Features
As the U.S. General Election Looms, How Will American Jews Vote?
By HENRY SREBRNIK May 5, 2024 First of all, before I go any further, we should get something straight: this whole so-called debate about anti-Zionism vs antisemitism is nonsense on stilts.
Sure, especially before the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel, many Jews were dubious about or even ideologically or theologically opposed to the Zionist project of recreating a Jewish state in the land of Israel. These groups ranged from various socialists on the left, such as the supporters of the Jewish Labour Bund, to haredim like the Satmar Hasidim. The latter still are, but no one thinks of them as “antisemites.”
All of this has virtually nothing to do with today’s so-called “anti-Zionists,” almost all of whom are non-Jewish antisemites making use of a word to confuse people about their desire to destroy a modern sovereign Jewish state, now more than 75 years old. (Yes, there are some misguided Jewish students involved, and the media loves them, but this is mainly a matter of ignorance and “Stockholm Syndrome.”)
Do you remember, not so long ago, that when right-wing Republicans and/or supporters of Donald Trump, made even mild criticisms of one or another Jewish politician or Jewish organization, leftwingers immediately said these were “dog whistles,” implying that this was code for antisemitism.
Now, though, when protestors parade around proudly with placards reading “F—k Zionism,” or ask Jewish students whether they are “Zionists,” this has nothing to do with wondering whether they are a member of a Zionist organization or a person who subscribes to the Jewish nationalist ideology centered on the Land of Israel. They are asking whether these people are Jewish, pure and simple.
“Zionist” has simply become a derogatory slur or abusive term for “Jew,” used by Jew-haters as a synonym, and not all that different from earlier, now archaic, versions such as “kike,” “sheeny,” or “Yid.” The animus is also directed at Hillels, synagogues, and other institutions which are Jewish, not technically “Zionist” as such. Is this really that hard to understand? And we Jews should not play their games by arguing the point.
After all, the word “antisemitism” is itself a euphemism, coined by a German Jew-hater in the 19th century, so as to appear a more “scientific” word for hating Jews. It’s not even accurate – as we know, Arabs and other peoples are also Semites, and no one who hates Jews has them in mind. Judeophobia would be a more accurate term, and we should make more use of it.
Anyhow, we also must stop trying to be “even handed” by trying to equate old-style Jew-hatred on the right with today’s versions, which are coming overwhelmingly from the left, under the rubric of “anti-Zionism.” Remember, anti-Israel demonstrations began the very next days after the Oct.7 massacres, and almost three weeks before Israel even launched its counterattack.
All this is by way of a segue to a very important matter coming our way this November: For whom will American Jews turn out in the forthcoming presidential election? We all know the statistics: For almost a century, a large majority of Jews have voted for the Democratic candidate, beginning with Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932. No Republican, including those who were victorious, came even close to capturing a majority of Jewish voters. Over the past several decades, according to data from the Pew Research Center, an average of 70 per cent of Jewish Americans consistently voted for the Democratic Party.
But October 7 has been a genuine zeitgeist shift. Even Jews blinded by an almost-religious loyalty to the party understand that it is being quite quickly captured by its far-left wing. Joe Biden may even be the last “pro-Israel” Democratic president (and he hasn’t exactly shone in that regard of late). The president himself has been unable to really condemn unequivocally and without moral relativism the outrages taking place on campuses.
I have for a long time thought that Israel shouldn’t have put all its defence needs in the U.S. basket. America is changing, demographically and ideologically, in a manner detrimental to Israel. The Democratic Party post-Biden will sooner or later be in the hands of the left-wing Congressional representatives known as the “Squad.” The protesters on the American university campuses should be called “Young Squadniks!”
The Hamas onslaught has left a mark on how Diaspora Jews look at their identity, especially in the United States. A recent survey conducted by the American Jewish Committee found that 78 per cent feel less safe since Hamas attacked Israel. “We are seeing an awakening, a heightened sense of consciousness among Jewish Americans,” asserted Steven Windmueller, professor emeritus of Jewish Communal Studies at the Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles.
They now have seen how elite university campuses like Harvard, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania, many of which are heavily funded by Jewish donors, have been breeding and spreading a climate of antisemitic hate.
As apparently some 100 university campuses across the United States are aflame with anti-Israel and “anti-Zionist” fervor, and Jew-hatred has now become mainstream in Democratic politics, Jews are reconsidering many of their basic assumptions about their position in America generally and the Democratic Party specifically.
Many liberal Jewish Americans also feel betrayed by some of their alleged allies, those whose causes they had supported throughout the years, from the Civil Rights movement to Black Lives Matter activists. The left doesn’t care about antisemitism if they deem it inconvenient to their cause. They just call it “anti-Zionism” and carry on.
A few weeks ago, a sermon by Reform Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, the senior rabbi at the Steven Wise Free Synagogue in New York delivered a stern warning to the Democrats. “Do not take American Jews for granted.”
Hirsch explained, “I have spoken to many American Jews in the past few months who have surprised me with their anxiety about developments in the Democratic Party, and their perception that it is becoming increasingly hostile to Israel, and tolerant of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism in its own ranks.”
Jewish Democratic voters who never considered voting for Republicans have been announcing that they are voting for Trump, or will stay home or vote for independent candidate Robert Kennedy Jr., but will never vote for Biden.
It is true that New York and California have the largest Jewish communities, and they remain firmly in the Democratic column, even if not a single Jew were to vote for them. The Jewish vote for Biden will decrease, and in the very blue states where Jews live, like California and New York, it doesn’t really matter. But four swing states –Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona — may well be decided by their large Jewish communities. Nowhere is that more apparent than in Pennsylvania, the swing state with the largest Jewish population – about 300,000 voting-age Jews — in a state President Joe Biden won by roughly 80,000 votes in 2020. (We are U.S. citizens who vote absentee ballot in Pennsylvania.)
I’m guessing that many Jews will sit it out. Of those voting, it will be hard for a lot of them to vote for Trump, constantly vilified day after day, but it may still reach 40 per cent. Still others who do vote may just leave the presidential line blank, and vote for Republicans for House and Senate seats.
I think there will be an almost perfect correlation between Jews who feel a deep attachment to the Jewish people — be it religiously, culturally, ethnically, or whatever –and voting Republican this year. For those who are Jewish mainly by “biology and genealogy” and for whom being Jewish is relatively unimportant, they are far more concerned with universal matters that now come under the rubric of terms like social justice, liberalism, diversity, inclusion, and so forth. They will come in at about 85 per cent for the Democrats. But as we don’t know the relative percentages of these two groups of Jews, predicting the overall Jewish vote for each of the two parties is difficult.
Addendum (added May 9):
Since writing this article, there have been two important developments. President Biden has said that he will in effect impose a partial arms embargo on Israel should the IDF complete the defeat of Hamas by capturing Rafah. Secondly, a number of American websites report that they have found evidence that many of the campus protests currently underway in the United States have been funded by foundations and non-profits whose money comes from wealthy donors who are supporters of Biden and numerous Democratic campaigns.
Given this, I’d revise my estimates of Jewish votes in November to predict that the overall vote for Republican candidates might exceed, for the first time in a century, 50 per cent. Even liberal Jews, typically reliable Democrats, will break at only about 75-25 per cent for Biden.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
Features
Shall We Live by Our Swords Forever?
By ORLY DREMAN (Oct. 4, 2024) t is hard to believe a year has passed… the worst year of our nation… a year of grief, nightmares, sorrow, crying, pain, bereavement, anger, desperation, frustration, hurt and anxiety because of this horrible endless war. Every person in the country knows people who were killed. When an old person dies naturally one receives it with understanding, but when young people die it feels like Job.
The average life span of Israelis is going down every day. We try to relax, breath deeply, do mindfulness, exercise, meet friends. Israel suffers four times more from anxiety and depression than any other place in the world. I feel I just want to sit down one day, cry and release, and not be strong all the time. All our souls are already in reserves for a year . Since our army’s survival depends on its reserve soldiers it means they are tired, have lost their jobs, and wives are heroes and have to quit their jobs because the husbands are not there to help with the kids. Children see their parents recruited, they see people with weapons in the streets, they hear the word “hostages”, they hear war planes in the sky twenty four seven, they are scared, and no wonder there is regression in their behavior.
We are an injured society in a war routine- every new death swallows up the death from the day before.
When the six young hostages were murdered in the tunnels in September and the bodies were brought back by our soldiers, many people in Israel felt it is like the day their own parents passed away- it was so sad. It was revealed they were starved- the bodies weighed 35 kg. (close to 80 pounds). In the tunnels with no air, no light, low ceilings so they could not stand up, no sanitary conditions – tortured by Satan. They urinated in bottles that remained next to them. We all feel responsible for their deaths. Did we demonstrate enough? Did we pray enough? The members of the cabinet who voted with Bibi not to make a deal to save them – how can they live with themselves? What if the nightmare came true and there are babies who were born in captivity and survived? Then we have more than 101 hostages. Our country was established on social solidarity that we do not leave bodies and injured behind. We are going to pay a heavy price if we do not do the just and correct thing and bring them back home.
I recommend you read the book “One day in October” – forty heroic stories from that day told by remaining relatives and friends about the heroic citizens who saved the country. Who is a hero? A person who cannot stand aside if someone is in distress; hey come to help, like those who jumped on hand grenades to save the rest. The injured who continued to fight. Men who stalled the terrorists in order to enable women and children to escape until they were murdered. Women who ran out of their homes while the shooting was going on to pull the injured into buildings. Five young women and men soldiers who saved one hundred new recruits in their base till they themselves were killed. The paramedic Amit Mann in Kibbutz Be’eri who stayed to save many lives when she could have escaped until she was killed. (in that kibbutz out of 1000 residents 100 were killed.) Aner, who was at the “death shelter” and managed seven times to catch the hand grenades the terrorists threw inside; Aner threw them back out, until the eighth time he was killed while his friend Hirsh Goldberg Polin lost his hand and was kidnapped to Gaza where he was murdered 11 months later. The few survivors of this shelter survived because bodies fell on them and hid them. So many who already got to safety with friends, but drove back again and again to rescue young people from the festival until they themselves got killed. How parents had to close their babies’ mouths so they did not cry and be heard, with the risk of choking them to death. Even for those who held a gun, it was not enough against groups of hundreds of terrorists. The families in the center of the country heard their dear ones on the phone screaming they are burning us and they have RPGs (rocket propelled grenades). There were some who wanted to do like in Masada- kill their families and then kill themselves – just not to be kidnapped.
The first eight hours of the war the terrorists were stopped only by citizens and some police. The army was not there. Every person who in his lifetime had taken a first aid course – even people in their seventies, bandaged and put tourniquets on the wounded while they were without water, with no electricity. In the book, an officer of the “Zaka” organization- whose members are always on scenes of unnatural deaths to collect body parts and who have seen all possible atrocities, said that if he would have known what he is about to see on Oct. 7th he would have asked God to make him blind. Another story in the book is of a Holocaust survivor who said it was worse than things they have seen during the Holocaust.
Whole families on the kibbutzim on the border were murdered- children, parents, grandparents. A friend of my seven-year-old granddaughter told me her grandparents lived on kibbutz Be’eri. I asked her if they were evacuated and she answered yes. I was told later that the grandfather was murdered while protecting his wife, who survived. The seven-year-old is in repression and denial. We have friends who live on the Gaza border who told us how the father, the son and a friend left in two cars to return and rescue people, but in the chaos our army mistook them for terrorists and they shot at the cars. The friend of the son was killed while the son managed to roll out of the car. The father who was in the second car describes the car being riddled with bullet holes and he still does not understand how he survived. Unfortunately, there were quite a number of these incidents.
There are evacuees who moved almost 10 times this year with their families from place to place. They cannot hold a job, the children change schools and change friends. What is nice about “the good Israeli” is one sees requests on Facebook from evacuated families asking for a place to live because the government does not pay for some of the hotels anymore, or those people live in areas that were not officially evacuated by the army/government, but still are in the rockets’ range. Other Israelis open up their homes to host these people.
We are now fighting seven fronts. We just started in Lebanon and we already have eight soldiers killed there in one day, but the damage from Hizballah was growing every day and they were crushing us. If Hizballah would have joined Hamas in sending 6000 terrorists through their tunnels into Israel on Oct. 7th in addition to the 4000 terrorists Hamas sent, it would have been the end of Israel. We’d have hundreds of thousands dead. The tunnels we discovered now in Lebanon are bigger than those in Gaza and cannot be blown up because of the terrain; it will only make them wider. Iran lost again in this second round of 200 rockets on Oct. 1st. Our air defense systems shot down most of the ballistic rockets. We must retaliate with a strong hand. We cannot live by our sword forever.
Our challenges today are not just against our enemies, but also against others who have different moral and ethical values. How can Bibi even think of replacing our excellent defense minister in the middle of the war – only for political reasons? Instead of making a deal in the south- returning the hostages, making peace with Saudi Arabia, forming a coalition against Iran, he is busy eternalizing his coalition. We deserve an empathetic leadership which sees the good of its people before themselves.
We have thousands of new disabled servicemen and women. It is no wonder that at all the Para Olympic games we win the highest number of medals. For organ donors today doctors are especially asking for cartilage because we have 20,000 new wounded ; this is something they did not do in the past.
It has been a very challenging year and we learned how strong we are. For the New Year may we blessed to see the return of all our hostages, start to rehabilitate them, put a smile back on our faces, sleep at night, worry less and feel safe again.
Features
New documentary about expulsion of Jews from Arab lands
On Monday, October 7 at 9pm ET, VisionTV will present the world premiere of Forgotten Expulsion: Jews From Arab Lands, a new documentary from filmmaker Martin Himel specially commissioned by Executive Producer Moses Znaimer.
ABOUT FORGOTTEN EXPULSION: JEWS FROM ARAB LANDS
On October 7, 2023, Palestinian Hamas terrorists massacred 1,200 Israelis and took some 250 hostages in an invasion marked by methodically planned unprecedented levels of barbarism.
Not only was it the most extensive slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, it also sparked a wave of Pro Palestinian/Antisemitic protests worldwide. The protestors claim Israel should be destroyed because it is allegedly a colonial state artificially created by European and North American Zionists.
The documentary Forgotten Expulsion: Jews From Arab Lands shows that these Zionists are Jews, and that Jews have been indigenous to the Land of Israel and the Middle East for the past 3,500 years. Jews are, and have been an intrinsic part of the Middle East long before the Arabs conquered the region 1,400 years ago; 1,000 years before Christianity, 1,500 years before Islam.
In 1947/48, it was not only 700,000 Palestinians who were displaced during the Israel war of Independence, but 850,000 Jews were also expelled from their ancient homes in Arab countries by Islamic regimes + their murderous mobs. The film argues that if Palestinians are to be repatriated and to receive compensation for their loss, then Jewish refugees from Arab Lands should also be repatriated + compensated.
Forgotten Expulsion also highlights the strange case of the Palestinians, the only refugee population in the world that never declines. That original refugee population of 700,000 now numbers 5 million. Some genocide!
Featuring:
Rabbi Elie Abadi, Senior Rabbi for the Jewish Council of the Emirates in Dubai, UAE, prominent Sephardic Judaism scholar
Avraham El Arar, President, Canadian Sephardi Association
Judy Feld Carr, Rescuer of 3,228 Syrian Jews + Human RIghts Activist
Professor Henry Green, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Miami
Eylon Levi, Former Israeli Government Spokesman, Current Leader of the Israeli Citizen Spokespersons’ Office, prominent figure representing Israel internationally since the start of the October 7 War against Hamas
Simcha Jacobovici, Canadian-Israeli Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker
Professor Shimon Ohayon, Head of the Dahan Center for Culture, Society & Education in the Sephardic Heritage, Bar Ilan University
Ambassador Mark Regev, Chair Abba Eban Institute at Reichman University, Former Senior Advisor to the Prime Minister for Foreign Affairs + International Communications
Eli Sadr, Former Jewish Refugee from Syria
Dr Stanley Urman, Executive Vice-President, Justice for Jews from Arab Countries
Levana Zamier, Former Jewish Refugee from Egypt
Features
The Issue with Anti-Zionism
One narrative that has grown more dominant in the past few months is that which seeks to target, discredit, and harm “Zionists.”
I worry that many Canadians do not actually know what “Zionism” means, nor do they understand its origins, or how its sudden weaponization is concerning to Jews everywhere, and should be concerning to you, too. I write this piece with the hope that it may provide some clarity to those looking to delve more deeply into discussions they are seeing emerge online and in our public discourse on this topic.
This week, I made a post on social media that took exception to a group trying to garner support for the boycotting of “Zionist Restaurants” in Montreal. In my response, I said the following: “Don’t be fooled by what this means: it means don’t buy from Jews. Don’t associate with Jews. Don’t be near Jews. This is antisemitism. This is hate. Call it out for what it is.”
“Remember to ask yourself this”, I said: “Why should my Jewish friends, colleagues, neighbours and fellow Canadians be the subject of targeted attacks because of how some feel about Israel?”
Why do I believe the demand to boycott or target “Zionists”, whether that be businesses or individuals, is problematic? I’ll explain.
Those who suggest anti-Zionism is not antisemitism will point out that Judaism and Zionism are different. They are correct in that one is a religion, and I would argue, a people (or culture for some), and the other is simply a belief that Israel, as a Jewish homeland, should exist. By critiquing Zionism, they say, they are taking issue with the Israeli Government, and not Jews.
Here is the problem with that: the vast majority of Jews identify as Zionists. Again, this just means that they believe in a Jewish State or homeland. Some hold this belief because they see Israel as the ancestral homeland of Jews. For others, it is because they feel as though the treatment of Jews, as destructive as it has been over history, merits a safe place for them to live as a collective.
Whatever the reason one calls themselves a Zionist, the important thing to know is that the view pertains to the existence of the State as a homeland itself, not the way the state conducts its affairs.
Zionism has absolutely nothing to do with a predetermined set of views about what the Israeli Government of the day decides to do on any issue, whether that be about Gaza, or policies related to education, or the environment.
Zionism does not presuppose a singular position on the actions of the government of Israel or of the Jewish people. When the Zionist movement began in fact, there was no Government of Israel.
Some Zionists will support elements of Israeli Government policy, and others, such as the over 500,000 protesting in the streets of Israel itself, will have a different view. At any given moment, Zionists, just like anybody else, will hold a range of views on various topics to do with both Israel and beyond.
So, when one says “boycott Zionists”, presumably on the basis of some objection that they have to Israeli’s military campaign in Gaza, they make an assumption that all Zionists are supportive of those actions being undertaken by the Israeli government. As such, they say, the “Zionists” should be punished through boycotts and public shaming.
The main point here is that one can be a Zionist while at the same time disagree with the way Israel responds to conflict. So why treat all “Zionists” the same?
Therein lies the problem. If one wants to call out people who support the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza, so be it – there is plenty to object to in my view – but don’t use the label of Zionism as the pretext that serves as the foundation of those criticisms. When one does that, they are crossing the line into antisemitism.
If one doesn’t believe Israel has a right to exist, they should say that instead. Do not universally categorize a group of people as being responsible for the actions of individuals or governments; that is what we call “prejudice.” Do not be prejudiced towards Jews by assuming they are all the same, that’s called antisemitism.
To call for the universal boycott and targeting of “Zionists” is really just a call to boycott those that believe Israel has a right to exist, and that, as it were, just so happens to include the overwhelming majority of Jews, too.
Ben Carr is the MP for Winnipeg South Centre
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