PITTSBURGH – Pittsburgh’s Jewish community is putting the Harris-Walz campaign on notice as they hurdle toward Election Day: stand with Israel and denounce anti-Israel activists or you’ll face Democratic defections at the ballot box.
The backlash has been brewing since the Harris campaign hosted speakers at Steel City rallies who had blamed Israel for the October 7 attacks that killed 1,200 people in southern Israel, despite explicit pleas from the Jewish community.
The campaign ignored those pleas, a person familiar with the conversation told The Post, and went on to give speaking roles to Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey and Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato, opening for Barack Obama and Tim Walz, respectively.
Gainey and Innamorato have come under fire from Pittsburgh’s Jewish voters since co-signing a statement with Squad member Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) that implied Israel was responsible for the massacre, claiming: “the violence did not start on October 7th.”
The statement, released on the one-year anniversary of Oct. 7, prompted swift condemnation from Jewish community leaders across Pittsburgh, home to a sizable chunk of the swing state’s 400,000-strong Jewish population poised to cast their ballots Tuesday.
With those votes on the line, Democrats’ dalliances with anti-Israel politicians could mean losing Pennsylvania’s 19 Electoral College votes — and the whole 2024 presidential election — to Donald Trump.
That’s not a far-fetched possibility, as several Jewish Democrats in Pittsburgh tell The Post they feel betrayed by their own party — and are considering casting their ballots for Trump on Tuesday.
Mother-of-two Aviva Lubowsky, 45, isn’t one of them. She’s a Harris supporter, but tells The Post Democrats are right to fear losing Jewish voters this cycle.
“If the Democratic Party wants to retain its Jewish voter base, they have to eschew and denounce extremists in the party,” she said. “The rhetoric they are using is dangerous for the safety of my children. It’s causing people who otherwise would vote for [Harris], to vote for Trump.”
“It makes me question whether I should be voting Democrat,” she added.
Jennifer Murtazashvili, a Jewish political scientist at the University of Pittsburgh who studies foreign policy and political divides, isn’t surprised to hear these sentiments from Jewish voters.
“The mainstream progressive left has a major problem on its hands,” she told The Post, adding that about 60% of her liberal Jewish friends in Pittsburgh are considering voting for Trump because they don’t trust Harris to secure Israel’s future or combat antisemitism.
“How can we discern what her policies are except by the people she surrounds herself with?” she asked, pointing not only to Gainey and Innamorato, but also to Harris’ national security advisor Philip Gordon, who supported the Iran deal under the Obama administration that restricted the Islamic state’s nuclear program while releasing billions of dollars to a regime that seeks Israel’s destruction.
“What does it say about how Kamala Harris is going to run the country? I think that’s why Jewish Americans right now have a lot of questions,” she added.
Long considered Democratic mainstays, Jewish voters are nationally showing their lowest support for Democrats since the Reagan era. And 62% of Jews are concerned about antisemitism in the Democratic Party as Israel enters its second year fighting Hamas terrorists in Gaza.
“There are undecided voters in the Jewish community where I never thought they’d be,” said one Jewish Democrat in Pittsburgh, who told The Post over 30 people approached him at Jewish holiday services in October with ambivalence towards Harris, and uncertainty over how to vote on Election Day.
“These are Democrats, not just registered Democrats but [people] who voted for Obama, Clinton and Biden.”
“The lack of moral clarity is giving people pause,” he added, citing Harris’ CNN town hall where she avoided answering if she would limit US support of Israel’s war in Gaza and whether she would be more pro-Israel than Donald Trump.
Another anonymous Jewish Democratic voter, who tells The Post she’s seriously considering voting for Trump, cited “failed moral clarity” as a reason she’s drifting away from the Democratic Party, pointing to the Harris campaign’s embrace of Gainey and Innamorato at her rallies.
“They obviously understood how dangerous it would be for Summer to be there,” said the voter, a 39-year-old mother from Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh’s historic Jewish neighborhood. She’s referring to Rep. Lee, who attended the campaign’s rallies but did not appear on stage.
“They are aware of this issue. They could have distanced themselves,” she added, and accused the veep of pandering to anti-Israel voters, many of whom are threatening to boycott the vice president at the ballot box.
But the No. 1 issue that’s driving this Jewish voter towards Trump is the fear that a would-be Harris administration would fail to deter the Islamic state from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
“Who do I want to be president when half of the world’s Jewry can be wiped off the face of the earth?” she said, putting her faith in Trump because he promoted Israeli-Arab relations through the Abraham Accords and reimposed sanctions on Iran in his first term.
And though the Jewish Democrat distrusts Trump’s isolationist tendencies towards Ukraine and denial of the 2020 election results, she said her fellow Democrats have “an irrational obsession to distance themselves from him even when his policies are good.”
“I know a lot of people in my world are not going to vote for either because they cannot stomach voting for Trump but they think Harris is a danger to Israel.”
Concern for Israel’s security dovetails with concern for Jewish safety, especially in Pittsburgh, which suffered the deadliest attack on Jews in US history in 2018, when a gunman killed 11 people at the city’s Tree of Life synagogue.
And just months ago three Jewish University of Pittsburgh students were attacked on campus, as antisemitic incidents have increased 360% in the US since the Oct. 7 terror attack over a year ago.
“When you have faced the kind of violence that our community has faced here and when you see the kind of violence facing Israel, this seems awfully existential,” Murtazashvili said. “It was shocking to see that language after the mayor saw what happened to Jewish students in his own city.”
Audrey Glickman, a Harris supporter and survivor of the Tree of Life massacre, didn’t blame the Harris campaign for trying to reach Arab and Muslim voters and defended the vice president’s support for Israel and the Jewish community.
“Kamala Harris is not a Squad member. She’s been to Pittsburgh more than once and talked to us more than once and has worked on antisemitism as an issue,” Glickman said, though she was saddened that the mayor would engage in antisemitic rhetoric.
Still, Lubowsky, who desperately wants Harris to win, emphasized that party leaders need to denounce anti-Israel voices in the party to win back disaffected Democrats.
“I have never voted for a Republican in my entire life. I will be for the first time this election,” Lubowsky said.
While she still supports Harris for president, she’ll be casting her ballot for Republican James Hayes, who is seeking to unseat Lee in Pennsylvania’s 12th District.
“American liberal Jews do not have a political home right now,” she said.
