Former President Donald Trump posted a message Sunday for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, urging liberal Jews to repent for voting “to destroy America & Israel because you believed false narratives.”
The message, which he posted on his Truth Social platform, included a post by JEXIT, a group of conservative Jews that urges fellow Jews to leave the Democratic Party.
The JEXIT post was headed by a comment: “Wake Up Sheep. What Nazi / Anti Semite ever did this for the Jewish people or Israel?” It then listed several of Trump’s best-known accomplishments for Jews and for Israel — a list that JEXIT also posted, in a different format, on other social media platforms.
#JEXIT FOR #Trump2024 pic.twitter.com/XrCbOfHUht
— JEXIT (@realJEXITusa) September 17, 2023
The Truth Social post repeats a theme that Trump has voiced in the past — namely, that American Jews who voted against him, after all he had done for them and for Israel, were showing “disloyalty” to their own community.
As this author noted in 2019:
Christian conservatives also ask me, politely, why Jews are liberal. Jewish conservatives are less restrained, and often express outright frustration. Norman Podhoretz even wrote a book about it: Why Are Jews Liberals?
For most Jewish conservatives, the question is as much about pain as politics. Each of us bears the scars of family dinners gone wrong, of angry e-mails from relatives who call us disloyal Jews — and even antisemites — because they watch CNN or believe their liberal rabbi or follow the trash that the New York Times prints about President Donald Trump, the first Jewish zayde in the White House and the best friend that the Jewish State has ever had.
…
[W]e conservative Jews have been told for years by left-wing Jews — some of whom only embrace their Jewish identity to trash Israel — that “Jewish values” require voting Democrat.
Trump has more Jewish grandchildren than many of the Jewish liberals criticizing him today. …
I don’t agree that Jews who vote Democratic are ignorant or disloyal. Some have been conned by the same media who will try to convince them Trump said something antisemitic today.
Some have genuine differences of opinion. I believe people can change their minds: I was once on the left, too.
But what Trump has done is given the Jewish left a taste of its own medicine.
Critics are already calling Trump’s post antisemitic; the Jerusalem Post chose to edit Trump’s comment down to “Trump attacks ‘liberal Jews destroying America’,” leaving out the word “Israel,” which is necessary context.
There is a pattern among anti-Trump Jews of accusing Jews who support Trump — or who are insufficiently critical of Trump — of being accessories to antisemitism or bigotry.
The tactic precedes Trump: In 2008, comedian Sarah Silverman urged young Jewish activists to participate in “the Great Schlep” to Florida to convince their elderly Jewish relatives to vote for Obama, suggesting that older Jews were racist and would not vote for Obama unless told to do so.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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