“Every four years, you hear the refrain, ‘This is the year the Democrats will lose their lock on the Jewish community.’ Is this the year?

Yehuda Kurtzer: I don’t think so. Over the past 70 or 80 years we’ve seen relatively consistent voting patterns in the Jewish community. The shift is in the intensity level. Jews who are passionately pro-Trump are louder and more pronounced than they’ve ever been, and the same is true on the left. More complicated than whether more Jews vote Republican is the way Jewish identity and practice have become politicized. That is, the dominant characteristic defining different groups of Jews now is not how they pray or whether they keep kosher, but their politics. That Orthodox Jewry in the United States, especially centrist Orthodox Jewry, has become Republican is a more interesting development than the actual numbers. It’s happened partly because of Israel, but it’s also a broader phenomenon.

Have partisan divides worsened because of what’s happened in Israel?

Yehuda Kurtzer: No question, what’s happened in Israel has altered many Jews’ political sensibility. I haven’t seen data yet, but every single day I hear some version of “I’m an October 7 Jew now,” from secular friends who feel a twinge of Jewish peoplehood attachment, from professors who feel lonely, from progressives who’ve lost their community and allies, or from Jews who say, “OK, I’ve decided I’m a single-issue voter on Israel.” But in another sense, Israel’s just the flashpoint. People may say, “I’m voting for Trump because I’m pro-Israel,” but not acknowledge they also share his larger social agenda on race or immigration or tax cuts. And American Orthodox Jews are lining up with evangelicals on a whole set of issues, not just on Israel.

Does it matter whether “the Jewish vote” is no longer seen as a single entity?

Yehuda Kurtzer: We’ve had the myth of being monolithic, and that serves the interests of those in charge of the community, to be able to speak with one voice. But I don’t think we’ve actually been monolithic on anything for a long time. The most provocative disappearance of Jewish consensus recently has been on defining antisemitism. That we can’t agree as a Jewish community on what antisemitism is and how to fight it is very telling. And proponents of the different definitions of antisemitism are all appealing to non-Jews as arbiters, trying to get outsiders—university administrators, government entities—to anoint them as the ones who speak for Jews on this.”

Read Yehuda Kurtzer’s full interview in Moment Magazine here.