Jewish Americans Face a Time for Choosing
Secular Jews have long been a voting bloc for Democrats, but the party’s recent anti-Semitism might encourage a sea change.
For many Jewish Americans, Hamas’s genocidal October 7 attack on hundreds of innocent Israelis provided a shocking reminder of the nature and genuine threat of the Palestinian jihadis. But an even bigger shock may have come from the support Hamas has received on college campuses and across major U.S. cities.
The anti-Semitic chant “from the river to the sea” has been echoed and repeated not by a bunch of rabid “white supremacist” MAGA Republicans but by leftist college students and Democrat lawmakers.
American Jews, who by large margins have for generations voted for Democrats and have supported the party’s complete embrace of radical leftist identity politics, suddenly find themselves classified as the oppressors and “colonizers” simply for defending Israel’s right to exist.
So shocking has the supposedly sudden rise of anti-Semitism been that some Jews are turning to the once-despised Fox News just to find news coverage that is not antagonistic toward Israel.
Will this sudden shock of reality open the eyes of American Jews to finally ditch their commitment to the Democrat Party? Will they finally see that the party most responsible for and with the longest history of promulgating racism, including anti-Semitism, is in fact the Democrat Party?
Unfortunately, for most of these Jewish Democrats, the answer is likely no.
While they clearly have been dismayed by the anti-Semitism on display across the country, the deeper problem is that the leftism undergirding the Democrat Party’s increasing embrace of Marxism is what many Jews themselves believe. Marxism is perhaps the inevitable result of embracing radical secularism.
“On issue after issue, Jewish voters march in lockstep with progressives,” observes veteran political analyst Don Feder. “In a June 2018 poll, 88% supported abortion on demand, 70% wanted stronger gun control, and 46% favored increased immigration, while only 17% wanted to see it decreased. Potential terrorists streaming across our border probably won’t put a dent in that thinking.”
The vast majority of Jews in America are non-religious. Their Jewishness is viewed more as an ethnicity and culture than as a commitment to Judaism.
Meanwhile, those Jews living in America who are committed to their Jewish faith, Orthodox and Hasidic Jews, already overwhelmingly vote Republican, similar to Evangelical Christians. Conservative Jews, like conservative Christians, hold their faith in preeminence, and therefore strongly favor holding to and maintaining the vision of America’s Founding Fathers for religious liberty and freedom of speech.
However, since October 7 is beyond any of the prior jihadi attacks directed at Israel over the years, as it was the bloodiest attack against Jews since the Holocaust, maybe — just maybe — some of America’s secular Jews have been awakened to the party and ideology from which the genuine threat to their existence comes. Maybe they will start listening to conservative media for a change and hear what we are actually saying instead of simply relying on Leftmedia propaganda. If enough of them start to do so, maybe their political minds can be changed.
One thing’s for certain: Republicans would welcome them with open arms.