A Jewish-American dream

According to recent polls of American Jews, organised by GBAO Strategies and by the Jewish Electorate Institute, between 55 and 60 per cent oppose United States’ military action against Iran. In one poll, 77 per cent expressed their belief that President Donald Trump does not have a plan for the conduct of the war. It marks a considerable shift away from polling indicating more widespread American Jewish support for the war at its inception. Notably, the latest polls have coincided with ongoing demonstrations in Tel Aviv against the war, criticism of Netanyahu by centrist Israeli politicians, and a growing fatigue among Israelis that there is no end in sight to the conflict.

While a majority of American Jews believe that the ayatollahs’ regime does indeed pose an ongoing threat to the existence of Israel, it is clear that any reservations about opposing Trump’s war have gradually fallen away. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chose to exploit Trump’s changing and changeable mindset in pursuit of Israel’s national interests. Yet his association with the Trump administration may now be becoming less of an asset and more of a liability. At its heart, the situation also reflects an inner conflict felt by many American Jews – between an implicit support for Israel against a reactionary, clerical, oppressive regime on the one hand; and on the other, their self-definition as liberals who have consistently opposed the Netanyahu government and voted against Trump in huge numbers in three successive elections.

Why, then, are American Jews an example of exceptionalism in American politics? And why are Jews in Trump’s second administration unrepresentative – an exception to exceptionalism?

In order to answer these questions, it is necessary to understand the stifling and oppressive conditions many of their ancestors faced under the yoke of the Russian Empire. In 2026, there are just over seven million Jews living in the United States. Many are the descendants of the two million Jews who left the Tsarist Empire between 1881 and 1914 and emigrated to the United States to escape pogroms, persecution and discrimination. For them, the United States was not simply ‘the land of the free’, but the ‘goldene medina’ – the ‘golden state’ in Yiddish – literally the Eldorado of their dreams and aspirations.

In March 1881, Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by a revolutionary socialist group called Narodnaya Volya (The People’s Will) in St Petersburg. His son and successor, Alexander III, blamed the Jews for the killing – and ignited a spate of pogroms in the Russian Empire. This led to a mass emigration of Jews to the United States, Europe and Ottoman Palestine.

The only Jew within the organising group that carried out the assassination was Gesia Gelfman. She was pregnant at the time and had played a minor role in maintaining a safe house for the conspirators. She was sentenced to death and informed that her execution would only take place some 40 days after giving birth. In the end, the execution never went ahead: Gesia cheated the hangman, dying of peritonitis in the aftermath of childbirth.

Alexander II was known as the ‘Tsar-Liberator’ after he abolished serfdom in 1861. Yet the Jews in the 19th-century Russian Empire were forced to reside in a ghetto area, known as the ‘Pale of Settlement’, which stretched across parts of Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Bessarabia and Russia itself. Alexander allowed some Jews to leave the area and to pursue professional careers in metropolitan locations, but they were still viewed as undesirables and kept at a distance, shunned as Christ-killers and seen as rivals in any business.

Many Jews had only joined revolutionary groups in the 1870s as a means to escape the stifling religiosity of the ghetto. Gelfman herself had fled the parental home on the eve of her wedding in order to escape an arranged marriage.

Almost three million Jews lived in the Pale of Settlement in 1881, of whom 80 per cent lived in shtetlekh – small towns and villages. The reaction to the killing of the Tsar was a public promotion of persecution. Gesia Gelfman was promoted as a Jewish Svengali, a puppeteer pulling the strings behind the scenes amid an unsaid sentiment that all Jews were subversives. The outburst of killings in 1881 built on a pattern of pogroms in Russia in 1821, 1849, 1859 and 1871.

The first pogrom took place in Elisavetgrad in mid-April 1881 and spread in the summer to both cities, such as Kyiv, and to peasant villages in the countryside. On Christmas Day, a pogrom commenced in Warsaw as worshippers left the Church of the Holy Cross. It targeted the impoverished inhabitants of the Jewish Quarter and lasted three days, with the result that 2,000 families suffered death, destruction and injury at the hands of the pogromshchiki.

The Jewish revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg, bore witness to all this. She told Karl Kautsky, the Marxist theorist, in 1917 that ‘the glaring lights, the ear-splitting noise, the mass of people pushing against me’ had followed her throughout her life.

Following the wave of pogroms, the Tsarist government passed the May Laws in 1882. These forbade Jews from settling ‘outside towns and boroughs’ or doing business on Sundays and Christian holidays. It also made it illegal to issue power of attorney to Jews in real estate transactions. A numerus clausus was instituted, which legalised a strict quota system for Jewish students attending university. In Moscow and St Petersburg, only three per cent could gain access to higher education. Meanwhile, Jewish physicians in the armed forces could not exceed five per cent of the total.

Many of those members of the Jewish intelligentsia who had marginalised their identity and embraced the cause of revolution in Russia were shocked that their comrades had remained silent in the face of such widespread violence against Jewish communities. The writers Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev said nothing. The greater good of overthrowing the Tsarist regime was best served, it was argued, by not antagonising the masses through condemnation.

The Jewish student, Chaim Hisin committed to his diary:

The recent pogroms have violently awakened the complacent Jews from their sweet slumbers. Until now, I was uninterested in my origin. I saw myself as a faithful son of Russia which was to me my raison d’être and the very air that I breathed… I wanted to devote my whole strength to the good of my homeland, and happily do my duty. Suddenly they come and show us the door and openly declare that ‘We are free!’.

If some Jewish revolutionaries had once thought the Jewish Question was unimportant, they now returned to a different form of Jewishness – one which was national and not religious. Progressives had failed to help the Jews in their hour of need. The task of the Jews, it was argued, was not to sacrifice themselves on the altar of revolution or to disappear through assimilation. Instead, a sense of ‘ourselves alone’ prevailed – a belief in auto-emancipation and not emancipation by others.

In an article of 1883 entitled ‘The Future of Our People’, Moses Leib Lilienblum described the sense of isolation and abandonment that many Russian Jews keenly felt:

The opponents of nationalism see us as uncompromising nationalists, with a nationalist God and a nationalist Torah; the nationalists see us as cosmopolitans, whose homeland is wherever we happen to be well off. Religious gentiles say that we are devoid of any faith, and the freethinkers among them say that we are orthodox and believe in all kinds of nonsense; the liberals say we are conservative and the conservatives call us liberal. Some bureaucrats and writers see us as the root of anarchy, insurrection and revolt, and the anarchists say we are capitalists, the bearers of the biblical civilisation, which is, in their view, based on slavery and parasitism. Officialdom accuses us of circumventing the laws of the land – that is, of course, the laws directed specifically against us. Even our merits are turned into shortcomings: ‘Few Jews are murderers’, they say, ‘because Jews are cowards’. This, however, does not prevent them from accusing us of murdering Christian children.

Most of the new arrivals in the United States found life hard and arduous. Even if, it was a land of opportunity, there was still antisemitism. Many clung to the ways of the Old World to shield themselves from discrimination. Their sons and daughters were different. Whereas the first Jewish immigrants retained memories of their cultural background, the second generation rushed to embrace Americanisation and to fade into the host society. The Yiddish-speaking parents of the Warner Brothers fled from Poland. The family of Israel Beilin – aka Irving Berlin – left Belarus to escape the pogromshchiki. Bernie Schwartz morphed into the film actor, Tony Curtis, to escape the antisemitism of his youth. He had been placed in an orphanage, aged eight, because his parents could not afford to feed him.

These Jews desperately wanted to leave the past far behind and to be accepted as bone fide Americans. US Jews ironically composed some of the best-known Christmas songs. Berlin famously composed ‘White Christmas’. Robert May wrote ‘Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer’, an ugly duckling tale that chimed very well with the notion of the American Jew as an outsider. In science, Jonas Salk developed the first vaccine against polio, while Albert Einstein found refuge from Nazism at Princeton.

The Jewish immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe brought with them a radicalism that cemented the first socialist, anarchist, communist and trades union groups in the United States. They also brought Zionism. Rosa Sonneschein from St Louis, Missouri, attended the first Zionist Congresses. Divorced and rebellious, she not only advocated women’s rights but also the Zionist answer to the Jewish Question.

The Jewish immigrants to the United States also carried with them the experience of two millennia of persecution for being different. This sense of non-conformity, often based on the tenets of universalism within Judaism, coloured the actions of a disproportionate number of Jews throughout the 20th-century. It defined them as dissidents in the Soviet Union, activists in apartheid South Africa, socialist-Zionists in Palestine, civil rights workers in the United States in the 1960s – and characterised the vast vote of US Jews against Donald Trump in 2024.

At the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, one of the few American attendees, Adam Rosenberg, commented that ‘we American Jews are favoured by the fact that there exist no “nations” in America but rather a conglomeration of different races’.

This differentiated American Jews from other Jewish communities in Europe and elsewhere. Jews were founders of the United States and not simply a tolerated minority. After all, Colonel Mordecai Sheftall, the son of English immigrants, had fought with George Washington and the American revolutionaries in the War of Independence. Antisemitism, however, had not suddenly disappeared in this new found land. The Ku Klux Klan accused Jews of undermining ‘American values’, despite a disproportionate number of Jews serving in the US armed forces during the First World War. In 1913, Leo Frank, erroneously accused of killing a 13-year-old Christian girl, was taken from his cell in Marietta, Georgia – and lynched by a mob which demanded his blood amid antisemitic taunts.

David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, a native of Płońsk in Poland and one of the leaders of Poale Zion, a socialist-Zionist party, was deported from Palestine by the Ottoman Turks in 1915 – and sailed on the Greek ship, the Patris, for New York. The American branch of Poale Zion was essentially an offshoot of the Russian one. Ben-Gurion gave lectures – mainly in Yiddish – to young people around the United States.

In Nashville, however, he was shocked to see segregation in the tramcar that he was riding in. In the front, there was the sign for ‘whites’; at the back, the one for ‘coloureds’. He later confided to his diary that he was troubled that there were actually some Jews who agreed with this.

Ben-Gurion later joined the Jewish Legion and returned to Palestine to fight the Turks. In May 1948, he read Israel’s Declaration of Independence and proclaimed the existence of a Hebrew Republic in the Land of Israel. Just 11 minutes later, the United States became the first country to recognise the new state.

The parallel was drawn between the American revolutionaries of 1776 and the Israelis of 1948 in that they had fought the same enemy, the British, to secure independence. On the other hand, American Jewish identification with Israel came after the shared awareness of the horrors of the Holocaust. By the early 1950s, the last years of Stalin were pervaded by a virulent state-sponsored antisemitism, an array of show trials of Jewish Communists and persistent rumours of a mass deportation of Soviet Jews to Central Asia.

While sympathy for Communism was no longer reflected through Shostakovitch’s ‘the Dawn of Humanity’ but more by Richard Crossman’s ‘the God that failed’, the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as Soviet spies in New York in March 1951 shocked many US Jews. Despite pleas from Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertolt Brecht, Frida Kahlo and many others, President Truman refused to pardon the Rosenbergs. Julius Rosenberg was sent with his innocent wife, Ethel, to the electric chair in June 1953. A prosecutor in this drama was Roy Cohn, a well-known political influencer and notorious manipulator, who was close to Senator Joseph McCarthy and later to President Richard Nixon. He also became a role model for the young Donald Trump.

American Jews had found a welcome home in the Democratic party. In 1932, they flocked to support President Roosevelt’s New Deal. They eventually broke through the wall erected by the Tammany Hall conservatives in the Democratic Party to become active participants. In 1940, a Gallup poll indicated that 87 per cent of the Jewish vote went to President Roosevelt, while Catholics were listed at 73 per cent and Protestants at 45 per cent.

In 1944, 90 per cent of American Jews voted for Roosevelt against Dewey. In 1960, 83 per cent voted for Kennedy and not for Nixon. Between 1933 and 1968, the Democrats were occupants of the White House with the notable exception of the Eisenhower years.

In more recent times, the Jewish vote has oscillated around 70 per cent for the Democratic candidates, including Clinton, Obama, Biden and Kamala Harris in 2024. By contrast, the ascent of Donald Trump to the presidency was met with a wave of disdain by many American Jews. There was a 71 per cent vote against him in 2016, which rose to 77 per cent in 2020. Yet Trump was promoted as ‘the most pro-Israel ever’. Why, then, did the largest Jewish community in the world vote against him in such great numbers?

Given that his daughter had converted to Judaism when she married Jared Kushner, Trump disparaged Jews not because he is antisemitic but because he is anti-liberal. He was perplexed and often irritated by the stand of Jewish organisations, and simply could not understand the liberalism of American Jews. In his personal and professional circles, Trump knew an exceedingly small coterie of Jewish businessmen, real estate agents and lawyers who had crossed the political Rubicon and become Republicans. He wrongly assumed that they were representative of the American Jewish community as a whole.

Yet American Jews understood – whether they were well-to-do or not – that they were a community of immigrants, emerging from a long history of persecution. The Trump administration’s recent search for scapegoats for societal failures, reflected by the recent killings by ICE officers in Minneapolis, was roundly condemned. In response, the White House wasted little time in acerbically attacking the city’s Jewish mayor, Jacob Frey, for his repeated opposition to the ICE presence on the streets on Minneapolis. The desire to ignore the rule of law and the bypassing of Congress concerned many Jews with an understanding of recent history. Indeed, Trump’s slogan, ‘America First!’, had been used by racist groups in the 1930s, which were not exactly known for their love of Jews.

Trump was supported by a plethora of evangelical Christian organisations. They understood Israel solely in religious terms. Indeed, 82 per cent of white evangelicals believed that God had granted Israel to the Jewish people. For Jews, given that committed socialists – many of whom were secular and atheistic – had actually established the State of Israel, the figure fell to 40 per cent, indicating a more informed understanding of Israeli history.

For both evangelical Christians and ultra-orthodox Jews, Trump symbolised the need for a saviour and a strongman who would get things done, no matter what constraints a liberal elite had placed on him. He was seen as God’s agent, a vessel for evangelical interests. The Berkeley academic, Arlie Russell Hochschild, described Trump’s status among his most ardent evangelical supporters as being akin to a ‘secular version of the Rapture’, alike in its intensity to a second coming of Jesus Christ. For his part, Trump has uncannily appropriated the iconography of belief – images of a long-awaited judgment soon to come, when merciless vengeance will be wreaked on evil-doers, wrongs will be righted and untold blessings delivered to the deserving. This is nothing less than a secular version of the Rapture.

In December 2017, the US Embassy was moved to Jerusalem, recognised by the Trump administration as the capital of Israel. In August 2020 in Wisconsin, Trump acknowledged that this move had been carried out ‘for the evangelicals’. In 2022, Trump lauded those ‘wonderful Evangelicals (who) are far more appreciative of (Trump’s record on Israel) than the people of the Jewish faith, especially those living in the US’.

In July 2024, following an assassination attempt, Trump invoked the Almighty while on the campaign trail and said that he had been saved by God in order to make America great again. Finally, at the Inauguration in January 2025, Franklin Graham of Samaritan’s Purse described Vice-President JD Vance as an Aaron to Trump’s Moses.

American Jews in 2026 therefore find themselves caught between Trump’s triumphalism and a widespread lack of knowledge about the complexity of the tortuous Israel-Palestine conflict among the general public. The lack of nuance has been a casualty of international media coverage of the Gaza war. The Pew Research Center reported in March 2025 that 53 per cent of Americans held a negative view of Israel, while the negative opinion held by Democrats had increased to 69 per cent. Older voters, who had borne witness to the conflict over decades, were less critical than younger generations, which often rely on abbreviated information and social media in forming their opinions.

Last year, a number of mainstream US Jewish organisations issued a statement condemning Netanyahu’s political allies. It included the Jewish Federations of North America, the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League. It said:

We are deeply troubled by statements from Israeli government ministers and activists advocating for the emigration or ‘population thinning’ of Palestinians in Gaza. These views reflect an inhumane approach, tarnish Israel’s reputation, and are fundamentally immoral.

While issuing statements condemning the government of Israel, Jewish organisations have defended Israel. This reflected the nuanced opinion of many Jewish communities around the world. Moreover, Jewish organisations have simultaneously had to deal with antisemitism on both the Left and the Right, which has increased exponentially since the start of the Gaza conflict.

Above all, however, it was this sharp turn to home-grown populism in the US that astounded and depressed many American Jews. Jewish history indicated how easy it was to be sucked into worshipping figures with feet of clay, when ignorance was seen as strength and lies as truth, when your neighbour became your persecutor. As Martin Luther King pointed out in 1963, in his book Strength to Love: ‘Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.’