Mr. Rosenberg said that this year he is voting for Josh Shapiro, the Democratic candidate for governor, because of his concerns about the Republican Doug Mastriano, who has alarmed many Jewish voters over incidents including criticizing Mr. Shapiro for sending his children to a Jewish day school. (Mr. Mastriano has said his criticism was directed at Mr. Shapiro’s decision to send his children to an “expensive, elite” school, and not based on the school’s religious affiliation.)
But his concerns cut both ways. In his state’s race for the Senate, Mr. Rosenberg is voting for the Republican, Mehmet Oz, citing concern that the Democrat, John Fetterman, “will vote with the left-wing woke progressive anti-Israel” faction in the Senate.
The years since the election of Mr. Trump — a champion of Israel’s right wing and the father of a convert to Judaism, but also the beneficiary of societal anger that has often had ugly undertones — have seen a rise in attacks against the Jewish community, which some leaders associate with Mr. Trump’s reluctance to distance himself from groups that traffic in antisemitism.
At the same time, the left has been rattled by rising divisions within the Democratic Party over Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, pitting those who have traditionally supported Israel against a rising class of progressive activists and lawmakers who ally themselves with the Palestinian cause. It is a fracture that has made the politics of the moment even more complicated for many American Jews.
“There’s this constant discussion and debate as to where it is worse — is it worse on the right or the left — when it’s present on both sides, no question,” said Rabbi Moshe Hauer, executive vice president of the Orthodox Union. “There’s been an ascendancy on the right, but there’s also been a very significant uptick on the left, and the evolution of antisemitism on the left is a major development.”
A new study by a group of academics including Leonard Saxe, the director of the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University, found that Jews across the political spectrum are equally concerned about what it calls “traditional anti-Semitism,” but that conservatives are more concerned than liberals about “Israel-related anti-Semitism,” meaning anti-Jewish views that can be conflated with criticism of Israel.
There are fissures: In Pittsburgh this week, a group of more than 200 Jews signed a letter criticizing a PAC related to AIPAC, the pro-Israel group, for donating to a Republican congressional candidate, and, in the process, also criticized AIPAC for supporting “lawmakers who have promoted the antisemitic ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory.”
