HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — For Rona Kaufman, signs are everywhere that more Jews feel abandoned by the Democratic Party and may vote for Republican Donald Trump.
It’s in her Facebook feed. It’s in the discomfort she perceived during a Q&A at a recent Democratic Party campaign event in Pittsburgh. It runs in her own family.
“The family of my generation and older generations, I don’t think anyone is voting for Harris, and we’ve never voted Republican,” Kaufman, 49, said, referring to Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris. has a Trump sign outside her house, and that’s a huge change.”
How big of a shift? Surveys continue to show that most Jewish voters still support the Democratic ticket, and Kaufman acknowledges that she is an exception.
Still, any shift could have enormous consequences in Pennsylvania, where tens of thousands of votes decided the past two presidential elections. Many Jewish voters say the 2024 presidential election will be remembered like no other, amid the growing fallout from Hamas’ brutal attack on Israelis last year.
Jews represent a small share of the voting population in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, the so-called blue wall of states that Democrats have come to rely on in recent presidential elections. In a close election, they are a large enough constituency that the Harris and Trump campaigns see the potential for any derailment to lead to a close contest.
That has forced Harris to walk a line between traditional Democratic constituencies with strong feelings about the war in Gaza, both Jews and Arab Americans — balancing support for Israel with outrage over the deaths of Israeli and Palestinian civilians and the destruction in the region. The Biden administration has pressured Israel to end its attacks, which continued last week with the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar by Israeli forces.
Trump has particularly tried to exploit the opening among Jewish voters, saying that Harris “doesn’t like Jewish people,” that Jews who don’t vote for him should “have their heads examined” and that he will be the “best friend that Jewish people have.” Americans have’. ever had in the White House.”
In the past, surveys have shown that the majority of Jews vote Democratic. A Pew Research Center poll released last month found that about two-thirds of Jewish voters support Harris. According to AP VoteCast, about 7 in 10 Jewish voters supported President Joe Biden in 2020.
The question is whether that has changed as Jews now see Israel’s continued existence in a new light as the war with Hamas spreads to Hezbollah and Iran.
That has put a new focus on the relationship between Israel and the US, which continues to provide military aid. And many Jews say rising acts of anti-Semitism in the United States and anti-Israel protests spreading across cities and college campuses — including in Philadelphia — have made them feel unsafe.
In Pennsylvania, still fresh in the minds of many, a gunman absorbed in white supremacist ideology killed 11 worshipers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, the deadliest attack on Jews in American history.
Because Pennsylvania plays a central role in the election, many say they have never seen such widespread outreach as it is now.
From Trump onwards, Republicans have been trying to win over Jewish voters by emphasizing a Democratic Party torn between its traditional and unconditional support for Israel and a growing faction that has accused Israel of war crimes in Gaza and called on Israel to quit unconditionally attacking Hamas. and demanded that the US end its military support for Israel.
For some Jews who usually vote Democratic, that has resonated.
“I think there are people who are reluctant Trump voters and feel scared as Jews in this country,” said Jeremy Kazzaz, a Pittsburgh resident and Harris supporter.
However, Kazzaz said Harris has a long record of fighting anti-Semitism, which is relatively unknown to many voters.
He pointed out that the Biden administration asked her husband, Doug Emhoff, who is Jewish, to lead a task force to develop a strategy to combat anti-Semitism long before Hamas attacked Israel. Emhoff was a key surrogate, campaigning for Jewish audiences in suburban Philadelphia and speaking at the groundbreaking of a new complex to replace the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.
But where Harris’s supporters see strong support for Israel — for example, the Biden administration has sent a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense battery to Israel, along with the troops needed to operate it — others see conditional support.
That includes Biden urging Israel not to hit Iran’s nuclear program or its oil fields. At the same time, Biden has emphasized his administration’s support for Israel and in her remarks on the anniversary of the Hamas attack, Harris said she will “always ensure that Israel gets what it needs to defend itself and that I will always will work to ensure the safety and security of the Jewish people here and around the world.”
Steve Rosenberg of Philadelphia, who voted for Trump in 2016 and then Biden in 2020, will vote for Trump in 2024. In large part, Rosenberg sees Biden’s lifting of Trump-era sanctions on Iran as a way to provide the Islamic Republic with money to finance. a war against Israel. Trump imposed the sanctions after destroying a treaty the Obama administration reached to slow Iran’s progress on nuclear weapons, which he called a bad deal.
“The question is, ‘Who is better off today than they were four years ago?’” Rosenberg said. “And the answer is Iran and the mullahs and their allies, and that’s because Biden and Kamala Harris have capitulated to Iran.”
Kaufman, who calls herself a progressive and lives in Pittsburgh’s heavily Jewish Squirrel Hill neighborhood, never thought she would vote for Trump.
But now she expects Trump to continue to take a tough stance on Iran — which she calls an imminent threat to democracy, human rights and Western civilization — and worries that Harris will appease Iran and pander to the left wing of the side.
Jews with very strong ties to Israel — her parents were born there and her daughter just completed a mandatory two years and eight months of service in the Israeli army — are also conflicted about supporting Harris, Kaufman said. “I say it out loud everywhere, but most people don’t say it out loud.”
However, many Jews who support Harris say they see Trump as a threat to democracy.
That’s important, they say, because minorities — including Jews — have reason to fear persecution under dictators.
They can unfold a list of Trump’s comments that they view as threatening: deploying the military against domestic enemies, expressing dual loyalty to Jews, making Jews scapegoats if he loses and, in the days after the attack on Hamas, criticizing Israelis. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised Hezbollah while being ‘very smart’.
Emhoff called Trump a “known anti-Semite.”
Some see Trump’s efforts on January 6, 2021 to cling to power as a threat. Many are wary of his affinity for dictators, bringing up his dinner at his Mar-a-Lago resort with far-right activist Nick Fuentes and rapper Ye, two men known for their anti-Semitic rhetoric.
“That’s the conversation I have with Jews,” said Rabbi Beth Janus of Philadelphia.
Janus said Jews she knows are excited that a woman could be president and that she is married to a Jewish man. Conversely, Trump’s support for Israel is transactional, she said.
“If it serves his needs and goals, he supports Israel,” Janus said. “But if that weren’t the case, he wouldn’t support Israel.”
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Follow Marc Levy twitter.com/timelywriter.
