With exit poll numbers showing Jewish voters swinging dramatically from the Democratic Party to the GOP in last week’s midterm elections, analysts say the trend is a sign that America’s Jews are “waking up” to the fact that the latest Democratic class is the most radical and anti-Semitic seen in modern U.S. history.

According to exit polls posted by NBC News, Jewish voters moved significantly away from the Democratic Party to Republicans by 19 points nationwide from 2024, one of the few silver linings for the GOP in an election that saw the party suffer historic losses nationwide. As noted by Republican Jewish Coalition CEO Matt Brooks, in the Michigan race for a Senate seat with outspokenly anti-Israel candidate Abdul El-Sayed, “precinct-level vote data clearly show that the more Jewish the precinct, the bigger the swing to Republican Mike Rogers.” (Despite this, El-Sayed won a decisive victory of 52% to Rogers’s 45%.)

“In a community that has largely pulled the Democratic lever reflexively for generations, Jewish Americans are waking up — withholding their political and financial support, and in many cases, openly backing GOP candidates,” Brooks observed.

As if to underscore the point, a left-wing activist group attempted to organize a boycott of any business that happened to be owned (or part-owned) by Jews in Philadelphia last weekend. A group known as Philly Bike on Your Left held a “boycott ride” on Sunday that targeted six restaurant businesses in the Rittenhouse area of the city. In an Instagram post, the group blared, “These Zionist establishments must go!” As reported by The New York Times, the event was co-sponsored by several groups, including Penn Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, and was attended by members of the Philadelphia chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (who later disavowed the event).

Once word of the event spread, a crowd of counterprotestors in support of the restaurants gathered that far exceeded the size of the protestors. Marti Lieberman, who owns one of the besieged businesses, a food truck called Mac Mart that sells macaroni and cheese dishes, stated that she was targeted even though she has never materially supported any Israeli businesses. The boycott protest even drew the condemnation of Democrats like Mayor Cherelle Parker, who stated that “singling out businesses because their owners are Jewish is unacceptable and has no place in our city.”

Experts like Rabbi Yaakov Menken, who serves as executive vice president of the Coalition for Jewish Values, say that many liberal Jewish voters “have finally realized” that Democrats “are not your friends. They are out to get Jews. They pretend it’s about Israel, but it’s just straight-out anti-Semitism.”

Menken went on to emphasize that Republicans should “keep doing what they’re doing” to continue to build the Jewish vote.

“[L]ook, it’s all pulled out of what we call Scripture,” he pointed out during “Washington Watch” Wednesday. “Those values, the Founding Fathers referred to the book of Deuteronomy more than any other book. That’s guidance that lasts, and that’s going to work, and that’s standing for truth to begin with. … [A]s long as the Republican Party continues to push out the anti-Semites in its own midst — unlike what the leftists have done — people like Thomas Massie and Tucker Carlson do not represent the Republican Party. They’re being pushed out. They’re not being coddled. That’s going to … continue to make a difference.”

Menken further contended that anti-Semitism “will always invert the reality,” highlighting the recent incident in Philadelphia. “Let’s make no mistake, what went on in Philadelphia was an anti-Semitic rally parallel to those that the Nazis used to conduct in the 1930s. They were not targeting Israeli businesses. Half the restaurants were co-owned by a single Israeli-American. The other three restaurants that were targeted were owned entirely by Jewish Americans. One of those restaurants is older than the state of Israel. So let’s not pretend that this had something to do with Zionism or support for Israel or anything of that nature. It was raw Jew hatred — finding a pretense, making it allowable to hate Jews, which is eerily comparable to Kristallnacht, which preceded it by about 90 years.”

As for what political leaders should do to protect American Jews going forward, Menken stressed that simply speaking out against anti-Semitism will go a long way. “If all they do is [use their] voice, we’ll take it. This is a free country. Nazis get to march, but we get to call them Nazis. What [a] difference [it would have made] if university presidents would have done even that simple move?”