The Great Awokening isn’t completely dead yet, but it’s slowly dying a well-deserved death. Especially in the US, where the Trump White House is assiduously undoing decades of Long March Left white-anting of public institutions. But an even more seismic shift appears to be underway: wealthy American Jews are walking away from the left.
Just as Western Jews have punched above their weight in fields from entertainment to science for centuries, in the politics of the last century they’ve exercised an influence disproportionate to their numbers. Again, this is hardly a surprise: intellectualism is a pronounced trait in Jewish culture for millennia. It’s only natural, then, that Jewish Americans should be so prominent in the intellectual substrata of American politics.
It’s not much of a surprise, either, that Jews have traditionally been drawn to progressive politics. A people whose history is a sorry tale of repeated and often violent persecution naturally feel an affinity for the oppressed. “You yourselves know the feelings of a stranger, for you also were strangers in the land of Egypt,” in the words of the Passover Seder.
With the left loudly proclaiming itself the champion of the poor and oppressed, then, Jews were obviously drawn to support leftist politics*.
There was only one nagging problem. As Norman Podhoretz noticed in the 1960s, his lived experience was nothing like the leftist narrative. All the blacks he knew were violent thugs who hated Jews. So, why were so many of his fellow Jews ignoring what he infamously called “My Negro Problem – And Ours”?
These ideas had appeared in print; therefore they must be true. My own experience and the evidence of my senses told me they were not true... it was the Negroes who were doing the only persecuting I knew about – and doing it, moreover, to me.
It’s taken a while, but at last a great many other American Jews seem to have cottoned on. As I wrote recently, just a couple of years after Hollywood mogul Jay Sures, a proud Jew […and] staunch defender of Israel, led pro-BLM rally in LA’s Century City district, his home was attacked by a pro-Palestinian mob. The Democrats are more and more a festering pit of open anti-Semitism.
As a result, a slew of wealthy Jewish donors are switching their allegiance to the Republicans.
Did the string of events beginning with the horrific Hamas massacre of Israeli citizens 19 months ago, followed by Israel’s brutal retribution and anti-Israel protests on scores of American college campuses, cause American Jews to have second thoughts about who their real friends are?
The Great Awokening was in sizable measure about whether the Great Replacement was wise. Did all the anti-Israel and/or anti-Semitic protests raise questions in the minds of Jews about whether the increasing diversity they long championed is going to be good for the Jews?
Joe Biden, for all his finger-wagging, generally made sure that American material support for Israel went on. But Kamala Harris was a different kettle of fish.
Kamala was in a coalition with a lot of people who really don’t like Israel, which could raise Jewish concerns about the future direction of the Democratic Party.
One way to begin to get an answer to these questions is to look at major political contributors by ethnicity, since they put serious money behind their views.
Canadian history professor Gil Troy found, for instance, that Jewish donors contributed 50 per cent of the funds to the Democratic Party and 25 per cent to the Republican Party – at least, until October 7 and its aftermath. In 2024, that all changed.
You can estimate the ethnic background of the biggest donors for yourself. A fine website called OpenSecrets.org lets you look up who gave how much to whom in every federal election since 2010.
So, I looked up the top 100 donors in 2024 versus in 2020 and then estimated their ethnicities from online sources.
For example, in 2020, the biggest donors were casino owner Sheldon Adelson and his Israeli-born wife, Miriam ($218 million to Republicans), followed by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg ($153 million to Democrats) and financier Tom Steyer ($72 million to Democrats) […]
In fourth place are packaging magnates Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein ($68 million to Republicans). Although there is a stereotype that anybody high-achieving with a Germanic surname must have Yiddish-speaking ancestors, a plethora of evidence shows that Mr Uihlein is a gentile German-American.
So, what about 2024? Firstly, the river of Jewish money began to dry up.
In 2024, the top position with $291 million was, of course, held by the gentile Elon Musk. He was followed by Timothy Mellon, whose WASP grandfather was secretary of the Treasury under three GOP presidents ($172 million), the widow Adelson ($148 million), and the Uihleins ($143 million).
So did where the money was going to.
This time, the top seven donors were Republicans, with Mayor Bloomberg in eighth place as the most generous Democrat ($61 million, down $92 million from 2020). Note that Bloomberg was elected mayor of NYC once as a Republican and twice as an independent, defeating the Democratic candidate all three times. Hence, he represents the right wing of Democrats: He still ponied up a vast sum for Democratic candidates in 2024, but he was notably less forthcoming than in 2020.
The table below shows the dramatic change in patterns of political donations.
So, among rich, politically engaged Jews there was a sizable (although not huge) swing from 2020 to 2024 away from the Democrats and toward the Republicans. I’d say these data points support, but do not quite triumphantly vindicate, the October 7th theory for why the media is less obsessively woke today than in 2022 […]
Contrary to countless recent think pieces, I don’t see all that much Silicon Valley money pouring into the GOP outside of Elon Musk […] a sizable majority of the Northern Californians on the top 100 contributors list in 2024 are Democrats: I count 11, about nine of whom appear to be in tech.
So, what’s the story? Firstly, that 2024 was not a good year for the Democrats when it came to big-money donors. Especially when it came to their former cash-cows: wealthy Jewish donors. Non-Jewish donations to the Democrats alone barely shifted. On the other hand, the share of donations from rich non-Jews giving to the Republicans or both parties boomed.
It could be that gentile zillionaires are finally learning lessons from their Jewish peers about the value of political donations.
Perhaps Trump, with his obsession with William McKinley’s tariffs, could be assembling a coalition that could win seven of the next nine presidential elections, as Republicans did from 1896 through 1928.
Whether that is indeed the case, or whether 2024 proves to be an anomaly, remains to be seen. But unless the Democrats drop their dalliance with the anti-Semitic far-left – something that there’s no sign of to date – Jewish mega-donors may finally realise what Norman Podhoretz noticed way back in the ’60s.
*Yeah, yeah, spare me the anti-Jewish conspiracy theories. There are no Elders of Zion cackling and rubbing their hands while they plot world domination. There never was. Sure, George Soros is Jewish: so are Dennis Prager and Ben Shapiro. As Prager says, I hate George Soros, too.
