For decades, conservative and Republican Jews have been waiting for their co-religionists to join them in larger numbers as members of the liberal intelligentsia and policymakers have become increasingly critical of or hostile to Israel and increasingly indifferent to or actual contributors to a generalized antipathy toward more Orthodox Jewish communities. Like the man in the shtetl who has given himself the job of waiting for the coming of the Messiah, it had long since come to seem hopeless but at least it’s been steady work. American Jews have been pretty comfortable with the idea that they can take care of their Jewish obligations by being liberal themselves and voting for liberals.
The only solution to this, it seemed, would be demography over time. By this I mean that, as secular Jews intermarry and fall away from their faith traditions and their community, the Jewish world in America will (as the generations pass) likely come to be defined by Jews of faith with traditional values and a daily connection to the oral and written law. That law is many things; indeed, it is about everything. But one thing it isn’t is culturally liberal. The people who live by its dictates do not need to use politics to substitute for their faith or to express it; they do it themselves, at three prayer services a day. Rather, such Jews will, as citizens, vote to do things to protect and preserve their own communities, and will find their natural home on the Right.
Only it isn’t going to take generations to happen, it seems.
Then came October 7. Over the course of the past 13 months, Jews in America have been harrassed, threatened, seen their ancestral homeland derided as a settler colonial genocidal state. They have seen Jewish kids mistreated on college campuses. And they have seen the Biden administration kowtow to Muslim populations hostile to Jews and the Jewish state in Michigan. They have heard the criticisms of Israel’s efforts to defend itself, and have noted the silence from the administration when it came to anti-Semitic assaults and the refusal of college presidents to condemn the treatment of Jews and Jewish topics under their ambit.
And Jews have acted.
The initial evidence from last night’s election is that there has been a significant shift in the Jewish vote from previous elections, a delta of anywhere from 10 to 40 percent overall. It’s very hard to quantify such things because Jews are few in number, hard to isolate in larger surveys, and hard to pin down. So, for example, one exit poll I saw showed the Jewish vote for Donald Trump in the low 40s; another at 22; another in the 30s. I’m not linking to them because I don’t trust any of them and don’t want to argue with any of them. So I’m instead going to point to certain counties in the United States where Jews reside in slightly or significantly disproportionate numbers. (As the weeks pass and we get accurate final data precinct by precinct in the United States, we can get a clearer picture of the Jewish vote because we’ll be able to key on concentrated areas.)
But look at what my friend Josh Kraushaar, the editor of Jewish Insider, tweeted: “Wow: Trump carried PASSAIC County, New Jersey. Majority/Hispanic electorate and home to a sizable Orthodox Jewish constituency.” Jews make up about 25 percent of the county’s population and it has been a Democratic stronghold forever. Joe Biden took Passaic in 2020 with 57.5 percent to Trump’s 41 percent. Last night, Trump won it with 50 percent to Harris’s 46.5 percent. That’s a 16 point overall swing in Trump’s favor. We don’t yet know how much of that is attributable to the Jewish vote and how much to changes in the Hispanic vote, but Jews surely played a significant role in this change in the county’s political course.
In Palm Beach County, Florida, there are about 175,000 Jews out of a population of 1.5 million, or about 12 percent. Kamala Harris won this county by .74 percent last night. Biden won it by 13 percent in 2020. Trump’s vote climbed nearly 7 percent while Harris dropped 7 points off Biden’s number. Again, we cannot know what the delta was in the Jewish community, but almost exactly the same type of shift happened in Broward County, where Biden got 64 percent in 2020; the vote shifted 14 percent toward Trump this year. Jews make up about 10 percent of the Broward population.
How about Nassau County, NY? Jews make up close to 20 percent of the population. Trump won Nassau by 5 percent. Biden took it by 10 in 2020.
It will take months to get more precise numbers here by going precinct by precinct and even block by block to quantify this change, but this is now something we are able to do if someone is willing to fork over the cash to make a nationwide study of it.
But make no mistake. The steady work is no longer in the waiting. It is in watching the change.