Trump and the Jewish Enlightenment

A Jewish computer science professor writes:

I voted against Trump three times, and donated thousands to his opponents. I’d still vote against him today, seeing him as a once-in-a-lifetime threat to American democracy and even to the Enlightenment itself. But last night I was also grateful to him for overruling the isolationists and even open antisemites in his orbit, striking a blow against the most evil regime on the planet, and making it harder for that regime to build nuclear weapons.

He goes on to praise Pres. Trump's Middle East policies.

His blog is mostly non-political. When he discusses politics, it is usually either on how much he hates the Woke Left, or how he hates Trump. And he hates Trump for somehow subverting the views of Enlightenment philosophers three centuries ago.

This reminds me of the famous Jewish Atheist Harvard professor Steve Pinker, who is also Trump-hater, a critic of the Woke Left, and admires the Enlightenment so much that he has written several books on it.

What are they talking about? What do they even mean by the Enlightenment? And if they like Trump's policies, why don't they vote for him?

Puzzled, I found this:

Growing emancipation of European Jews in the eighteenth century was matched by an intellectual movement that came to be called the Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah. Jews started to enter the mainstream of European society, in particular in major German cities such as Berlin, and Jewish thinkers had to accomplish two tasks. They needed to show their Gentile peers that they were just as committed to rationality as anyone else, and they needed to persuade other Jews that they should establish links with the local non-Jewish cultures in which they lived. ...

The basis of Haskalah was respect for reason, as the word suggests (sekhel being reason in Hebrew) and this was to have longstanding effects on Jewish culture. It contributed to the start of Reform Judaism in Germany, its basis being a putative rational attitude to traditional Judaism. It also played a part in the secular nature of Zionism, the idea that the Jews, like other national groups, had a right to a homeland that was based on reason not tradition.

I never heard of this. Today, the orthodox Jews vote for Trump, and the other Jews vote against him with a religious passion.

I have posted theories about this, but maybe I am wrong, and it all stems to some obscure Jewish philosophers who lived centuries ago. I will have to investigate this further. Pinker bizarrely attributes all that is good in the world to this Enlightenment, as if no one knew what to do until some 18th century Jewish philosophers had the great idea to use reason.

No, I do not think that these Enlightenment philosophers had any significant impact on the modern world. The use of reason goes back to Aristotle, and probably long before him. These philosophers do not even seem particularly rational to me.

I have posted many times on European developments that led to modern civilization. I credit events of a millennium ago, not the Enlightenment. To the extend that Enlightenment philosophers were influential, they were mainly Christian. Not Jewish or anything else.

But what's with this Jewish devotion to Enlightenment philosophers, and what does it have to do with hating Trump? I do not know. I think it is the key to a modern political puzzle.

The above professor writes:

“if, as it seems, Israel can survive only by waging constant wars against its neighbors, then doesn’t that itself prove the problem is Israel’s existence, and that modern Israel should never have been created at all?” ...

I used to be much further left than I am now. I turned against leftism largely because I saw how the progressive anti-Zionist worldview, taken to its logical conclusion, leads inevitably to this sort of question. If the highest value was the welfare of the masses, and if (hypothetically) the masses wanted the Jews gone, then by what right would the Jews remain alive?

Okay, but why is he anti-Trump?