What Is Biden’s Case to American Jews?

American Jews voted for Joe Biden to be their President or Vice President by over 50 points in 2008, 2012, and 2020. With the 2024 election on the horizon, it’s looking like this year may hold the first national election where Biden’s support among Jewish Americans begins to show its cracks. There’s just not a strong case for most American Jews to vote for Joe Biden; in fact, there’s an increasingly strong case to be made against supporting the incumbent this November.

In a year that has seen numerous Democratic politicians cheer on Hamas terrorists, major Democratic donors fund anti-Israel organizations, and radical left-wing organizations force universities to cancel in-person graduation ceremonies, President Biden himself has been making his own errors in regards to the American Jewish community. However, Biden has been attempting to tightrope walk his way through a facade of balancing “both sides.” How can Biden possibly claim to care about “both sides” when he recently delayed aid to Israel, authorized money to anti-Israel, anti-American, terrorist-harboring regimes such as Iran and Qatar, and included the radical antisemitic organization Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in his “Plan to Combat Antisemitism?” His actions simply don’t match his words.

To divide the Israel-Hamas conflict into merely two sides neglects the complexity of the geopolitical situation and the longtime suffering of Arabs living in Gaza. When the Israeli government left Gaza in 2006, Hamas leaders could have created the next Singapore. Instead, Hamas leaders refused to invest into infrastructure and education – they’ve spent vast resources on rockets, tunnels, and self-enrichment. The leaders of Hamas are worth billions of dollars and live in Qatari luxury as their constituents suffer in squalor without educational infrastructure and crumbling financial prospects.

The people who live in Gaza and are not aiding the Hamas terrorists are genuine victims. By slowing the Israeli government as it attempts to eliminate Hamas, Joe Biden is harming not just the citizens of Israel – but innocent Gazans as well.The only way the people of the region will see peace is if there is zero tolerance for terroristic regimes such as the one led by Hamas in Gaza since 2006. Arabs living in Israel experience some of the highest standards of living of any Arabs in the world – yet Jews are not even allowed in Gaza and the Arabs who live there are exploited by corrupt leaders living on the other side of the Arabian peninsula.

Joe Biden has supported almost $1 billion in funding for a UN agency that funds schools that “regularly call for the murder of Jews, and create teaching materials that glorify terrorism, encourage martyrdom, demonize Israelis, and incite antisemitism.”

In general, the Biden administration has done little to combat the rise in domestic or global antisemitic rhetoric coming from organizations such as the UN. The administration’s presence on the global scene, as has been evident since the Afghanistan withdrawal disaster, has increasingly become that of a pushover. In February, Biden reassured the King of Jordan that Christian and Jewish prayer would continue to be banned on Jerusalem’s temple mount and as recently as March of this year, Biden gave Iran a sanctions waiver allowing their regime access to up to $10 billion in assets. Iran funds attacks on Israel and Jews throughout the world using their many proxy terrorist groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. Iran has a long history of funding these organizations which openly claim a desire to eliminate the Jewish people, and today there are less than 10,000 Jews in all of Iran despite the land once having a vibrant Jewish community.

The Jewish community at Columbia University recently penned a powerful and moving letter:

“Our religious texts are replete with references to Israel, Zion, and Jerusalem. The land of Israel is filled with archaeological remnants of a Jewish presence spanning centuries. Yet, despite generations of living in exile and diaspora across the globe, the Jewish People never ceased dreaming of returning to our homeland — Judea, the very place from which we derive our name, “Jews.” Indeed just a couple of days ago, we all closed our Passover seders with the proclamation, “Next Year in Jerusalem!”

Many of us are not religiously observant, yet Zionism remains a pillar of our Jewish identities. We have been kicked out of Russia, Libya, Ethiopia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Poland, Egypt, Algeria, Germany, Iran, and the list goes on. We connect to Israel not only as our ancestral homeland but as the only place in the modern world where Jews can safely take ownership of their own destiny. Our experiences at Columbia in the last six months are a poignant reminder of just that.

We were raised on stories from our grandparents of concentration camps, gas chambers, and ethnic cleansing. The essence of Hitler’s antisemitism was the very fact that we were “not European” enough, that as Jews we were threats to the “superior” Aryan race. This ideology ultimately left six million of our own in ashes.

The evil irony of today’s antisemitism is a twisted reversal of our Holocaust legacy; protestors on campus have dehumanized us, imposing upon us the characterization of the “white colonizer.” We have been told that we are “the oppressors of all brown people” and that “the Holocaust wasn’t special.” Students at Columbia have chanted “we don’t want no Zionists here,” alongside “death to the Zionist State” and to “go back to Poland,” where our relatives lie in mass graves.

This sick distortion illuminates the nature of antisemitism: In every generation, the Jewish People are blamed and scapegoated as responsible for the societal evil of the time. In Iran and in the Arab world, we were ethnically cleansed for our presumed ties to the “Zionist entity.” In Russia, we endured state-sponsored violence and were ultimately massacred for being capitalists. In Europe, we were the victims of genocide because we were communists and not European enough. And today, we face the accusation of being too European, painted as society’s worst evils – colonizers and oppressors. We are targeted for our belief that Israel, our ancestral and religious homeland, has a right to exist. We are targeted by those who misuse the word Zionist as a sanitized slur for Jew, synonymous with racist, oppressive, or genocidal. We know all too well that antisemitism is shapeshifting.

We are proud of Israel. The only democracy in the Middle East, Israel is home to millions of Mizrachi Jews (Jews of Middle Eastern descent), Ashkenazi Jews (Jews of Central and Eastern European descent), and Ethiopian Jews, as well as millions of Arab Israelis, over one million Muslims, and hundreds of thousands of Christians and Druze. Israel is nothing short of a miracle for the Jewish People and for the Middle East more broadly.”

Zionism cannot be disconnected from Judaism. The Jewish people are not from Poland – we were murdered in Poland. The Ashkenazi Jews are not descended from Khazars, they are descended from the same people who left Israel as the Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews are. DNA studies suggest that Semitic peoples of light or dark skin have more in common with each other than they do with the broader Caucasian or African population. It’s embarrassing to witness some of the “anti-colonialist” messaging used by the anti-Israel organizations as they generally advocate for recent colonizers to take land by violence against a people who have resided in the land of Judea since the dawn of civilization.

Richard Spencer, the most notorious neo-Nazi of the past decade, proudly endorsed Joe Biden in 2020 and defended his endorsement in numerous debates against political streamers like Destiny and Styxhexenhammer (Tarl Warwick). A quick glance at neo-Nazi hubs around the time of the 2020 election reveals a desire for “accelerationism” by voting for the Democrats and a distaste for Donald Trump, whose daughter is Jewish and who negotiated multiple peace deals for Israel while moving our embassy to Jerusalem. Today, the “groyper” community of antisemites on the hard right have allied with the hard left on their belief in the destruction of Israel and the dismantling of arbitrary “Jewish power.”

Those who are heavily invested in politics are taking notice of Biden’s failures to properly address antisemitism affecting Jewish Americans and the crisis overseas, from those on the left such as Destiny and Brianna Wu to those on the right such as Brian Mast and Tim Pool. An array of national Jewish groups called on Joe Biden to address rising antisemitism under his administration even back in 2021 as Jewish Americans were assaulted by anti-Israel protesters. Neoliberal commentator Bill Maher criticized Joe Biden’s plan to use taxpayer dollars to support “Jew-hating” in early May. For seven months, Biden’s administration has sat idly by as protesters violently assault Jewish Americans and destroy the college experience for the majority of attendees who want nothing to do with anti-Israel radicalism.

Orthodox Jews support Trump by a lopsided 70-point margin over Joe Biden, a larger margin than the overall Jewish community supported Biden by in 2020. Where Donald Trump addressed antisemitism in his statements to Congress, including in his State of the Union address, Joe Biden didn’t make any mention of it during his recent State of the Union in March. Biden’s support had dropped to the low 60s with American Jews by mid-2022, and it is expected to drop further by November as the Democratic party doubles down on anti-Israel rhetoric and embraces antisemitic allies. Joe Biden’s embrace of antisemitic framing narratives concerning “illegal settlements” and “settler violence” demonstrate that he is no ally of the Jewish people or of Israel and that he has been compromised by the same antisemites who elevated leaders like Ilhan Omar to power. Biden has attempted to interfere in Israeli domestic elections and has even used taxpayer funds to suppress opposition to his actions.

Here in Arizona, where the presidential race and the race for US Senate are expected to be very close, Jewish voters could easily provide the margin of victory. According to the American Jewish Population Project, Jews make up 2.1% of the state’s voters—about 115,000 adults. The state was carried by Trump in 2016 by just over 91,000 votes and by Biden in 2020 by about 10,000 votes. The Jewish vote will matter in Arizona and in key states across the country.

So, what is the case for Jews to support Joe Biden? That he sounds sweet when he says he supports Israel and loves America’s Jewish community? Sweet words don’t equate to sweet actions, and often they lead to the exact opposite. 90% of Jews live in America or Israel, and Jews living in both nations must elect leaders who are going to ensure that “never again” isn’t just a phrase but taken seriously. Joe Biden has overseen the greatest rise in antisemitic action and rhetoric in recent history, and American Jews are starting to notice.