American Jews cannot count on Biden or Trump.

Here’s what we should do instead.

Donald Trump speaking at the 2016 AIPAC Policy Conference (photo: Lorie Shaull)

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

---

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Share this essay using the link: https://www.futureofjewish.com/p/american-jews-cannot-count-on-biden-or-trump

---

The current political environment in the United States might just be beyond repair.

The upcoming presidential election feels like a race between two diehard cults; one camp cannot stand the other one so much that they easily articulate far more reasons why not to vote for the other than the reasons to vote for the one representing their political party.

But for the independents and centrists in the crowd like myself, it is pretty obvious that both parties accuse each other of the very same things for which they are guilty: populism, dirty politics, oligarchy, and crime (to name but a few).

For American Jews, both political parties argue that the other side is worse for the country’s Jews, and both arguments are valid, which means neither side is great for Jews in America.

Biden has locked arms with the far-Left factions in his Democratic party by, among other moves, aggressively courting Arab and Muslim Americans and their progressive “allies” immediately following the October 7th (Arab Muslim) attack on the (Jewish) State of Israel — an attack which many of these Arab and Muslim Americans supported (whether or not they are loud about it).

Less than three weeks after the October 7th Hamas-led massacres in Israel, and many days before Israel’s ground incursion into Gaza as a response, Arab and Muslim Americans and their besties were incredibly unhappy with Biden’s response to the Israel-Hamas war and said he could risk losing their support in the 2024 election.¹

Then, a few weeks into the war, the Biden administration started grouping antisemitism and Islamophobia into the same sentences, even though it was the Jews who suffered our worst attack since the Holocaust.

And in November, amid soaring antisemitism, Biden’s vice president Kamala Harris found the gall to spiritlessly unveil an anti-Islamophobia strategy — just one day after the FBI director told senators that antisemitism is reaching “historic levels” across the U.S.

“But Kamala’s husband, Doug, is Jewish!” many Democrats proclaim.

You know what else is true? Doug’s daughter Ella had a fundraising campaign for Gaza, writing that the campaign was “supporting urgent relief for Gaza’s children” and attaching the appeal to her Instagram page which has 315,000 followers. Then it came out that Hamas gets $8 million to $12 million per month from charities posing as humanitarian organizations, to circumvent international sanctions.

And just so we are clear about how “Jewish” Mr. Emhoff is, this past Chanukah he told a completely inaccurate, politically manufactured story about the Jewish holiday, writing on social media: “In the Hanukkah story, the Jewish people were forced into hiding. No one thought they would survive or that the few drops of oil they had would last. But they survived and the oil kept burning. In these dark times, I think of that story.”

The actual story is that the Maccabees, a small band of Jewish fighters, liberated the Land of Israel from the Syrian Greeks who occupied it and sought to impose their Hellenistic culture, which many Jews found attractive.

What’s more, several senior Biden administration officials met in February with Osama Siblani, a Michigan-based publisher of the Arab American News who has praised Hamas and Hezbollah, and claimed the U.S. government was “bought” by the “Zionist lobby.” My intuition tells me that Siblani has influence with Arab American voters in the battleground state of Michigan, and the Biden administration wants a piece of it.

What many Democrats do not realize is that there are no free lunches. When the Biden administration asks a “favor” from people like Siblani and others (often behind closed doors), there are sociopolitical promises on the backend, either in the moment or at some point down the road.

For example, this year National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan “randomly” promoted Maher Bitar — a former anti-Israeli activist of Palestinian descent who has hosted conferences praising Islamic terrorism — to a new position on the National Security Council.

Bitar determines priorities for intelligence operations and collection, and what information the U.S. intelligence community will share with foreign intelligence services. Likewise, he decides how to relate to information that foreign intelligence agencies (i.e. Israel’s Mossad) share with the Americans (like an impending attack on a synagogue in the United States).

How did Bitar get into national politics? He started as a foreign affairs official at the U.S. State Department in 2011, working for Biden’s former boss, Barack Obama, otherwise known as America’s first “progressive” president.

Maher Bitar and his family with then-U.S. President Barack Obama (photo: The White House)

Like Bitar, many of the folks who worked in the Obama administrations have been working for that of Biden. The reality that many Americans do not realize is that Biden is a figurehead for thousands of political appointees who run the government on a daily basis, many of whom bring their sociopolitical agendas into the workplace.

And I am not talking about the “progressives” who believe in healthcare as a right, environmentalism, economic inequality, and workers’ rights. I am talking about the ones who are brainwashed by the “oppressor versus oppressed” hocus-pocus and subsequently work to impose “social justice” course-corrections via societal, governmental, and corporate means.

This ought to worry many American Jews because, according to this utter nonsense, the Jews are part of the “White oppressor class” and need to be punished accordingly. Hence, the Far-Left is just as antisemitic as any other group on the political spectrum, but they are more creative at hiding it under the guise of “anti-Zionism” and “pro-Palestinian.” Hence why the U.S. State Department has become increasingly anti-Israel under both the Obama and Biden administrations.

And this promises to be just the start. If the Far-Left is gifted another four years in the White House (via a Biden victory), I would expect to see more governmental actions against American Jews for no good reason other than the quasi-calculus that the Jews are part of the “White oppressor class.”

This is where many Trump supporters relish in glee and claim that the Republicans are now “the party of the Jews.” Not exactly. While on the surface it seems that the Republicans are more “pro-Israel” for the time being, let’s not be so naive. Virtually every “pro-Israel” piece of rhetoric and political action is cynical, and self-interest tends to prevail.

More specifically, many Republicans see the Democrats dropping the ball with American Jews and are looking to seize the opportunity to garner their votes ahead of November’s election. Indeed, many American Jews are jumping ship from the Dems to the Republicans, and I don’t blame them.

But such Jews must be aware that the Republicans have a dark antisemitic past, and just because they are friendly to the Jews today (for their votes and political donations) does not mean that they will forever and always be.

In fact, one of Donald Trump’s emissaries to Arab Americans is a Lebanese-born businessman named Massad Boulos. He moved to Texas as a teenager; speaks Arabic, English, and French; and recently joined the Trump family when his son married the former president’s younger daughter.²

Boulos has taken on the challenge of trying to convince the politically influential Arab American community angry at the Biden administration, that Trump is a better option. So, who has Boulos been in touch with? You guessed it: Osama Siblani.

“I told Massad, ‘This isn’t about you being Lebanese and me being Lebanese,’” said Siblani. “You can’t just buy votes. You have to give something substantial to the community.”

Again, there are no free lunches. As the Arab American communities and their allies grow in the United States, so too will their influence and power. And many Arab Americans will likely demand things that are not in the so-called “best interests” of American Jews because they are revengeful antisemites (you know, like the Palestinians). Anti-Zionists, do I mean? Those less gullible know there is not much difference between the two labels, if not in intention then in outcome.

Just look at an episode from this past Sunday in Los Angeles, where hundreds of thugs from a group called the Palestinian Youth Movement descended on Adas Torah synagogue and blocked access to its entrance, leading to violent clashes.

The riots at the synagogue in Los Angeles’ Pico-Robertson neighborhood show that American society and authorities do not take the escalating rhetoric and threats by “anti-Israel” (i.e. antisemitic) factions in the U.S. seriously.

Despite having enough time to prepare and, according to Jewish community members, notwithstanding their pleas to the authorities for a strong police presence, the city’s leadership failed to provide adequate security. On social media, Jewish congregants complained that the Los Angeles Police Department did not receive the necessary order to properly intervene.

Back in May, the Detroit People’s Conference for Palestine included many of the major pro-Palestinian groups involved in the post-October 7th protests, who were welcoming members and affiliates of terrorist groups. They praised armed violence and held panel discussions on its importance.

And these are just two of the countless examples as antisemitism resurfaces across America, largely disguised as “anti-Zionism.” Therefore, American Jews would be wise to realize that the glory days of American Jewry are over, and neither Biden nor Trump are going to save the day.

This doesn’t mean that American Jews need to start packing their bags or worry about another Holocaust, but a deep-dive into Jewish history would be a good place to start, precisely because the historical entirety of Jewish persecution is far greater than the atrocious Holocaust.

For example, in the Soviet Union, Jews could get by so long as they denounced their Judaism and Zionism. During the Spanish Inquisition, Jews were forced to convert to Catholicism or faced expulsion. And in the ancient and even more modern Arab world, Jews had to pay fees in exchange for safeguarding their life and property, as well as for the right to worship unmolested.

So, what should American Jews do? I think the best advice is to become as flexible as possible, such as:

1. Develop a career that can be taken to another country if necessary.

2. Position financial assets accordingly.

3. Apply for Israeli citizenship (which does not require the termination of American citizenship).

4. Check eligibility requirements for citizenship or long-term visas in other countries

5. Create a realistic, easily implementable back-up plan.

Obviously no one knows the future, but we do not need a crystal ball to realize that neither a Biden nor Trump victory in November will change the reality that American Jews can no longer count on the U.S. to be an unequivocal safe-haven.

---

1. “Biden’s Israel stance angers Arab, Muslim Americans; could jeopardize 2024 votes.” Reuters.

2. “Trump allies hope his daughter Tiffany’s father-in-law can help flip votes in Michigan.” The Los Angeles Times.