“Progressive feminist” Rona Kaufman, once an opponent of President Donald Trump, is backing him in 2024 because of her frustration with the weakness of the Biden-Harris administration’s response to the October 7 terror attack.
Kaufman published an op-ed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Saturday titled “Why I, a progressive feminist Democrat, am voting for Donald Trump.” It reads, in part:
After witnessing the horrors of Oct. 7 and after realizing that too many Democratic Party elected officials and constituents lack the moral clarity to respond effectively to the war Israel is fighting and to the threat of the political ideology of Islamism, I have decided to vote Republican.
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I am voting for the party that is more likely to contain Iran and remind it and its terror proxies that America will defeat their threats to democracy and freedom; more likely to support Israel in its defensive, existential war; and more likely to protect civil rights by punishing unlawful acts of violence and antisemitic harassment on college campuses.
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I am not voting for the party that chooses appeasement as its foreign policy. I am not voting for the party that took no definitive action as antisemitic violence raged on college campuses across the United States.
Read the full op-ed here.
Notably, the Post-Gazette is published in the same town where Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff chose to make his “closing argument” against Trump on antisemitism on the anniversary of the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting.
Emhoff, who helped direct the Biden-Harris administration’s “antisemitism strategy,” allowed a radical antisemitic group into the process and failed to prevent the explosion of antisemitism in cities and on campuses since October 7.
Most Jews are expected to vote Democratic, but Trump could pull an historically large minority of Jews to his side.
Data cited recently in the Jewish Journal revealed that Trump is the clear favorite among Jews who place Israel and the fight against antisemitism as high priorities. For many liberal Jews, other issues, like abortion, are more salient.
Kaufman is not alone: there are many Jewish feminists, notably Phyllis Chesler, who are furious at the silence of left-wing feminists after the violence of October 7, in which Hamas terrorists and Palestinian civilians committed mass rape in their attack on Israel, in addition to the 1200 murders and 250 kidnappings they carried out on that day.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.