It’s been a hard year for American Jews. For generations, many of us have been stalwart members of the Left, proud of our progressive bona fides and the solidarity we have extended those with less power and privilege, both on American soil and globally. American Jews have always had an affinity for the Left. As new arrivals here, we were overwhelmingly working class and brought a keen sense of the injustices suffered in the old country into the labor movement. When the Left shifted its focus from labor activism to civil rights, the persecution we had escaped and the memories of the Holocaust—just 20 years old when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. marched across the Edmund Pettis Bridge—made American Jews especially outraged at the injustices against Black Americans, whose struggle for equality called upon a wellspring of Biblical texts for support and mirrored our own oppression in Europe. Even as the Left moved into a more identity-based iteration at the end of the twentieth century, progressive American Jews felt it was our role as people with privilege to stand with the oppressed—be they women or LGBTQ communities or undocumented immigrants.
Yet after Hamas’s October 7 brutal massacre of 1,200 innocent Israelis, many were shocked to find that the Left no longer had an affinity for Jews. American Jews felt abandoned by the Left, which seemed eager to erase, excuse, whitewash, or even celebrate Hamas’s crimes against our brothers and sisters.
For many Jews, it was a shocking wake up call, leaving them feeling politically homeless. I can sympathize: It’s a process I went through five or six years ago myself. That’s when it became clear to me that the Left hadn’t just left us—it had left the very values that drew Jews to the Left in the first place.
Yet since then, I have come to believe that there is an inheritor of those values—especially the pro-labor approach to the economy. The case I’d like to make to you today is that the inheritor of the tradition of American Jews is Donald Trump.
Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump arrives to speak during a campaign rally at Suburban Collection Showplace on October 26, 2024 in Novi, Michigan. Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump arrives to speak during a campaign rally at Suburban Collection Showplace on October 26, 2024 in Novi, Michigan. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
If you’re a progressive Jew and you get your news from the New York Times or MSNBC, you have probably been told that Donald Trump is a white supremacist, that he’s an aspiring dictator, a Hitler wannabe, an authoritarian with no respect for the rule of law and endless contempt for our democracy. You may believe that he will implement a federal abortion ban, that he said Jews are to blame if he loses, that there will be a bloodbath, that he called neo-Nazis
Donald Trump, Inheritor of the Left and the American Jewish Legacy
