Haredi Jews Look to Trump as a Pro-Israel, Traditionalist Tough Guy
NEW YORK (JTA) — American Jews are likely to vote for Hillary Clinton in November, but American Jewry’s fastest-growing community is likely to go the other way.
A solid majority of haredi Orthodox Jews will vote for Donald Trump, say experts and Republican operatives in the haredi enclave of Borough Park, Brooklyn. While poll data isn’t available on the fervently Orthodox vote, observers say the haredim are attracted by Trump’s hawkish foreign policy, pugnacious personality and image as a successful businessman.
It doesn’t hurt that he’s a man.
“When you’re fighting a war, you want someone who’s tough, who’s going to be on your side,” said Heshy Friedman, a business consultant in Borough Park who founded the group Jewish Democrats for Trump. “I don’t think he means things literally. You need somebody who borderlines on going crazy.”
The haredi community in New York City and in the state has supported Democrats in the past. Both Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo have courted the haredi vote by ensuring social services for the poor and promising not to intrude in communal affairs. Borough Park’s state assemblyman, Dov Hikind, is a conservative Democrat.
But unlike American Jews in general, who have overwhelmingly voted Democrat in national elections for a century, the haredi community has shifted Republican in the past couple of decades as its numbers have grown, according to Samuel Heilman, who has studied the community for decades as a sociologist at Queens College of the City University of New York. The haredi move rightward parallels a similar move among all American Orthodox Jews, who include the less insular modern Orthodox community.
A recent poll of Florida Jews found that Orthodox voters there back Trump by a 3-to-1 margin.
“The haredi community clearly leans toward the Republican Party,” said Hikind, who is undecided in the presidential election. “Mostly it’s been Republican because of the sense that Republicans are much closer to Israel, much friendlier to Israel.”
Haredim vote Republican, Heilman said, both to distinguish themselves from less observant Jews and because they identify with the party’s social conservatism. He said this election could push haredim to Trump in especially large numbers because Clinton is a woman. Voting a woman into the most powerful position in the world, Heilman said, would be hard for a community whose gender roles are so clearly defined that its newspapers don’t even print photographs of women, including public figures like Clinton.
“They don’t want to be like the rest of the Jews,” Heilman said. “The idea that a woman can have the ultimate position doesn’t sit right with them. When the president of the United States makes news, they can’t put a picture of her in Yated Neeman,” a leading haredi paper.
But Clinton’s gender is not necessarily a deal-breaker for haredi voters. In the New York Democratic primary election in April, Clinton garnered far more votes than challenger Bernie Sanders in the neighborhood’s haredi areas, winning approximately 70 percent of the vote in some precincts.
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