Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the late leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, encouraged his followers to vote.

But three decades after his death, too few Jews living in Crown Heights, the movement’s home base, are casting ballots, according to a nonprofit there aimed at increasing voter turnout.

There is no question about which presidential candidate will win New York City, but the Jewish Future Alliance is encouraging Crown Heights Jews to vote anyway — to signal to local elected officials that they make up a constituency worth paying attention to.

“Anti-semitism is on the ballot. October 7th is on the ballot,” read postcards that the group mailed recently as part of a get-out-the-vote campaign. “Elected officials are looking to see if the community turned out.”

The group’s director, Rabbi Yaacov Behrman, believes that after decades of attrition, a change is afoot in the neighborhood, with community members increasingly turning out to vote.

“There was a perception out there that our vote doesn’t matter,” Behrman said. “With everything going on in the world, even before Oct. 7, we started to see how elected officials actually impact our lives.”

Behrman’s group collated data about voter turnout by cross-referencing publicly available voting records with community sources such as school lists and phone books. The data showed that, between the 2013 mayoral primary and the 2021 mayoral primary, Jewish community turnout in the 43rd district, which covers Crown Heights and Prospect Lefferts Gardens, rose more than 400%, from 479 to 2,696, including newly registered voters. (For already registered voters, turnout increased by around 200% over that period, the group says.) The data shows that 5,602 Jewish community members in the district have voted since 2020, and the group estimated that there are more than 5,000 unregistered Jewish voters in Crown Heights.

Nationwide, around 70% of American Jews identify with the Democratic Party. Among Orthodox voters, however, three quarters are Republicans, according to a Pew Research Center survey. Crown Heights supported Trump by a considerable margin in the 2020 presidential election, forming an island of red in deep blue Brooklyn, and Trump and some of his surrogates have courted Hasidic voters ahead of Tuesday’s vote.

Some of the top issues for the Crown Heights community are crime and funding for social programs, said Zalman Friedman, a member of the Crown Heights Jewish Community Council, a nonprofit that provides community services in Crown Heights. Its board members are periodically elected by the community. According to Friedman, one goal of voters in the neighborhood is elect candidates who will advance school vouchers and other strategies to make yeshiva education more affordable.

“Participate in the conversation, participate in the process, and that’s half the battle,” Friedman said. “The candidates should know that you’re listening, that you’re involved.”

The six members of the Jewish council were voted in earlier this year for three-year terms — meaning that this is their first presidential election on the job. Members of the council have leaned into getting the vote out, sending out a letter to the community, putting ads online and in messaging groups, and setting up booths in the neighborhood, Friedman said.

Both the Crown Heights Jewish Community Council and the Jewish Future Alliance are nonprofits and cannot endorse any candidates. While New York’s electoral college vote will almost certainly go to Democrat Kamala Harris, voters aim to have an impact in local elections, such as next year’s mayoral race.

“When elected officials draft policy, they look at community turnout,” Behrman said. “So if you vote, the elected officials are going to see that and it’s going to make people understand that we care.

“In the June primary, when people are running for mayor, if they see a large turnout of the community, they themselves are going to take into consideration the needs of the community,” he said. “Just going out to vote, no matter who you vote for, helps the community.”

The Crown Heights Jewish community used to turn out for elections at a high rate in the 1950s and 1960s, Behrman said, but turnout declined because people felt that their votes did not have an impact.

“Everybody voted in this community. There was no such thing as not voting,” he said. “We want to bring that back.”

That perception of local votes “not counting” has been changing as community residents understand that local elections have an impact on issues important to Crown Heights residents, such as education and social services funding. New York’s Hasidic schools, or yeshivas, came under heavy scrutiny in recent years, starting with a New York Times series of exposes in 2022 that brought the schools national attention. The articles said the schools neglected secular education to the detriment of students, while community members argue the system is a successful, and essential, pillar of the community.

The Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacki and the subsequent surge in antisemitism furthered voters’ interest in electing supportive local politicians, Behrman said. There have been hate crimes against Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn and anti-Israel protests have disrupted life in the area, causing traffic disruptions, holdups at JFK Airport, and making people feel unsafe on the subway, he said.

“People are spit at, people are verbally assaulted and physically assaulted and a lot of that has to do with the rhetoric of elected officials,” Behrman said. “People want to do something and they want to help and they want to fight back and voting is a way of fighting back.”

The Jewish Future Alliance’s postcards were sent out to thousands in the neighborhood to encourage them to vote. After the election, community members who voted will receive a thank-you card, and those who didn’t will get a card saying something along the lines of, “We missed you,” Behrman said.

“We want people to understand that it’s appreciated and it’s needed,” he said.

In addition to the video advertisements and postcards, the get-out-the-vote campaign released a series of five testimonials to local media from longtime neighborhood voters urging residents to participate.

In one of the testimonials, Crown Heights resident Shabsi Turner describes how he has voted in every election since 1952, except for one election that occurred while he was serving in the military.

“Growing up, everybody I knew voted,” Turner said in a testimonial published on the community news site ColLive. “Most of them were Europeans of the previous generation, and they felt more intensely about voting than we Americans. Unfortunately, some of us take it for granted.”

“Your vote matters because elections have been won by a single vote,” Turner said. “That vote could be yours.”

WASHINGTON — A candidate listens attentively as a supporter laments that “Palestine is being erased” and that “No amount of money or power should be prioritized over human life.” 

The same candidate praises a mayor who says Israel is committing genocide, calling him “great.”

The candidate in question was not Kamala Harris, whose interactions with pro-Palestinian activists on the campaign have been heavily scrutinized and criticized by Israel advocates. It was her rival, Donald Trump. 

Trump’s appearance in Dearborn, Michigan this weekend — where he got the endorsement of local Arab Americans — yielded conventional campaign-stop headlines.

“Trump meets with Arab Americans in Dearborn, but top community leaders skip event,” CBS said. “Trump meets Arab Americans in Dearborn, vows to bring peace in Middle East,” said the Detroit Free Press.

There was barely a mention of the introduction Trump got from Albert Abbas, owner of the Great Commoner cafe.

“I can’t stand in silence when Palestine is being erased — please help us stop the bloodshed,” Abbas said, as Trump cocked his head. “No amount of money or power should be prioritized over human life”

At the event, Trump also greeted Amer Ghalib, the mayor of Hamtramck, one of a handful of municipalities to formally boycott Israel, who has accused Israel of “genocide” in its current war against Hamas. The Trump campaign sought Ghalib’s endorsement after hearing that his socially conservative views had alienated the town’s Democrats.

One conservative outlet, the National Review, lambasted Trump last month for accepting Ghalib’s endorsement — and for calling the mayor ”great” — but the outrage and mainstream media coverage that typically follows many encounters between Vice President Kamala Harris and Israel’s harsh critics did not ensue.

Last month, Harris was interrupted during a Wisconsin campaign stop by a student who accused Israel of genocide. Her team ejected the man from the event, but after he left, she said, “What he’s talking about, it’s real.” Under heavy criticism, a spokesperson clarified that Harris was not agreeing with the protester’s comments.

The episode fueled an ongoing narrative of Harris as siding with Israel critics when she speaks to them. The trend came into its fullest expression in August when the Uncommitted movement of pro-Palestinian advocates said Harris was considering an arms embargo on Israel, a measure the group supports. The Harris campaign clarified that she did not support an embargo and had only said she would continue to speak with the movement. 

Conservative media seizes eagerly on Harris’s associations with some of the most vocal Democratic critics of Israel in Congress, including Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar and Pennsylvania Rep. Summer Lee. Meanwhile, CNN unearthed 2018 video of Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate, praising a local Imam known for amplifying antisemitic comments.

Some observers, watching Trump court the Arab-American vote, perceived a double standard: “Trump is visiting Dearborn, Michigan. Had Harris done this, I’m sure the pro-Trump Israel advocates would condemn it loudly,” tweeted Corey Walker, a correspondent for the Algemeiner, a right-leaning Jewish publication.

When asked about a double standard, Rich Goldberg, who served as a national security official under Trump, said he had a better gut feeling about the former president.

“A lot of pundits like to talk about the ‘kishkes test’ — typically it’s a test of which candidate feels Israel and the Jewish community in their kishkes,” he said in a text.  

“I think we have a very different kind of kishkes test this cycle — a question of which candidate turns your own kishkes upside down when you think about their views and policies on Israel and pro-Hamas activism in our country. Israel is at war,” he said. “Jews are under attack. This isn’t hypothetical anymore, it’s real and it matters. And I think that’s driving unprecedented numbers of Jewish voters to Trump.”

Naomi Rose, writing an op-ed for The Commentator, an independent student publication at Yeshiva University, cited a number of statements by, and associations of, Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, her running mate, that she deemed hostile to Israel. “To vote for a Harris-Walz administration would be to vote for an administration that is inherently anti-Israel, and consequently, antisemitic,” she concluded.

Trump’s supporters say there’s a reason his pro-Israel supporters are not unnerved by associations or incidents that would have them rushing to social media to condemn Democrats: his record from 2017 to 2021, when as president he reversed years of orthodoxies on the Middle East, favoring Israel’s claim to Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and parts of the West Bank, cutting funds to the Palestinians, pulling out of the Iran nuclear agreement and brokering normalization deals between Israel and countries in the region.

The Trump campaign referred a request for a statement to the Republican National Committee, which in an email noted that polling of Israelis shows they strongly favor Trump. 

Elizabeth Pipko, an RNC spokeswoman, said Trump was the best guarantor not just of the safety of Israelis but of American Jews.

“For many American Jews like myself, the events of October 7th, 2023, and the year that followed, will forever remind us of the threats we face around the world, and in our own country,” she said in an email. “To this day, many I know are afraid to leave their homes appearing visibly Jewish, in major cities across the United States. It is not difficult for most to recognize that the leadership of Kamala Harris failed when it came to our protection and that the Democrat party of our parents and grandparents no longer exists.”

Who Trump meets with is less important than what he did, said David Friedman, who served as Trump’s ambassador to Israel. (Friedman, notably, criticized Trump after the former president dined with a Holocaust denier in 2022, and said he subsequently spoke with Trump about that dinner.)

“Trump and Harris both have a record of four years in office,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “That’s what counts. Trump’s record was the most pro-Israel in history; Harris, one of the worst.”

Matt Brooks, the CEO of the Republican Jewish Committee, said that Trump earning Arab-American support is a measure of how much he can get accomplished with diverse and even antagonistic actors.

“We obviously we don’t agree with everything this guy says,” he said, referring to Ghalib, the Hamtramck mayor, “but he endorsed Trump knowing full-well how pro-Israel he is.”

While it’s true that the Biden administration has in recent months had tense relations with Israel over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct of the war, supporters of the president and Harris note that it also shepherded through $14 billion in emergency defense assistance for Israel and deployed U.S. forces to the Middle East to inhibit threats on Israel by Iran or its proxies. Harris has committed to full defense assistance for Israel and has said all options are on the table to keep Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

Trump’s ties to critics of Israel have come more into view as he cultivates the Arab and Muslim American vote in Michigan, a swing state. In a recent letter to community leaders. he has vowed to restore peace to Lebanon. 

A political action committee backed by billionaire Elon Musk targets Arab Americans with ads emphasizing Harris’ pro-Israel bonafides — as well as the Jewishness of her husband, Doug Emhoff.

Matt Brooks, the CEO of the Republican Jewish Committee, said that Trump earning Arab American support is a measure of how much he can get accomplished with diverse and even antagonistic actors.

“We obviously we don’t agree with everything this guy says,” he said, referring to Ghalib, the Hamtramck mayor, “but he endorsed Trump knowing full-well how pro-Israel he is.”

Trump has not quite won over the Arab-American vote: Some Arab-Americans cannot shake memories of a president who wholeheartedly backed Israel when he was in office, and who instituted — and vows to reinstitute — a ban on entry targeting citizens from a number of Muslim-majority countries.

He has also, at times, made his Jewish supporters uneasy: Trump notably gets plenty of attention and criticism when he flirts with antisemites and antisemitic rhetoric, including from Jewish Republicans. 

And his relationship with Israel could get tense. Israeli officials, the Times of Israel has reported, have expressed concern that Trump’s insistence on a quick end to the war — by some accounts, he wants it done by inauguration — could upend U.S.-Israel ties. 

His running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, has advocated isolationist policies and for a time blocked a joint Ukraine-Israel-Taiwan defense assistance package. He recently said that Israel and the United States will not always agree on Iran.

Halie Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said there was no guarantee that Trump would be as supportive of Israel in a second term, noting his predilection toward isolationism. 

“His foreign policy has been egregiously inconsistent, and — according to his own former national security adviser, John Bolton — his support of Israel is not guaranteed in a second term,” she said.

Ellie Cohanim, a top staffer in the State Department’s antisemitism monitor office under Trump, said Trump’s past — not his campaign-trail associations — predicts his future.

“For anyone curious what President Trump’s policy will be towards Israel as our 47th president, you just have to review his track record as our 45th president,” she said in an email. “Donald Trump showed such historic support for Israel as our 45th president, that he will go down in history as the most pro-Israel, pro-Jewish President in American history.”

The publisher of Haaretz, Israel’s most influential left-leaning publication, sent shockwaves through his newspaper and beyond after saying Israel fought “Palestinian freedom fighters” and calling for sanctions against Israel.

In Amos Schocken’s remarks last week, he also accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government of apartheid and a “second Nakba” and compared Israel to apartheid-era South Africa.

The remarks have led to backlash from a major stakeholder in the newspaper and some subscription cancellations, as well as threats from Israel’s communications minister. The episode threatens to jeopardize the credibility of an outlet that serves as an essential news source and ideological home for the dwindling ranks of the Israeli left. 

Schocken, 79, whose family has owned Haaretz since the 1930s, made the comments at a London conference sponsored by the paper and other left-leaning groups on Oct. 27. Other speakers included former centrist Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and former British Prime Minister David Cameron, a Conservative who recently served as foreign secretary.

“Israel has a government that opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state,” the publisher stated during his prepared remarks. “It doesn’t care about imposing a cruel apartheid regime on the Palestinian population. It dismisses the costs of both sides for defending the settlements, while fighting the Palestinian freedom fighters that Israel calls terrorists.”

He added, “The only recourse with such disastrous government is to ask other countries to bring pressure to bear, as they did in order to end apartheid in South Africa. … A Palestinian state must be established and the only way to achieve this, I think, is to apply sanctions against Israel, against the leaders who oppose [Palestinian statehood], and against the settlers who are in the occupied territories in contravention of international law.”

Schocken also said the Israeli government “supports the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from parts of the occupied territories,” and accused Israel of carrying out “a second Nakba,” the Palestinian term for the flight or expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians upon Israel’s establishment. 

Calls for sanctions — as well as apartheid accusations — of the kind Schocken made are often treated as offensive and beyond the pale in Israeli public discourse, though a recent survey found that a third of Israelis said sanctions against extremist settlers were justified. Hundreds of Haaretz subscribers, including several Israeli government ministries, also canceled their subscriptions over the weekend in response to Schocken’s comments, according to Walla, which is owned by The Jerusalem Post, a right-leaning rival of Haaretz. Advertisers have also reportedly begun to pull back. (Haaretz is a syndication client of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, as is The Jerusalem Post.)

His remarks also prompted blowback from people who objected to his mention of “freedom fighters,” which some took as a reference to Hamas, which killed 1,200 Israelis in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack that launched the war in Gaza. 

The paper’s own minority stakeholder, Russian-Israeli oil magnate Leonid Nevzlin, who owns 25% of Haaretz, called Schocken’s comments “appalling, unacceptable, and inhumane, displaying profound insensitivity toward the victims of that tragic day, the casualties of the ongoing war, the hostages and their families, and the people of Israel as a whole.”

He asserted that the publisher’s views also conflict with “the vast majority of the newspaper’s journalists and staff.”

The country’s communications minister has suggested a government-wide boycott of the paper (an idea he also proposed in November 2023 over anger with its coverage). A group representing Israeli victims of terror attacks has filed a complaint accusing Schocken of incitement. And the country’s Diaspora Ministry accused Haaretz of joining in with a global campaign to delegitimize Israel.

By Wednesday, Schocken had issued a statement walking back some of his remarks. 

“Many freedom fighters around the world and throughout history, possibly even those who fought for Israel’s establishment, committed terrible acts of terrorism, harming innocent people to achieve their goals,” he said. “I should have said: freedom fighters, who also resort to terror tactics — which must be combated. The use of terror is not legitimate.”

He added, “As for Hamas, they are not freedom fighters as their ideology essentially states, ‘It’s all ours, others should leave.’ … [The] organizers and perpetrators of the October 7 attacks should be severely punished. … There are Palestinian freedom fighters who do not use terrorism.”

While Haaretz — which publishes in both Hebrew and English — has a relatively small audience within Israel compared to its centrist and right-leaning rivals, its journalism and editorials have a wide global reach and an international reputation for independent reporting. This is not the first time it has stirred controversy through its commentary — a 2014 column lambasting Israeli pilots for Gaza airstrikes drew significant backlash — but this incident comes after Israel has cracked down on dissent and shut down the local operations of Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based publication. 

The paper’s English-language editor Esther Solomon, who also organized the conference and introduced Schocken, responded to a JTA request for comment by referring to an editorial published Monday in the paper repudiating Schocken’s comments. 

The unsigned editorial, published in both Hebrew and English and titled “Terrorists Are Not Freedom Fighters,” states that Schocken did not apply the term to “Hamas terrorists” and defended his reputation. But it also chastised the publisher for his remarks. 

“The fact that he didn’t mean to include Hamas terrorists doesn’t mean that other terrorist acts are legitimate, even if their perpetrators’ goal is to free themselves from occupation,” the editorial reads. “Deliberately harming civilians is illegitimate. Using violence against civilians and sowing terror among them to achieve political or ideological goals is terrorism. Any organization that advocates the murder of women, children and the elderly is a terrorist organization, and its members are terrorists.”

The editorial also kept up the paper’s longstanding critique of Netanyahu, saying that he has routinely painted non-violent Palestinian activity as “terror” and that he has “blurred the critical difference between genuine terrorism and activities that, even if many Israelis dislike them, are nevertheless legitimate.”

American Airlines announced over the weekend it would not be resuming flights to Israel until September 2025, extending an existing pause by an additional six months and potentially sparking a cascade of other airline delays in resuming regular Israel service.

The move makes American Airlines the first United States-based carrier to push back flights to Israel until at least the second half of 2025, amid a swath of cancellations affecting most non-Israeli airlines. 

Delta and its partner airlines currently have pauses on Israel flights through March, while United Airlines has not set a return date yet for its own Israel flights. 

Many carriers suspended flights to Israel following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack and have delayed their return to the region citing renewed security concerns including the expansion of regional conflict into Lebanon and Iran. Others resumed flights after Oct. 7 but suspended them amid escalating tensions between Israel and Iran, which has included multiple missile barrages from Iran.

The scarcity of flights and their frequent interruptions have made traveling to and from Israel an expensive, often madcap process. To manage costs, many travelers are opting to fly first to a European city that has budget service before connecting to their final destination — although several budget European airlines, including EasyJet and Ryanair, have also suspended service to Israel through at least spring 2025.

The Israeli carrier El Al is currently the only airline offering direct flights between the United States and Israel. El Al’s effective monopoly on the service since Oct. 7 resulted in an investigation over price gouging and a change in policy that locked in flight rates to and from some European cities.

In a statement, a spokesperson for American Airlines told the Jewish News Syndicate that customers who had already bought flights could get a full refund or exchange them for another airline.

“I don’t know anyone voting for Trump,” my mother said, hyperbolically. She hates the man so virulently that my sister and I are sure to steer clear of talking politics, even though we are all Democrats. 

My mother is wrong. My father, her ex-husband, is a staunch Trump supporter, and likely switched his party affiliation the minute he divorced her 30 years ago. But so is my brother, an ultra-Orthodox rabbi in Los Angeles, whose congregation is likely to vote in large numbers for the former president as well.

Mine is a family divided, an instantiation of the polarization that has swept the country. Meanwhile, the polls show that a sizeable majority of Jews will once again vote for the Democratic candidate.

But neither the polls nor my relatives’ politics tell the whole Jewish story in this tense election year. I suspect that no matter how Jews end up voting, many are going to the polls this year as part of the small but significant cohort of undecided voters. 

I used to be incredulous about the undecided voter. “How can anyone not know who they want to vote for?” I’d demand. “It’s always so clear!” As a lifelong Democrat who supports women’s rights, gay marriage, welcoming immigrants and a whole slew of other liberal positions, I thought something must be wrong with undecided voters.

The came Oct. 7, and the silence of our liberal friends, colleagues, companies, compadres. 

Yes, we’d stood up with them for #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter and every liberal cause, but they were not standing up for us. Even before Israel launched a ground invasion of Gaza – well before it launched an invasion of Lebanon — progressives began denouncing Israel, accusing it of genocide, ignoring the hostages and either ignoring or defending the killing by Hamas of 1,200 people in Israel on what some called a day of “liberation.”

As the months went by, and the death toll rose — and hostages (or their bodies) remained in Gaza — it got worse here in America: College campuses became protest zones that made many Jews feel unsafe; “Zionist” authors were blacklisted; artists came out against Israel and lifelong Democrats like me began to feel adrift: betrayed, abandoned, alone.

It was through this lens that Jews like me began to look at our political choices. Yes, President Biden rushed to back Israel after Oct. 7, and gave it a green light to root out Hamas. Harris came out at the Democratic National Convention for “Israel’s right to defend itself,” but will she do the same if elected president? Could the Democrats have done more to denounce what was happening on the campuses?

And yes, while Trump has said many problematic things about Jews and other minorities – including suggesting Jews will bear a big part of the blame should he lose — his record on Israel and Iran was reliably hawkish. Meanwhile, it was Republicans such as Ron DeSantis in Florida and Elise Stefanik in upstate New York who came down the hardest on the campus protests.

As I consider this tension, on the eve of a momentous election, I finally, deeply understand the undecideds. 

I’m not the first to observe that what we have long referred to as voters who are undecided are actually voters who are unexcited. It’s not that most of these people don’t understand the issues, or haven’t researched the candidates. It’s that they once they begin to question which issues are most important to them, no candidate stacks up. If Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party are bad for Israel, but Donald Trump and the Republicans are bad for America, who do you vote for?

Historically, “dual loyalty” is a “bigoted trope used to cast the Jews as the other,” according to the American Jewish Committee. But alive and kicking around the heart and soul of many Jews in America is a question that many of them dare not say aloud: Which is more important to us at this fraught moment, Israel or America?

“America will be around forever but Israel’s very existence is at stake,” one undecided voter commented on my Facebook page.

My Israeli-born, naturalized American husband, meanwhile, pointed out that the equation is not so simple: He doesn’t believe that Trump is good for Israel — just good for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“Which president is better for Israel,” he said, “depends on which Israel you support — Bibi’s nationalist-fundamentalist one, or the progressive, secular state” (which he sees himself part of).

And for many Jewish voters, it’s actually not clear what “good for Israel” might even mean anymore. Does it mean letting Netanyahu and his government do whatever they want, unfettered? Or does it mean restraining the worst impulses of a right-wing government and pushing Israel’s leaders to keep hopes for a two-state solution alive? 

I recently took three hours of my day to listen to Bari Weiss’ Honestly Podcast, featuring a debate between conservative Ben Shapiro and liberal Sam Harris. Shapiro was unabashedly team Trump, and Sam Harris a more tepid supporter for Kamala Harris (or “anyone but Trump”). They each thought their candidate was better for both Israel and America, resolving the dual loyalty question.

Come Election Day, many people won’t vote, will write in other candidates or will vote holding their noses. And I bet there are other “dual loyalists” trying to choose between their pocketbooks and conscience — or other competing loyalties.

And I? I would lose friends on both sides for saying who I am voting for — either getting called a self-hating Jew or a Nazi. (The irony is not lost on me.)

But my point is not who I’m voting for. It’s that I finally understand the undecideds. And I’m throwing my hat in with them.

During campaign stops ahead of Election Day, both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris promised Michigan voters that they would work to end Israel’s conflicts — with Trump pledging “peace in the Middle East” and Harris promising to “do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza.”

Some of Harris’ most outspoken pro-Palestinian critics, meanwhile, are urging voters to elect her despite her support for Israel.

The candidates’ pledges came as Harris and Trump were making a final push to win the swing state during the last days of their neck-and-neck campaign. Michigan has large populations of both Jewish and Arab voters, making it a hotspot for activism over the Israel-Hamas war as well as Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Trump has portrayed himself as a champion for Israel but has also sought to take advantage of Arab-American disaffection with Democrats over the Biden administration’s support for the war. On Friday, he visited a Lebanese restaurant in Dearborn, Michigan, an Arab-majority city of 100,000.

He vowed that, if he is elected, “You’re going to have peace in the Middle East, but not with these clowns that you have running the U.S. right now.”

Speaking to reporters among a friendly, standing-room-only crowd at the Great Commoner restaurant, Trump said, “You have people in the Middle East that aren’t doing their job and you have people in the U.S. that aren’t doing their job.”

Trump’s host at the event, restaurant owner Albert Abbas, said, “We look to a Trump presidency with hope, envisioning a time when peace flourishes, particularly in Lebanon and Palestine.”

He added, “I can’t stand in silence when Palestine is being erased. Please help us stop the bloodshed. No amount of money or power should be prioritized over human life.”

Also in Michigan, Harris said at a Sunday rally in East Lansing that she would work for peace in the region. She repeated her formulation for a solution to the conflict, which she has stuck to as she has also sought to appeal to both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian voters.

“This year has been difficult given the scale of death and destruction in Gaza and given the civilian casualties and displacement in Lebanon,” Harris said.

“It is devastating and as president I will do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza, to bring home the hostages, end the suffering in Gaza, ensure Israel is secure, ensure the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, freedom, security and self determination,” she added to applause. Harris also vowed to “continue to work on a diplomatic resolution in Lebanon.”

Jewish voters have traditionally supported Democratic presidential candidates by a wide margin, but anti-Israel activism, especially in progressive spaces such as college campuses, has given pause to some Jewish voters. Republicans view that as an opening to peel Jewish voters away from Democrats, while also taking steps to attract Arab-Americans.

Over the course of the year, some pro-Palestinian activist groups urged their followers to spurn Joe Biden and Kamala Harris due to their support for Israel, and Green Party candidate Jill Stein has also sought those votes by placing Gaza at the center of her campaign. In February, the “Uncommitted” campaign, which urged pro-Palestinian activists to refrain from supporting Biden in the Democratic primary as a pressure tactic, garnered 10% of the primary vote in Michigan.

Last month, Uncommitted emphasized that its supporters should not vote for Trump. But now some of the administration’s most prominent pro-Palestinian critics are explicitly urging people to vote for Harris. Georgia State Rep. Ruwa Romman, a Palestinian-American who was unsuccessfully put forward by pro-Palestinian activists to speak at the Democratic National Convention, made the case for Harris in an op-ed in Rolling Stone.

Romman, whose case for Harris was amplified by “Last Week Tonight” host John Oliver, acknowledged that many Arab and Muslim community members were torn about supporting either candidate. She announced that she will “swap her vote” — voting for Harris in the swing state of Georgia in exchange for a voter in a solidly blue state casting their ballot for a third-party in protest.

“The reality is a second Trump presidency would ensure continued disaster for our community and far too many other allied communities as well,” Romman wrote in the op-ed. “Vote for Vice President Harris not because she represents all of our ideals, but because there is a chance, even slim, that we can push her.”

Last week, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of Israel’s most vocal critics in the Senate, called on undecided voters to support Harris, despite misgivings about her position toward Israel. He said he frequently got questions about the war in Gaza.

“Some of you are saying, ‘How can I vote for Kamala Harris if she is supporting this terrible war?’ That is a very fair question,” he said in a video on X.

“We will have, in my view, a much better chance of changing U.S. policy with Kamala than with Trump, who is extremely close to [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and sees him as a like-minded, right-wing extremist ally,” he added.

The two most recent Democratic ex-presidents have also stumped for Harris in Michigan. President Bill Clinton gave a full-throated defense of Israel at a Harris rally, accusing Hamas of putting civilians in harm’s way and noting that many of Hamas’ Israeli victims supported a Palestinian state.

“I’m going to do everything I can to convince people that they cannot murder their way out of this, either side,” he said. “But when I read that people in Michigan are thinking of not voting because they’re mad at the Biden administration for honoring its historic obligation to try to keep Israel from being destroyed, I think that’s a mistake.”

Former President Barack Obama, meanwhile, campaigning for Harris, attacked Trump for his past policies and associations with far-right figures.

“Maybe you’re Muslim-American or Jewish-American and you are heartbroken and furious about the ongoing bloodshed in the Middle East and worried about the rise of antisemitism,” Obama said in Milwaukee on Sunday.  “Why would you place your faith in somebody who instituted a so-called Muslim ban, who sat down for pleasantries with Holocaust deniers, who said that there were ‘very fine people’ on both sides of a white supremacist rally?”

This article was produced as part of JTA’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around the world to report on issues that affect their lives.

Even though they’re too young to vote, Shayne Cytrynbaum and Lucy Targum are running campaigns to get others to the polling booths.

Targum, 16, a junior at Concord Academy in Concord, Massachusetts, says her interest in community service comes from her Judaism. “The values that are really important to me about Judaism, like repairing the world, are really a driving force behind my interest in social justice,” she said.

While Targum and Cytrynbaum are just small parts of the larger get-out-the-vote movement, they see themselves as essential players in democracy. By organizing letter-writing events and recruiting poll workers, they hope to set an example for youth who may feel powerless.

A number of Jewish organizations have been running nonpartisan get-out-the-vote campaigns this year, including the National Council of Jewish Women, the Jewish Future Alliance and the Jewish Electorate Institute. The Jewish Council for Public Affairs sponsors “The Chutzpah to Vote,” an initiative to get Jews and their allies to the polls.

“We’re living at a moment when so much is at stake: the safety and rights of countless communities, including Jews, the future of our planet, and democracy itself,” said Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the JCPA. “Jewish teens, and all teens, are critical to the democratic process even if they’re not yet able to vote themselves.”

Along with her classmate Caroline Espinosa, Targum organized her first letter-writing event for her high school in mid-August. She partnered with Vote Forward, a non-profit organization that focuses on writing nonpartisan, handwritten letters to reach voters in swing states where former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are head to head in the polls.

Since then, Targum has organized four more similar events, sending 400 letters to Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

“I wanted to do something and this was something that I could do,” she said. “I can’t vote in November, but I can write letters and I can encourage other people to vote.”

Cytrynbaum, 17, a senior at Golda Och Academy in West Orange, New Jersey, says the Jewish value of tikkun olam, or repairing the world, got him interested in the climate crisis, which led him to the get-out-the-vote movement. “Any social justice issue you care about is going to be impacted by how much people get out to vote,” he said. 

Cytrynbaum said the Jewish community has a long history as a relatively powerless minority, and flourished in pluralistic, democratic societies. “If you want to stay alive as a community and stay united, we need to respect diverse opinions,” said Cytrynbaum, who is a policy co-director with Jewish Youth Climate Movement.

This September, the Jewish Youth Climate Movement announced its 2024 election drive, “Shema Koleinu,” Hebrew for “hear our voices.” The drive mobilizes members to serve as poll workers, organize voter registration drives, call voters to get out the vote, and educate voters. 

Cytrynbaum has been focusing on voter education and poll work in the week leading up to election day.

While Cytrynbaum was too young to work the polls in the 2020 election, he made a promise to himself that once he turned 16, the minimum age in New Jersey, he would sign up. Now 17, he’s recruited 14 kids to work at the polls, up from eight last year. And, within the Jewish Youth Climate Movement, he has recruited 38 people to do poll workers.

“Our democracy is stronger when everyone votes,” Targum said, “and when more people make their voice heard.”

WASHINGTON — The presidential race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is close and consequential, with the candidates offering two vastly different ideas of America — and that contest has gotten the lion’s share of Americans’ attention.

Below the top of the ballot, voters will decide on Tuesday in around 470 races for the House of Representatives and the Senate — where both parties have a chance of gaining, or retaining, control. There are also 11 gubernatorial races on the ballot. And a number of the outcomes may hinge on the Jewish vote, whether because of debates over Israel or because the district in question has a large population of Jewish voters.

Here’s a quick glance at six races where Jewish issues have come into play.

New York 17th Congressional District: Mike Lawler vs. Mondaire Jones

Control of the House may run through several swing districts in New York; Democrats have so far flipped one, the 3rd, where Tom Suozzi regained his old seat after the House expelled fabulist George Santos. Both parties have turned their focus to the 17th, covering an area to the north and west of New York City, where Republican Rep. Mike Lawler beat a Democratic incumbent in 2022. Now, Lawler is facing former Democratic Rep. Mondaire Jones.

The district is home to Rockland County, which has a large haredi Orthodox population, many of whose residents vote based on the endorsements of leading rabbis.

Both candidates have vied for those endorsements, visiting local Hasidic leaders alongside senior members of their own parties. Lawler visited the Hasidic village of New Square with House Speaker Mike Johnson, and Jones recently followed suit with New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader.

Lawler, according to coverage of the race in The New York Times, has been “ubiquitous” in visiting Hasidic voters. “I’ve seen Lawler more times than I’ve seen my rabbi,” one local public relations executive quipped.

Jewish Insider reported that Lawler is poised to nab the New Square endorsement. (A similar dynamic exists in the neighboring 18th district, where Democrat Pat Ryan appears to be safe in part due to his cultivation of haredi voters.)

Both candidates have also touted their support for Israel — and their opposition to its critics. Lawler has been a leader on pro-Israel issues, often working with pro-Israel Jewish Democrats; he recently introduced legislation that would penalize universities for allowing antisemitism to flourish. Jones, meanwhile, was once floated as a potential member of the Squad, the progressive group of lawmakers who are critical of Israel, but pivoted once the moderate Democrat he hoped to unseat decided not to run again. This year, he denounced Squad member Jamaal Bowman’s criticism of Israel and endorsed Bowman’s successful challenger.

Jones’ pivot didn’t stop Lawler, in a debate last month, from lambasting Jones for supporting a Palestinian state. Jones, in turn, has aired an ad blasting Lawler for defending Trump after Trump said Jewish voters would be to blame if he lost the election.

Virginia’s 7th Congressional District: Eugene Vindman vs. Derrick Anderson

Virginia’s 7th Congressional District, stretching from Washington’s outer suburbs south to Richmond, is a true swing district. Voters there have supported both Republicans and Democrats, including Rep. Abigail Spenberger, a moderate who is running for governor.

Both of the candidates to replace her are military veterans, one Jewish and with a higher profile than the other.

Democrat Eugene Vindman and his brother Alexander were working in the White House in 2019 when they played roles in Donald Trump’s first impeachment. Alexander, a Ukraine specialist, flagged a call to officials in which Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky to dig up dirt on Biden. Among the officials Alexander notified was his brother Eugene, an ethics specialist in the White House.

Trump sacked the twins after the impeachment, elevating into national prominence their story of coming to the United States as toddlers from the Soviet Union, fleeing persecution of Jews and seeking freedom. In his congressional testimony during the trial, Alexander Vindman assured his father that here in the United States, one was free to expose wrongdoing by the president.

Republican Derrick Anderson has cast Eugene Vindman as being on a “revenge” tour against Trump. Vindman has not focused his campaign on his role in Trump’s impeachment, though he recently began a fundraising email, “It’s been 5 years since Trump made the corrupt phone call that forever altered the lives of me and my twin brother.” Another feature of the campaign: Anderson, who is not married, posed for publicity shots with a family who wasn’t his, and Vindman has not let voters forget it, running an ad with an Anderson double tossing a frisbee at a cardboard cutout daughter.

Michigan Senate: Elissa Slotkin vs. Mike Rogers

Rep. Elissa Slotkin, a Jewish Democrat, is fighting hard to keep this swing state Senate seat blue, running to replace longtime Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow, who is retiring.

The race was for weeks a tossup, but Slotkin solidified as a likely favorite in the waning days of the campaign.

When Slotkin declared her candidacy last year, she seemed like a natural choice: She’s a defense hawk, with a resume that includes years in the CIA and the Department of Defense. Stretches from Detroit’s suburbs to East Lansing, her district encompasses a lot of Republican patches, but she has held it since 2018. 

In early polls, she handily led her Republican challenger, former Rep. Mike Rogers, who worked in law enforcement and as a CNN commentator. But the race has tightened in part because of Arab- and Muslim-American disaffection from the Democratic Party because of President Joe Biden’s support for Israel. Michigan has a large population of Arab and Muslim voters and has been a center of pro-Palestinian political organizing.

A pro-Trump political action committee with ties to billionaire Elon Musk has run ads highlighting Slotkin’s Jewish identity and support for Israel in Arab-American areas.

Since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war last year, Slotkin has sought to walk a tightrope, taking meetings with leaders of both communities in her state. And when a controversy last month pitted Michigan Palestinian-American Rep. Rashida Tlaib against Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, Slotkin was the only Congress member whose name appeared on two letters: one condemning bigotry against Nessel and the other condemning bigotry against Tlaib.

North Carolina governor: Mark Robinson vs. Josh Stein

Of the seven swing states where the Trump and Harris campaigns have spent scads of money and time in recent weeks, North Carolina is seen as among the likeliest to go red, with Trump consistently enjoying a small lead in the polls.

The state’s Republican nominee for governor, Mark Robinson, isn’t faring as well. Robinson, the state’s lieutenant governor, has been mired in a succession of embarrassing revelations about past statements, including invoking antisemitic stereotypes about Jews and money, and writing in an online forum that he is a “Black NAZI.”

Those scandals have led the race to look like a blowout win for the Democratic nominee, Attorney General Josh Stein, who is Jewish. Stein is a centrist Democrat, and the son of leading civil rights attorney Adam Stein. He previously worked as a lawyer and state senator.

California Senate: Adam Schiff vs. Steve Garvey

Rep. Adam Schiff, a Jewish Democrat, is a shoo-in to replace the late Dianne Feinstein, the Jewish Democrat who died in office a year ago.  (The incumbent Sen. Laphonza Butler, named by Gov. Gavin Newsom to fill out Feinstein’s term, is not running.) He is well ahead of his Republican rival, former baseball star Steve Garvey, in the polls in the deep blue state.

Schiff, in many respects, is a conventional old-school Jewish Democrat: He’s a security hawk who, like Feinstein, earned his congressional chops in the Intelligence Committee. He is also pro-Israel and has the endorsement of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s affiliated political action committee.

What makes Schiff stand out on the national stage is how much Trump despises him for taking leading roles in the president’s two impeachments. Later, Schiff was in the spotlight for his work on the committee to investigate the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, pro-Trump riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Trump dubbed Schiff “Shifty Schiff,” a moniker that was seen by some as antisemitic. The former president now calls Schiff an “enemy from within” and has threatened to jail him along with the other members of the Jan. 6 Committee. Responding to the threat, Schiff told a local California outlet, “We’re taking this seriously, because we have to.”

Should both of them win their races, that presages a difficult relationship, to say the least.

Arizona House and Senate: Paul Gosar, Abraham Hamadeh, Kari Lake, Ruben Gallego

Arizona is notable for its preponderance of far-right Republican House members. Five of the state’s six Republicans (out of nine total representatives) have peddled falsehoods about the 2020 election.

At least two GOP candidates in this cycle, U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar in the 9th and Abraham Hamadeh in the 8th, have been dogged by accusations of antisemitic statements or associations with antisemites.

In 2008, when he was a teenager, Hamadeh wrote “If you think Jews aren’t big in america (2%) how come 56% of them are CEO’S,” in a post on an online forum. Gosar was among the speakers at a 2022 conference run by Nick Fuentes, a prominent white nationalist and Holocaust denier.

Two years ago, four like-minded far-right Republicans — whose candidacies all disquieted local Jews — lost elections in the state, among them Hamadeh and Kari Lake, a former newscaster who then ran for governor (and who never conceded despite her loss). Lake is now running against Rep. Ruben Gallego.

Lake, who once exchanged pleasantries online with a Nazi sympathizer with whom she had posed for a photo, and who endorsed (and then withdrew her endorsement) of a virulently antisemitic Oklahoma State House candidate, is trailing Gallego.

Despite her far-right and insurgent bona fides, Lake has the endorsement of the Republican Jewish Coalition, which conventionally favors traditional Republicans and has worked to defeat Republicans with reputations for antisemitism or opposing Israel.

Nevada Senate: Jacky Rosen vs. Sam Brown

Harry Reid, the former Senate Majority leader, ruled Democratic politics in his home state with an iron hand.

There was puzzlement when he selected Jacky Rosen, a software developer with no political record except the presidency of her synagogue, to run for the U.S. House in 2016 in a competitive race in suburban Las Vegas — but the state party fell into line, and Rosen won the primary and then the race. (Maybe Reid’s choice should not have been such a surprise: His wife was born Jewish and he had a longstanding and deep affection for Israel.)

Less than two years later, with her freshman term barely under her belt, Reid tapped Rosen to run for Senate. Reid had retired but still exercised considerable influence. Once again, Rosen validated Reid’s pick when she won the purple state. (She likes to say it was harder leading a synagogue than working in national politics.)

Rosen has become a leading figure in combating antisemitism on Capitol Hill, setting up a Senate task force on the issue with Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Lankford. She is a lead cosponsor of the Countering Antisemitism Act, which would create a coordinator to combat antisemitism domestically. Last year, she faced death threats in the wake of the launch of the Israel-Hamas war.

She has also earned a derisive Trump nickname, “Wacky Jacky.” 

Reid died in 2021, but his legacy looks to extend beyond the grave: Nevada is must-win if Democrats hope to keep the Senate, and for a while the race was touch-and-go for Rosen. In the final days of the campaign, however, polls show her pulling ahead of Republican challenger Sam Brown, a businessman and decorated war veteran.

 

Iran has executed a 20-year-old Jewish man who killed a man in a 2022 fight after the victim’s family refused to negotiate an alternative punishment.

Arvin Ghahremani, 20, had been scheduled to be executed in May but received a stay after Jewish and human rights groups around the world called attention to his case.

Ghahremani was arrested more than two years ago on charges that he had killed a man with whom he had a financial dispute. In a report published Monday in Mizan Online, an Iranian news agency, the prosecutor for the city of Kermanshah, where Ghahremani lived, offered details about the killing, saying that the victim had been stabbed five times, including in his back and neck.

The prosecutor said Ghahremani had confessed to the crime and that the execution had been carried out in compliance with Iranian law after the victim’s family had twice declined referrals to the Dispute Resolution Council, a government body through which citizens can negotiate disputes outside of the formal justice system.

Iran’s penal code is based in part on Islamic Sharia law, which requires qisas, or retaliation in kind, for certain crimes but allows blood money to the family of the deceased as an acceptable recompense in cases of manslaughter. But according to statements spread on Telegram in May by Iranian Jewish leaders, the victim’s family repeatedly refused offers of payment, known as diyat, and attempts by the community to mediate the issue with Islamic leaders were unsuccessful.

The May statement noted that the Jewish community had offered to fund a school or mosque named after the deceased, but the offer was not accepted.

The nonprofit Iran Human Rights, which operates out of Norway, said Ghahremani had been hanged at Kermanshah’s central prison. The group tied Ghahremani’s execution to Iran’s explosive conflict with Israel, which has included a recent volley of strikes and a report Sunday that Iranian leaders are readying a “strong and complex” attack in response to Israel’s recent bombing of Iranian military facilities.

“In the midst of the threats of war with Israel, the Islamic Republic executed Arvin Ghahremani, an Iranian-Jewish citizen, today,” said the group’s director, Mahmood Amiri-Moghadam, in a statement. “Like many of those sentenced to qisas, Arvin’s case and the judicial process had significant flaws. However, in addition to this, Arvin was a Jew, and the institutionalized anti-Semitism in the Islamic Republic undoubtedly played a crucial role in the implementation of his sentence.”

Ghahremani was among the estimated 8,500 Jews who still live in Iran, following an exodus of most of Iran’s once-major Jewish population after the 1979 revolution that put Islamic leaders in charge.

While Iranian Jews must be cautious about their contact with the Persian Jewish diaspora, the Kermanshah Jewish community drew attention to Ghahremani’s case by circulating messages on WhatsApp. Many used his Hebrew name, Arvin Netanel Ben Siona. One included a desperate voice note from his mother. “I am asking everyone to help pray,” Sonia Saadati said in a tear-filled message in Farsi.

Donald Trump’s fans and critics alike have compared him to some of history’s most famous rulers: Cyrus the Great, Adolf Hitler, King David and more. 

But on the eve of the election, a celebrity pastor named Jonathan Cahn wants his evangelical followers to think of the Republican candidate as a present-day manifestation of a far more obscure leader: the biblical king Jehu, who vanquished the morally corrupt house of Ahab to become the 10th ruler of the Kingdom of Israel. 

“President Trump, you were born into the world to be a trumpet of God, a vessel of the Lord in the hands of God. God called you to walk according to the template; He called you according to the template of Jehu, the warrior king,” Cahn told the hundreds of Christian leaders who gathered last week for the National Faith Summit outside Atlanta. He also shared a clip of his prophecy about Trump on his YouTube channel, which has more than a million followers. 

What Cahn means — and why at least one scholar of the Christian right says he is worried — requires some background. Cahn, 65, is the son of a Holocaust refugee and grew up in a Jewish household in New Jersey. When he was 20, he says he had a personal revelation that led him to Jesus, and he eventually became the head of a Messianic congregation, blending Jewish rituals with Christian worship and a focus on doomsday prophecies. 

Cahn helped popularize the interpretation of 9/11 as an apocalyptic biblical allegory. In his telling, the terrorist attacks were akin to God’s rebuke of the biblical nation of Israel, and they happened because God wanted the United States to revert to a time before legalized abortion and gay rights when religion held a more central place in society — or else. His book on the topic, “The Harbinger,” came out in 2012 and spent months on The New York Times bestseller list. 

Cahn continued to release commercially successful books, and combined with his social media activity, he established a growing and enthusiastic audience for his prophetic warnings. 

Then Trump came along. During Trump’s first term, many evangelical Christian supporters explained his lack of religiosity by comparing him to Cyrus, the pagan ruler of ancient Persia, who served as God’s agent by, according to the Bible, helping the Israelites return home from exile. In 2018, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, amid an effort to build stronger ties with the evangelical movement, praised Trump as a modern-day Cyrus. 

But Cahn had spun a different prophetic narrative about the new American president. He released a book called “The Paradigm” a few months after the 2016 election, which cast Trump as Jehu, the biblical king who took control of and restored the Kingdom of Israel, whose territory largely overlapped with parts of present-day Israel and Lebanon. Just as Jehu killed the idol-worshippers who had taken over the kingdom, Trump would “drain the swamp” of Washington and “make America great again.” In this contemporary rendition, Hillary and Bill Clinton play the role of Ahab and Jezebel, the evil rulers who had led the kingdom astray. Jezebel is also seen as wicked in the Jewish tradition, but she is far more prominent as a symbol in evangelical discourse today, representing feminism, sexual promiscuity, and moral decay. 

In the 2024 election, Biden’s replacement with Harris as the Democratic candidate challenging Trump allowed the template of Jehu-versus-Jezebel to get updated and become salient again. 

Two weeks before Cahn spoke at the National Faith Summit, an ally of his named Ché Ahn evoked the comparison at another mass religious event. Ahn heads Harvest Rock Church in Pasadena, California, as well as a network of thousands of ministries all over the world. He is a leader of a spiritual movement known as New Apostolic Reformation, which aims for Christians to dominate society and government. Major Republican figures like Mike Pompeo, Sarah Palin, and Josh Hawley have visited Ahn’s church, reflecting the growing influence of Christian nationalism on the Republican party.  

On Oct. 12, Yom Kippur, Ahn appeared at the “Million Women March” event on the National Mall, speaking before a crowd of tens of thousands with many wearing prayer shawls or blowing shofars — traditionally Jewish symbols highlighting the movement’s overlap with Messianic Judaism. 

“Jehu will cast down Jezebel,” Ahn said, and prophesized a victory by Trump over Harris.

The social media user who brought the recent Jehu comparisons to wider notice through posts on X is Matthew Taylor, a scholar of the Christian right at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, & Jewish Studies, a Baltimore-based Interfaith research and advocacy group, dedicated to “[dismantling] religious bias and bigotry.”

“Since Harris became the candidate this summer, we’ve seen the Jehu image really rise to the surface much more,” Taylor said in an interview. “This is the story [Cahn and Ahn] want running through their followers’ heads, their lens for interpreting the election and its aftermath.”

In the grim biblical story, recounted in the book of II Kings, as Jehu ascends the throne, he kills Jezebel by ordering her thrown out of a palace window, after which he stomps on her body, which is then eaten by dogs. The new warrior king then goes on a killing spree, slaying the families of Ahab and Jezebel and other Baal-worshiping pagans who had despoiled the kingdom.

“Jehu came to the capital city with an agenda to drain the swamp,” Cahn said in his speech, addressing Trump, who also spoke at the National Faith Summit. “Jehu formed an alliance with the religious conservatives of the land. So, it was your destiny to do the same. Jehu overturned the cult of Baal by which children were sacrificed. So, God chose you to overturn America’s cult of Baal, Roe vs. Wade.”

Cahn and Ahn did not respond to a request to their ministries from JTA to discuss the theology of their recent statements. 

Neither pastor elaborated on the analogy they were drawing and neither made an explicit call for violence. But Trump has generated widespread concern by speaking of retribution, calling his political opponents “the enemy from within,” and talking about using the military against political enemies if he wins. 

Given the riots that took place at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 after Trump challenged the election results, and his ongoing promotion of electron fraud narratives, independent experts and government agencies are warning of increased political violence. Many Jewish leaders are particularly concerned because Trump recently blamed Jews for his potential defeat.

Taylor says the pastors’ followers would be familiar with the biblical story of Jehu and he believes that they are priming their audience to accept violence during the election or afterward.

In a post on X, formerly Twitter, that surfaced the Jehu prophecies, Taylor voiced his alarm. 

“If Trump wins in this election, the Jehu ‘template’ tells Trump’s Christian supporters: some real-world violence may be needed to purge America of her demons,” Taylor wrote. “If Trump loses this election, particularly to Kamala Harris their ‘Jezebel,’ the Jehu template prescribes vengeance.”