Why I’m voting for Harris
“Do what is just and right in the sight of the Lord.”
That statement in Deuteronomy 6:18 is repeated, in one form or another, throughout the Torah. It is Judaism’s prime directive. It is why God chose our father Abraham to found our people. (See Genesis 18:19.)
According to the most recent surveys, at least 30 percent of Jewish voters will cast their ballots for Donald Trump on Tuesday — and they will violate the Torah’s prime directive by doing so.
They do not seem concerned that Trump hung a target on all Jewish backs when he warned those attending the Israeli-American Council National Summit in Washington, D.C., in September that if he loses this election, “the Jewish people would really have a lot to do with that.” He made almost the exact same comment earlier that day at a “Fighting Antisemitism in America” conference on Capitol Hill. He also trumpeted his oft-repeated refrain that Jews who vote for Harris “need their head examined.”
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Actually, Jews who vote for Trump “need their head examined,” because he is an out-and-out antisemite. Jewish voters for Trump cite his support for Israel as their main reason — support he gave to keep his Christian nationalist base happy, not because he has any regard for us.
These voters also dismiss Vice President Kamala Harris’s strong support for Israel’s right to defend itself because she has called for an end to the war in Gaza. They ignore the fact that Trump has done so, as well. In mid-August, he claimed to have told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a telephone call to “get [it] over with fast….; the killing has to stop.” (Netanyahu insists that conversation never took place.)
There are many other facts about Trump that his Jewish voters ignore at the peril of all of us.
Among the most recent is a series of supposedly “pro-Harris” ads that have been targeting voters since September in specific areas of Michigan, supposedly sponsored by a group calling itself the “Future Coalition PAC.” The ads tout the fact that Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, “would be the first Jewish presidential spouse ever.” Harris and “her husband and top adviser, Doug Emhoff” are “making history, standing up for what’s right, supporting Israel.”
These outrageous and patently antisemitic ads are actually pro-Trump ads. They have appeared mainly in areas with the highest concentrations of Arab American voters, who are considered critical to putting Michigan in the Trump column. Behind these ads stands Elon Musk, who called for a “massive crushing victory” for Trump at Sunday’s Madison Square Garden rally. He spoke at the rally while sporting a black cap with “Make America Great Again” written in heavily Germanic-looking dark gray letters (read into that what you will), and proudly displayed it to the crowd.
Jewish voters in Michigan are also targets for Musk’s campaign. Those ads attack “two-faced Kamala Harris” because she “stands with Palestine, not our ally Israel.”
Another fact Jewish Trump voters ignore is that antisemitic incidents have been setting records each year, almost from the moment Trump announced his first candidacy in 2015. That was when the haters came crawling out of their holes, because, as they joyously proclaim, Trump speaks their language and promotes their agenda. Jew-hatred in the United States rose by 34 percent in 2016, soared by another 57 percent in 2017, and kept soaring throughout 2018, 2019, and 2020. In 2022, according to the Anti-Defamation League, the United States recorded its highest number of antisemitic incidents ever. Then came 2023, when antisemitic incidents rose by a frightening 140 percent over 2022. In April, the ADL said it had “tracked more incidents in 2023 than in the previous three years combined.”
Trump all too often uses catchphrases taken from the white nationalist playbook, thereby emboldening the hate groups, especially such violence-prone ones as the Ku Klux Klan. Chris Barker, who heads one of our nation’s most active Ku Klux Klan chapters, crowed to a British newspaper that he has “never seen the Klan grow at the pace it’s growing now,” for which he says Trump is directly responsible.
In December 2016, the KKK publicly celebrated Trump’s electoral victory. As the Associated Press article reported at the time, that was because “Trump’s election as president proves whites are taking back America from blacks, immigrants, Jews, and other groups they describe as criminals and freeloaders.”
David Duke — the white supremacist, antisemitic conspiracy theorist, Holocaust denier, and onetime KKK Grand Wizard, is perhaps the most vocal in describing Trump as the haters’ enabler-in-chief. Trump, he has said, embraces “most of the issues … I’ve championed for years. My slogan remains ‘America First.’”
“America First” is also a slogan (along with “Make America Great Again”) that Trump says defines his politics, but it also underscores how Trump speaks their language. “America First” has been a virulently antisemitic catchphrase since before World War II. It is a direct lift from Charles Lindbergh’s virulently antisemitic pre-war “America First Committee.”
At Charlottesville in August 2017, Duke said this: “We voted for Donald Trump because he said he’s going to take our country back,” by which he means taking it back from the Jews. One of the chants that horrible day was, “We won’t be replaced by Jews.” Charlottesville, Duke said, was the fulfillment of Trump’s vision for America.
After Trump’s widely criticized performance at the Helsinki summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in July 2018, Duke said this: “[In] my lifetime, I have never seen such a courageous attack on the whole of the…Zionist Occupied Government of the United States, and the Zionist Occupied Media! Today Trump is a Hero…! Bravo Trump! Bravo Russia! Bravo to all the true American Patriots who put America first…before the Zionist Deep Evil State ruling American Media and Politics.”
Trump is antisemitic, and he always has been. The record speaks for itself.
Other facts also go ignored.
We Jews, as any antisemitic white nationalist will gladly testify, are all about money. That would explain Trump’s telling John O’Donnell, who was president of the now long-gone Trump Plaza and Casino in Atlantic City, that the “only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”
His antisemitism also explains why Trump defended owning a copy of “My New Order,” Adolf Hitler’s book of speeches, by saying it was given to him by a Jewish friend in the film industry. That friend, the late Martin Davis, was not Jewish. Trump assumed he was because Davis headed Paramount Pictures and its parent Gulf and Western. As the white supremacist world will tell you, we Jews control the film industry and the media.
In 2017, Trump literally made headlines worldwide by taking 40 days to address a sudden wave of antisemitism the ADL called the worst since the 1930s. In 2019, he ignored making any comment, much less issuing a condemnation, when a pickup truck deliberately rammed into a crowd of Jews demonstrating outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement center in Rhode Island.
On International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2017, Trump deliberately deleted all references to our martyred Six Million from the statement the State Department’s Holocaust office drafted for him.
While visiting Poland in July 2017, Trump ended a presidential tradition harking back to 1989 by declining to visit the monument honoring the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto.
Trump often suggests that we Jews are not true Americans. He tells Jewish audiences that Israel is “your country,” that Benjamin Netanyahu is “your prime minister,” and that Democratic policies could eventually “leave Israel out there all by yourselves.”
There also is Trump’s notorious November 2022 dinner with two virulent antisemites: the rapper Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, who is arguably this country’s leading Holocaust-denier. Trump steadfastly refuses to apologize for dining with them or to criticize either West or Fuentes for their antisemitic rants.
Only a month before that dinner, Mort Klein, the national president of the Zionist Organization of America, called Trump “the greatest friend Israel has ever had in the White House.” Only nine days before that infamous dinner, Klein stood proudly at a ZOA dinner while Trump was awarded the organization’s rarest of honors, the Theodor Herzl Medallion. Trump’s repeated refusal to apologize, however, compelled Klein to lash out against Trump. In a statement, he said, “ZOA deplores the fact that President Trump had a friendly dinner with such vile anti-Semites,” which “helps legitimize and mainstream anti-Semitism.”
Trump often invoked antisemitic tropes in his 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton, including his insistence that Clinton frequently “meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty.” A campaign ad released just four days before Election Day 2016 identified the people behind that “global power structure” seeking to undermine this country: George Soros (the man the haters almost always cite when they invoke the conspiracy theories that Jews want to control the world), the then Federal Reserve chair and now Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein — all Jews.
This is not about politics. The republican democracy we so cherish is at risk on November 5. Voting for Trump is not doing “what is just and right in the sight of the Lord.” In a very real sense, voting for him is a sin.
Shammai Engelmayer is a rabbi-emeritus of Congregation Beth Israel of the Palisades and an adult education teacher in Bergen County. He is the author of eight books and the winner of 10 awards for his commentaries. His website is www.shammai.org.
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