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Identity politics aside, if Garland were nominated during Obama's first term, Republicans should have (that doesn't mean would have) viewed it as an attempt to find someone who is more accomplished than political. He's 100 times better than Kagan or Sotomayor. I'm a cynic, though. Even though the intellectual analysis of Obama's action here - essentially a compromise between the idea that a final-year president shouldn't make important appointments and that an appointment should be blindly partisan - seems positive, nothing these days is ever positive. Not even a small gesture is rewarded.
But if we want to analyze why so many judges are Jewish in that age group and older, remember that civil rights wasn't just for people of color. In most business and academic worlds prior to about 1975-80 if you were Jewish, you could only get so far. Jewish families often steered their children toward medical professions and the law, where those barriers didn't exist.
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