Recent polling shows former President Donald Trump at historic highs among American Jews. He remains underwater, though.
God told us in the desert that we were a stiff-necked people, but Jews shouldn’t feel there’s any sacrilege in supporting the golden candidate. For American Jewry and for Israel, the contrast could not be more stark.
Jews justifiably vote reflexively against antisemitism. Antisemitism on the Right is a serious crime problem. Antisemitism on the Left is a serious cultural problem — and increasingly, an education problem.
Trump would, of course, be stronger on crime on all fronts than Vice President Kamala Harris. And Harris, of course, would flatter if not fan the flames of antisemitism on campus and in K-12 education.
As for antisemitism on the Right, what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 was a travesty. But after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, we saw a Charlottesville every day on college campuses for months on end. Unlike Trump, who was president at the time of the Charlottesville riot, Harris didn’t emphatically disavow the antisemitic protesters who overtook college campuses this past year.
And this wasn’t just because Harris feared alienating the Muslim voting bloc in Michigan. It was, also, and probably more so, because far-left campus ideologues are the key demographic for the future of the Democratic Party in terms of human capital. They’re the ones who will go on to staff congressional offices, federal agencies, and the massive left-wing nonprofit apparatus.
No wonder the Biden-Harris administration played catch-and-release footsie with colleges that entertained Jew-free tent cities and enabled mini-pogroms. For the Biden-Harris administration, tackling campus antisemitism wouldn’t just be like biting the hand that feeds — it would be like biting the tip off its own spear.
Indeed, if the Harris faction of the Democratic Party has its way, students won’t need to wait until college to be indoctrinated into left-wing antisemitism.
The most worrisome development for Jews in K-12 education has been the rise of ethnic studies, which casts Jews as oppressors. In Harris’s California, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) had to veto a proposal to include this curriculum in the state’s education system because the antisemitism was just too blatant.
Yet the Biden-Harris administration picked Miguel Cardona as the secretary of education, whose only real accomplishment as Connecticut state superintendent was piloting the first ethnic studies graduation requirement. And Harris picked Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) as her running mate, whose major accomplishment in K-12 education was pioneering the most far-left, ethnic studies-infused social studies standards in America.
Harris could, of course, have dramatically bolstered her chance at victory by picking Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) as her running mate. But everyone knew the writing was on the wall when the far Left pounced on him for what they thought was the gravest of possible moral scandals: He had served in the Israel Defense Forces.
Despite Shapiro’s public teshuvah (repentance) for this, it was obvious that Harris was less likely to pick him than the Satmar rebbe is to eat bacon-wrapped shrimp on Yom Kippur.
That rebbe, by the way, recently endorsed Trump. In fact, Trump’s support among Orthodox Jews is staggering. Why? Because they value their religious liberty and freedom. They know that there is a massive push from the far Left to pack the Supreme Court and that if Harris wins and ever has the senators to do it, she will.
Orthodox Jews in New York already have a taste for what this will mean. Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and former Mayor Bill de Blasio went after them by any hook or crook.
In an era where the Supreme Court is packed by the far Left, what wouldn’t a Democrat attorney general do when Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) or other members of the “Squad” come calling?
As for Israel: One of the two candidates moved the embassy to Jerusalem (against all world opinion) and pioneered the Abraham Accords. The other tells her pro-Hamas hecklers that they have a very good point.
Oct. 7 was a wakeup call — a revelation. The Torah teaches that it’s all too easy to forget or disregard even the grandest of revelations. Not all Jews, of course, consider themselves politically guided by the plain text of the Torah. There are many values and principles that can and will influence our votes. Two Jews, three opinions, as the joke goes.
But if your north star is combating antisemitism and securing the future of the Jewish people, this really shouldn’t be a choice.
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Max Eden is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Josh Hammer is Newsweek’s senior editor-at-large and the host of The Josh Hammer Show.