Anxiety, concern and hope: How swing-state rabbis, and their communities, are reacting to Trump’s win
The very question of whether to acknowledge the election with congregants can be fraught
A couple watches President Donald Trump’s victory speech from a TV screen, Nov. 5, 2024, in Foster City, Calif. (Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images)
(JTA) — Prior to Election Day, Rabbi Abe Friedman shared that he has two rules for discussing politics from the pulpit: The topic has to be Jewish, and the message can’t just be tied to a specific moment.
Now one day after the vote that returned Donald Trump to the White House, Friedman said this moment required a rabbinic response — even if it risked breaking his own rules.
“We have no idea what’s going to happen in January, but on the campaign trail, he said a lot of things that, as a close reader of Jewish history, have left me very uneasy,” said Friedman, senior rabbi of Temple Beth Zion-Beth Israel, a Conservative synagogue in Philadelphia.
Friedman is especially concerned about how Jews will be treated given Trump’s promises to round up and deport migrants, as well as the rhetoric from his campaign about minorities. Those dynamics, he feels, often spell trouble for Jews.
“I think it’s cause for concern for Jewish communities, if there are any minority groups that are being targeted,” Friedman said. “It doesn’t always start with us, but it finds us, one way or another.”
Friedman was one of a number of swing-state rabbis who spoke with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency ahead of the election, which then appeared to be in a dead heat and which was dividing Jewish communities across the seven battlegrounds. They each said tension was present in their communities — and that U.S.-Israel relations were at the top of many congregants’ minds.
After the race was called early Wednesday, JTA returned to those same rabbis to gauge how they and their communities were processing the results. While Trump appears likely to have swept all seven states, exit polling suggested that American Jews voted overwhelmingly in support of Vice President Kamala Harris.
The rabbis who spoke to JTA on Wednesday expressed a mix of emotions — from anxiety over what a second Trump term would mean for Jews, to hope that Jewish communities could find common ground in a turbulent political climate.
For Rabbi Asher Lopatin in suburban Detroit, the prevailing reaction to Tuesday’s results has been hope. And he gave a nod to the reasons that many Jewish Trump supporters cited when explaining their support for the former president.
“I’m always hopeful, and I always see the positive side of things,” Lopatin said. “I’m hopeful that the people that [Trump] surrounds himself with are good and honest people, and people that will look out for the good of our allies, such as Israel, and will be strong against our enemies, such as Iran.”
But while many Jewish voters approached the election with Israel as their top issue, in Savannah, Georgia, Rabbi Samuel Gelman said the first congregants he spoke to after Election Day prioritized domestic policy concerns. Gelman led a morning prayer minyan on Wednesday with members who, he said, skewed younger and more liberal than his overall community.
“This might go against the grain: From congregants who are disappointed, I heard very little about Israel,” Gelman said. “Even from the one or two this morning who were more happy, the conversation so far — we’ll see how it progresses — has not really been about Israel, it’s been about America.”
Polls have shown that only a small percentage of American Jews rank Israel as their top issue, something that tracked with Gelman’s experience on Wednesday. He said his congregants raised concerns about the economy, America’s treatment of minorities and the future of public health. (Trump has said that one of his most prominent allies, the anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., can “go wild on health” in his administration.)
“Almost all the conversation, honestly, this is the kind of conversation you could have heard from any person who was upset, who voted for Kamala, who then saw Donald Trump win,” Gelman said. “It didn’t happen to be particularly uniquely Jewish,”
An immediate question for many rabbis was whether and how to share their thoughts with their congregations, either in the form of communal emails, through sermons on Shabbat, or both.
Recognizing how challenging it may be for rabbis to calibrate their messages at a time of intense, wide-ranging emotions — including, potentially, their own — several organizations have teamed up to offer a “post-election rabbinic recharge” in advance of Shabbat.
Among the sessions on offer through the initiative, convened by an organization called Atra: Center for Rabbinic Innovation, are ones on how Shabbat can be an opportunity to unite communities and on how spiritual leaders can bridge political differences. One is titled, “’You are Wrong, AND I Love You’: Torah perspectives on how we find love for those we believe are truly mistaken.”
For Rabbi Joel Alter in Milwaukee, crafting his remarks proved a difficult balancing act. On the one hand, Alter said he was troubled by the falsehoods and dark tone of Trump’s campaign. On the other, he said his goal is always to avoid partisanship.
“So much of what went down in this campaign was so negative and so often false, so deeply cynical about the integrity of the American system, that I feel like, let’s have a debate about policies, but let’s speak honestly to each other,” Alter said. “This dark vision is very disturbing.”
But he qualified that, especially given how divided Wisconsin is, “There are going to be congregants who may feel that that’s not the case, that, no, [Trump’s] campaign was about how the system really is hopelessly broken, and the campaign was only speaking the truth and so on.”
Alter added, “It’s a little hard to know where the baseline is, where we can talk to each other openly and where we have to hold our words back because we’re crossing over into what’s deemed partisan territory.”
Gelman said his approach to the next few weeks will be dictated by how his congregants react, beginning with this coming Shabbat. He is considering holding a roundtable-style program where people can talk about their feelings if he senses “a lot of distress or tension.” But he’s worried that such as program itself may be perceived as partisan.
“If I do, for instance, publicize a roundtable processing session when it doesn’t seem like the congregation needs it, that might be seen as taking a political stance,” Gelman said. “Is it because Rabbi Gelman’s upset that Kamala Harris didn’t win? Is it because he wants to gloat that Donald Trump did win? I’m going to keep an eye and see what the needs of the community are.”
Lopatin is thinking not only about his own congregants but about community relations beyond the walls of his synagogue, the modern Orthodox Kehillat Etz Chayim. He acknowledged that many members of the Jewish community, both in Detroit and beyond, are crushed by Trump’s return to power. But he said he sees the outcome as an opportunity for Jews and their allies to find common ground, especially on “tachlis,” or bottom-line, practical issues that affect the local community.
“I hope the election is a little bit clarifying that, whatever your politics are, we have to come together and be strong together and support each other,” Lopatin said. “There are issues that we really care about, local issues in the community, our schools, our children’s education, that we really can agree on, and that we want to make sure that our kids have a secure environment in school.”
The end of the election season, Lopatin added, came with a positive no matter the result. He hopes it could ease local disagreements over Israel in Michigan, which is home to the country’s largest Arab-American population.
Lopatin said he is optimistic that local Jewish and Muslim communities can begin to rebuild relationships that were tested by the campaign and debates over the war in Gaza. He noted that Trump receiving support from both pro-Israel Jews and from Arab-Americans may be a sign of common ground.
“Some of the pro-Israel community was against [Trump], clearly, but a lot of the pro-Israel, maybe more right-wing pro-Israel community supported him, voted for him, and a lot of the Arab American and Muslim community voted for him,” Lopatin said. “I don’t know what that means. I hope it means something good. I just hope it means that some in the Muslim and the Arab American community realize that the goal is peace, the goal is not destroying Israel and fighting Israel.”
Friedman said he realizes that different sorts of Jews may experience the Trump administration differently: He said that LGBTQ Jews or Jews of color “are going to face a whole different set of ramifications than other people in the Jewish community.” But he also hopes to send a unifying message.
First, he said it was crucial for congregants to know that “their rabbis are here and available to listen, to support people in working through whatever it is that’s coming forward.”
Second, Friedman said there were Jewish lessons he hoped to provide for this tense political moment, including the ideas that everyone is created in God’s image and that Jews are commanded to look out for one another.
Finally, he said, he hopes to return to a common Jewish rallying cry — “Am Yisrael Chai,” or “the Jewish people lives” — to remind his community that Jews are resilient. True to his rules, it’s a message Jews have invoked from time immemorial.
“We are a people who have endured thousands of years of hardship and challenge and uncertainty, and I have no doubt in my mind that we will persevere through all of the uncertainty and upheaval that, frankly, this election has already brought, and that we have every reason to think is going to continue into the future,” Friedman said.
He added, “We need to remember that the Jewish people has made it through hard times before, and we are the keepers of that flame of courage that will get us through at this time, too.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.
If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
