressed hope for more personal and economic freedom in their new homes.
More: .https://www.jweekly.com/2021/01/08/why-some-right-leaning-jews-are-leaving-california-for-redder-pastures/ |
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