editorials
Celebrate Israel’s Economic Juggernaut
A s we brace for the frustration and uncertainly
of Israel’s fifth national election in four years to
be held next Tuesday, and bemoan the frustration
of an Israeli electorate so deeply divided on a host
of political and social issues, it is worth taking a step
back to marvel at the remarkable success of the
Jewish state’s bursting economy.

While virtually every country in the world is
suffering from rampant inflation, slow economic
growth and challenges to maintenance of cur-
rency values, Israel is an exception. Israel’s econ-
omy is growing at one of the fastest paces in the
world; it boasts a very low rate of inflation and
a high level of employment. Israel’s shekel is
reported to be the world’s best performing cur-
rency among the more than 30 that trade actively,
and the only one that strengthened against the
dollar in the past decade.

Israel’s projected domestic product growth in
2022 will reach 5.2%. Unemployment is at an
impressive 3.5%, and Israel’s inflation rate of 4.3%
is less than half the annualized rate in the U.S. and
Europe. Israel’s economy is strong and is poised to
continue to grow. Analysts attribute that strength
to a culture of innovation that dominates Israel’s
business sector and a broad, diverse and growing
base of companies that make up corporate Israel.

As highlighted in a recent Bloomberg analy-
sis of Israel’s economic success, it is innovation
and technology that drive Israel’s remarkable
impact on some of the world’s largest industries.

The range of impacted industries includes busi-
ness sectors as diverse as auto parts, medical
equipment and food, water and climate-change
solutions. Companies like Mobileye Global Inc.,
the creator of vision-based driver assistance pro-
grams, and Innoviz Technologies Ltd., the maker of
light detection ranging (Lidar) sensor and percep-
tion software for autonomous driving are making
a significant impact on the worldwide automobile
industry. And Nanox Imaging Ltd. — a company
devoted to moving from predictive medicine to
preventive medicine — brings new approaches
and promise to governments, hospitals and clinics
with cloud-based image analysis, online diagnosis
and billing services while continuing its work in
the development of a 3D medical imaging device.

And then there is Redefine Meat, the Israeli
startup in its fourth year that seeks to address
meat’s significant impact on the challenges of cli-
mate change and sustainability by creating the first
3D printed plant-based steak, which now boasts
distribution in more than 500 restaurants and
butcher shops in Israel, Berlin, Amsterdam and
London. There are, of course, many more such compa-
nies, each with an impressive story and many with
eye-popping success. There are some 630 compa-
nies domiciled in Israel. Not all of them will succeed.

But not one of them accounts for more than 10% of
Israel’s market value. That diversity — coupled with
an innovative, single-minded dedication to under-
standing new challenges and working through
them without fear of failure — bodes well for con-
tinued growth and expansion of Israel’s economy.

We can only hope that the new government
Israel will elect on Nov. 1 will bring a similar sta-
bility, reliability, innovation and a drive to solve
problems creatively. JE
T he upcoming midterm elections on
Nov. 8 are important. The outcome will
determine control of the U.S. Senate, the
House of Representatives and leadership
and control of state government. In our
deeply divided and hyper-partisan political
environment, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

So, if you care about who is going to rep-
resent your interests in the next Congress
and in the state Capitol, and you care
about any of the issues being debated on
the campaign trail, you need to make your
voice heard by voting. Candidates you
elect will be in a position to make a differ-
ence going forward.

We urge you to vote no matter what com-
peting polls are predicting. That’s because
we have seen repeatedly that many polls
are not reliable predictors of election out-
comes. Analysts have differing views on why pollsters
keep getting things wrong. Some complain that
the polling questions themselves are biased and
tend to pre-ordain a result. Other argue that some
pollsters improperly focus on registered voters
rather than likely voters and assert that likely vot-
ers will more accurately predict election results
than registered voters who may not actually show
up to vote. And then there is the claimed under-
counting of Republicans because of “shy Trump
14 OCTOBER 27, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
supporters” or others seeking to avoid vilification
or worse for support of more conservative can-
didates or positions. This sometimes leads to no
answer or misleading answers to polling surveys
and skews poll results.

Further complicating things are the hot political
issues that initially grab voter attention, and then
cool down after some period of time. In this elec-
tion cycle, the abortion issue, the flailing economy
and the Jan. 6 hearings may be good examples of
hot topic concerns with differing voter impact with
the passage of time.

Earlier this year, most analysts expected
Republicans to make big gains in
November, as usually happens for the
party that doesn’t hold the White House.

But the Supreme Court’s decision to over-
turn Roe v. Wade, the rollout of the Jan.

6 hearings and the investigation of for-
mer President Donald Trump’s handling of
classified documents and the rise, fall and
threatened further rise of gas prices have
all captured voter attention and served as
a rallying point for advocates to push for
voter turnout to elect candidates sympa-
thetic to a particular view. That was then.

But now, some reports suggest that
uneasiness about the economy and immi-
gration may have overtaken abortion con-
cerns or continued focus on the expanding
saga of Donald Trump’s legal problems, raising
new concerns and predictions about control of
the House, Senate and state capitols.

But who knows? And that’s precisely the point.

No matter what you hear from the pollsters, not
a single poll result actually votes for a candidate.

Only registered voters can do that. Voting is an
enormous privilege and empowers each of us to
be a part of a communal decision on issues that
matter to us. We encourage you to vote on Nov. 8.

Your future depends on it. JE
iStock / Getty Images Plus/ SDI Productions
Ignore the Polls. Go Vote!



opinions & letters
Does Trump Hate Jews,
or Just ‘Bad Jews’?
they are not. That’s the Trump heard in a recent
video clip, asking if the fi lmmaker was “a good
Jewish character.” Good Jew or bad Jew?
Tamkin calls her book an attempt to “wrestle
with what I believe to be the one truth of American
Jewish identity: it can never be pinned down.”
Still, a lot of people have tried — sometimes out
of the best of intentions, and sometimes to push
people out of the fold. When we presume to tell
ourselves who is and isn’t a “good Jew,” however,
we shouldn’t be shocked when others — espe-
cially a politician who has made racial tribalism his
brand — do the same. JE
BY ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL
Photo by Gage Skidmore / The Star News Network /cc-by-sa-2.0
I n her new book “Bad Jews,” Emily Tamkin frames
recent American Jewish communal politics as a
series of clashes between antagonists who insist
there are right ways and wrong ways to be Jewish
— that is, “good Jews” and “bad Jews.” It’s a useful
and revealing way to look at how Jews fi ght among
themselves. It’s also incredibly timely (or timeless). Donald
Trump had his own version of “bad Jews” in mind
when he tweeted this month that American Jews
were insuffi ciently grateful to him for his support
of Israel, and warned that “U.S. Jews have to get
their act together and appreciate what they have
in Israel — before it is too late!”
Some Jewish groups heard that as an antise-
mitic threat. Even giving him the benefi t of the
doubt — I thought he meant that Israel itself
would be in danger if Jews didn’t vote for a
pro-Israel president like him the next time — it
does fi t into a pattern in which Trump treats “the
Jews” as a monolith, and distinguishes between
the good Jews who vote for him and the bad Jews
who don’t recognize their own self-interest. That
sort of ethnic pigeonholing never ends well. And
as I have written before, I don’t know if Trump is
antisemitic, but he has certainly been good for
antisemitism. Trump was also echoing the kinds of internal
Jewish conversations that Tamkin describes. It
may be presumptuous for a gentile politician
to explain how “good Jews” vote, but Jewish
individuals and organizations have been doing
it for years. Liberal Jews use the “good Jew/bad
Jew” framing, on everything from immigration to
LGBTQ rights. But it has over the years become a
conservative specialty, especially when it comes
to Israel:
In 2002, New York Times columnist William
Safi re urged Jewish Democrats to put their
domestic agenda aside to vote for Republicans
he felt had a better record on Israel.

In 2008, neoconservative icon Norman
Podhoretz lamented that liberalism had “super-
seded Judaism and become a religion in its own
right.” In 2011, Jewish conservative fi rebrand Ben
Shapiro tweeted, “The Jewish people has always
been plagued by Bad Jews, who undermine it
from within. In America, those Bad Jews largely
vote Democrat.”
In 2018, Jonathan Neumann turned that idea
into a book-length attack on Jews involved in
Andrew Silow-Carroll is editor-in-chief of the New
York Jewish Week and senior editor of the Jewish
Telegraphic Agency.

Former President Donald Trump in 2021
social justice movements, subtitled, “How the
Jewish Left Corrupts and Endangers Israel.”
In each case, the writers implied that good Jews
put the fate of Israel ahead of other values —
which, to the degree that they are liberal, seem to
the writers barely Jewish in the fi rst place.

Some of those objecting to Trump’s tweet said
it fed the “dual loyalty” accusation — that is, Jews
pledge their true allegiance to Israel. But again,
Trump is turning an internal Jewish discourse
back on itself. Let’s be honest: Caring about the
well-being of Israel — political, social, military — is
a normative value in the vast majority of American
Jewish settings: synagogues, schools, summer
camps, community councils. That’s not dual loy-
alty, but solidarity with millions of co-religionists
and extended family members. Such solidarity
is the right of any ethnic group, and Jews have
rightly owned it, even as polls show that is the
minority of Jews who make Israel their number
one issue at the polls. Trump’s tweet is a funhouse
version of that tendency — demanding Jews
stand in solidarity with Israel but on his terms, and
exclusive of other priorities.

Trump’s tweet is of a piece with what Maggie
Haberman, in her new book about Trump,
describes as the “racial tribalism” the real estate
mogul absorbed in the New York City of the
1960s, ’70s and ’80s. In that Archie Bunkerish
New York, individuals were pegged and defi ned,
for good and ill, by their ethnicity. In Trump’s view,
Jews are good business people, savvy negotia-
tors and of one mind when it comes to Israel —
and are confounding and even ungrateful when
letters Compounding an Error
The president recently said that “there will be
consequences” in his latest kerfuffl e with the
leader of our once-close ally, Saudi Arabia. This
may be one of the few times in his tenure that he
may be right/half right, since we will suff er the
eff ects of those consequences.

As the Exponent implies (“From Fist Bump to
Poke in the Eye,” Oct. 20), Biden’s statement
during his campaign to make the kingdom an
“international pariah” was a sound moral state-
ment while at the same time being a very poor
foreign policy one. The reason is simple: While
the Saudis’ morality leaves much to be desired, its
economic and political power remains vital to the
Middle East’s ability to contain Iran’s hegemony
in the area.

It’s long been obvious that both America and
Israel need the kingdom to be part of a coali-
tion to act as a buff er against Iranian expansion.

Threatening the Saudis along with some of his
other poorly conceived policies was an unforced
error, and compounding it by indulging in retali-
ations would send the kingdom directly into the
Soviet and Chinese coalition. JE
Steve Heitner, Middle Island, New York
Letters should be related to articles that have run in the print or
online editions of the JE, and may be edited for space and clarity
prior to publication. Please include your first and last name, as
well your town/neighborhood of residence. Send letters to
letters@jewishexponent.com. JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
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