A Widening Rift and a Faith Based Ballot: What the 80-20 Jewish Vote Means
A widening gulf between progressive and Orthodox, and between American Jews and Israelis, but at the same time the pogrom in Amsterdam reminds us of our common fate.
Shabbat Shalom.
Some end of week, pre-Shabbat thoughts.
When exit poll results from the 2024 vote began filtering out, there were many shocking results. Among them, the nearly 80-20 pro Harris split of the Jewish vote was among the least shocking numbers - it was only a few points bluer than 2020 - but given the rightward lurch of most other groups, it was monumental. To get to that number, progressive Jews had to swim like smoked salmon upstream against a hyper-charged climate-fueled rapids too powerful for any normal salmon to overcome. And when I say progressive, I should be clear that that includes many modern Orthodox Jews. You can’t get to 80 percent without them.
Plus, they had to counter overwhelming Haredi support for Trump, which, in New York, reduced the Harris polling edge to single digits, 54-46, according to Fox. And recent polls of Jews in Israel are nearly as lopsided for Trump (giving him two thirds support) as their American cousins were against him.
There are two big takeaways here.
One is that the growing political split between progressive Jews and Haredim has become all but impossible to repair.
Progressives and Haredim live on different Jewish planets. That’s not new, nor should it be surprising that it’s gotten worse, despite an enormous reservoir of love most Jews of all backgrounds have for Israel, at least in the abstract.
And yet, with all this, as we witness another abomination of hate directed against us in Amsterdam yesterday, with Israeli soccer fans being brutally attacked by organized extremist Muslim gangs in a clear act of antisemitic hate, we realize that those who hate us do not distinguish between our denominations.
The other takeaway is that we not only have a breach among Jews, but that this divide stems from each group’s adhering to fundamentally different Judaisms.
The Judaism practiced by progressive Jews - which synthesizes deeply-held American values of tolerance and democracy with themes of social justice and world repair embedded in our sources - is dramatically different from the Judaism of the ultra Orthodox, which is based on different sections of the same sources. One Torah has yielded many different Judaisms.
Simplistically stated, there is a Book of Ruth Judaism, preaching a love of the stranger and a Book of Joshua Judaism, preaching a bomb ‘em back to the Bronze Age ethos of total conquest.
I don’t agree with Joshua, but it’s part of my sacred writ, so I deal with it. There are lots of things I don’t agree with in Jewish texts. But my Judaism, the Judaism of the 80 percent of American Jews who voted for Harris, is Ruth and Naomi’s Judaism. It’s the reason that group voted Democratic, not because they are knee-jerk Democrats. It was for religious reasons. We voted our religious values every bit as zealously as Evangelical Christians and Haredi Jews voted for Trump. It doesn’t matter that many progressive Jews profess to be agnostic or atheist. Their’s was still a faith-based ballot.
That point is not entirely new, but this week it deserves a closer look.
Here is an illuminating X posting by Dov Waxman, an author and professor of Israel Studies at UCLA. The yellow highlights are mine.
Two key points are made here:
First: Those on the right who bemoan the fact that the concept of “Tikkun Olam” (“world repair”) has replaced what they call “authentic” Judaism for progressives, are only half right. Yes, it has taken its place at the core of progressive Jews’ faith system. But no, it is not inauthentic.
I’m not asking whether the ultra-Orthodox or progressive Jewish belief system is more historically tied to the Judaism of rabbis living 2,000 years ago or from the Psalms a thousand years before that. In fact, Judaism has evolved in many directions, and no single version can lay claim to being the only divinely-ordained interpretation of sacred writ, whether from Sinai or from the hands of a scribe during the Babylonian exile. There are many, many different Judaisms that have sprouted over the centuries, including, one can argue, Christianity.
But what Waxman emphasizes here is that, when progressive Jews vote to defend the stranger and befriend those marginalized by the majority, we are doing it - again - out of religious conviction. It’s not just a stubborn refusal to give up on the party of FDR, whom Jews revered even as he refused to bomb the death camps or let our people in. It’s not just a misty nostalgia for the Great Society and Selma. And it’s not simply because we treasure kindness above all. It’s because all of that - all of that - has the power of religious tenet, something handed down from Sinai, or at the very least from our grandparents and great grandparents. That’s why Israel is central for us too, even as we struggle with some of her actions. It is a core religious value for progressive Jews.
What many ultra-Orthodox Jews fail to understand is how something like women’s and LGBTQ rights, which seem so untraditional to them, are core religious values for the 80 percent of Jews who voted for Kamala, values that are rooted in those same sources.
Similarly, progressive Jews often denigrate the fervor of the Orthodox for religious practices the progressives have largely abandoned. That is also unfair and wrong.
We need to accept not only the legitimacy of all Jews, but also of all Judaisms. Some boundaries need to be drawn (eg Christianity is no longer a form of Judaism), but people need to understand that when an issue touches at a core religious value, it is not just a transactional policy priority that can be abandoned simply because the country is in the midst of a dissatisfied mood-swing. I can’t give up on defending people with disabilities simply because the Republican standard bearer prefers to make fun of them.
That’s why nearly 80 percent of Jews voted for Kamala and opposed Trump, and they would have voted that way for Biden too.
Second observation based on Waxman’s post: While much of the rest of the country chose a numbing nostalgia over a cold, hard examination of the prior Trump administration, Jews didn’t. It’s partly because we’re skeptics to begin with (the curse of being “college educated”). But mainly it’s because, for Jews, the Trump era was demonstrably horrific. Others may forget Charlottesville and Pittsburgh, but for us the shock will never fully recede. It’s when America went from being the “Golden Land” to Kishinev, in the blink of an eye.
It’s like how Blacks must feel when Trumpism evokes the “greatness” of being American in the 1950s - or the 1850s. Great? For whom? Certainly not for them.
2017-20 was not a great time for Jews, and even assimilated, non-traditional Jews understand that. And not just Jews. Whatever you feel about Black Lives Matter, what happened to George Floyd shocked anyone with just a millimeter of conscience. And of course, there was Covid. I can’t figure out for the life of me exactly what people - including many from minority groups - were nostalgic for when they stepped into the voting booth. But 80 percent of Jews weren’t buying the Glory Days of Trump I.
So we are left in this awkward position where Trump will almost certainly extract revenge on progressive American Jews, while at the same time bestowing rewards on his right wing Jewish cronies. He did that last time too. I can forget about getting an invitation to the White House Hanukkah party for the next four years. Alas. I’ll deal with my dissapointment.
But it’s also possible that he learned some lessons from Charlottesville. I know I’m giving him entirely too much credit, but being overtly supportive of White Supremacists became a political liability for him. The “good people on both sides” comment followed him everywhere. We’ll see how determined he is to spread his hate across the land and whether the few sane advisors he has left will steer him away from putting American Jewry on his “Enemies List.”
I leave you with this last thought as the sun begins to set. Holding back the full force of hate will be a supreme challenge. But on this eve of Kristallnacht, with the Amsterdam pogrom fresh in our minds, maybe we can begin by trying to bridge the gaps that are closest to home. Some may prefer Ruth and others Joshua, but the same sources belong to us all, and so do the same enemies.
This Shabbat, let’s think about how we can spend less time sniping at the 80 or the 20, and more about how to help our suffering cousins, and the many other victims of hate.
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