November 3, 2020

Four years later, Trump’s immigration record includes previously unprecedented policies, such as separating families at the border and reducing the cap on refugee admissions to just 15,000 per year. Stephen Miller, the White House aide who has crafted much of that policy, says he wants to further restrict immigration if Trump is reelected, including by zeroing out refugee admissions entirely.

Many American Jews are thinking about that record — and Miller’s ambitions — as they vote in the presidential election. Polls show that three quarters of them are likely to vote for his challenger, Democrat Joe Biden, who has vowed to roll back Trump’s anti-immigration initiatives early in his presidency.

Data about American Jewish attitudes on immigration specifically is limited, but a 2017 American Jewish Committee poll found that three quarters of American Jews disapproved of Trump’s immigration policies, far more than the 59% of Americans overall found by a Washington Post poll the following year.

That corresponds to American Jews’ overall voter patterns: About 70% tend to vote Democratic in national elections, one of the highest rates for any ethnic group. But while Jews tend to be progressive on most political issues, their history imparts an added emotional drive to immigration issues.

“It goes beyond our experience as immigrants,” said Melanie Nezer, the senior vice president for public affairs at HIAS, the Jewish immigration advocacy group. “There’s also our historical experiences, refugees, in particular people who were persecuted based on their faith and ethnic ethnicity, throughout many, many generations.”

Jewish Democratic groups, and liberal groups like Bend the Arc and J Street, have emphatically opposed Trump’s immigration restrictions in their advocacy. But American Jewish immigration advocacy predates the Holocaust, when liberal refugee admissions by the United States could have changed the course of Jewish history. In the 1920s, American Jewish groups rallied against a bill that drastically reduced immigration from Europe, which ultimately resulted in Jews being stranded on the continent under Nazi rule.

So American Jews were supportive in 2013 when President Barack Obama proposed immigration reforms that would create a path to legal citizenship for undocumented immigrants and streamline the legal immigration system while beefing up border security and cracking down on employers who hire undocumented workers.

“Scripture tells us that we shall not oppress a stranger, for we know the heart of a stranger — we were strangers once, too,” Obama said, citing the biblical commandment that has fueled many a conversation at a Passover Seder.

That commandment is the most oft-repeated in the Torah, appearing at least 36 times. Barbara Weinstein, the associate director of the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center, at the time called it “one of the core biblical basics.”

Trump ran on a promise of undoing Obama’s reforms, and his campaign routinely trafficked in xenophobic rhetoric.

Once in office, he quickly set to work making good on those promises, issuing that early executive order, which came to be known as the Muslim ban, and fighting to preserve it against multiple legal challenges, some of them mounted by Jewish advocacy groups.

The Jewish presence at protests against the order was evidenced by the hastily drawn signs some were bearing (“Our Jewish family stands with refugees” read one at Dulles Airport near Washington D.C.) and by the kippot dotting heads in the crowd.

A call went out to lawyers to assist folks who might be blocked from entering the country after landing at U.S. airports (some people from banned countries were caught mid-travel), and there were Jews among those as well. Chava Brandress, a lawyer who said a pro-bono listserv she belonged to “exploded,” was among the Dulles protesters.

“I felt, ‘I can’t understand how this is happening again,’” she said then, referring to the restrictive laws in the early 20th century that prevented many European Jews from finding refuge in the United States, often with deadly consequences.

Nezer cited the Muslim ban as one of three immigration episodes that galvanized American Jews. Another, she said, was the Trump administration’s practice of separating children and their parents at the southern border, which resulted in thousands of families being separated. The administration still cannot find the parents of hundreds of children.

Nezer said the family separations especially hit a nerve for Jews raised on stories of World War II-era children separated from their parents. She described a typical call: “I’m appalled to hear that babies are being taken from their parents, what can I do?”

The third episode Nezer cited was the 2018 shooting at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, the deadliest attack on Jews in American history. The gunman, who killed 11 worshipers, said he targeted Tree of Life because one of its congregations worked with HIAS through the group’s Welcome Campaign, which advocates for refugees and helps to settle them in their communities.

At the time, Trump and his allies were warning of an “invasion” by migrant caravans heading for the southern border,  leading many to draw a connection between that rhetoric and the gunman’s actions.

The shooting fueled a spike in donations to HIAS, from $7.4 million in 2017 to $17.3 million in 2018. The group used those funds to supplement government funds to settle refugees — and to expand the number of synagogues in the Welcome Campaign. There are now 455 in 37 states.

Few if any of the synagogues working with HIAS are Orthodox, a reflection of the political divide between them and the majority of American Jews. Nezer said a handful of Orthodox congregations joined the campaign at its inception but now appear not to be active participants.

One recent poll commissioned by an Orthodox magazine found that 83% of Orthodox Jews said they would vote for Trump, and haredi Orthodox communities especially have been outspoken in their support for the president.

But even among the minority of Jews who are politically conservative, immigration has not been a prominent issue — and some of Trump’s Jewish supporters say they can’t back his approach to immigration.

“I love Trump but I still don’t agree with him on immigration,” Heschy Tischler, a leading right-wing activist in Orthodox Brooklyn, told JTA this fall. “I believe this country should be open to everyone.”

The Republican Jewish Coalition did not respond to a request for comment about the role immigration is playing in this year’s election. But it has never prioritized immigration in its advocacy. It criticized Obama’s immigration moves only on procedural grounds, sidestepping any statements about their content at a time when many other Republican groups lambasted them.

More recently, Trump got a hero’s welcome at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s April 2019 conference, particularly for his Israel policies. But when he brought up his strictures on immigration, the reaction was more muted, especially when he repeated “we’re full,” a discomfiting reminder of how U.S. authorities turned away refugees from Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, the Republican from South Carolina who is one of Trump’s staunchest supporters, was in the room and took note of the muted reaction. He told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency at the time that he wished Trump had put it differently.

“America does not need more St. Louis,” Graham said, referring to the shipful of Jewish refugees turned away from America in 1939. “The asylum laws in this country represent the best of who we are. They’re broken, let’s repair them, but let’s not lose the concept of asylum. I wish [Trump] would have started with that context.”

Some of America’s immigrant Jews are more politically conservative, in part because they are fearful that the political conditions that drove them from their home countries could be replicated in a Democratic-led United States. That can translate into support for some of Trump’s immigration policies.

“They believe that the anti-Semitism that is carried through much of the Muslim world is something that could easily spread in the United States,” David Wolpe, the rabbi of Sinai Temple, a large Conservative synagogue in Los Angeles, said about his many Iranian-born congregants.

At the same time, Wolpe said about his congregation, “There’s a tremendous sympathy to immigrants, and I think anger at the ill-treatment of immigrants.”

Biden has appealed to that sympathy and anger in making his case to American Jews. “We must welcome the stranger by reasserting our founding promise as a nation of immigrants and asylum seekers,” he wrote in a JTA op-ed last month.

He has vowed to increase refugee admissions to 125,000 a year, to create a task force to reunite separated families and to preserve Obama’s reforms so that people who were brought to the country illegally as children can stay. Those promises are likely to resonate with the vast majority of American Jews.

“We understand what it means to be displaced, to be marginalized, and to be homeless,” said Gayle Pomerantz, the rabbi of Temple Beth Sholom in Miami. “It is therefore central to our mission as Jews to welcome the stranger and ease their suffering.”

“A big part of the increase in enthusiasm is how President Trump…went from an unknown commodity to a known commodity,” said Eli Steinberg, an Orthodox writer and consultant in Lakewood, New Jersey. “He definitely has a stronger, more robust base of support in the community now.” Steinberg is among that increased base of support, having gone from writing in “anybody else” in the 2016 election to supporting Trump in this year’s election.

This summer, a haredi Orthodox rabbi endorsed Trump, saying the president had “done a good job.” A well-known Orthodox pop singer rewrote one of his hit songs in the president’s honor and performed it at a Jewish summer camp. And 13 leading Orthodox rabbis thanked the president for his executive order declaring religious services “essential” in a letter that was released last week in what looked like an endorsement in the presidential race. “Thank you Rabbis!” the president tweeted in response.

Over the past two Sundays, Orthodox Jews have organized rallies in support of Trump with supporters joining in from Orthodox communities across the New York City area.

And in recent days, new endorsements of the president have come out of a number of Hasidic communities.

In New Square, a town in upstate New York that is home to a large community of Skverer Hasidim, the village board endorsed Trump in fliers posted around the town, according to a tweet from Jake Turx, a reporter for Ami Magazine. The flier encouraged everyone in the town, which voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in 2016, to vote for Trump.

For some Orthodox Jews supporting Trump, Israel is an important selling point for the president. In addition to moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and recognizing the Golan Heights as Israeli territory, in the last several months, Trump has brokered multiple agreements between Israel and Arab countries.

But for many Orthodox Jews, support for Trump doesn’t come down to Israel alone.

Vos Iz Neias, a popular source of online news in Hasidic communities, endorsed Trump Sunday in an editorial that accused Biden of being a socialist and of general senility. The endorsement also noted Trump’s actions on Israel and his support for school vouchers, which Orthodox organizations have long advocated for because they would allow families to use public funds to pay yeshiva tuition.

“For Jews, Americans and Jewish-Americans, the choice couldn’t be more clear. We can look forward to four more years of strength, progress and realization of our nation’s greatness…or to relinquishing the gains we have enjoyed under the leadership of President Trump,” Vos Iz Neias wrote.

A Twitter account called Satmar HQ, which frequently tweets announcements and statements from a faction of the Satmar Hasidic community, posted a set of fliers endorsing Trump on behalf of the Satmar community in Kiryas Joel in upstate New York. The fliers specifically named prison reform as something for which the community had to show its gratitude to the president and noted that there was no minyan in Otisville, a prison known for accommodating Orthodox Jewish observance, on the holiday of Sukkot this year, apparently because so many Jews who were imprisoned there had been released.

For some in the community, the release of Sholom Rubashkin, a Hasidic meatpacking plant executive who was convicted of financial fraud in 2009 and sentenced to 27 years in prison, was a turning point. In December 2017, Trump commuted his sentence, leading to celebrations in some Hasidic communities, where the mitzvah of pidyon shvuyim, redeeming prisoners, is an important value.

“For a lot of people, the Rubashkin thing was a big issue,” Steinberg said. “All these have this common thread that runs through them, that he positioned himself as a friend of the Orthodox community. The things that people care about, he’s made priorities.”

For Steinberg, the primary issue driving him to embrace the president was religious liberty.

Particularly during the pandemic, he said, as synagogues in New York were subject to rules that were, at times, stricter than other gathering places like restaurants, Steinberg said it became even clearer that he aligned with the president’s understanding of religious liberty.

“It clarified where the parties assigned value to religious worship,” Steinberg said, noting an executive order Trump signed in May declaring houses of worship “essential,” and ordering governors to allow houses of worship to reopen.

“It meant a lot when he said that houses of worship are considered essential,” he said.

He also noted the way that Democrats responded to incidents of anti-Semitism as a factor driving Orthodox Jews towards the Republican party. He pointed to a bill passed by the House in May 2019 which denounced anti-Semitism along with a number of other forms of bigotry. The bill was originally written in response to comments made by Rep. Ilhan Omar that were considered by many to be anti-Semitic. Set against the backdrop of increased anti-Semitic incidents in New York City and surrounding communities in previous months, particularly targeting visibly Orthodox Jews, the handling of that bill upset Steinberg.

“That radicalized me,” he said.

Of course, with most Orthodox Jews living in states with large Democratic majorities, it’s unlikely that the Orthodox vote will impact Trump’s chances. But the fierceness of support for Trump in Orthodox communities has had an impact on the communities themselves and left Biden supporters feeling marginalized.

“It’s completely different than the last election,” Lunger said.

Then, she said, “A lot of people didn’t vote, a lot of people they’d vote, but there wasn’t a lot of investment the way there is now with people being so passionate about it.

Lunger started tweeting with the hashtag #yidenforbiden last week in a bid to show that Orthodox Jews who supported Biden were not alone.

“Like a lot of things in the community, speaking out against the dominant narrative is taboo,” she said. “There are people who, speaking out, they’re worried about their job being in danger, their kids being bullied, they’re worried about shidduchim,” or arranged marriages.

Hundreds liked her tweet and dozens retweeted it or shared their own reasons for supporting Biden, using the hashtag. The tweets made clear that Trump’s hold on the community is not as all-encompassing as it may seem from the Trump flags in the street and the eye-catching rallies organized by his Orthodox supporters in New York City Sunday.

“There is much enthusiasm for the president among haredim, if only out of concern for what a Democratic administration may do on the religious rights front, and out of gratitude to Mr. Trump for his actions vis a vis Israel and the Middle East,” Rabbi Avi Shafran, a spokesperson for the haredi Orthodox umbrella organization Agudath Israel, said in an email. “There is also, though, I should add, a quiet minority of haredim who are not enamored of the president and favor Mr. Biden.”