Haven't they historically voted Conservative? I may be wrong on this.
Dealing mostly with voting in General Elections here... local elections are much more complicated and can greatly confuse things... some of this is my opinion based on my own work so... aha...
Jews (orthodox, secular and all the shades between) usually voted overwhelmingly Liberal before the First World War, mostly because Tory candidates in areas next to Jewish slums tended to love using anti-semitism in their campaigns (often very successfully; there were more than a few parts of the East End that cast far bigger votes for Tory candidates than would normally be expected). After the war, Labour began to dominate in all the Jewish slum areas while better off Jews increasingly moved to rapidly developing middle class suburbs (where, I think but don't know for sure, they continued to vote Liberal) and from the 1930's onwards the CPGB started to do well in some overwhelmingly Jewish parts of the East End, culminating in the election of a Jewish Communist M.P in 1945 (for Stepney Mile End). Here's a picture of him:
The CPGB retained a surprisingly large share of the Jewish vote (especially in the East End) until the '70's, only dying off as the Jewish community grew more affluent and moved to the suburbs. I think they had a couple of councillors in Stepney until the mid '60's (I'll check this soon).
Overall, the Jewish vote (including the orthodox in London; though note that Golders Green and so on were never Labour areas; the favoured party of protest against Tory anti-semitism remained the Liberals and there is still a curiously strong LibDem vote in local elections in that general area) remained mostly Labour until the 1980's although this ever weakened by increasing affluence, suburbanisation and the decline of traditional Tory anti-semitism. In the '80's there was a big swing to the Tories caused by a mixture of things; Thatcher-era Tories just did very, very well in all kinds of suburbia and no ethnic-religious group (then anyway) was as suburban as Jews were, Thatcher was on very good terms with senior figures in the various orthodox communities, while the Left (stronger in London Labour than anywhere else in the country) was widely seen as anti-Jewish; the nasty deselection of Reg Freeson (an old fashioned Jewish lefty) by Livingstone in 1985 can be seen as symbolic. Another picture is needed. Here's Freeson in the '80's;
There was then a huge swing away from the Tories amongst all the more affluent ethnic-religious minorities in the 1990's (most suburban London Hindus had actually voted Tory in General Elections in the '80's, for example), leaving us more-or-less where we are now; in other words, that there is no longer a fairly uniform Jewish vote and that the community is broadly (very, very,
very broadly) split along London (including (and
especially, actually) Herts and so on) - Rest of England and Orthodox - Secular lines. Affluence is also a factor, of course.
With the exception of Hasidic communities the richer the area, the more likely it is that Jews will vote "normally" for their socio-economic status.
