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Jewish Republicans, come home to the Democratic Party!

This is a dismal time to be a Jewish Republican.
[additional-authors]
May 24, 2016

This is a dismal time to be a Jewish Republican. Unless he’s struck by lightning or attacked by a swarm of killer bees, Donald Trump will be the Republican Party candidate for president.

(If you are an enthusiastic, die-hard Trump-ette, you can stop reading this. You are beyond reasoning with.)

To briefly recapitulate just some of the reasons Trump is so awful, and unimaginable as president:

• Trump encourages his followers to beat up protesters.
• He promises to torture terrorists, and kill their wives and children.
• He has to be prodded and berated to unenthusiastically repudiate the support of white supremacists and neo-Nazis.
• He mocks and denigrates women and the physically handicapped, among others.
• On his foreign policy advisors: “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things.”
• He admires strongmen and dictators like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jung-Un.
• He’s “neutral” on the Israel-Palestinian conflict, then Israel’s best friend, and who knows what next week.
• He has no fixed principles in either domestic or foreign policy, no allegiance to truthfulness, and no ethical or moral standards.

When “Is he more like Juan Perón or Benito Mussolini?” is a genuine question about your candidate, your political party is in more trouble than a convention of radical feminists in Saudi Arabia.

Nevertheless, millions of people have voted for Trump. Republican leaders who earlier rated him lower than bubonic plague now endorse him. He could indeed become the next president, particularly since a dispiriting quantity of Berniacs swear that they’ll vote for Trump rather than Hillary Clinton in November.

Where does that leave a rational Jewish Republican? Many current Jewish Republicans are former Democrats who checked out because the party shifted too far from the political center. As Dennis Prager has said, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party; the party left me.”

But the GOP has been boarded and captured by people who prefer David Duke and Patrick Buchanan to William F. Buckley and Mitt Romney. Under Trump, the Republican Party is no longer a place for any self-respecting moderate voter, which most Jewish Republicans are. And that means supporting Clinton, maybe even rejoining the Democratic Party.

Now, Hillary is a flawed candidate. That’s another way of saying she isn’t a perfect candidate. Is there ever a perfect candidate? Does she hold precisely the positions on, for example, Israel, we would like? Probably not, depending on who “we” are. But she is the most consistently pro-Israel—and generally the most sensible—candidate on the ballot. Republicans are in the habit of demonizing Clinton as a radical, but the Huffington Post recently ran a piece titled, “There Is a Moderate Republican in This Race, But She’s Running as a Democrat.” That’s how the illiberal Left understands Clinton, which should reassure moderate Republicans.

Jewish Republicans, come back to the Democratic Party. At least organize a chapter of “Republicans for Clinton.” Anything to keep Trump out of the White House.

Paul Kujawsky is an Executive Board member and former President of Democrats for Israel, Los Angeles. The opinions expressed here are his own.

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