Over time, being a Democrat didn’t work for me, and 9/11 was my real awakening. I realized that America needed to focus on national security and being safe.
I’m an Orthodox Jew. I grew up Orthodox, I went to religious schools and I go to synagogue all the time. I’ve dealt with anti-Semitism my whole life. I’m from New York originally and there, I experienced plenty of anti-Semitism. In Seattle, where I live now, I was running for public office in 2019 and I received anti-Semitic death threats towards myself and my family.
During a Jewish holiday, I found a note on my door from the Seattle Police Department and FBI joint task force asking me to contact them. It turned out that someone had posted anti-Semitic death threats against me and my family on a right wing website.
The Seattle police couldn’t trace the IP address, so they dropped the investigation. I knew people in the tech world in Seattle and had them hunt down the IP address; it came up as a leftist activist.
So, anti-Semitism comes from the right, and it comes from the left. Social media has enabled it to grow and be seen more than it may have been seen before. People say there is more of it now. There’s not more, people are paying more attention.
When I received death threats, I thought of myself more as a libertarian at that point. I felt I was pushed to the right when I was rejected by the left on multiple occasions. But I didn’t vote for Trump in 2016, because I looked at both him and Hillary Clinton and said: Nope.
In 2020, I did. Trump won my vote through his policies. I felt he had done everything in his power to actually make things better for Jews and make things better for me. Did I hate the tweets? Sure. Did I hate the rhetoric? Yes. But through his policies, Israel had four peace deals with Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan and Morocco. Those peace deals, the Abraham Accords, were not about Palestine and Israel, they were about the fact that Iran is a larger threat to the region.
In December 2019, Trump signed an executive order on anti-Semitism that included Jews in Title VI civil rights protection. He did that in the White House as part of a Hanukkah celebration. This is a guy with three Jewish grandkids who are observant. This is the guy who has been generous with his money to Jewish causes.
Even my early experience with Donald Trump wasn’t so much the guy from The Apprentice, it was more from the stories about donations and the way he was thought of in the observant Jewish community in New York when I lived there.
I was in Israel right before the pandemic broke out in 2020. While I was there, I was walking down the street and I noticed they had Trump yarmulke everywhere. It was after Trump had moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jeruslaem, and in doing so, he earned the love of the people of Israel.
I went into one shop, and just for fun, I said, “Hey, do you have any Biden yarmulkes?” The owner just laughed at me and said they wouldn’t sell them; that nobody would want them, because of how beloved Trump was in Israel. They have named train stations after Trump in Israel. So when he makes the comments that he could be the Prime Minister of Israel, I believe that’s true.
Trump also took part in an interview with me on my radio show almost a year ago, in November 2021. I reached out to his people specifically to address the Abraham Accords and before the interview, he was exceptionally charming.
People say that when you are in a room with Donald Trump you feel like you are the sole focus of his attention, and that’s how I felt, even on a phone call. He also spent seven or eight minutes after the interview talking to me about my ratings and about success for my show.
Knowing Trump the way we all do, you call with one topic in mind and you’re going to get everything else. And during our discussion he said that Israel “literally owned Congress.” I think in the tape you see my eyebrows go up.
I don’t want to put words in his mouth or make assumptions, but I personally assumed that what he probably meant was that Israel used to enjoy bi-partisan support in the halls of congress. But he doesn’t talk that way and he said what he said.
At the same time, all my Orthodox Jewish friends kind of laughed at the comment. They thought that was Trump being Trump.
So when I read Trump’s recent comments, including that “our wonderful Evangelicals are far more appreciative of this than the people of the Jewish faith, especially those living in the U.S.” I didn’t read them as anti-Semitic. I thought: Yeah, he’s not wrong. Because, in my opinion, that’s the way it’s actually going in the U.S.
American Jews, overwhelmingly, are not observant Jews, and I am seeing more and more people in the non-observant Jewish world embracing anti-Israel philosophy. Israel used to be the one thing we all agreed on.
So I totally understand where Trump is coming from when he makes comments like that. I believe that unfortunately a lot of American Jews are teaming up with people who want to destroy Israel.
There are American college students who are Jewish, supporting Palestinian groups on campus that are anti-Israel. I sent my kid to college in Israel because I didn’t want to send him to college in America. So when I saw Trump’s comments, my attitude was that what he said is not wrong. If American Jews continue to turn their backs on Israel, who is supporting Israel from American Jewry?
With Trump, I wish we didn’t have the rhetoric, I wish we didn’t have the tweets and I wish it would just be about his policies. Unfortunately we live in the real world. I look at Joe Biden, who was supposed to be the “uniter-in-chief” and that hasn’t happened either.
However, President Joe Biden has typically been very pro-Israel. I disagree with every single domestic policy of his, but I have nothing bad to say about Joe Biden in that regard.
But if Trump is the Republican nominee in 2024, I will vote for him against whatever democrat is put up. Not because I don’t like the Democrat party. I still vote for Democrats occasionally on a local level, but when I look at their field, when I look at Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, I don’t see anybody who is going to be better than Trump.
However, I would rather that Trump is the king-maker—because we can see how effective that can be—and let somebody like Ron DeSantis run. I am concerned that if Trump runs it will be about Trump and the tweets and the investigations. Rightly or wrongly, that’s what it becomes about, as opposed to what Joe Biden and the democrats have done for the country over the past few years.
In terms of how we will tackle anti-Semitism now and in the future, I believe that Jews tend to unite when there is a common enemy; when something awful happens. It’s either a really happy occasion like a bar mitzvah or a wedding, or it’s an awful tragedy. I don’t want that, God forbid, but we saw people coming back to synagogues in droves after 9/11.
After the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre in 2018, people filled the synagogues. I saw that there was discussion between many different strands of Judaism; Reform Jews, Orthodox Jews and many others, talking together to improve community security. Unfortunately, that seems to me to be the only thing that shakes out malaise. And that’s scary. I wish it wasn’t the case.
Ari Hoffman is the host of KVI AM 570 Talk Radio in Seattle. You can follow him on Twitter @thehoffather.
All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
As told to Newsweek senior editor Jenny Haward.
