Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

310 // JEROME A. CHANES
ty-minority" district, said the Court, three criteria, which make racially polarized
voting the real test of vote dilution, must be met: first, there are sufficient numbers
of the minority group, and the group is geographically compact enough, to
elect someone from a single-member district (in other words, to be able to create
a "majority-minority" district); second, the minority community must be "polit-
ically cohesive," that is, it must express common electoral or political aspirations;
and third, a pattern of racial polarization must be demonstrated—majoritycommunity
block voting that has usually led to the defeat of minority-supported
candidates.
Race was the deciding factor in Gingles, and thereafter race became the central
feature of most: districting and reapportionment situations. 48 The Gingles inter-
pretation of the 1982 amendments, which in essence gave sanction to legislatures
and courts to redistrict, or to create entirely new legislative districts, for the purpose
of increasing the possibility of electing minority-group members, had consequences
for other groups. Yet groups not "protected" under federal statute were
effectively deprived of representation as a consequence.
Where were Jewish groups in all of this? The organized Jewish community,
across the board, supported the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but its attitudes toward
the 1982 amendments did not signify an orgasmic frenzy. Some agencies supported
the amendments; some sat them out, and were silent. One agency, the
American Jewish Congress, opposed them, predicting possible negative consequences
for the Jewish community, even though few Jews had to date been affect-
ed by reapportionment under the Voting Rights Act (the Chasidim of
Williamsburgh in UJO v. Carey were a noteworthy exception)/ 19
In fact, one of the first post-Gingles cases to reach the Supreme Court did
involve a Jewish community, that of Dade County, Florida, including Miami and
Miami Beach. Johnson v. DeGrandy (originally Wetherell v. DeGrandy) tested the
validity of a redistricting plan for state legislative seats. The plan was developed
in June 1992 by a federal district court in Florida, which found a plan previous-
ly crafted by the state legislature to be insufficient in its response to Section 2 of
the Voting Rights Act. (Section 2 is violated if members of a "protected" class
"have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the
political process and to elect representatives of their choice.") 50
As plaintiff, the Florida House of Representatives maintained that the district
court's plan went beyond the requirements of the Voting Rights Act, and
violated the act's spirit by effectively disenfranchising other populations. For
the Jewish community, the issue in DeGrandy was that the court's proposed remedy
would create Hispanic districts at the expense of other, including Jewish,
communities—in effect, giving to a community that already has plenty by taking
away from another that had less. 51
In a 7-2 decision handed down in 1994, the Supreme Court rejected the dis-
trict court's judgment and interpretation, and in effect rejected a "maximization"
standard as contrary to the original purposes of the Voting Rights Act. Yet the