Donald Trump’s election brought vindication for some Orthodox Jews. “Who’s out of step now?” said one. Photo by David Becker for the Washington Post

By Louis Keene November 6, 2024

There was a delicious surprise awaiting people who showed up for afternoon prayer services Wednesday at Rabbi Gil Student’s Manhattan office building: a celebratory chocolate cake with “Trump” written on it in white frosting.

“I have to admit,” Rabbi Student wrote in a post on X. “It felt weird saying tachanun” — the weekday supplication prayer that is skipped on holidays — “given the jubilant mood.”

American Jews have, for decades, mostly voted for Democrats for president, and Tuesday was no exception, with various exit polls showing that between 66% and 79% backed Vice President Kamala Harris. But Orthodox Jews like Student have long bucked that trend. Three-quarters support the Republican party, according to a 2020 survey by Pew Research; 86% supported Trump, according to an exit poll from GBAO Strategies. And as poll results showed former President Donald Trump heading back to the White House for a historic second term, some took to social media to gloat.

The posts on “Frum Twitter” — the nickname for Orthodox Jewish discourse on X — reflected feelings of joy and vindication. They addressed their remarks to grieving Democrats, mocked liberal talking points, dispensed pithy advice or conveyed plain schadenfreude. Trump, after all, had not merely eked by with electoral math; he won the popular vote, too, by some 5 million votes, the first Republican to do so in two decades. Conventional wisdom was wrong. Bring on the memes.

Trump’s comeback had come to represent a sweeping response to Orthodox grievances. It was the repudiation of Democrats’ insistence that Trump was an antisemite Jews would be crazy to support. It was a rebuke of the wokeness they believe is fueling antisemitism on college campuses and threatening religious freedom. It was the ultimate exposure of the liberal bias of mainstream media — which, unlike the prescient Orthodox commentariat, couldn’t spot Trump’s broad resonance staring them in the face.

“We’ve been getting accustomed to what looked like a new normal, and we were fearing that this is what America has become, this is what the country is comfortable with,” said Eli Steinberg, a commentator on the Haredi Orthodox community. “Seeing that America looks at that and says ‘no’ is very reassuring.”

Representation matters

Trump’s approach to the Middle East during his presidency won him many supporters in the Orthodox world. He appointed an Orthodox ambassador to Israel, moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and helped Israel normalize relations with several Gulf States in the Abraham Accords. He also gave Orthodox leaders access: He has a daughter and son-in-law who are Orthodox, and played key roles in his first administration. And before he left office, Trump commuted the prison sentence of Sholom Rubashkin — a kosher food magnate convicted of bank fraud who had become a cause célèbre in the Orthodox world — and pardoned the Israeli handler of convicted spy Jonathan Pollard.

Rabbi Dovid Bashevkin, an Orthodox podcaster who teaches at Yeshiva University, said this track record made the Democrats’ characterization of Trump as a Nazi sympathizer a tough sell for Orthodox Jews. Trump’s personal failings — his crass language, sexual improprieties, even dining with avowed antisemites like Ye and Nick Fuentes — were besides the point.

Orthodox Jews tend to have a “utilitarian, transactional” view of politics, Bashevkin said, seeing elections less as a way to discover or express values than as a tool to protect them.

“We don’t need to fall in love with our candidates,” he explained. “We don’t need to deify our candidates. We have our role models within our community. And because of that, when we think politically, a lot of the arguments against Trump fell flat.”

So when Trump’s former chief of staff said the former president fit the definition of fascist and had said admiring things about Hitler, many Orthodox voters saw the ensuing news coverage and Democratic attacks on him as disingenuous, even hypocritical.

Steinberg, the Orthodox commentator, said Tuesday’s results revealed that it wasn’t just Jews who didn’t buy it. It was most Americans, across demographic groups.

“You get a lot of this feedback from people who say some kind of variation of, ‘How in the world could you support this guy?’” he said. “Where it stands right now, 51% of the country said, ‘Yeah, I can support this guy.’ So who’s out of step now?”

The fight against antisemitism

Many Orthodox Jews also were deeply frustrated with Harris’ sympathy for pro-Palestinian protesters who they see as trafficking in antisemitism.

Steinberg, for example, said that even Hasidic Jews who are anti-Zionist found the treatment of Jewish college students over the last year appalling.

“Any Orthodox Jew thinks when they see that, ‘These are people attacking Jews,’” he said. “And it doesn’t matter what your position is on Zionism. You see something that’s enabled by the Biden-Harris administration.”

While Orthodox Jews had sent thousands of postcards to the White House last fall to thank President Joe Biden for his strong support of Israel, feelings changed over the year, especially as Biden — and Harris — became openly critical of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s tactics in Gaza, and as protests of the war swelled here in the U.S.

Rabbi Bashevkin, the YU teacher and podcaster, recalled seeing “Hamas is coming” spray-painted on a monument in Washington, and pro-Palestinian protesters shutting down freeways during rush hour. People involved in those actions, he said, should have been prosecuted with the same fury as those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“I think people were tired of being gaslit into what reality is by the political establishment,” he said. “I was not seeing the media or our country hold our political leaders to task for what we were seeing.”

Anti-woke backlash

The issue of “wokeness,” more than anything, seems to be where the Orthodox broke with the rest of the Jewish fabric. Most mainstream liberal Jews have supported diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, marriage equality and trans rights. By contrast, one of the leading voices of anti-wokeness has been Libs of TikTok, a Twitter account run by an Orthodox Jew named Chaya Raichik.

Casting Trump’s victory as a great rejection of wokeness seemed to animate much of Orthodox Jews’ post-election schadenfreude. “Go woke, go broke,” read one of Rabbi Student’s tweets.

Wokeness can mean different things to different people, but critics paint it as a performative expression of leftist values, rooted in the idea that the world is essentially divided into categories of oppressor and oppressed.

“The woke agenda runs directly in conflict with our timeless religious values,” Steinberg said, adding, “Where that agenda comes into conflict with matters of religion, we’re told continually that we have to take a back seat.”

As an example, he cited New York state’s secular education requirements for private schools, including Orthodox yeshivas. Also abortion rights and LGBTQ+ rights: Wokeness, Steinberg said, would force Yeshiva University to fund a queer student club, or require an Orthodox doctor to perform an abortion.

Bashevkin said the last year had laid bare for Orthodox Jews the empty rhetoric of wokeness. He pointed to Khymani James, a Columbia student activist who was suspended for saying “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” and noted that James had begun those remarks by stating his pronouns.

“There was a real awakening of identity in this country and the need to preserve and center marginalized groups,” Bashevkin said. “And I think there is no demographic or society who feels the double standard of those efforts of inclusivity more than the Orthodox community.”

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