A widely reported poll claims that half of American Jews think the president is antisemitic and that Israel’s leadership is fighting in Gaza for political reasons.
By Morton A. Klein and Elizabeth A. Berney, Esq.
(May 19, 2025 / JNS) A few days ago, multiple news publications reported on the results of a poll by Jim Gerstein’s GBAO Strategies for a newly formed, supposedly “nonpartisan” outfit: the Jewish Voters Resource Center. The final tally suggested that half of Jewish Americans believe that U.S. President Donald Trump is antisemitic, in addition to other left-wing results.
Unfortunately, the mostly identical news articles in The Forward, The Times of Israel, Israel Hayom, The Hill and Arutz Sheva failed to mention the poll’s dishonest phrasing of its questions to elicit far-left results, the poll’s skewed polling sample or the fact that Gerstein was J Street’s former vice president and biased pollster.
But many active in the American Jewish community suspected that the poll results were not believable and simply wrong. It did not seem possible that a legitimate poll would find “half of American Jewish voters believe Trump is antisemitic”; that 62% supposedly believe that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Netanyahu resumed the war in Gaza in March for personal political considerations as opposed to Israel’s national security”; or that significant numbers of American Jews believe that Trump’s efforts to end campus antisemitism causes more hatred.
So what’s going on? First, pollster Gerstein has a history of conducting deceptive polls to promote J Street’s agenda. Commissioning Gerstein’s polls through the new “Jewish Voters Resource Center” outfit seems to have been an effort to obscure that these are still misleading polls designed to promote the same anti-Israel J Street agenda.
Second, the polling sample was heavily skewed to overrepresent Jews who voted against Trump and to underrepresent Republicans and Orthodox Jews. Only 26% of Gerstein’s polling sample voted for Trump, and 16% were Republicans. An AP/Fox News analysis exit poll showed that 33% of American Jews voted for Trump. The exit poll numbers for Trump were also much higher in states with large Jewish populations (45% in New York, 43% in Florida and 41% in Pennsylvania).
Exit polls are not as reliable as actual results and likely understated Jewish voters for Trump: A Tablet study of actual precinct-level results found that in New York and other areas, “Nearly every neighborhood with a notable density of Jewish-specific businesses and institutions … voted heavily Republican or saw a rise in Trump’s performance.” For instance, Trump received 62% in a heavily Syrian Jewish area of Brooklyn, N.Y., and between 75% to 90% of the votes in the borough’s heavily Russian-Jewish area.
Gerstein’s “poll” was, apparently, a case of “Let’s ask people who voted against Trump what they think of him now.”
Third, questions exist as to whether all of Gerstein’s sample consisted solely of Jews and whether certain ethnic Jews were omitted. Gerstein said he selected his poll sample from a voter database, choosing people with Jewish-sounding first or last names, a standard under which a voter named Mohammed Goldstein would qualify. He then asked potential respondents if they “self-identified” as Jewish. However, “identifying” as something is not the same as being something. Further, is Gerstein aware of the names used by American Jews hailing from Syria, Russia, Ukraine, Persia, Greece and elsewhere? What about surnames like “Hakimi,” used by both Persian Jews and Persian Muslims? Failing to include such Jews, who tend to favor Trump and Netanyahu, would also have skewed Gerstein’s sample.
Fourth, and extremely significantly, Gerstein’s questions amounted to a “push poll,” designed to elicit the answers he wanted. For instance, the poll stated: “Below are some actions that Trump has taken or may take as president,” it then asked whether the poll respondents approved of actions on the list (all designed to be adverse) such as “Cutting funds for USAID which provides funds for vaccinations and food deliveries in developing countries.” Given the way that the question was phrased, 76% disapproved of cutting funding to USAID, the U.S. Agency of International Development. After all, who would support denying food to presumably poor developing countries?
If the poll respondents had been asked whether they supported “Cutting funds to USAID, which was shown in congressional hearings to have granted or diverted billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer funds to Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas affiliates,” the response might have been very different.
Notably, every item on the list of “Trump actions” was designed to elicit dislike or hatred of Trump and his actions. No positive actions were listed. The poll also included a list of negatively phrased “Trump actions” on antisemitism in an attempt to elicit the absurd belief that Trump is antisemitic. There wasn’t a single item on the list phrased in a positive or even neutral manner.
For instance, the poll’s antisemitism list asked respondents whether the following caused antisemitism to increase or decrease: “The Trump administration arresting and deporting pro-Palestinian protesters who are legal residents of the United States.” Some 61% of respondents answered that this would increase antisemitism. If the question had been phrased: “The Trump administration arresting and deporting Hamas-affiliated foreigners who violently attack Jewish students and demand the murder of every Jew on campuses,” the result would most likely have favored Trump’s efforts to combat antisemitism.
Similarly, the funding cuts question claimed that funding was cut to universities that the Trump administration merely “said” were not doing enough to combat antisemitism. This question implied that U.S. colleges are doing enough to combat antisemitism and that Trump was using antisemitism as an excuse to cut funding; 49% of people responded to this loaded question by saying that Trump’s actions increased antisemitism.
If the question had been phrased to explain that these universities were not combating Jew-hatred after decades of efforts to have them do so—and that the universities were enabling a campus climate in which Jewish students were violently attacked and blocked from attending classes—then few of the poll respondents would have answered that Trump’s action increased antisemitism.
Unfortunately, the news reports on the poll results failed to explain that the questions were embedded falsehoods about Trump’s laudable actions to curb campus antisemitism.
In 2018, ZOA published an eye-opening, book-length special report, “J Street Sides With Israel’s Enemies & Works to Destroy Support for Israel,” detailing J Street’s multiple insidious methods of assaulting Israel and Israel’s friends. Chapter 21, pages 115-118, delved into how J Street, via its then-vice president Gerstein and his polling company, conducted deceptive polls and misrepresented polling data to create the false impression that American Jews supported J Street’s agenda.
For instance, Gerstein conducted a poll asking American Jews whether they would support a hypothetical Iran nuclear deal with gradual, limited sanctions relief when, and if, benchmarks were met; severe restrictions on Iran; and intrusive inspections. J Street then deceptively used the results of this hypothetical Iran-deal poll to claim that American Jews overwhelmingly supported the catastrophic Iran deal.
The 2015 Iran nuclear deal, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was nothing like J Street’s hypothetical. The actual deal gave hundreds of billions of dollars of sanctions relief and economic windfalls to Iran near the agreement’s outset, not “gradually.” It allowed enrichment above the amount needed for civilian use and made it virtually impossible to inspect Iran’s undeclared nuclear activities. Reliable polls showed that two-thirds of American Jews and 80% of young Jews opposed the deal.
J Street also misrepresented the results of others’ polls: For instance, J Street falsely claimed that Israelis favored a “settlement freeze” when in fact Israelis favored growth in Judea-Samaria by two to one.
Anti-Israel radicals are now engaging in the same deceptive polling via their new “nonpartisan” organization. The press needs to investigate these deceptive polls far more carefully when reporting on them.
Morton Klein is the national president of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA). Elizabeth Berney, Esq. is the ZOA Director of Research & Special Projects.
This op-ed was originally published in JNS and can be viewed here.