Why most American Jews reject Trump

I don’t know – and really don’t care – if former President Donald Trump is an antisemite at heart. After all, his daughter Ivanka converted to Judaism before marrying Jared Kushner, he has Jewish grandchildren whom he presumably loves, Jews such as David Friedman and Stephen Miller feature prominently in his entourage, he appeared at a fundraiser hosted by Jewish real estate developers on the Jersey Shore this past weekend, and the Republican Jewish Coalition, the Republican Party’s Jewish arm, is endorsing him without any apparent hesitation or reservation.

Some of his comments over the years, on the other hand, have ominous implications. Never mind that he considered at least some of the neo-Nazis who screamed “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville to be “very fine people.” Never mind that he had a highly publicized dinner at Mar-o-Lago with two quite notorious antisemites, the rapper Ye, formerly Kanye West (“I’m going Death con 3 on Jewish people”) and the white supremacist Nick Fuentes (“All I want is revenge against my enemies and a total Aryan victory . . . I’m just like Hitler”). Trump’s own words over the years suggest that he does not hold most Jews in high esteem.

At the above-mentioned fundraiser, he said that Vice President Kamala Harris “hates Israel” and quoted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as telling him that American Jews voted for Democratic candidates out of “habit.” This before he reportedly said – for the umpteenth time, as it happens – that “Any Jewish person that votes for Kamala, or a Democrat, should immediately have their head examined.”

In a subsequent radio interview, he repeated his contention that “if you’re Jewish . . . if you vote for a Democrat, you’re a fool, an absolute fool.” Doubling down, he not only accused Harris of being antagonistic toward Israel but added that she “she doesn’t like Jewish people. You know it, I know it and everybody knows it and nobody wants to say it.”

Like her husband and step children? Like the governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, who is on her vice presidential short list and who has been campaigning on her behalf? Like Senators Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, both (D—CA) who endorsed her when she first ran for the Senate from California in 2016? Please give us all a break.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have never met Vice President Harris or her husband, but I did contribute modestly to her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 and I now support her enthusiastically for president of the United States.

But Trump’s virulent personal attacks on Harris, which are likely to continue unabated through November 5 (Election Day) and beyond, aren’t the real eye-raiser here. We’ve all gotten used and largely inured to his propensity for disparaging verbiage. The slur that American Jews vote for Democrats out of “habit,” on the other hand, should make us all sit up and take notice.

First, let’s not forget that a not insignificant number of American Jews regularly vote Republican — 26 percent of them are estimated to have voted for Trump in 2016 and somewhere between 21 percent and 31 percent did so in 2020. That’s pretty much in line with Jewish voting patterns in recent presidential elections. Only Ronald Reagan in 1980 received as high as 39 percent of the Jewish vote. (Mitt Romney received 30 percent and John McCain 22 percent.)

Why did at least a quarter of American Jews vote for Trump? Perhaps they share his xenophobic America First outlook; perhaps they like his tax policies, especially if their income is in the higher echelons; perhaps they are drawn to the Republican Party’s conservative ideology and hold their collective noses when it comes to Trump.

But that leaves the roughly 75 percent who did not want anything to do with Trump the last two go rounds and are almost certain to remain true to form. The question is why. Trump’s answer, which he attributed to Netanyahu, that it is out of some sort of mindless habit is as insulting as it is inaccurate.

Insulting because the likes of Trump and Netanyahu cavalierly dismiss and denigrate any principled positions that do not align with theirs. And, surprise, surprise, most Jews do not support or identify with far-right politicians who espouse neo-fascist views. That’s not out of habit but because of a knowledge of history and an instinct for self-preservation.

Spoiler alert: Jews haven’t fared all that well under fascist regimes generally, and I am intentionally not making any analogies to Nazi Germany in this discussion. White supremacists such as Nick Fuentes also have a long history of antisemitism, and this includes the Ku Klux Klan.

The obvious question then arises: What about the strident antisemitism from the extreme left as manifested in the anti-Israel, anti-Zionist demonstrations and university encampments over the course of the past ten months? And what about the failure of far too many supposedly liberal or progressive groups to denounce that antisemitism?

This is a serious concern, to be sure, but the mainstream of the Democratic Party as represented by President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Speaker Hakeem Jeffries, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, among many, are outspoken in both their support for Israel and their abhorrence of any form of antisemitism. Representatives Rashida Tlaib (D—MI), Ilhan Omar (D—MN), and the soon-to-be former Representative Jamaal Bowman (D—NY) are in their party’s minority in this regard.

Why else are most American Jews highly unlikely to climb aboard the MAGA express train in 2024? One explanation is that they fundamentally believe in the rule of law, and rightly see Trump’s incitement of the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol and his subsequent promise to pardon the perpetrators of that insurrection as conclusive evidence of his willingness to subvert that rule of law.

Please bear in mind that while baseball greats Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax were hailed by American Jews as symbolic of their having become a legitimate part of Americana, the true icons of American Jewry include Supreme Court justices Louis D. Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Not for nothing do we consider ourselves to be the people of the book, and by book we mean the book of laws.

Another principled reason why American Jews will vote for Harris over Trump: According to the highly respected Pew Research Center, over 80 percent of them believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. And Trump proudly takes credit for the US Supreme Court decision that overruled Roe v. Wade. Oops.

Yet another reason: Almost as many American Jews support continued aid to Ukraine (77 percent) as support aid to Israel (80 percent). Does anyone think these 77 percent are unaware of the likelihood that Trump, were he to be reelected, is likely to throw Ukraine overboard the first chance he gets and align himself and the US with Vladimir Putin?

The fact – contrary to the Trump/Netanyahu dismissive belittling of American Jewry’s values and intelligence – is that the overwhelming majority of American Jews are simply not in line with, and will not fall in line behind, Trump and Trumpism.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

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Menachem Z. Rosensaft is Adjunct Professor of Law at Cornell Law School. He is the author of the forthcoming Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz (Ben Yehuda Press, 2025).