It’s difficult to say what a U.S. presidential election will mean for the Jewish people when the identity of the candidates is not only in flux, but dramatically so.
First there was Joe Biden, whose debate performance had him seeming quite possibly not up to running again, and like finishing the term upright would be a stretch. Would he stay the course?
Then there was Donald Trump, also not a chicken of the spring vintage, but more crucially someone who just came this close to being assassinated. This, in turn, led to a new wave (?) of right-wing cancel culture, with Libs of TikTok poster Chaya Raichik getting a Home Depot employee fired for not keeping her visceral reaction to this to herself.
Do you require a Canadian angle, too? Professor Shoshana Jacobs, a biologist at the University of Guelph, also posted about the assassination attempt in a manner some found insufficiently sombre (“When 4 inches really matters”) but that was not in fact a wish that the bullet hadn’t missed.
Everyone who’s been calling Trump a Nazi since his election or since the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol—an everyone including some Jews—now has to spell out that their wish for Trump to vanish from the political arena is not in fact a desire for him to be dramatically offed in what would doubtless be the start of even more violent political unrest. Even those who simply dislike Trump as a candidate but don’t think he’s evil had to walk on eggshells for a minute there, lest their harsh rhetoric be interpreted as basically violence. This seemed to give Trump an easy path back to the White House.
So, too, did his vice-presidential pick, Ohio’s Senator and bestselling Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance. A 39-year-old not too “woke” to say what he really thinks (who knows what he thinks-thinks, though) about “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too,” Vance had once been a Never-Trumper but it was a flexible sort of never as he is now as MAGA as it gets.
So it seemed as if Trump had things wrapped up, but then Biden said no wait actually he realizes he is 10,000 years old and can’t run again without torpedoing the Democrats’ chances (I paraphrase), which means… unclear. Biden and many other Democrats are behind Kamala Harris getting promoted from vice presidential candidate to presidential, which would seem like the natural order of things. But because she is a politician, some people don’t like her, for valid reasons and silly ones.
And there’s the small matter of the U.S. not yet having had a woman president and quite possibly not being ready to allow someone of the daintier sex such responsibilities, really better drop the ladies off in the shoe department of Nordstrom (I think America still has those) and call it a day. Can one really run a woman against Trump, if the fate of democracy is in his losing? Wouldn’t it be better to find the oldest, whitest man possible? Wait a moment…
No, I have not forgotten about the Jewish bit, or rather, bits.
Since Oct. 7, the fight against antisemitism has become a right-wing-coded concern. Trump gets to run as the pro-Israel candidate, the Bibi buddy, the haver of a Jewish daughter, Ivanka. Sure, Vance might vibe isolationist Real Americans hyper-Christian do-we-really-want-this, he might set off every atavistic badfortheJews cell in my body, but Trump himself? He’s a real estate guy from New York, a familiar figure who may pose a threat to various marginalized groups (immigrants, professors) but not necessarily Jews as such.
Well.
I had not given any thought to Pennsylvania even having a governor, but it does, and it’s a 51-year-old Democrat named Josh Shapiro. Like many but not all people with names like Josh Shapiro, this is an individual of the Jewish persuasion, and a friend of Israel at that. He proposed to his wife in Jerusalem! And closer to home, he defended a Philadelphia Jewish restaurant that pro-Palestinian protesters had for their own I’m sure extremely valid reasons decided was effectively the Knesset.
A Democratic ticket with an out-and-proud Jewish vice presidential candidate and a presidential candidate with a Jewish husband (Doug Emhoff; same couldn’t be said of Tipper Gore, from the Gore-Lieberman days) would do much to allay any concerns Jewish voters might have about the Democrats being a hotbed of left-wing antisemitism.
It would also, along with his status as the religiously observant, married father of four, serve as a message the broader electorate: that the Democratic party remains the place of calm, centrist liberalism. It’s not that any Jewish candidates or spouses would accomplish this (ahem, Bernie Sanders) but in this case, yes. A young(ish) pious Judeo-Christian normie might be a brilliant choice as VP or, depending where things head nomination-wise, the actual POTUS.
While I know some are, as reported at Jewish Insider by Gabby Deutch, I’m not especially worried about Shapiro turning off would-be Democratic voters who happen to be antisemites. The ones who weren’t going to vote for Shapiro because Zionism already weren’t voting for Biden for the same reason.
That said, I could see a way that fighting antisemitism would switch back over into a primarily left-wing-coded concern, thereby emboldening the right to speak freely on that front. This is merely a hunch born of reading the replies to some lady posting that her “fellow white ladies” needed to transcend their racism and help “elect a black woman president.” A post irritating in its 2016-ness and probably not helpful but also anodyne as things go.
Regardless, some sleuths figured out that she’s Jewish and boy oh boy did they not just say huh and move on. No, they did a big ol’ Jews-aren’t-white, Jews-are-anti-white pile-on, crossed with (because the internet) complaints that the woman voicing political opinions isn’t one they admire in the physical sense. For the far-right, Jews are not left-behind victims of DEI or wokeness or whatever, but are the brains behind the operation. It is possible that Jews are, all told, in a better spot if the mainstream right has our back. Under a troll-themed Republican administration, this is not guaranteed.
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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.
