If one were going by discourse, vibes, ink spilled, things of that nature, Donald Trump would have won the Jewish vote in the U.S. presidential election, no contest. The keffiyeh-wrapped anti-Israel far-left, a major force elsewhere in the West, hadn’t made many inroads in the U.S., until all of a sudden it had. University campuses and literary magazines embraced the omnicause, a fusion of preexisting social justice causes now spearheaded by an effort to Free Palestine. Sure, Kamala Harris has a Jewish husband and was hardly affixing a red triangle to her personal brand, and was viewed as too pro-Israel by some. But American Jews, like Jewish people elsewhere, had soured on the left. Right?
The media itself seemed convinced. “This election, however, feels different,” per an August L.A. Times temperature-taking op-ed. Jewish Americans were breaking with our nebbishy ways and—apparently—buying guns, a source of endless media fascination. There was going to be a brand new Diasporic Jewry of muscle, this time in MAGA hats, rather than heading for the Levant. (At most, the Ezra Levant.)
It certainly felt like a change was in the works.
But it didn’t happen.
While many traditionally Democratic demographics did vote for Trump more than anticipated, Jews were not one of them. It’s estimated that 79 percent of Jewish voters chose Harris. Per the Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “If accurate, the National Election Pool’s result would be the lowest proportion of Jewish votes for a Republican presidential candidate in 24 years.”
Republican Jews exist. Depending the circles you move in, they may well seem the norm, but the thing is that they are not. For all the heterodoxy, contrarianism, and liberal disillusionment afoot, the imagined—dreaded, hoped-for—rightward migration didn’t happen.
Allow me, a dual citizen who grew up in the U.S. of A., to America-splain.
How is the U.S. Jewish vote still so Democratic, even as Trump himself has become less associated with nativism (or more precisely, with racist nativism)? A lot would have to relate to Jewish American demography. While more observant Jews—the ones likeliest to vote Republican—tend to have more kids, the ranks of liberal Jews grow via patrilineal descent, non-Orthodox conversion, and Jews switching to denominations more liberal than the ones they grew up with.
And the perception of the Republicans as the party that will overthrow the overeducated coastal elites or what have you… I mean this is not not the stuff of antisemitic dogwhistles. Not generically anti-minority. Antisemitic.
Yes, there are prominent media personalities, some Jewish, on the anti-elitist pro-Trump bandwagon, but there are that many more Jewish voters who recoil at right-wing populism—particularly of the Christian-right-tinged variety.
If Trump won in part ‘because Israel’ and ‘because antisemitism’—unlikely to have been major factors, but factors all the same, so bear with me—it was not at the behest of the Jewish electorate. Confusingly, acting in Jews’ interests and acting in the interest of The Jews are not one and the same.
The fight against antisemitism has become entrenched as a right-wing struggle. But it has become largely decoupled from Jewish communal self-advocacy. As I’ve explored for The CJN’s print magazine, we’re seeing a new breed of philosemites, interested in defending Israel and opposing wokeness, but not necessarily motivated by an affinity for Jews or Jewish culture. They’re putting a Star of David in social media bios—but they’re not diving into the bibliography of Mordecai Richler.
Trump’s early cabinet picks—and his choice of former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel—are best understood in these terms. It’s what The Jews would prefer, even if Jews themselves—ourselves—aren’t convinced.
Recall the threatening language Trump used, prior to the election, about what would happen if Jews didn’t vote for him. Huckabee’s less than pro-Palestinian stance has understandably gotten a lot of coverage, less so his record of framing the U.S. as a Christian nation. The Huckabee pick needs to be understood in that context, and not as a goodwill gesture to pro-Israel Jews. It’s a way for Trump to align not just with evangelical Christians but also with the broader right-wing ideology anti-antisemitism has come to signify.
Stance on Israel was not the first thing on Jewish American voters’ minds when selecting a candidate. This gets at why most went with Harris, but also why the ones who preferred Trump went in that direction. Yes, some Jewish voters did the Trump-because-Israel thing—while things got so muddled that so, too, did some anti-Israel voters—but not all that many in the end. The urban Jewish Trump voters might have thought “Harris” sounded suspiciously close to “Hamas,” but they just as well might have thought Republicans are the party of law-and-order, and been fed up with the tendency of Democrat-led cities to look the other way of unsafe conditions in the name of progressivism. (Are there implications here regarding Canadian cities? Sure seems that way, she types, considering the state of public transit in Toronto.)
Does Harris’s impressive support among Jews mean, then, that antizionism has made great inroads among Jewish Americans? Nope nope and nope once more. It means that American Jews, who are broadly speaking pro-Israel, even now, either weren’t focused on that issue or (or really, and) didn’t see the Democrats as anti-Israel.
I could see how, from outside the U.S., the overwhelming support for the more left-wing candidate—paired with the outsize media coverage antizionist Jews keep getting—it might seem like Jewish Americans voted for Harris in order to Free Palestine. But whether you want or don’t want that to be the case, it just… wasn’t. These are not voters who would have gone for Trump if voting solely about Israel, but, in many cases, ones who are pro-Israel, but in the same way the mainstream Democratic party is pro-Israel. In favour of the state’s continued existence, not necessarily of its furthest-right or most hawkish manifestations. This was not about Jewish American voters overcoming qualms to vote for the Democrat.
Things may shake out differently voting-wise in Canada, where politicians on the left are that much less likely to make pro-Israel reassurances, and, conversely, where supporting a further-to-the-right candidate tends not to mean putting one’s support behind, for example, abortion bans. Jewish Canadians may well shift further to the right, on account of Israel stuff and other stuff. But what that means is different in the Canadian context. Here, we very well might be just one more part of a multiethnic coalition that supports conservative politics contrary to the persistent (in some circles) myth that doing so is the provenance of white supremacists.
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The CJN’s senior editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected], not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai.
