PITTSBURGH — A Jewish law professor’s long love affair with the Democratic Party has come to an end.
She’s voting for two Republicans this November — most notably Dave McCormick, the businessman running to unseat 17-year incumbent Democratic Sen. Bob Casey.
“For the first time the Republican perspective is appealing to me. They are coming out strong for Israel,” Rona Kaufman, a Duquesne University law professor and past Obama volunteer, told The Post.
She said it’s because she’s both a feminist and a Zionist.
The Israel-Hamas war has divided the Democratic Party. While anti-Israel Democrats threaten to boycott Kamala Harris because she won’t commit to ending US military support of Israel, pro-Israel Democrats like Kaufman are prepared to withhold their support because they don’t believe the vice president will stand unwaveringly with the Jewish state.
Closing in on Casey in the Senate race, McCormick is exploiting this division to peel off the 3% of Pennsylvania’s voters that are Jewish. And his wife is helping pull in at least one of these voters.
“Having had a romantic relationship with the Democratic Party, I feel like they’ve cheated on me, and I’m so upset, and I feel like they’ve pushed me into the arms of this other party that is a rebound,” Kaufman said with a laugh.
But she’s serious.
Kaufman’s not on board with former President Donald Trump, but she plans to vote for McCormick and James Hayes, the Republican running to unseat Squad member Democratic Rep. Summer Lee.
She can’t bring herself to vote for Harris either.
The lifelong Democrat once trusted the party as a strong supporter of Israel, America’s only democratic ally in the Middle East.
She lost faith after Oct. 7.
Exactly one year ago, Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israel and killed, kidnapped and raped more than 1,400 people, including more than 40 Americans.
While President Biden and other Democratic leaders have largely supported Israel’s military and right to defend itself — though he and Harris haven’t kept from being critical — the far-left wing of the party has opposed the Jewish state, including Pittsburgh’s freshman congresswoman Lee.
“Pittsburgh is a microcosm of the betrayal of the Democratic Party,” Kaufman said.
Lee called for a cease-fire just weeks after Hamas committed the deadliest attack against Jews since the Holocaust. She’s pushed for an arms embargo against Israel and accused the country of committing genocide.
“The genocide claim has been leveled against Israel for a decade,” Kaufman said. “It’s a lie to justify destroying Israel.”
Kaufman once believed dialogue could achieve peace in the Middle East. Now she says, “Peace through strength,” echoing though not convinced by Sen. JD Vance’s words in the vice-presidential debate.
“You cannot make peace with people who’ve come to kill you,” Kaufman elaborated, but “the Democratic perspective at its core is still based in that flawed view.”
The history of Israel runs through Kaufman like it does many American Jews.
Her grandparents fled Poland after the Holocaust and found refuge in Israel, a fledgling state fighting for its existence in 1948. They made a living running a small grocery store and farm.
Before coming to America, Kaufman’s father was an officer in the Israel Defense Forces in the 1970s.
And Kaufman’s daughter Naomi Kitchen served in a search-and-rescue unit in the Israeli-occupied West Bank during the latest war in Gaza. Kaufman has visited Naomi twice in northern Israel since the Oct. 7 massacre.
Kaufman said her views hardened after hearing her daughter’s experiences.
“The men threatened to rape her all the time. That’s the greeting she encountered” as a woman carrying a gun, said Kaufman, a legal scholar who’s specialized in violence against women.
Kaufman said Israel isn’t only supposed to protect just Jews but Jewish women — long the victims of sexual violence — as well.
“Our people will be safe. Our women will not be raped. And October 7 broke that,” she said.
Verified by the United Nations but denied by some on the far left, terrorists raped Jewish women and paraded them through the streets.
“They ripped open such a historic wound in the Jewish psyche,” Kaufman said. “Even if people get killed, that is why our response is so absolutely necessary. If you attack our women and children, you should expect retribution.”
A proud defender of both women’s rights and Israel’s self-determination, Kaufman cannot fathom the Democratic Party’s tolerance of people like Lee.
“Why would the Democratic Party allow itself to be degraded?” she asked, wishing Casey, Harris and the party would call out anti-Israel and antisemitic Democratic politicians and voters, which she worries represent the party’s future.
For her Jewish community liaison, Harris chose Ilan Goldenberg, a supporter of the Iran deal that eased sanctions and put billions into regime coffers who’s argued against defunding the Palestinian Authority over its promotion of terrorism.
“He’s not at all representative of mainstream Jewry. His views are wrong,” Kaufman said.
“It’s almost like I’ve been completely betrayed by somebody I cared for. And I don’t think that’s an uncommon sentiment,” she added, speaking about the Democratic Party.
Kaufman admires Pennsylvania’s other Democratic senator, John Fetterman, who’s renounced the “progressive” label and supports unconditional military aid for Israel.
“I wish others would follow his lead. He demonstrates moral clarity and integrity,” she said.
Searching for moral clarity this election season, Kaufman has found it in Dave McCormick, who slammed Casey in a New York Post op-ed for failing to get a vote on his bill cracking down on campus antisemitism and not rescinding his endorsement of Lee after 40 Pittsburgh Jewish leaders denounced her anti-Israel rhetoric.
Though Kaufman believes Casey is a strong supporter of Israel, she met McCormick at a neighborhood vigil for the hostages still imprisoned by Hamas. She admired his military service in the first Gulf War in Iraq: “I like him and I like his story and I like his wife’s story.”
Dina Powell McCormick, a Coptic Christian from Cairo, served as deputy national security adviser in the Trump White House and helped draft the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and some Arab nations, including Saudi Arabia.
The McCormicks traveled to a kibbutz after Oct. 7 and met with families of Hamas-held hostages.
“A Coptic Christian in the Middle East understands the threat of Islamism,” Kaufman said.
“That’s someone whose worldview I feel I can really count on.”
