WASHINGTON -- Jewish Republicans know they are few in number. But at a recent gathering at the St. Regis Hotel in downtown Washington, they pondered the meaning of an especially alarming figure: zero.
The stinging defeat last month of Eric Cantor, the House majority leader and the highest-ranking Jewish politician in U.S. 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, said 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 Cantor, there are now 31 Jewish members of Congress -- 30 of them Democrats and an independent senator from Vermont, Bernie 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 any of its children in Congress.
Some Democrats offer their own answer, depicting Cantor's loss as the removal of a final fig leaf from what has become a homogeneously Christian party with little room for religious and ethnic minorities. Others said the loss of Cantor, a conservative standard-bearer deemed insufficiently conservative by voters who preferred a Tea Party challenger, revealed the Republicans' exclusion of moderates of any stripe.
"It is a very right-wing party, more so than in the past," said Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y. "And by so doing it is alienating most of the Jewish electorate and becoming an increasingly monochromatic party without minorities of any kind."
Despite their overwhelmingly Democratic leanings, Jewish members of Congress have a varied political heritage. Early Jewish representation on Capitol Hill included Whigs and Know-Nothings. Florida sent David Levy Yulee, an inflammatory Whig-Democrat and secessionist known as the "Florida Fire Eater," to Washington as a territorial delegate in 1841 and then as a Democratic senator in 1845, according to Kurt F. Stone, author of The Jews of Capitol Hill.
After the Reconstruction era, which largely proved a wilderness for Jews of both parties, New York elected the country's first Jewish Republican congressman, Edwin Einstein, in 1879. Jewish Republicans consistently served in Congress from then until the World War II period, when the 1941 and 1945 Congresses both lacked a Jewish Republican. In 1947, New York elected Jacob Javits, a Republican, to the House. His brief absence in 1955 to serve as the state's attorney general arguably left the last void for Jewish Republicans -- depending on how one categorizes Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who served five terms and whose father was of Jewish descent.
But as the number of Jewish members of Congress climbed to a high point of 47 in 2009, the number of Republicans had dwindled to two. The defection that year of Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania to the Democrats left Cantor as the last man standing.
Cantor's startling fall has, however, been a blessing for a handful of Jewish Republican candidates who are suddenly being showered with attention from donors.
"Jewish Republicans are for better or worse panicking that there is going to be no representation," said Adam Kwasman, a Jewish Tea Party candidate for Congress from Arizona.
"There has been a priority shift in the heart and soul of Republican Jews across the country," Kwasman said. "They were far more relaxed before Cantor lost."
The Jewish Republican candidate that congressional analysts give the best shot at winning is state Sen. Lee Zeldin of New York, who is taking on Tim Bishop in Suffolk County, Long Island. On a recent afternoon, Zeldin, an Iraq War veteran, said he had come to appreciate how vital a bridge Cantor had been to "Jewish organizations, pro-Israel, philanthropists." Since the former majority leader's defeat, he said, those organizations have been looking for another strong connection to Congress.
"I haven't spoken to everybody," said Zeldin, who met recently with the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee. "But the people I have spoken to are disappointed, they are very emboldened to want to help us. They are asking themselves if they could have done more to ensure that Cantor didn't lose in the first place. It's certainly on the top of everyone's mind as far as the Jewish community goes."
A Section on 07/13/2014