About a month ago, I had lunch at a great diner in South Philly. My omelet was fantastic, oozing with cheese and fresh veggies and — dare I say it — bacon.

The place was plastered with political messages attacking Trump. There wasn’t even a shade of nuance about who the owners and operators are supporting in the upcoming election.

That’s fine. I have no problem with private business owners making whatever statements they think are appropriate. We are not living through Mao’s cultural revolution, and everyone gets the right to run their businesses however they choose.

Would I attack them for espousing views I find to be anathema? No.

I have the choice to walk away or ignore their politics and enjoy their gastronomy.

Harris supporters haven’t achieved that same level of maturity.

First, we have their anger at a Bucks County McDonald’s for allowing Trump to work the fryer and serve up orders at the drive-thru. Trump did what Trump does better than anyone, troll the opponent with humor.

This was a direct hit on Kamala’s as-yet-unsubstantiated claims that she flipped Big Macs in college.

More recently, an ad appeared depicting a few Jewish women in a diner, discussing the way Democrats had dealt with antisemitism and the assault on Israel since Oct. 7.

One of them is quoted as saying “I never voted Republican in my life, but I am voting Trump.”

The ad was sponsored by the Republican Jewish Coalition and produced by the Philadelphia-based Jamestown associates. It doesn’t specifically indicate where it was filmed, but anyone from this area can easily identify it as Hymie’s, the legendary deli in Bala Cynwyd.

The relevance of Hymie’s is that it is located smack dab in the center of the Jewish community in Montgomery County, and that is a demographic that the Trump campaign is seeking to target.

Not that they have to do as much heavy lifting as they would have, prior to Oct. 7. That event created a paradigm shift in Jewish communities across the nation, following as it did the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh in 2018.

There has been an increasing rise in antisemitic acts in the past decade, and they have exponentially exploded since the Oct. 7 massacre. There is also the perception, a not unfair one, that many high-profile Democrats have been too lukewarm in their condemnation of these attacks.

That’s precisely why the GOP thinks that Jews, and particularly those who live in a crucial area in the most important of all swing states are persuadable. Which brings me back to the ad.

Many people reacted with anger when they thought that Hymie’s was endorsing Donald Trump. The owner has been very clear that he is endorsing no one, and that his doors are open to Kamala Harris as well.

But that hasn’t pacified many of those who think that Trump supports Nazis and that anything that seems to favor him is anathema. They have called for boycotts of the deli.

As someone who has lived in the area for a long time, I know that’s not going to happen. Hymie’s will be able to weather this pseudo-storm just as Morning Glory will still be serving up omelets to pro-life Catholic conservatives who are not voting for Kamala.

But the controversy points to a deeper problem. The ad has been attacked almost as if it represented a betrayal of the Jewish community, as if the community owed its vote to the Democrats.

I reached out to Sam Markstein at the Republican Jewish Coalition, and he told me the whole point of the ad is to underscore a feeling that many Jews have expressed, namely, that they will feel safer under a President Trump than under a President Harris: “Those Jewish grandmothers depicted in the ad are afraid, and they are afraid for their grandkids who can’t walk on college campuses without being attacked for who they are. As the one woman says, ‘I never cared for Donald Trump, but he kept us safe.’ ”

It is clear that Jews, like every other demographic, are divided in this election. As a Catholic who cannot vote for Kamala because of her radical abortion stance but who knows others who have no problem with it, I understand that there is a multiplicity of views in each voting demographic.

The problem is when these divergent views are silenced or worse, attacked as being dangerous. That is what the Democrats call fascism.

The ad sent a powerful message: Some of us are voting for our very survival.

And that is a message everyone needs to take seriously.

Copyright 2024 Christine Flowers