In a Jewish neighborhood of Los Angeles, the presidential election is all about Israel

(JTA) — LOS ANGELES — Avi, a 35-year-old nurse from Los Angeles, has never voted before.

But on Monday, he was headed to a polling station at a synagogue in the Jewish neighborhood of Pico-Robertson to cast an early ballot. What’s driving him to vote this time, he said, was Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel last year and its aftermath. That’s also why he’s voting for Donald Trump.

“Since Oct. 7 I’ve been paying more attention to things related to Israel, and I care more than I did before,” said Avi, who is Jewish and declined to share his last name. “I haven’t been particularly happy with how the Biden-Harris administration has handled Israel since Oct. 7. In the immediate aftermath it was OK but since then I think they’ve put a leash on Israel.”

Oct. 7 has changed the lives and feelings of many American Jews — and is shaping how they think about Tuesday’s election in states across the country. In Pico-Robertson, that shift may well take the form of a split neighborhood now leaning more toward Trump. Like voters nationwide, Pico residents said they were feeling anxious about an election they have experienced as divisive. Several would not share their names, and a number of others declined to give interviews at all. And like Avi, many said they expected to vote for Trump because of his Israel policies.

“I think a lot of people just don’t know which way it’s going to go,” said Miriam Mark, the executive director of a Jewish organization doing voter outreach, about the overall election outcome. “I think there’s a healthy dose of fear out there.”

Pico-Robertson is filled with synagogues of multiple denominations, kosher restaurants and other Jewish businesses and institutions. Many residents are Orthodox, but a Conservative rabbinical school recently moved to the neighborhood, which last year was the site of a pair of antisemitic shootings.

How the neighborhood voted in 2020 depends on where its borders lie. According to the Los Angeles Times, Pico-Robertson’s main precinct was nearly split in 2020, with 602 votes for Biden compared to 578 for Trump. A New York Times election map of the area says it went narrowly for Trump, 848 to 751, a red-hued island in blue Los Angeles.

Those numbers make the neighborhood an outlier among Jews nationally, who historically vote in large majorities for the Democratic candidate. But it accords with the country’s Orthodox Jewish community, which has shifted heavily in recent years toward Republicans and Trump.

Area voters understood that no matter which direction the neighborhood goes, it will have zero impact on the national result: Barring a seismic shock, California’s electoral votes will go to Kamala Harris. That hasn’t made voters there any less conflicted, though.

“I’m not sure, so much, that my vote in California matters,” said a 36-year-old lawyer who lives in the neighborhood and declined to share his name. “But in my community I talk to my friends and family about what makes sense and in my view, there’s not a clear choice for Jews in terms of Israel.”

A woman who lives in nearby Beverly Hills, another Republican-leaning area, who was finishing up her grocery shopping at the neighborhood’s kosher Elat Market, said she was also concerned about the vote.

“Everyone I talk to is extremely stressed out by the election,” said the woman, who declined to share her name. “It’s probably the most important election of my lifetime, and I’m 75.”

She is voting for Harris — mainly as a vote against Trump, whom she called “unhinged.” She believes Harris, like past American presidents, will continue to be an ally to Israel and said some of her fellow Jewish voters who support Trump “don’t see beyond” his support for Israel.

The lawyer, however, could not bring himself to vote for either candidate. He voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 election, but said Oct. 7 had changed the dynamics of U.S. politics.

“The attack on Israel made a lot of theoretical questions more real in terms of the U.S.’ funding for Israel and questions from candidates about whether there should be strings attached,” he said.

While many of his friends are supporting Trump, he said the former president had too many “red flags” — ranging from his character to his 34 felony convictions to his remark that Jews would be partly to blame if he loses.

“People in my community overlook the value of the character of a politician,” he said. “In my community we’re not supposed to respect someone who is so callous like that.”

Of course, Pico-Robertson boasts its share of diehard Trump supporters, not least because it is home to a community of Iranian Jews as well as expats from Israel, where most people prefer Trump. Danny D., a consultant who moved to the United States from Tel Aviv around 10 years ago, voted early for the Republican candidate, who he believes will “fix things” like the economy and U.S.-Israel relations. He said he doesn’t know anyone voting for Harris, whom he called “anti-Jewish.”

“I think if Harris will be elected, I think there will be more antisemitic actions against Jews,” he said.

He also fit squarely into another subset of Trump voters: He said he didn’t think his vote would matter because the election is “set up.”

“I think that Trump needs to be elected but it’s going to be Kamala,” Danny said. Repeating a claim from 2020 that has been thoroughly debunked, he said that he had seen videos on Instagram of voting machines changing people’s votes from Republican to Democrat.

Another voter, a part-time tutor aged 81, said she too was proudly pro-Trump. She said that after four years of each party being in power, she voted for Trump “because things were better under him than under this awful Biden-Harris thing.”

The woman said she used to support Democrats. But she had started voting Republican around 2004, when the Orthodox shift toward the Republicans kicked off. She said most of her friends are supporting Trump this year, too.

“It’s just the liberal secular Jews who are still voting for Democrats,” she said. She pointed to Trump backing an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear sites as proof of his ironclad support for Israel.

“He says it all there in one sentence, while Kamala runs around in circles,” she said, mispronouncing the vice president’s name.

Josh Kessler, who works in Hollywood, said it was a “tough year for Jews to decide” who to support, but said he was voting for Harris. He accused both sides of pandering to Jewish voters.

“There’s a lot of sensitivity and turmoil going on over the past year, and I think that’s been forced on the Jewish people,” said Kessler, 49. He said he identifies as moderate or center-right, but applauded the Biden administration’s response to Oct. 7. He added that he believed Harris would continue to support Israel if she wins.

“If you look historically, Biden-Harris has done more for Israel than any administration in U.S. history,” said Kessler. “Harris has been painted as a progressive but I feel like in her heart she knows that Israel needs to protect itself.”

Elsewhere in the neighborhood, a mobile voting center was parked outside Dr. Sandwich, a popular kosher restaurant, to encourage Jews to vote.

The “Los Angeles Unites” initiative is a project of the Teach Coalition, an Orthodox Union-affiliated advocacy group focusing on Jewish education that has mobilized Jewish voters across the country. Mark, the executive director of Teach CA, the organization’s California outpost, said the program has engaged tens of thousands of voters across L.A. County.

The mobile vote center, a large van, has traveled across the city since the initiative launched Sept. 19, with an emphasis on educating people about the political process and encouraging them to vote, particularly in local elections. Mark said the initiative is nonpartisan and has worked with nearly 50 local Jewish schools and synagogues to reach voters through Shabbat programming, volunteer phone-banking and outreach events.

Robert Lehan, who is not Jewish but is volunteering as a driver for the mobile voting center, said a lot of people have been asking him who they should vote for.

Lehan said he’s heard distress from members of the Jewish community about “what’s going to happen to our country, and how is it going to affect Israel, and everything else, but primarily the Jewish community.”

Mark said her background is not in politics or advocacy, but that she got involved through an effort, led by the Teach Coalition, to secure funding for Jewish special needs education in California. A court sided with the coalition last week.

Mark pointed to that case as evidence that local elections matter, too, especially for Jews. She said this election was the first time she had filled out her entire ballot. And she suggested that the area’s Jews may have priorities that they can unite on, no matter who wins the White House.

“We really want to make sure that people understand that there’s not just one thing on the ballot,” Mark said. “It’s so important to vote locally, because, again, as a community, if we want change for our community, we have to show local officials that we have a voice and that we have power when we come together.”

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