Shortly before the Nov, 3 election, Jeffrey Salkin of Religion News Service (or an RNS headline writer) came up with the perfect subhead in a book review: “You know the saying that two Jews have three opinions? It’s more like eight. A new book tells why.”
The book is Polarized: Why American Jews Are Divided and What To Do About It by Rkoberta Kwall of DePaul University law school, and it points the way to siomething I’ve always admired about Judaism and Jewish writers, their ability to entertain — and argue — different interpretations.
In spite of the polarization that affects all of us, that ability showed up abundantly in this month’s US election. Israel held elections, too, but negotiations to form a new governing coalition are ongoing and undecided.
Before the US election, pundits confidently expected that Jewish voters would turn away from the Democrats, whom they traditionally support, in response to perceived antisemitism on the left wing of the party. When election day came, it was immediately obvious the returns were more nuanced than anticipated.
Typical of pre-election coverage was an Oct. 15 story on i24NEWS, the Israeli TV network, that quoted Harry Enten of CNN as saying the Democrats’ lead “has absolutely tumbled into the Hudson River among Jewish voters.”
Enten, who characteristically affects the delivery of a borscht belt comedian, cited New York state election statistics showing a 36-point shift away from the Democrats since the 2022 midterms (specificaly, a 40-point lead in 2018, a 49-point lead in 2022 and a 13-point lead in 2026 survey data).
Comparable returns from last week’s US vote aren’t yet available, but national exit poll data suggest a more nuanced picture. An exit poll commissioned by J Street, the liberal Jewish advocacy group in Washington, suggests no dramatic overall shift occurred, at least not on a national level. Said political writer Jacob Magid of the Times of Israel, which reported the exit poll data:
Seventy-two percent of Jewish voters supported Democratic congressional candidates in the US midterm election, exactly the same as in the previous election in 2024, the poll said. Meanwhile, 26% voted Republican, versus 24% two years earlier — a difference within the survey’s margin of error.
That doesn’t mean a shift isn’t happening, however, and it doesn’t mean perceived antisemitism and support for Israel aren’t wedge issues affecting Democrats and Republicans alike. In the same i24NEWS report that quoted Enten of CNN, Israeli-American pundit Mark Schulman of Tel Aviv gave some of the background:
Traditionally the Republican Party was the antisemitic party. They were the party of exclusion. They were the party of country clubs that Jews weren’t allowed to join, neighborhoods that Jews couldn’t move into. Those were the Republicans back then. […] What’s happened now is a significant part of the Democratic Party seems to be truly antisemitic.
By this, Schulman means the Democrats he has in mind are highly critical of Israel, “rabidly anti-Israel” in his words. “Anti-Israelism, or whatever it is, turns into antisemitism way too easily,” he told Nicole Zedeck of i24NEWS:
Now of course there are all these definitions. Is it real antisemitism or is it just anti-Israel? But by all means the way they have been cohabitating the idea of antisemitism and anti-Zionism and all into one, they become antisemitic, at least significant portions of them.
Schulman is right: It’s time for some definitions. And a word or two about my own perceptions, or biases, on the subject. Israeli-Arab relations, antisemitism and the war in Gaza are difficult and complicated intersecting issues, and they’re only more fraught because of our legacy of settler colonialism in the US. It’s complicated.
Probably the most widely accepted working definition of antisemitism was adopted in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. It reads as follows:
Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.
The definition is legally non-binding, and the IHRA website sets out several “examples [that] may serve as illustrations.” Among them:
- Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.
- Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
- Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.
“Manifestations [of antisemitism] might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity,” says the IHRA more generally, adding this caveat. “However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.”
As I read it, the IHRA’s working definition permits interpretations like Schulman’s, accusing Democrats of “rabid antisemitism” as a matter of opinion, but leaves the question open for discussion. When a 2023 bill to incorporate it into US Education Department civil rights investigations of pro-Palestinian student protests was debated in Congress, one of its authors advised restraint.
“For 25 years I jealously guarded the term anti-Semitism,” Kenneth Stern said on Christine Amanpour’s TV show. “To have a sting it has to be used only in the clearest cases. […] Now there’s a push to make it almost ubiquitous, and when everything becomes anti-Semitic, nothing is anti-Semitic. And that makes it harder to fight anti-Semitism.”
To my mind, the term has been politicized — and, I would say, trivialized — by congressional Republicans with a political grudge against “leftist” students and universities they deem part of a liberal “elite.” I’ve blogged about it HERE, where I quoted Stern; and HERE, when I quoted legal scholars at Israel’s Haifa University who argue it“was never about Jewish safety. It is about consolidating authoritarian power under the veneer of minority protection.”
Since everyone else seems biased on the subject, I feel like I need to own up to my own. For starters, I believe the Republican crusade against pro-Palestinian student activism and antisemitism is, at best, disingenuous and at worst Islamophobic. In fact, I believe that antisemitism and Islamophobia alike are deeply rooted in my Christian tradition, and I see them as two sides of the same ugly coin.
When I was growing up in the 1950s, the Holocaust was a living memory and support for the United Nations and a Jewish state in Israel were axiomatic. I still maintain those attitudes 75 years later, Over time, however, I’ve had to modify those beliefs.
- When I visited Israel on a Holy Land tour 15 years ago, it struck me as a vibrant, multicultural society. But in the occupied territories, I saw too many little reminders of Jim Crow. For someone who grew up down South and knows Jim Crow when he sees it, it was a deeply unsettling reality check.
- Since then, I’ve only gotten more unsettled. I’ll leave it to courts of competent jurisdiction to say whether that response consitutes genocide, but I believe the Israeli government was goaded into a disproportionate response in Gaza to Hamas’ atrocities Oct. 7, 2023. In addition, both the current Netanyahu government and violent “settlers” on the West Bank are clearly in violation of international law.
- Ever since my Holy Land tour, I have followed Jewish and Arab peace activists, and I continue to hope for a two-state or federal solution, perhaps incorporating language of Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence that cites “freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel” and adds the state “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.”
Accordingly, my caution lights start blinking orange to red when I notice Republicans trying to use Israel as a wedge issue to further divide Democrats, especially as they wax Islamophobic.
As Mark Schulman was quick to point out to i24, the Republicans “have their own problems.” And, as Itamar Mann and Lihi Yona of the law school at Haifa argued in 2025, their “redefinition of antisemitism isn’t simply a policy shift – it’s part of a deeper transformation of American democracy.” More chillingly, it ”feels to many [Jewish liberals] like an attack on who they are as Jews.”
All of this was amply reflected in the American exit polls liberal Jewish advocacy organization in Washington. Jacob Magid’s report in the Times of Israel put the diversity of opinion in context, and his analysis deserves extended quotation:
Seventy-two percent of Jewish voters supported Democratic congressional candidates in the US midterm election, exactly the same as in the previous election in 2024, the poll said. Meanwhile, 26% voted Republican, versus 24% two years earlier — a difference within the survey’s margin of error.
The poll was released following this week’s Democratic sweep of the House of Representatives and the Senate, in which voters overall shifted to the party by a significant margin. The election saw a crop of new US lawmakers who accuse Israel of genocide — and, in some cases, have spoken out against Jewish statehood — win races in the House and Senate.
Their victories came as public opinion of Israel has dramatically sunk in the US, especially among Democrats, and as voters expressed anger about the Iran war, which the US and Israel launched jointly in February.
Overall, US President Donald Trump’s favorability was low among Jewish Americans of all age groups, with 77% having unfavorable views of the president. The poll also found that US Jews had a low opinion of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with 72% holding an unfavorable view.
Orthodox Jews (65%) had a favorable view of Trump, and also were the only Jewish group to vote majority Republican in the midterms, according to the poll.
“American Jews remain a core Democratic constituency with firmly held political beliefs and values, and their voting behavior has remained remarkably consistent despite the emergence of controversial issues each election cycle,” said GBAO Strategies founding president Jim Gerstein, whose firm conducted the poll.
“Conventional wisdom about the impact of Jewish concerns over antisemitism and what it means to support Israel often misses the mark on how Jews process these issues in America’s political context,” he continued. “The reality is that Jews express nuanced thinking on these issues that is frequently missing in the extensive media coverage of the Jewish community.”
The study, conducted between October 28 and November 3, surveyed 800 self-identified Jewish voters and has a margin of error of 3.5%.
For the most part, the exit poll focused on the anticipated vote in the Nov, 3 election, but Magid highlighted criticism of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which has played a decidedly partisan role in recent years, saupporting Republicans and pro-Israel Democrats:
The J Street poll asked whether Super PAC spending by the group’s rival, the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, against candidates who criticize Israel increases antisemitism in the US. Sixty-six percent said it does.
While most respondents (48%) said those AIPAC-funded ads would make no difference to their vote, more said the organization’s advertising (39%) would make them less likely to vote for a candidate than more likely (13%).
Which brings us back to Jeffrey Salkin’s book review on the RNS website. Salkin writes a column called “Martini Judaism,” whch has, as its running title suggests, a light touch in dealing with serious topics.
Framing his review by quoting the “saying that two Jews have three opinions,” Salkin cites DePaul University law professor Roberta Kwall, whose book of the polarization of American Jews came out at the beginning of October. (He also had her on his podcast.) Salkin says throughout history, Jewish thinkers have never spoken with one voice:
The Jewish people has always been a collection of tribes — whether the biblical tribes, or the ideological “tribes” of post-biblical times, or the mystical, rational, Zionist, non-Zionist, anti-Zionist, Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, etc., tribes of the modern world.
Which brings us to Roberta Kwall’s latest book, “Polarized: Why American Jews Are Divided and What To Do About It.” The subject of our most recent podcast, the book is an amazing photograph of the American Jewish condition: polarization along religious, political and Israel lines.
Salkin says each of the Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Sephardic and secular Jewish communities has its own “generalized vocabulary, practices, behaviors and norms.” And that’s before the polarization of US politics kicks in.
“The solution?” he adds. “Become fluent in a second Jewish language. Learn to actually understand and appreciate how Jews different from yourself think and live.” That’s especially important when it comes to Israel. He explains, citing Kwall::
That need to empathize extends, especially to Israel. Kwall offers a taxonomy: far-right Zionists, who support West Bank settlements and rarely criticize Netanyahu publicly; identity Zionists — the largest group — who love Israel unconditionally but not uncritically and for whom Israel is core to Jewish identity; non-Zionists/soft anti-Zionists, who are either indifferent or heading toward anti-Zionism; Haredi theological anti-Zionists, who oppose a Jewish state on religious grounds but differ importantly from the committed anti-Zionists (like Jewish Voice for Peace) who oppose Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. The categories are porous, she writes, and some Jews straddle two different groups rather than being squarely aligned with one.
And that leads Salkin to what he says “the most important part of the book,” as Kwall offers an eight-point platform of eight points that she believes most American Jews can agree on:
- Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state.
- American Jews were shocked by post-Oct. 7, 2023 antisemitism.
- Universities have largely failed in fighting antisemitism.
- Fighting antisemitism from all sources is critical.
- Hamas and all forms of terrorism must be condemned.
- Innocent Palestinians deserve sympathy and support.
- Criticism of Israeli government policies is appropriate.
- A two-state solution is the ideal long-term aspirational goal.
I might quibble with at least one of these points. I remain unconvinced that all of the political accusations of antisemitism on campus have merit. (Then again, I’m not a law professor in a major metro area like Chicago. So I’ll reserve judgment.) That said, however, I think Kwall and Salkin have a platform there that this goy from downstate Illinois can agree on. If anything can lead the people of Israel and Palestine — indeed, all of us — out of the present tragic morass, it will be something very like these principles.
Works Cited
“He Helped Define ‘Antisemitism’; Now He Says the Term Is Being Weaponized,” Amanpour & Company, PBS, May 1, 2024 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FFAcHMO488&t=971s.
International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, “Working Definition of Antisemitism,” IHRA, Berlin, 2016 https://holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definition-antisemitism.
Jacob Magid, “US Jews continued to back Democrats in midterms amid generational chasm on Israel — poll,” Times of Israel, Nov. 6, 2026 https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-jews-continued-to-back-democrats-in-midterms-amid-generational-chasm-on-israel-poll/.
Itamar Mann and Lihi Yona, “The new definition of antisemitism is transforming America – and serving a Christian nationalist plan,” The Guardian, March 23, 2025 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/mar/23/antisemitism-redefinition-jewish-safety-christian-nationalism-democracy.
Jeffrey Salkin, “Why American Jews are divided, and how we can fix it,”Religion News Service, Oct. 29, 2026 https://religionnews.com/2026/10/29/why-american-jews-are-divided/.
Also my blog posts “Israeli law professors warn partisan crackdown on pro-Palestinian students threatens ‘prelude to persecution’ of Jewish, other progressives,” March 24, 2025 https://ordinaryzenlutheran.com/2025/03/24/haifa-law/; and “‘When everything is antisemitic, nothing is antisemitic’: Why partisan crackdowns on free speech backfire. (It’s complicated.),” May 3, 2024 https://ordinaryzenlutheran.com/2024/05/03/antisemitism-bill/.
[Uplinked Nov. 12, 2026]
