Historically, Jews in Western countries have strongly leaned to the left of politics. Mostly because they bought into the left’s self-serving rhetoric about social justice, which strongly appealed to not only Judaism’s sense of justice, but the historic reality of the Jewish diaspora. Liberation for everyone, the argument goes, was also liberation for the long-oppressed Jews.
It beggars belief, though, that even the most rusted-on Jewish voter could still be loyal to a left that actively, loudly, hates them. To be sure, anti-Semitism is an enduring stain on the fringe of the right, but vicious, open anti-Semitism is endemic to the mainstream of left today. While the left are palling up to the murderous Jew-haters of Hamas, the US right are backing one of the most philo-Semitic presidential candidates in US history.
It remains to be seen if a historic shift of the Jewish vote happens at this election.
Rachel Weinberg calls herself a religious Jew first, then a proud American. She said she has only one choice for president: Donald Trump.
“I don’t like everything he says,” the 72-year-old retired preschool teacher from Michigan said after volunteer canvassers for the Republican Jewish Coalition knocked on her door Sunday. “But I vote for Israel. It is our life. I support Israel. Trump supports Israel with his mouth and his actions” […]
The door-to-door outreach to Jewish voters with a history of backing Republicans is part of a new effort the group is undertaking this year in five presidential battleground states in hopes of boosting Trump over Democrat Kamala Harris in the Nov 5 election. Although surveys show that Jews vote decidedly Democratic, the Republican Jewish Coalition is hoping that the door-knocking will peel off enough votes to make a difference in an election year when the war between Israel and Hamas has stoked debate and provoked division.
They’re facing an uphill battle, though.
About 7 in 10 Jewish voters nationally backed Democrat Joe Biden in 2020, while about 3 in 10 backed Trump that year, according to AP VoteCast, a sweeping survey of the electorate. A Pew Research Center poll released last month found that about two-thirds of Jewish voters back Harris.
How’s that working out for them?
Despite their relatively small proportion of the population, a swing in the Jewish vote could be enough to make a difference in even heavily Muslim Michigan.
Biden carried Michigan in 2020 by fewer than 155,000 votes out of roughly 5.5 million cast. Although Jewish voters account for only 2% of the state’s voters, the 15,000 new Jewish Republican voters the coalition has identified since the 2020 election – out of roughly 120,000 Jewish voters in the state – could make an impact in what is shaping up to be a very close race, said Sam Markstein, an RJC spokesperson.
The Republican Jewish Coalition’s targeting is very specific in Michigan, as it is in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Here, its work is centered in Oakland County, the state’s second most-populous county, with 1.3 million people just northwest of Detroit.
It’s particularly focusing on the upper middle-class suburbs of Farmington Hills, Oak Park, Southfield and West Bloomfield – the township with the state’s largest Jewish population, where Israeli flags hang in some front windows.
But, even thousands of years after the Exodus, a great many Jews are still choosing to live in denial.
Halie Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said in a statement that Jewish voters are a key part of a winning Democratic coalition.
“Kamala Harris shares the views and values of the majority of American Jews, while Donald Trump threatens and denigrates us, trafficks in antisemitic rhetoric, aligns with dangerous extremists, and aspires to be a dictator on day one,” Soifer said.
Literally none of those things is true. This is the sort of metastasised Trump Derangement Syndrome Jewish Republican voters are up against.
Meanwhile, in deep-blue Democrat citadel, Chicago:
Chicago police are not pursuing hate crime charges against a Muslim man who shot and injured a visibly Jewish man as he made his way to shul on Shabbos morning – despite video obtained by YWN showing the suspect shouting “Allah Akbar” as he fired at police and paramedics in a subsequent shootout.
His motive remains unclear, obviously.
The suspect, identified by police as 22-year-old Chicago resident Sidi Mohamed Abdallahi, faces over a dozen serious felony charges, including six counts of attempted first-degree murder and seven counts of aggravated discharge of a firearm at police officers. After allegedly shooting the 39-year-old Jewish man in the 2600 block of West Farwell Avenue around 9:30 a.m., Abdallahi engaged in an exchange of gunfire with responding police officers, who ultimately shot and apprehended him. He remains in critical condition at a local hospital.
Local residents were stunned to learn that authorities have not considered hate crime charges in what appeared to be a targeted attack on a Jewish man simply walking to shul. “Notably, and despite evidence that seems to suggest an antisemitic motive for the shooting, authorities did not file hate crime charges,” Alderman Debra Silverstein of the 50th Ward wrote in a statement.
As one Jewish commenter noted:
‘The victim is a pesky white Jew. Ho hum. The narrative has to be a scrawny white kid wearing a red MAGA hat shooting up a gay black church. Nothing else matters. Yawn.’
Still think the Democrats are on your side?
