Trump’s reelection is devastating American Jews. Our tradition tells us how we should begin to move forward
The future for the US looks bleak. But individuals — and communities — still have power
The future looks dark. So we must commit to more fully supporting each other. Photo by Ricardo DeAratanha/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Contributing Columnist Emily Tamkin November 6, 2024
At synagogue on Friday, I was speaking to a group of people and said, of the election, “we’ve got us.” What I meant: We’ve got each other. But most of them misheard me as saying, “We’ve got this” — meaning, given my own politics and that of much of the congregation, that Democrats had it in the bag. “Wow,” someone told me afterwards. “You’re really confident.”
I was not, and should have been even less so, since former President Donald Trump — twice impeached, convicted on 34 felony counts, found liable for sexual abuse — has been elected to the White House again. But as the dismal results have rolled in, I have been thinking of what I said, and what I was heard saying, and what I have come up with is this: The only way we are going to get through this is with each other.
What comes next will, in all likelihood, be very hard. If we look at other countries, like Slovakia and Israel, we see that politicians accused or convicted of crimes, or whose governments have been accused of corruption, when allowed to return to office immediately set about trying to dismantle the system that could hold them accountable. There is no reason to think that Trump will not try to do the same.
Over half of the authors of Project 2025, an ideological blueprint for the second Trump administration, worked for Trump’s first administration in some capacity. And so, despite Trump’s protestations that he had nothing to do with it, we can be excused for worrying that some of it might be adopted, like the part about infusing the U.S. government with Christian nationalism.
There is no reason to think that abortion access and reproductive rights more broadly will not come under attack, an assault on women’s lives and on our religious liberty. Nor is there reason to think that freedom of press and assembly, two cornerstones of the liberal democracy that have allowed American Jews to flourish safely in this country, won’t be attacked, too. This is before we get to the economy, which multiple economists have warned Trump will, to use the vernacular, break, or to human health, which will likely not be improved by putting anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of health and human services.
It’s to say nothing of how Trump’s plans, such as they are, will make the fight against climate change more difficult.
Up against all of that, “we’ve got each other” sounds small. But I will be repeating it to myself, over and over, until it feels big.
I mean this specifically for Jewish communities: We can, and will, find solace within and across our individual Jewish spaces. I do not think we will all suddenly agree on the meaning of antisemitism, deeply troubling instances of which I expect will rise when a person who regularly spews antisemitism returns to office. But I do hope that we will work together to speak out against such antisemitism when it comes from the most powerful person in the world, which it will.
“The entire Jewish people are considered guarantors for one another,” Shevuot 39a says. I hope that we take that to be true. In this country, in the face of a new leader who will certainly resent a majority of American Jews for not backing him, we speak up for one another.
And I mean this more generally, too, even when the issues are not explicitly Jewish.
“If I am not for myself, who is for me? But if I am for my own self [only], what am I? And if not now, when?” we read in Pirkei Avot. It is time, now, to think about supporting others as supporting ourselves.
When we push back on noxious xenophobia, we are pushing back on the idea that there is one kind of American. We affirm that this country has room, physically and ideologically, for lots of different types of people, including us. When we donate to our local abortion funds — as I do, monthly — we understand that helping others access abortion keeps the reproductive access a little bit freer and a little bit fairer for everyone. When we try to do something to stop the demonization of trans children, we are saying that we want to live in a country where all children are left to figure out who they are and grow up with safety and security.
Have we got this? I have no idea. I don’t know how the Democratic Party can begin to fix what’s ailing it, or what the future of our free, fair elections might be, or if we will continue to have them at all. I don’t know what the country will look like four years from now for women, or children in public schools, or immigrants, or Jews.
But what I do know is that the only antidote to alienation is community. Trump is the president-elect, and we’ve got us. We’re all we have.
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