If you want a sense of how elderly Jewish Americans are likely to vote this November, speak to the residents of Jerusalem's Ramat Tamir retirement community. Nestled in the city's northern hills is a collection of Jewish seniors in neat, well-maintained apartments, where most of the ambient conversational buzz is in English and American-accented Hebrew. Its American residents are people who seemingly could just as easily have retired to Florida.
One of the residents, 105-year-old Miriam Pollak, is believed to be the oldest American voter living abroad. With five generations of descendants, she "stopped counting" how many great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren she has. She is surprisingly engaged and aware, and even tech-savvy: She spends significant time on-line reading political news from America; she even "Skypes" her children and grandchildren in America daily.
She is a lifelong Democrat and votes in Del Ray Beach, Florida - and she is voting for John McCain. Barack Obama, she and her family say, is just "too much of a risk."
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