Trump and the Jewish vote

Posted

My Uncle Sam was an accountant by profession. He was an Orthodox Jewish man, strictly observant, who came of age along with Israel. He was famous for his letters to the editor of The New York Times. He wrote passionate letters...hundreds and hundreds...about Israel, and anti-Semitism, and racism, and every conceivable injustice that broke his heart.

As a child, I would read his letters, clipped out and tacked on his bulletin board in his small home office in Brooklyn. He had a big celebrity client, and the picture of them was there too!

I loved numbers, and I loved his adding machine. He used to give me huge columns of numbers to add up, and I loved every second, the long tape folding over and over onto itself to the carpet.

I asked his children if he would have voted for Donald Trump were he alive. (70% of Orthodox Jews did, according to a Yeshiva University poll, as compared to 23% of all Jewish people.)

They said, “He never in a million years would have voted for Trump. He was passionate about Israel. Always raised money for Israel and UJA. He was active in B’nai B’rith and was practically running a one-man referral agency for people needing social services. He davened every day until the last two years of his life, and was a member of a little Orthodox cooperative congregation because he didn’t like the politics going on in the big Orthodox temple.

“I don’t think he would have gotten past Trump’s fascist and Nazi connections or the fact that he talked about the Holocaust without mentioning the Jews. Also I think he would have found Trump’s bullying repugnant and the conflicts of interest would have bothered him. Dad had a strong sense of fairness.”

Paul Hoffman 

East Greenwich, RI