The series of unfortunate events that began October 7, 2023 in the Holy Land were obviously of world historical import, but we don’t know yet what they fully import. It’s quite likely that the end of the Great Awokening was due to American Jews turning against Wokeism in the wake of 10/7/2023 and the subsequent anti-Zionist / anti-Semitic protests by the Diverse, but the evidence is not yet conclusive.
Understanding the Jewish vote is important not because Jews are a large minority but because they are a rich, influential, energetic, and generous one. Even more important than how they vote is how Jewish donors are trending politically because they comprise a huge fraction of the biggest donors to both the Democrats and Republicans. Later on this week, I will look at the ethnicity of the top 50 donors in 2020 vs. 2024.
It’s unclear from the small sample of self-identifying Jews in the exit polls whether or not Jews moved right or left in 2024. From The Tablet:
The answer depends in part on what you mean by ‘Jewish’
by Armin Rosen
November 14, 2024… Per the National Election Pool’s exit poll, which was publicized by major news organizations, Kamala Harris captured 79% of the Jewish vote, a historically high margin. Fox News pollsters, on the other hand, tagged Jewish support for Harris at 66%, a number low enough for the Republican Jewish Committee to brag about it. Earlier this week, a survey sponsored by the Teach Coalition, the Orthodox Union-affiliated group that advocates on behalf of religious schools, found that 40% of Jews in congressional swing districts in Pennsylvania and the New York suburbs voted Republican, meaning that Jews, like a number of other historically Democratic-voting constituencies, tacked right in unprecedented numbers in the places where their votes mattered the most.
Based on Tablet’s own comparison of precinct-level numbers from the 2020 and 2024 election, Donald Trump did improve his performance in a range of Jewish neighborhoods across America. From the yeshivas of Lakewood, New Jersey, to the bagel shops of New York’s Upper West Side; from Persian Los Angeles to Venezuelan Miami; from the Detroit suburbs to the Chabadnik shchuna in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, Jewish areas voted in higher percentages for the Republican candidate than they did in 2020, which in turn was better for Republicans than 2016. The oft-cited exit poll pushed by CNN, NBC and others asserting that the Jewish vote went 79% to Harris did not include New York, New Jersey and California, which have some of the largest Jewish populations in the country. Claims that the numbers are holding steady for Democrats become more difficult to sustain after a close look at vote totals in the places where Jews actually live.
On the other hand, it’s hard to find non-ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods in the U.S. where Jews demographically dominate.
For example, in Southern California, Jews peak out around a quarter or, at most, a half of the Westside of L.A. and the San Fernando Valley from Venice Beach to Agoura Hills to West Hollywood. Wealthy Jews tend to prefer for aesthetic reasons neighborhoods that are still fairly gentile.
Plus, California, as I might have mentioned once or twice over the years, is slow to count its votes.
Steve, unfinished sentence?
"Even more important than how they vote is how Jewish donors are trending politically because they comprise"
Yes. The classification in the US can be already pretty confusing. The question who is a jew anyway only adds to this. Many jews would deny that they are white, while those who would think themselves as white would probably more inclined for the republicans.
And also as many jews found after the Hamas attack, outwardly they are mostly white, so if that switch was flipped inside them, that might have made them more likely to vote right. And we know that the switch was indeed flipped in at least some people.