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THE JEWISH LIGHT USA
Looking Back At A Crazy Jewish Year Of Politics
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By Ron Kampeas
Clockwise from top left: President
Donald Trump, Laura Loomer, Joe
Biden, Senator Kamala Harris,
Joe Biden, Rabin Square in Israel,
Ambassador David Friedman (Getty Images / JTA montage)
WASHINGTON (JTA) — To prepare for Rosh Hashanah, take a break, my editor said. Let’s take this moment to look back at the crazy year in politics, he said.
So, I did — but it wasn’t a restorative break. In 5780, the news didn’t stop.
Shana tova to my readers, and here’s hoping we’ll get a bit of a breather in 5781. Here are some takeaways and highlights from the past Jewish year.
The Jews of impeachment
Last fall, the story was President Donald Trump’s impeachment — doesn’t that feel like a biblical millennium ago? It’s easy to forget the sheer number of Jewish players at the heart of the ordeal, from Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to the whistleblower Alexander Vindman to the Democrat committee chairs who led the proceedings, like Adam Schiff. I rounded up the long list here.
The fact that the Democrats’ three lawyer witnesses were Jewish also caught the eyes of people like Ann Coulter, who said there was “too little ethnic diversity” on the panel.
Annexation anxiety
Another bombshell development that feels long ago at this point, especially after Tuesday’s signing
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I covered the intense response to Netanyahu’s goal, which critics warned would permanently damage the possibility of a two-state solution. A Democratic senator proposed legislation against the annexation, and some of the most prominent pro-Israel voices in Congress came out loudly against it. Even AIPAC, the biggest pro-Israel lobby in the country, allowed lawmakers their criticism here.
Biden, Democrats and Israel
Among the 20-plus candidates who vied for the Democratic nomination, Joe Biden had the longeststanding and closest relationship to the pro-Israel community. Once the former vice president was the nominee, he made clear that he would hew to his bona fides: Biden said he would not consider conditioning assistance to Israel nor boycott the AIPAC lobby’s annual conference, and he nixed including the word “occupation” in the Democratic Party platform.
But the Israel-skeptical progressives in the party are not going away; in fact, they are gaining strength. “The Squad” remains in place, and the quartet of first-term congresswomen is expected to be bolstered by new members who ousted longtime pro-Israel stalwarts.
Republicans and Jews, waiting out Trump
The Republican congressional leadership, joined by the Republican Jewish Coalition, spent a good part of the year attempting to purge
extremists from the party’s ranks (and the convention) — and then retreating into silence when some of the same extremists were endorsed by President Trump. It didn’t help that Trump has made it his mission to purge from the party the foreign policy interventionists like John Bolton who once comprised the wing of the party most favored by politically conservative Jews. Or that the very themes the extremists peddled seeped into the Republican convention messaging.
How to pitch Trump to the Jews remained the main Republican Jewish dilemma this year. Trump made the work interesting with Rosh Hashanah greetings in which he berated Jews for voting for Democrats and again appeared to conflate American Jews with Israel.
Loomer looming
Earlier this month I spoke to Laura Loomer, the Jewish rightwing provocateur who was kicked off Twitter for her Islamophobia. She’s running for a House seat against a Jewish incumbent, Lois Frankel, who’s a moderate establishment Democrat. Frankel calls Loomer a bigot; Loomer says Frankel does the bidding of jihadists. The whole thing was a very Jewish slice of the culture wars.
The Abraham Accords
I was at the White House this week as the foreign ministers of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain joined Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to sign the Abraham Accords — treaties opening up normalized diplomatic relations between their countries and Israel. It was a historic moment, and I parsed the messaging at the signing event. My colleagues explained the nuts and bolts and significance of the deals. ì Early Votingis happening now. Vote to empower schools.
By Ben Sales
A map shows the 20 congressional districts with the most Jews. (Laura E. Adkins/JTA) (JTA) — About one-third of American Jews live in just 20 of the country’s congressional districts. Nearly half of those districts are in New York, and all but one of them is represented by a Democrat.
Meanwhile, the district with the most Jews in the country is also the site of Mar-a-Lago, President Donald Trump’s Florida estate.
Those are among the findings from a recent study analyzing Jewish voting patterns. Key findings from the study, which was conducted by the Jewish Electorate Institute and the Steinhardt Social Research Institute at Brandeis University, were published online Aug. 25.
The study, like previous others, found that Jewish voters are more Democratic and politically liberal than the country at large. It also found, similar to earlier research, that Jewish
voters tend to be older than average.
What’s new here is that the researchers were able to identify not only how Jews vote but where they cast their ballots. The study found that the majority of Jewish adults live in four states — New York, California, Florida and New Jersey.
“In all of the so-called battleground states, not only Florida but places like Pennsylvania and Ohio and Michigan, those are states where if something similar to 2016 happens in 2020, Jews are large enough in number in those states where they could make a difference,” said Leonard Saxe, director of the Steinhardt Social Research Institute.
Approximately one-third of Jewish adults, about 1.8 million, are concentrated in just 20 congressional districts among the 435 across the United States.
The district with the most Jewish voters, Florida’s 21st, is drawing a lot of attention this year for its race between two Jewish candidates, the Democratic incumbent Rep. Lois Frankel and Laura Loomer, an antiIslam provocateur who won the Republican nomination and Trump’s
endorsement. Loomer released an ad this week that used Holocaust imagery and Yiddish to attack Frankel as an opponent of Jewish interests.
The district covers southeastern Florida cities such as Palm Beach, Boynton Beach and Delray Beach, and includes 152,000 Jewish adults, according to the study. In total, the district has about 524,000 registered voters. According to the study, the district is 24.3% Jewish, and more than half of those Jewish adults are older than 65.
The two adjacent districts down the South Florida coast, the 22nd and 23rd, also crack the top 20 for Jewish voters. Both are also represented by Jewish Democrats: Reps. Ted Deutch and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, respectively.
Most of the other districts in the Jewish top 20 are in New York and New Jersey, including seven in New York City and two on suburban Long Island. The second-largest Jewish district overall, New York’s 10th on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, has 151,000 Jewish adults and is represented by longtime congressman Jerry Nadler, a Jewish Democrat. The other New York City districts cover large swaths of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island.
The lone district on the list represented by a Republican, Rep. Chris Smith, is New Jersey’s 4th, which includes the heavily Orthodox city of Lakewood. That district is about 10% Jewish, with 51,000 Jewish adults, according to the study.
The rest of the top 20 districts are in Los Angeles County and the suburbs of Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Boston.
Overall, eight of the top 20 Jewish districts are represented by Jews. Saxe said the list of the most Jewish districts is a key data point ahead of the 2020 census, which will likely lead to congressional redistricting.
“The concentration of Jews and whether that concentration is allowed to continue, whether it’s not, will be an important issue,” he said. “In those districts where Jews are 10% or more of the population, they’re also a very significant force in choosing members of Congress.” ì
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Considering Withdrawal From Americans For Peace Now Event Memorializing Yitzhak Rabin
By Ron Kampeas
US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez addresses the virtual 2020
Democratic National Convention, livestreamed online and viewed on a laptop screen from London, England, on
August 19, 2020. (David Cliff/NurPhoto via Getty Images) (JTA) — Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, the popular progressive New York congresswoman, is withdrawing from an Americans for Peace Now event memorializing Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister a Jewish extremist murdered in 1995 for his efforts to achieve peace with the Palestinians, a spokeswoman said.
A person close to the talks between Ocasio-Cortez and the pro-two states group told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the decision was not yet final. A person associated with the presidential campaign of Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee, told JTA that should Ocasio-Cortez withdraw, it would be “problematic.” “She could have rejected the invitation for any number of reasons,” the Biden campaign associate said. “But if she agrees and then pulls out, she’s creating problems for her own party.”
Ocasio-Cortez on Friday told Alex Kane, a writer with Jewish currents that she was reconsidering the invitation to appear at the event. “Hey there — this event and my involvement was presented to my team differently from how it’s now being promoted,” she told Kane. “Thanks for pointing it out. Taking a look into this now.”
Kane later quoted a source as saying that that the invitation to Ocasio-Cortez was not framed as a memorial, but as a review of the Oslo peace process launched by Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in 1993. Americans for Peace Now has since Aug. 29 framed the Oct. 20 event as a Rabin memorial. It falls close to the 25th anniversary of Rabin’s assassination as he left a peace rally in Tel Aviv, on Nov. 4, 1995.
Also scheduled to appear at the event are Rabin’s granddaughter, Noa Rothman, and actor Mandy Patinkin, who last month released a video saying “I’ll be hosting a virtual memorial event for Yitzhak Rabin.”
A number of pro-Palestinian groups and figures had lacerated Ocasio-Cortez for agreeing to attend, describing Rabin, who was an officer in the 1948 Independence War, as a war criminal for his order to expel Arabs from their hometowns in that war, and for calling for brutal measures to repress the First Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, when he was defense minister from 1987-1990.
“His legacy is one of violence and dispossession for Palestinians,” Adalah Justice Project, a pro-Palestinian advocacy group said on Twitter in announcing that Ocasio-Cortez had pulled out of the event. “Thank you, AOC, for listening to the lived experience of the Palestinian people.”
Rabin, elected prime minister in 1992, was the first Israeli prime minister to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization as the legitimate representative of the Palestinians and formed a bond with Arafat, who publicly mourned his passing, and who made a rare and risky visit into Israel to relay condolences to Rabin’s widow, Leah. ì
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Meet The Top 15 Jewish Political Donors In This Election Cycle
By Ron Kampeas
Businessman Tom Steyer, then a Democratic presidential hopeful, speaks at the Rev. Al Sharpton Minister's Breakfast in North Charleston, S.C., Feb. 26, 2020. (Logan Cyrus/AFP via Getty Images) (JTA) — George Soros may draw some of the most vociferous criticism, but he’s hardly the biggest political donor in this cash-heavy election cycle — Democrat or Republican.
In fact, Soros is 24th on the largest givers in this cycle, and Jewish donors on both the right and left populate the list above him.
That’s according to Open Secrets, which provides the top 100 individuals or married couples donating to the 2020 campaign. Among the top 25 on the list, 15 are Jewish or of Jewish origin.
They include Tom Steyer, No. 1 on the list, and Donald Sussman, who have joined Soros in the litany of Democratic donors criticized by Republicans. Miriam and Sheldon
Adelson are No. 5 — their money goes exclusively to Republican candidates. Plus, there’s a host of Jewish donors who have drawn little public attention despite giving in the multimillions.
The Open Secrets rundown is up to date as of Sept. 8. With the final weeks of the campaign seeing an accelerated fundraising push, the rankings are likely to change.
Here’s what you need to know about the big-spending Jewish donors seeking to influence this year’s high-stakes elections, especially those whose giving has made the most waves.
1. Tom Steyer
Amount given so far: $54 million to Democrats
Steyer tops the list by far. The hedge funder, who was among the candidates seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, has donated over $54 million to Democrats — and, intriguingly, $35 to Republicans.
Lest you think Steyer is leading this cycle because of his own campaign, he has resided in the top three since the 2014 congressional cycle, and most of his money has
Nor Joe Imports, LLC “the tradition continues” 25 years strong!
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gone to outside groups backing an array of Democratic candidates. (Steyer has endorsed Joe Biden and is fundraising for him.)
Steyer, whose father was Jewish and who identifies as ethnically Jewish, is a practicing Episcopalian, although in his youth he practiced Judaism and included a rabbi in his wedding.
4. Stephen and Christine Schwarzman
Amount given so far: $28.4 million to Republicans and $8,400 to Democrats
Stephen Schwarzman is CEO of Blackstone, an investment management firm, and served on one of Trump’s council of business advisers until they all shut down after the deadly neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville in 2017. Trump equivocated in condemning the rioters, and businesses came under pressure to cut ties with the administration.
Schwarzman told Reuters he got messages calling him a Nazi.
“It was pretty clear that the country itself felt like it was going out of control,” he said at the time. “We decided there was too much pressure for too many people all running public companies.”
His first major donation to Israel was in 2018, when he gave the National Library $10 million.
5. Sheldon and Miriam Adelson
Amount given so far: $28 million to Republicans
Sheldon Adelson, 87, is a Las Vegas-based casino magnate and Miriam, 74, is a physician. They are major givers to an array of Jewish and pro-Israel causes, as well as to medical research. Adelson’s endorsement of Trump in May 2016 opened the floodgates to Jewish donors who until then had been skeptical of the candidate.
Their ongoing support for Trump has been in question: Trump reportedly berated Sheldon Adelson last month for not giving enough to the campaign as Biden’s fundraising began to outpace the incumbent’s. But Adelson bellied up this month and has pledged $50 million to elect Republicans and send Trump back to the White House.
Adelson may be hedging his bets: He reportedly has paid $87 million for the residence of the U.S. ambassador in suburban Tel Aviv, possibly as a means of preventing Biden from moving the embassy back to that city (although Biden has said he has no intention of doing so). Trump says his move of the embassy to Jerusalem was one of the highlights of his presidency.
6. Donald Sussman
Amount given so far: $22.3 million, all to Democrats save for $5,600 to Republicans
Sussman, 74, launched his investment career at age 12, in 1958, when he bet that the Cuban revolution would drive up the price of sugar. He’s known for his close ties to the Clintons — he was a major backer of Hillary’s 2016 presidential campaign. Sussman said he was dumping money into her campaign because of her pledge to take money out of politics, and he acknowledged the irony.
In his charitable giving, he appears to be particularly proud of his relationship with Israel’s Weizmann Institute, listing his position as deputy chairman of its international board of governors and his honorary doctorate from there on his official bio.
Sussman was married to a Maine congresswoman, Chellie Pingree, from 2011 to 2016 and continues to be heavily involved in the state. He has given $100,000 to groups backing Sara Gideon, who is challenging incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins. Despite his stakes in the New England state (he is on friendly terms with his ex, and for a period owned MaineToday, a media company) Republicans there have endeavored to depict Sussman as an interloper, or in the state’s lingo, “from away.” In a radio interview, Collins singled out three “from away” Jews, including Sussman, as backing Gideon’s campaign.
7. James and Marilyn Simons
Amount given so far: Nearly $21 million to Democrats
James Simons has been called one of the smartest Wall Street financiers of all time, thanks to his contributions to string theory and his application of mathematical breakthroughs to investment banking. Born to a Jewish family in the very Jewish Massachusetts suburb of Brookline, Simons’ net worth is over $23 billion. He and his wife set up the Simons Foundation, one of the largest charity groups in the U.S., in 1994. 9. Michael Bloomberg
Amount given so far: $19.3 million to Democrats
Bloomberg, who runs an eponymous media empire, was a threeterm mayor of New York, elected as
POLITICAL DONORS Continued from Page 8
a Republican and then as an Independent. He endorsed Hillary Clinton for president in 2016 and in his speech at the Democratic convention excoriated Trump as a con man, earning the Trump sobriquet “Mini Mike.” Bloomberg, 78, mounted a campaign for the presidency this year and initially polled well — until he was eviscerated in his first debate by a rival, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who depicted Bloomberg as Trump lite.
During his run, Bloomberg had pledged $1 billion to electing whomever won the nomination. Once he quit the race, however, he seemed to have forgotten his promise (and also a vow to pay the salaries of his staffers through the election, whatever happened).
But he’s back: Bloomberg said this month that he will spend $100 million in Florida, a swing state won by Trump in 2016 and critical to his reelection.
He has already donated $16 million for paying the fees of former felons. (Floridians voted overwhelmingly in a 2018 referendum to allow former felons to vote, rolling back a Jim Crow-era law. Jewish groups backed the initiative. The GOP-led legislature effectively scuttled the initiative by passing a law requiring that the ex-felons pay outstanding fines and court fees. Challenges are wending their way through the courts.) Florida’s Republican attorney general says Bloomberg’s donation may be criminal and wants the feds to investigate.
10. Jeffrey and Janine Yass
Amount given so far: More than $13 million, mostly to Republicans
Jeffrey Yass, a trader who cofounded the Susquehanna International Group, is the lone libertarian on the list. In the 2016 cycle he gave $2.8 million to Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s campaign. Major beneficiaries of his largesse include Save the Children and the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
12. Deborah Simon
Amount given so far: $12.5 million to Democrats
Simon is the daughter of Mel Simon, the lata billionaire businessman and movie producer who was involved in Jewish philanthropy. Deborah Simon and her sister, Cynthia Simon-Skjodt, have long given to progressive and Jewish causes such as the Anti-Defamation League.
Based in Indiana, Simon has been a longtime ideological opponent of Mike Pence, the vice president and former governor of the state known in part for his antiabortion stance. This year, she has said she will “do anything” to unseat Trump.
Simon also donates to the U.S. Holocaust Museum and talked with the museum’s magazine this summer.
“The Holocaust was a formative part of my Jewish identity,” she said. “The danger of xenophobia and the rising hatred we’re seeing around the world and in this country is very troubling to me.”
13. Henry and Marsha Laufer
Amount given so far: $11.8 million to Democrats
Henry Laufer worked closely with James Simons at his pioneering Renaissance Technologies, a quantitative hedge fund, and also became a billionaire. Marsha Laufer, his wife, was the Democratic Party chair in the Long Island, New York, town of Brookhaven for seven years. Outside of the presidential race, the Laufers have given to several individual Democratic politicians, including Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, a former chair of the Democratic National Committee.
16. Joshua and Anita Bekenstein
Amount given so far: Nearly $11 million to Democrats
Joshua Bekenstein is a co-chairman of Bain, the global finance company co-founded by Mitt Romney, the former Republican presidential candidate and now Utah senator. Along with his wife, Bekenstein has given to an array of candidates and PACs this cycle, as well as to the Democratic Party. Residents of suburban Boston, they also operate a donor-advised fund through the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Boston.
18. Bernard and Billi Wilma Marcus
Amount given so far: $9.7 million, all to Republicans save for $6,900 to Democrats
Marcus, 91, co-founded Home Depot and has long been a major donor to Jewish causes, looming large in the Atlanta area. This year he took on the Jewish Future Pledge, dedicating at least 50% of his charitable giving to Jewish causes, and his eponymous foundation gave $20 million to the Jewish Education Project to help lower the cost of youth trips to Israel.
Marcus is all in for Trump. His pro-Trump posture — he gave Trump’s campaign $7 million in 2016 — has led to boycotts of Home Depot, although he retired as the hardware chain’s chairman in 2002. The New York Times, reporting this week that the Republicans were trying to get the Green Party on the presidential ballot to siphon votes from Biden, revealed that Marcus funded an identical campaign in 2016. It may have worked: The votes for the Greens were greater than the margin of Trump’s key victories in Wisconsin and Michigan.
Marcus also backs congressional candidate Laura Loomer in South Florida. Mainstream GOP Jews have endeavored to ignore Loomer, who is Jewish and a self-declared Islamophobe. She’s run a campaign that has incurred the wrath of mainstream Jewish groups for likening Democrats to Nazis. Trump has enthusiastically endorsed Loomer — he lives in the district.
22. Paul Singer
Amount given so far: $8.8 million to Republicans
Singer, 76, is a hedge funder who eased the Republican Party (somewhat) into accepting rights for LGBTQ people (his son is gay). He has a tenuous relationship with Trump and was the initial funder of the opposition research that led to revelations about Russian attempts to infiltrate the Trump campaign. But by last year he was on the Trump train, saying Democrats posed a socialist threat to the United States.
23. Stephen and Susan Mandel
Amount given so far: $8.8 million to Democrats
Stephen Mandel, a hedge fund manager, and his wife both grew up in Jewish families. Their philan-
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