Why I can’t vote for Donald Trump

Joel Geiderman is the California Chairman of the Republican Jewish Coalition and the former Vice Chairman of the United States Holocaust Museum, appointed by George W. Bush.

He writes in the Jewish Journal:

As a Jew and the son of a Holocaust survivor, what scares me about Trump is his treatment of people as groups, using negative stereotypes to stir up the emotions of uneducated and disaffected people, and appealing to the worst instincts of people. He disparages minorities before he says he “loves” some of them. For now, it’s Mexicans, Muslims, the Chinese. Jews, after all, are the ultimate minority. During the Diaspora, Jews spread out and shifted from country to country, based on acceptance by the majority in the countries to which they migrated. During World War II, we all know what happened when Jews found the doors shut. While I am not arguing for uncontrolled migration, the demonization of people seeking shelter or a better life is not compatible with our history.
One of Trump’s ex-wives alleges he kept a copy of Hitler’s speeches at his bedside. I have no idea if this is true, but the fact that she thought people would find it credible is disturbing. I haven’t heard that come up in even the bitterest divorces. Trump’s failure to immediately disavow the KKK makes you wonder.
Furthermore, Jews don’t demean women. Woman are revered. Modern synagogues treat the matriarchs as we do the patriarchs, honoring them in daily prayers. Shavuot celebrates Ruth, and Purim, Esther. Jewish adults don’t make fun of a woman’s menses.
On Israel, Trump seems uninformed and naive. Being an even-handed broker between a Democratic ally and Hamas is ridiculous. The fact that he approaches diplomacy as he would a business deal (which for him often ended in bankruptcy) is foolishness. Trump’s defense of his bona fides on Israel is that he once marched in an Israel Day parade. This is reminiscent of the fact that he gets foreign policy advice from watching “the shows.” There is no substance here.

He doesn’t know if it is true that Trump kept a collection of Hitler’s speeches at his bedside but hey, it’s worth including in his essay.

Trump’s a bad man because he uses negative group stereotypes, but the Jewish Torah is wonderful even though it is filled with negative group stereotypes.

Jews don’t demean women except for when they do. I wonder if he has ever studied Torah? I’m not condemning Torah here. I’m saying that if you condemn Trump for saying things, you have to condemn the Torah at the same time for even more outrageous comments.

There is no objective definition of hate speech that would not simultaneously condemn much of the Jewish tradition.

Being the son of a Holocaust survivor does not convey an iota more wisdom than being the son of a Honduran ditch digger.

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‘WHEN IT COMES TO THE HATERS, TIME TO STOP TALKING’

Who’s a hater? It depends on the who-whom. Who is hating on whom? When the Torah calls male homosexuality an abomination, that will sound like hatred to homosexuals and their supporters while for others it is just commonsense. When Americans hate on Muslims, they’re expressing their legitimate and rational group interest that Muslims are their enemy. When non-Jews hate on Jews, they’re expressing their gentile group interest. For an Amalekite or a Palestinian or a Muslim, hating Jews is rational. What kind of self-respecting Arab or Muslim does not hold some hatred of Jews in his heart? That would be weird.

If you are a leftist, then you believe that race and religion are not important categories for dividing people, so therefore you are going to oppose ethno-states such as Israel. If you don’t, you are compromising on your leftism in the service of other values.

BDS is not some mystically evil movement. It is a rational and effective way for promoting group interests and leftist values.

Liel Lebovitz writes: The cult of conversation holds debate sacred, but there’s no reason to have discussions with those who wish Jews ill.

…I am a co-host of Unorthodox, a newish and irreverent podcast from this here magazine, and our guest the other week was Rebecca Vilkomerson, who heads an organization called Jewish Voice for Peace. Both JVP and Vilkomerson are ardent supporters of the BDS movement, which I, like many—arguably, most—Jews, see as inherently anti-Semitic. Singling out the Jewish state alone for opprobrium can hardly be explained by anything save for sheer, blind prejudice; the same is true for the call, central to the BDS movement’s and Vilkomerson’s beliefs alike, for the dissolution of the Jewish state and its replacement with a binational republic. But here was Ms. Vilkomerson, expecting to be treated with civility, and here was I, completely at a loss. It wasn’t that I disagreed with my guest. It wasn’t even that I found her views odious. The differences between us were more profound than mere differences in taste. One of us believed that Jews, like all the world’s nations, had the right to self-determination and a sovereign state; the other did not. How, I thought as I stared at my microphone, do you debate with someone who denies you this most basic right? You don’t. I rarely shy away from confrontation, but with Ms. Vilkomerson earnestly advocating that Jews would only be safe and good once they abandon their independence and entrust their well-being to the very same people who, historically, had slain their ancestors at every turn, I went silent. There was no point in talking anymore.

The same drama, more or less, is at the core of the recent controversy surrounding the Open Hillel movement. Earlier this month, a long list of scholars—including some of my dearest friends and many others I greatly admire and respect—signed up to join Open Hillel’s academic advisory board, supporting the nascent organization’s commitment to allowing even Israel’s fiercest critics to speak in front of Jewish groups on campus, something that Hillel itself opposes. Too often, this debate between Hillels, open and otherwise, is portrayed as a referendum on free speech and tolerance, with the parent organization accused of blocking out difficult and unpalatable opinions rather than having the courage to listen, reason, and discuss. The truth, however, is grimmer and more difficult to resolve. Hillel’s refusal to allow BDS activists to address its members isn’t an act of censorship—one, after all, hardly lacks safe spaces for Israeli-hating on college campuses these days—but the rational, even obvious, course of action. Just as you wouldn’t expect a gay student group to invite a practitioner of gay conversion therapy to give a talk, say, or a black student group to welcome a white supremacist arguing for the reversal of Brown v. Board of Education, so you shouldn’t be surprised when a Jewish student group refuses to let in those who ignore all of the world’s evils and all of Israel’s virtues to insist that Palestinian nationalism be lauded while its Jewish counterpart be banned.

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The Campaign to Toxify Donald Trump Among Jews

Joel Pollak writes:

Say what you will about Donald Trump, but he is not an antisemite. Yet there is a malicious campaign afoot to paint him as one.

Tablet Magazine, for example, has launched a “Trump Watch” series, complete with German Gothic script that is apparently meant to remind readers of antisemitic tabloids in Nazi Germany. Its mission: to show the “daily low-lights of Donald Trump’s attempt to use the dark forces of bigotry to become President.”

The inaugural post cites Louis Farrakhan’s praise for Trump for refusing money from Jews (as he has from virtually everyone, thus far).

The post goes further, and quotes Lloyd Grove’s absurd article at the Daily Beast, in which Breitbart is accused of inciting Twitter trolls to scare Federalist writer Bethany Shondark Mandel, who has never once been attacked by this website. Breitbart News has called on the Daily Beast to retract the article. (No one from Tablet contacted Breitbart News before regurgitating the article’s false innuendo, and wrongly associating Breitbart with bigotry.)

The next edition of Trump Watch links Trump with the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement — though it admits he has nothing to do with it. Actual quote: “Factually, of course, they’ve little in common. But facts don’t matter here because facts don’t always make sense.”

The following Trump Watch hits him for comments about the KKK, whom he had already disavowed. And the next takes up a letter signed by foreign policy experts opposed to Trump’s candidacy, and suggests “maybe something darker is taking place … Republicans with fundamentally authoritarian instincts are beginning to shoot glances at one another and to see their opportunity.”

None of the above is convincing, or even attempts to be. It is aimed at toxifying Trump among potential supporters in the Jewish community and beyond.

Never mind his daughter Ivanka’s Orthodox Jewish conversion, or Trump’s endorsement for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The man, and his supporters, must be demonized.

Take, for instance, Bill Kristol’s Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI), which did outstanding work in trying to stop the Iran deal. You might think Kristol and ECI would acknowledge Trump’s efforts to fight the deal, including his address to a large rally on Capitol Hill last fall.

Instead, ECI has waded into primary politics with a new ad this week claiming that Trump is dangerous for Israel because of his “disturbing affection for anti-American dictators.”

And earlier this week, Nefesh b’Nefesh, a non-profit organization that helps Jews who want to make aliyah (move to Israel), tweeted to Jewish Republicans who oppose Trump that “we’re here if you need us.” The tweet (for which the organization later apologized) was responding to an op-ed in the left-leaning Forward that claimed Jewish Republicans are worried about Trump because of his “nativist working class political movement,” adding that “the Jewish experience with overweening, oversensitive wannabe dictator-chieftains is not a good one.”

The article purported to speak for Jewish Republicans. But there are certainly some who support Trump as well.

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Haaretz: ‘Trump went for the Muslims, and hate was unleashed on the Jews’

Notice that Sasha Abramsky’s underlying fear here is that gentiles will discover that they have group interests and they will desire the same sort of cohesion that Jews seek. In other words, he fears that gentiles will become more like Jews.

Most Jews want Israel to be a Jewish state. Why should not gentile Americans want American to be a white Christian nation?

Haaretz: “These are men and women who have a two dimensional vision of America: that of a white and a Christian nation. They have no truck with pluralism; no time for diversity. It is a narrow, bigoted worldview, and they feel, finally, that in Trump their moment is at hand.”

That sounds like a mirror image of the Torah view of a Jewish state. In the Torah perspective, there is no room for non-Jewish citizenship in Israel. No non-Jew will have a leadership role over Jews, not even over water carriers according to Maimonides. This perspective is not unique to Jews. It is a normal, natural and healthy ethnocentrism prominent in all proud peoples, including the Japanese, Chinese, Russians, etc.

Sasha Abramsky writes:

When I traveled to Nevada last week to interview Trump supporters at the caucus there, time and again those supporters told me they thought American Muslims should be deported or should be killed. They were talking about ALL Muslims. Period. Some of those same people made a point of asking me, when they heard my name, if I was Jewish. The undertone of menace was unmistakable.

These are men and women who have a two dimensional vision of America: that of a white and a Christian nation. They have no truck with pluralism; no time for diversity. It is a narrow, bigoted worldview, and they feel, finally, that in Trump their moment is at hand.

Trump’s post-Super Tuesday speech,in which he shamelessly claimed to be a unifying,inclusive, candidate, would have been laughable had the damage he has already caused not been so deep.

Trump has called for the barring of Muslims from entering the country; for the registration of Muslims already living in the country; for the building of a “beautiful” wall between the U.S. and Mexico; for the wholesale and immediate deportation of more than 11 million undocumented residents.

He has, repeatedly, said that he wants to smash the faces of protestors. He has advocated the summary execution of terrorism suspects – and their families. And he has ridiculed the disabled, the poor, and pretty much every other non-white and non-wealthy group of people.

He has failed to adequately denounce his support from the KKK, re-tweeted quotes attributed to Mussolini and a cluster of other white supremacist groups, and has been cheered on by French fascist Jean-Marie LePen – who once declared the Holocaust to be a footnote of history. Like the LePen family, he is piggy-backing on feelings of white alienation and anger at Muslim immigrants to create a mass movement.

He now has a chance to best even their best electoral results so far if he manages to take over the party that controls the U.S. Congress and 28 of the fifty governorships.

Trump has gone from one blustery insult to the next… and each step of the way he has, like the Fascist politicians of earlier decades, built up his support by promising national salvation and by advocating an iron fist against ethnic and political enemies.

It is no coincidence that the country is seeing a spasm of race-related hate-crimes, including the execution-style murder of three Muslim students in Indiana last week.

It is no coincidence that the KKK rallied in southern California last week.

Trump is unleashing beasts, and, even if he occasionally tones down the rhetoric and comes off as moderate – as he went out of his way to do in his victory speech Tuesday night – he has created by far the most noxious and dangerous political coalition in modern American history.

I think often, these days, of the famous lines by Martin Niemoller, and how they might be updated to reflect the multi-ethnic pastiche of modern America:

“First they came for the Muslims/And I did not speak out/Because I was not a Muslim.

Then they came for the Mexicans/And I did not speak out/Because I was not a Mexican.

Then they came for the feminists and the gays/And I did not speak out/Because I was not feminist or gay

Then they came for the blacks/And I did not speak out/Because I was not black.

Then they came for me/And there was no one left/To speak out for me.”

I think of the incredulity that cultured, decent Weimar Germans had when Hitler came on the political scene. I think of how they treated him as a coarse joke, as something to laugh at rather than to be terrified by. I think of those German workers, in the beer halls, talking about how Hitler would make Germany great again. I think of those same workers, listening, glassy-eyed, as Hitler explained how the Jews had stabbed their glorious fatherland in the back. I think of how they trooped to the polls in 1932, longing for national salvation, enough of them turning out for the Nazis that Hitler’s rise to power became all-but-impossible to stop.

I think of how quickly that great and cultured country slid into barbarism, and of how completely a demagogue managed to capture and to mold all of the institutions of state.

Trump has hypnotized many millions of Americans, and he has read the mood of an angry, disempowered, scared, and frustrated electorate extraordinarily well. He plays one group against another with seeming ease. He’s good enough at this that he could even try to appeal to Jewish voters in Florida by ginning up his anti-Muslim language in time for the Florida primary later this month. It would be catastrophic if it worked.

There is no more urgent task facing the American political system – and the international system as a whole, which is so intimately interconnected with the United States – than to find a way to break this demagogue before he breaks the political system of the world’s pre-eminent democracy.

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ABC’s Sunny Hostin: Trump’s Stance on Border Security, Immigration Akin to Hitler’s Extermination of Jews

From Breitbart: Monday on ABC’s “The View,” network senior legal correspondent Sunny Hostin argued there no difference between Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump’s tough tack on immigration and border security and Adolf Hitler’s extermination of the Jews in Nazi Germany.

Partial transcript as follows:

PAULA FARIS: I spoke with the campaign last week I covered him on Super Tuesday this of the big take away. He’s a attracting first time voters the crossover voters. And there’s a lot of Democrats that are voting for him, and I think you guys we have to be reflective of this country there are a lot of people that do support him to make a gross generalization that if you’re voting for him here racist, I don’t necessarily think that that’s fair as well.

SUNNY HOSTIN: That is a generalization I don’t think any of us are saying that every single Trump supporter is racist … but I don’t think we can deny the fact is there are a group of people that his message is resonating with, and that is a message of discrimination and bigotry and misogyny and it’s there.

JOY BEHAR: Demonizing the other. That’s what his message is.

JEDEDIAH BILA: When you’re talking about Hitler though. I mean, that is like equating Donald Trump to someone who wants to exterminate a whole race of people. Or a whole religion. He didn’t say anything like that.

HOSTIN: He wants to build a wall, he wants to send millions and millions of Latinos from this country. He wants to torture people, how is it different?

BILA: You can’t equate border security with the extermination of the Jewish people.

HOSTIN: How is it different? I just did.

BILA: You can’t though. You can’t.

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How Donald Trump Scared the Jews, Won the Election — and Saved Israel (This Is No Purim Spiel!)

Hatred and bigotry is not the exclusive domain of gentiles but you won’t get that commonsense in this hysteria from Chaim Shalev, for whom Jews are always victims and goyim who believe they have group interests are nasty:

The campaign was even harsher than anyone had predicted. After being told by his advisers that there simply wasn’t enough time to win over enough African, Hispanic or Asian Americans, Donald Trump went for broke, in an effort to secure the 72% of the white vote that he would need in order to stand a chance of winning the ballot in November. “The War of the Races,” was how some pundits described it.
Trump did not play his race cards openly, though some viewed his ambiguous statements as stoking the flames. When he changed his famous slogan to “Making the Real America Really Great Again,” minority leaders said they sensed a threat. When he dismissed the sporadic violence that broke out in Alabama between white supremacists and African Americans as “a legit argument,” liberal newspapers were nothing less than outraged. When a New Mexico mob attacked a family of illegal immigrants, Trump said that would no longer happen once the wall went up and “Mexico paid for it.” He used the same tactic when a series of mosques were burned in cities across America, saying that tempers would cool off once the temporary freeze on allowing Muslims to enter the United States as well as the partial ban on Muslim travel between states without a special permit would go into effect.
Most American Jews tried to steer clear of the whole meshugas. They gravitated almost by default towards the Democrats, but didn’t feel the urge to stand out among the many liberal leaders as well as prominent Christian clergymen protesting the increasingly ugly atmosphere of the campaign. Some of the rhetoric on the radical left, which often included incitement against whites as well as anti-Israel propaganda, made them feel no less uncomfortable than the vitriol emanating from the right.
But then reports started to appear of Trump rallies in which Stars of David were painted alongside the Muslim crescent on placards, with big exes on both.
“I didn’t see anything of the sort, you reporters are such liars,” Trump said, even when shown several anti-Jewish signs being waved right under his eyes in a mass meeting in Cincinnati. Confronted at a press conference in late September with several flyers containing caricatures of George Soros, Haim Saban and Sheldon Adelson as the three wise monkeys, which had been handed out at the entrance to his Chicago event, Trump blew his top. “And how many of you are Jews anyway?” he asked the shocked reporters. “Let’s see a show of hands here, c’mon folks,” he said, adding his punch line after a short pause, “because if you don’t we can always pull down your pants and find out.” The crowd that had been invited to serve as Trump’s audience burst out in appreciative laughter.
Things then went from bad to worse. Ultra-Orthodox supporters of Trump, who were persuaded by Rick Perry that Trump meant well for religious people everywhere, were driven out of a GOP meeting near Albany, accompanied by curses, shoves and several people waving their right hands in what seemed like Nazi salutes. Then Trump’s running mate told a frenzied crowd in El Paso that “Bloooomental and Schoooooomer” were ganging up on Trump to prevent America being great again “because the New York establishment wants to suck us dry.” Finally, asked to respond to a New York Times report about the hundred of millions of dollars that had been reportedly pouring in to Democratic coffers from distressed Jewish donors, Trump said: “The Jews don’t give me money because they know I can’t be bought. So they’re doing everything they can to destroy me. We’ll see how to deal with this thing once I’m in office, but I promise you, it won’t be pleasant.”
Trump was lambasted by all the major news outlets, and even Fox News said his statement was “superfluous and inflammatory.” The Republican candidate’s campaign advisers were close to hysteria, convinced that such an incendiary statement, coming less than 72 hours before the polls opened, could doom the New York billionaire’s bid for the White House. On Election Day, Jews indeed joined Hispanics and African Americans in breaking all known records for voter participation, but so did white Americans all across the country. Trump was trounced in major blue states such as California, New York and New Jersey, but he received over 80% of the white vote in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, and won the elections with a handy majority in both popular and electoral votes.
He asked Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio to accompany him to his inauguration and refused to rescind the invitations to the inaugural ball that his advisers claimed had been sent “by mistake” to David Duke and several other white supremacists. Pat Buchanan, Trump’s transition team announced, would serve as “special White House adviser.”
This is when Jewish panic went into overdrive. Though the overwhelming majority said that Trump would probably moderate himself and “where would we go anyway,” others, especially on the liberal left, were swept away in the general hysteria that gripped most Democrats. “Our complacency is like that of Jews in Germany in the 1930s” one distressed Jewish leader told a dumbfounded Chuck Todd on Meet the Press. “When our grandparents comforted themselves after Hitler and the Nazis came to power by asking ‘what’s the worst that could happen?’ Todd wanted to follow up, but the words seemed to stick in his throat so he frantically signaled to go to commercial break.

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Daily Beast: How Breitbart Unleashes Hate Mobs to Threaten, Dox, and Troll Trump Critics

The MSM is not used to white people standing up for themselves. Until Trump, that right was reserved for minorities.

If you attack Donald Trump, you are making yourself a target for Trump supporters, just like those who attack Bernie Sanders are marking themselves a target for Bernie supporters.

This one-sided article says very little about the nasty slurs hurled against Donald Trump and his supporters.

Lloyd Grove writes:

Conservative essayist Bethany S. Mandel, who has been awash in a deluge of social media abuse since she began denouncing Donald Trump, finally purchased a handgun over the weekend.
“It’s a .22 magnum revolver,” says Mandel, the mother of two young children, who applied for a firearms permit at her local suburban police department after absorbing a fusillade of vile, anti-Semitic tweets and Facebook messages in recent months.
“I’m picking it up,” Mandel says about her firearm, “after the shop’s background check comes back.”
Having practiced at a New Jersey firing range, she prefers a revolver to a pistol because “my aim is far better,” she says.
“My husband [New York Post Op-Ed page editor Seth Mandel] isn’t happy about it,” she says about her new acquisition.
The 29-year-old Mandel, who writes for The Federalist, a conservative/libertarian website that often inveighs against Trump, is a pugnacious online presence who frequently crosses swords with self-avowed acolytes of the Republican presidential frontrunner.
She has especially tangled with Breitbart News, the rabble-rousing, Trump-friendly website—named for its late founder, culture warrior Andrew Breitbart—that regularly savages the GOP establishment, the media elite, the Washington consultant class, and the Fox News Channel, which it likes to portray as the willing enabler of all these sinister forces.
“When I went to my local police department and applied for the gun permit, they said, ‘Maybe you should stop writing things that make people angry,’” Mandel recounts. “And I said, ‘OK, I’ll give that some consideration.’
‘You have kids. Why would you do that?’
‘Because I want to leave them a world that is worth living in.’”
Yet one can hardly fault Mandel’s feelings of vulnerability. Typical online insults (screenshots of which she provided to The Daily Beast) included “you deserve the oven,” complete with the image of a Domino’s Pizza oven—this from an apparent Trump fan who goes by the Twitter handle @dinguscout.
After Mandel observed: “Another night blocking all the anti-Semites who are helping Trump make American[sic] great again,” a second apparent Trump supporter, @unusr1, tweeted at her: “Missed one, you slimy Jewess.”
It is entirely predictable that, among other news outlets—including The Drudge Report, The New York Times and The Washington Post—the Twitter feeds of Mandel’s Trump-fan assailants often include links to stories on Breitbart News, and even to audio clips from Breitbart News Daily, the SiriusXM satellite radio program hosted by Breitbart executive chairman Stephen K. Bannon and Breitbart News editor in chief Alex Marlow.
Nicknamed “Trumpbart” by detractors, the outlet claims 17 million readers, and is widely seen as a credulous purveyor of Trump’s angry populist, anti-immigration, anti-Muslim message, and as an enthusiastic booster of the reality show billionaire’s candidacy.

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Donald Trump on Jewish Daughter Ivanka: ‘This Wasn’t in the Plan But I’m Very Glad it Happened’ (VIDEO)

From Algemeiner Feb. 6, 2015:

While Donald Trump did not plan on having a Jewish daughter, he is glad he did so, the business tycoon said Tuesday night upon accepting the Liberty Award at The Algemeiner’s ‘Jewish 100′ Gala in New York City.

“I want to thank my Jewish daughter. I have a Jewish daughter,” he said at the event, which drew a star-studded crowd of 500 to the Capitale on Bowery. “This wasn’t in the plan but I’m very glad it happened.”

Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, converted to Judaism in 2009 before marrying real estate developer Jared Kushner, whom Donald described on stage as a “spectacular guy.” In presenting the award to her father, Ivanka described him as someone who has firm convictions and “a man who uses his platform and uses his voice to effectuate change.”

“He is fundamentally somebody who believes that it’s his civic duty to speak his mind and often say what’s not popular and what others are afraid to,” she added. “He has used his voice often and loudly in support of Israel and in support of developments within Israel, in support of security for Israel and in support of the idea of Israeli democracy.”

On stage, Trump concluded his acceptance speech by asserting his strong support for the Jewish state. He told the audience, “We love Israel. We will fight for Israel 100 percent, 1,000 percent. It will be there forever.”

Other honorees at the event included philanthropists Joseph and Deborah Aronow, late entertainer Joan Rivers and speaker of the Knesset Yuli Edelstein.

Watch Donald Trump’s speech in the video below:

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Why Some Hasidic Jews Are Loving Donald Trump’s Campaign

VICE: Chaim Schlaff was born and raised in a Hasidic Jewish community in London. He now lives in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, and describes himself as a “proud legal immigrant.” He is also an enthusiastic Donald Trump supporter.

Schlaff says he “loves” the way Trump speaks and so do most of his friends: “He talks about everything we think.”

Schlaff is not the only member of the Hasidic community in the greater New York City area that feels this way about Trump. According to many Hasidic voters and political commentators, Trump has sparked an undeniable interest in parts of this culturally isolated world.

“Among my circle of friends, at least 90 percent [support] Trump,” said Yanky Lichtman, a Trump supporter who lives in Lakewood, New Jersey, one of the biggest Orthodox Jewish communities in the New York area.

David Gross, a Hasid who lives in Brooklyn, said he was never interested in politics before this election, but “when Trump decided to run I got excited.”

“He is honest, an everyday person,” Gross said. “A lot of people I know agree with him, but they just don’t want to say it.” Gross added that he’d probably just sit out the general election if Trump was not the Republican nominee because “it won’t be as interesting.”

Jacob Kornbluh, a New York-based Orthodox political reporter for the news site Jewish Insider, says that there is “no question support for Trump is widespread” within the Hasidic community. The majority of Hasidic voters he’s spoken to have said they plan on supporting Trump, although Kornbluh says that he has also found support for Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz within the community. But for the average Hasidic voter, says Kornbluh, “Trump is their guy.”

The Hasidim are the most conservative wing of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community and are culturally, ideologically, and politically distinct from mainstream American Jews. While Jewish voters overall are consistently one of the most liberal groups in the country, nearly two-thirds of ultra-Orthodox Jews say they are politically conservative, while 57 percent of Orthodox Jews identify with or lean towards the Republican party, according to a Pew survey of Jewish Americans.

There have not been any polls of Hasidic voters ahead of the primary election, so much of the evidence of support for Trump within these communities so far has been anecdotal. But the fact that Trump has also done well among evangelical Christians in the primary states that have voted so far (in South Carolina, he won 34 percent of the white evangelical Christian vote) is a fairly telling indicator of how Hasidim will vote as well.

Since 2000, ultra-Orthodox Jews in New York have voted in national elections in extremely similar patterns to how evangelical Christians voted, according to Sam Abrams, a political scientist at Stanford University who studies the politics of American Jewish voters. The only other religious group of Americans that are as consistently conservative (politically and ideologically) as Orthodox Jews are white, evangelical Christians, according to Pew.

If it were any other election, it might be surprising that a candidate like Trump is popular in communities as conservative as Hasidic Jews and evangelical Christians. The twice-divorced reality television star has bragged about the size of his penis on national television, voiced support for gay marriage (although he has since walked that back) and extolled the virtues of Planned Parenthood. None of this exactly matches up with the socially conservative views held very deeply by both groups.

Related: Donald Trump Just Referenced His Penis Size in a Nationally Televised Debate

But one of the fundamental aspects of Trump’s campaign — which has confounded political pundits to no end — has been his ability to find support across seemingly contradictory pockets of the American electorate. Since the start of this election, commentators have been obsessed with assigning each candidate to specific groups of voters based on their demographics, backgrounds and ideologies; Ted Cruz’s base was supposed to be evangelical Christians concentrated in the south, while Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio were the “establishment” guys that would appeal to moderates in northeastern suburbs. But Trump smashed through this framework by proving he was able to pick up supporters across all kinds of voters.

Trump’s popularity in the Hasidic community highlights this phenomenon. When asked about their support for Trump, many Hasidim use the same lines and talking points one hears from Trump supporters at his rallies around the country.

“I like the way how he says it,” said Lichtman. “He tells you straight what he thinks and that’s a big plus.”

Lichtman added that he, along with many of his friends who are also supporting Trump, are “fed up with the establishment on both sides. [We] gave them a chance and nothing worked.” Like Brooklyn’s Gross, Lichtman says that if Trump is not the nominee he probably won’t vote in the general election at all.

Others cited Trump’s business experience as a big reason for their support. There’s a “feeling he’ll be able to create jobs, create wealth, bring jobs into this country,” Gross said…

Those who closely track the politics and culture of the Hasidic community speculate that one reason that Trump has gained popularity among some of its members is very specific to the way Hasidic life is organized. For generations, the ultra-Orthodox religion and communities have been structured around a strong central leader, a rebbe or rabbi, who controls nearly all aspects of their life.

“How we operate on a daily life is to follow a certain rabbi and be inspired by him and do whatever he orders without questioning him,” says Kornbluh.

Trump represents a similar type of leader, who promises plenty of great solutions if the country just follows his example. Explanations of how, exactly, he’ll achieve those solutions come later. (See: “Make America Great Again”). These similarities between Trump and the rebbe style of leadership could be “why a lot of Orthodox Jews are inspired by him without questioning what he says or what his views on certain issues are,” said Kornbluh.

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National Review: White Working Class Communities ‘Morally Indefensible… They Deserve to Die’

LINK: This article first appeared in The Daily Caller:

National Review’s Kevin Williamson believes Donald Trump’s appeals to the white working class are “immoral” because that demographic’s way of life deserves to die out.

In a featured article for the prestigious conservative journal entitled “The FatherFuhrer,” Williamson seeks to rebut criticism that he and other conservatives don’t articulate any policies that would appeal to Trump’s blue collar supporters.

Williamson, a long-time critic of The Donald, essentially agrees that he doesn’t support any policies or rhetoric directly tailored to the working-class — particularly about jobs being taken by outsourcing and immigration — because it would be wrong to do so.

“It is immoral because it perpetuates a lie: that the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by outside forces,” the NR roving correspondent writes. “[N]obody did this to them. They failed themselves.”

He then goes on to make the conclusion that it’s great these communities are dying out because they have a warped morality and are a dead weight on the economy.

“The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible,” the conservative writer says. “The white American under-class is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul. If you want to live, get out of Garbutt [a blue-collar town in New York.]”

You can read the rest of the story here.

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