How Republicans Tried To Flip the Jewish Vote — and Created Donald Trump | The Forward |
By Samuel G. Freedman

On the Shabbat morning of June 19, 1943, in a tiny upstairs shtibl in the East Bronx, my Uncle Seymour became a bar mitzvah. My grandmother had given the rabbi very specific instructions for the occasion. As Seymour walked through the congregation, bearing the Torah scrolls, the rabbi followed right behind him, holding aloft a portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It was an almost literal enactment of the almost literal worship that American Jews had for FDR, the New Deal social compact he developed, and the political coalition that would preserve it for decades to come.

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Our temptation, even now that he is about to be formally nominated at the Republican convention, is to think of Trump as an anomaly — an awful anomaly, but an anomaly nonetheless. A different temptation is to comfort ourselves and compliment ourselves by focusing on those admirable rabbis at the AIPAC conference who came together against hate, who boycotted Trump’s speech and held a prayer service. I do salute them, but the painful, indeed tragic reality is that not only is Trump the logical outcome of a 60-year trend in Republican politics to play on racial and ethnic hatred, but as such, he’s even more specifically the predictable result of a decades-long effort by political conservatives, both Jewish and gentile, to flip the Jewish vote or at least a significant portion of it from Democratic to Republican.

When you’re asked to check many of your cherished beliefs at the political door — meaning support for church-state separation, for racial and gender equality, for gay and lesbian rights, for immigration reform, for the legitimate role of labor unions in the workplace, for governmental role in providing the social safety net — and when you are asked to exchange them all for a very skewed, particular definition of supporting Israel and Zionism, then you shouldn’t be surprised that what you get is Trump. Had Trump not captured the nomination, it would have gone to Ted Cruz, who espoused many of the very same positions and looked less extreme only in comparison to reckless, inciting Trump.

About the author: A tenured professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Samuel G. Freedman was named the nation’s outstanding journalism educator in 1997 by the Society of Professional Journalists. In 2012, he received Columbia University’s coveted Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching. Freedman’s class in book-writing has developed more than 65 authors, editors, and agents, and it has been featured in Publishers Weekly and the Christian Science Monitor. He is a board member of the Jewish Book Council and Religion News Service. He has spoken at the Smithsonian Institution, Yale University, and UCLA, among other venues, and has appeared on National Public Radio, CNN, and the News Hour with Jim Lehrer.

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