Chaim Amalek writes: “This is an insightful article, but one thing it misses is the very rapid demographic transformation now underway in Jewish America. Simply put, the old Jewish America of Jews as liberals in a hurry, more attached to the New York Times than to the Torah is fast giving way to a deeply religious, generally conservative and often Trump-embracing population that loathes Hollywood, the New York Times, and, often, the Democratic Party itself. For example, the birthrate among the hasids is extraordinary. Men and women marry as White Americans used to a hundred years ago, and begin procreating immediately. Mothers with 8 kids are not rare. Liberal Jews on the other hand breed like other well educated whites, which is to say, at a much much lower rate. The result is that while the orthodox were a tiny minority of New York Jews at the middle of the 20th Century, they now are an absolute majority among Jewish children in the city, and this preponderance will of course propagate thorugh various age cohorts as time goes by. The old lefty sort of Jew is fated to disappear.”
Seen from above, the 2016 electoral map of New York City is blue with dots of red. Trump’s home district is blue, but across the water a red wedge slices into Brooklyn. Around that red wedge are districts where Hillary won 90 percent of the vote and Trump was lucky to get 5 percent. Inside it, he beat her in district after district.
The voters who handed him that victory are the Chassidic Jews of Williamsburg who dress in fur hats and black caftans. Their districts, crammed in by hipsters and minorities, are a world away from the progressive activist temples whose clergy went into mourning at Hillary’s loss.
East of Prospect Park, in a vast sea of blue, is what looks like a red sofa. Trump won here with the Chabad Chassidim of Crown Heights. He won in the more mainstream Orthodox Jewish communities of Flatbush. He won by huge margins among the Russian Jewish immigrants of Brighton Beach who listen to a man dubbed the “Russian Rush Limbaugh.”
As the left-wing Forward put it, “Nearly every election district that Trump won in Brooklyn was in a Jewish neighborhood.” But it was a certain type of Jewish neighborhood. The wrong type.
“You can compare them to Rust Belt voters,” a Forward source states. “They are hardworking people, not college educated.”
And then in Far Rockaway where the housing projects by the beach give way to the red Orthodox Jewish communities that extend into Long Island.
There’s a line that recurs again and again in the attacks on David Friedman; the man picked by President-elect Trump to serve as the ambassador to Israel. It’s not stated openly. It’s implied.
“David Friedman, a bankruptcy lawyer from Long Island,” is the sneering summary.
Remnick, the New Yorker’s left-wing editor, took the sneering to a new level, titling his smear as “Trump’s Daily Bankruptcy.” Jewish identity, he declares, has never been a matter of “bankruptcy law.”
To a certain class of elites, it is self-evidently absurd that a bankruptcy lawyer from Long Island be appointed to anything or be listened to about anything. David Remnick is a Washington Post man married to a New York Times woman who went on to inherit the editorship of the New Yorker and turn it into a left-wing echo chamber. He lives in a $3.25 million four-bedroom Manhattan apartment with a wood-burning fireplace.
And David Friedman is the Orthodox son of a Rabbi from Woodmere who still lives there. His father was a Republican who hosted President Reagan. He might occasionally be allowed to read the New Yorker.
And that’s about it.
Yet it’s hard to think of anything that might recommend Friedman more to Trump.
