Article
JTA: Republicans and Democrats both try to paint the other side’s candidates as worse for the Jews
October 23, 2018
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In their campaigns to get out the Jewish vote, and to elicit donors, the two partisan Jewish groups, the Jewish Democratic Council of America and the Republican Jewish Coalition, are seizing on the other party’s vulnerability and defending their own side.
White nationalists “have a home in the Republican Party because our president has legitimized these movements,” Halie Soifer, the JDCA’s executive director, said in an interview.
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The Jewish partisan groups have made clear where they stand on at least some of its bad actors: Brooks has said that the Republican Jewish Coalition will have nothing to do with Virginia’s Stewart or Iowa’s King, and Soifer’s Democratic group has spoken out against the Israel views of Tlaib and Omar.
Part of the mission of Jewish partisan groups is to explain to the national party why it opposes a trend or an individual. Both Brooks and Soifer said they are doing just that, but that they did not expect the national party to shut out actors like Omar, Tlaib, King or Stewart.
“It’s important, as we do within the Republican sphere, that we stand up and make clear what the boundaries are in terms of the statements that some of these candidates are making,” Brooks said. “It’s easy for us who have a clear set of values to say ‘this guy’s views do not align with where we are.’ It’s harder for the party, which has a broader, bigger tent.”
Soifer said it was important to distinguish between foreign policy positions, however outlandish, and bigotry.
“To have an issue on a specific foreign policy issue is very different than associating oneself with a movement of neo-Nazis, anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers,” she said.