Orthodox Jews Standing by President Trump, Only More So These Days
jewishweek.timesofisrael.com
Trump’s Orthodox voters still on board.
Ronald Rubin, an Orthodox professor emeritus of political science at CUNY, reached back three-quarters of a century to Leo Durocher, one of baseball’s great bare-knuckled scrappers, to find a parallel to President Donald Trump. “Nice guys finish last,” snarled Durocher, and no one ever called Trump nice.
“People don’t give Trump enough credit,” Rubin told us. “He knows that the world is a dangerous, provocative place. He believes in strength.”
After a seemingly endless barrage of confrontations and accusations from Trump detractors — regarding issues from Charlottesville to the Southern border to Helsinki — liberal Jews are at the “resistance” barricades, while Orthodox Jews are standing by their man.
“We Orthodox Jews march to a different tune,” Rubin continues. Politically and socially conservative, and cautious, “We understand the tragedy of history. We’ve learned the dangers of naivete. We’ve learnt the need for Jewish power, particularly with Israel.”
The Orthodox are not only standing by Trump, but it appears they are doing so in greater numbers than on Election Day.
In June, an AJC survey found that Trump had a favorability rating of 26 percent among Jews, up from the 19 percent who said they voted for candidate Trump; it stands to reason that the bump-up probably comes from the Orthodox community. “Without question, Orthodox support for Trump has picked up,” said Steven Bayme, AJC’s director of Contemporary Jewish Life and AJC’s institute on Jewish-Israeli relations and an adjunct professor at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, a Modern Orthodox seminary in Riverdale.
“The Trump administration has been there for the [Orthodox] community’s needs,” said Nathan Diament, executive director of the Orthodox Union’s Advocacy Center. “It starts with his policies toward Israel,” notably the absence of pressure on the Jewish state to make concessions to the Palestinians or to curtail settlement building, “as well as appointing Nikki Haley [as ambassador] to the United Nations, where she has been a tenacious defender of Israel.” In contrast to Trump and Haley, several Orthodox conservatives pointed to the Obama administration’s refusing to veto a 2016 Security Council resolution that denigrated Israel’s access to holy sites and Jerusalem’s Old City.
Trump has gotten high marks for doing what no other president has done: moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
Trump also gets credit, Diament said, for nullifying the Iran nuclear deal, for his support of religious liberty, his conservative judicial appointments and, “at least rhetorically, supporting school choice, which would be helpful to families in day schools.”
Trump isn’t perfect, of course, say some of his Orthodox supporters. Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, a former political aide to Republicans and Democrats (Mayor Koch, Gov. Pataki and Sen. D’Amato), referenced the Trump administration’s family separation policy for arrested illegal immigrants, including asylum seekers, at the Southern border. “Yes, the policy was not carried out with finesse, no question about it,” Wiesenfeld said. The issue lit a fire under liberal groups that cited Jewish values in their opposition; Orthodox groups such as the OU and Agudath Israel condemned the policy as well, though they did so after the OU was criticized, both inside and outside of the Orthodox community, for meeting with Attorney General Jeff Sessions as children were being separated from their parents at the border.
But, added Wiesenfeld, “what’s really detestable is when this gets compared to the Holocaust. The kids are getting proper food and medical care. … The criticism is over the top, just as the Helsinki [summit] criticism was over the top.”
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