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Two different Jewish tribes choose different candidates

By Jonathan S. Tobin    October 16, 2020

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS—Jewish News Syndicate. Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobi

Among the least surprising poll numbers to be published recently were the results of the Pew Research Center survey that reports a sizable 70 percent of American Jews say they are voting for former Vice President Joe Biden, while 27 percent are planning to cast their ballots to re-elect President Donald Trump.

Those figures show that despite all that has happened in the last four tumultuous years, none of it has changed the minds of Jewish voters; in 2016, the exit polls produced similar results with 71 percent backing Hillary Clinton and 24 percent choosing Trump.

Equally unsurprising were the results of two other polls. One was an Ami magazine poll that showed that American Jews who identify as Orthodox backed Trump over Biden by a whopping 83 percent to 13 percent. Another, from I24News showed that 63 percent of Israelis preferred Trump while only 19 percent wanted Biden. That last number could be seen as a matter of self-interest on the part of Israelis. But about half of the respondents also made it clear that they thought their American cousins were mistaken with 48 percent saying that U.S. Jews were wrong to embrace the Democratic Party and 35 percent saying they were right to do so.

That Israelis like a president who likes them so much is hardly a shock in much the same way that most citizens of the Jewish state didn’t like President Barack Obama, despite the fact that most American Jews loved him.

But once we go beyond that obvious conclusion, how do we explain these clear differences? The glib response is to merely put it down to most American Jews being liberals, while the Orthodox and Israelis lean to the right. There’s truth in that, but the answer goes much further. The results say relatively little about the issues or the merits of the candidates and everything about the differences between the Orthodox and the non-Orthodox, as well as the contrasting nature of American and Israeli societies and their political cultures.

The only interesting thing to note about the Pew results is that many Biden and Trump supporters have a hard time understanding the people on the other side. To the majority who are generally liberal and loyal Democrats, the election isn’t so much about Biden as it is in opposing Trump, whom they believe isn’t merely wrong but the epitome of evil.

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