“As world politicians lurch far to the right and reaction to it is fierce from the far left, are Jews squeezed in the middle? Is this 1930’s deja vu (all over again, as Yogi Berra used to say)?”
1. The New Anti-Semitism 2
2. How Liberalism Loses -- An inflexible agenda and a global retreat 9
3. Antisemites to the Left of Me, Nazis to the Right: Stuck in the Middle With Jews 11
4. When the right and left fight over anti-Semitism, Jews are caught in the middle 21
1. The New Anti-Semitism
In Europe and the U.S., rising political forces on both the right and the left have revived old patterns that scapegoat Jews for society’s ills
By Yaroslav Trofimov July 12, 2019, the Wall Street Journal https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-anti-semitism-11562944476
When France’s Yellow Vests began to protest weekly last November, it was about President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to raise fuel taxes. Within a few months, it also started to be about the Jews.
Signs that labeled Mr. Macron as a “whore of the Jews” and a slave of the Rothschilds, a reference to the president’s past employment with the investment bank, became a fixture of the demonstrations. In February, several Yellow Vest protesters—since disavowed by the movement—assaulted the Jewish philosopher Alain Finkielkraut on the doorstep of his Paris home, yelling, “You will die,” “Zionist turd” and “France is for us.”
“When there is a world-wide economic and social malaise, people look for scapegoats—and the Jews have always served as scapegoats,” said Francis Kalifat, the president of CRIF, the council uniting France’s Jewish institutions. “Anti-Semitism creates bridges between the far right and the far left: They have such a hatred in common that they come together.”
In France and other Western societies, the proliferation of new political forces that challenge the established liberal order—from both the right and the left—has revived old patterns of vilifying the Jews as the embodiment of the corrupt elites supposedly responsible for society’s ills.
Meanwhile, unfiltered social media has pushed these anti-Semitic tropes, long confined to the fringes, into the mainstream of public debate. On any given issue—from economic inequality to the financial crisis to immigration and terrorism—old and new conspiracy theories blaming the Jews have gained new traction, abetted by the political polarization and general crisis of confidence permeating Western democracies.
2 “Latent anti-Semitism is being activated,” said David Feldman, director of the Pears Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism at Birkbeck, University of London. “Populist politics is not inherently anti-Semitic, conspiracy theories are not inherently anti-Semitic, but both very easily lend themselves to an anti-Semitic turn and easily become anti-Semitic.”
This change comes after an unusual, postwar golden age that Jewish communities enjoyed across Western Europe and the U.S. over the past several decades. After the horrors of the Holocaust, a commitment to minority rights, religious freedom, an inclusive vision of nationhood and a human-rights-based liberalism seemed to be the bedrock of political life in Western democracies. While anti-Semitic prejudice persisted in some areas, overt anti-Semitism seemed taboo.
‘The trend away from liberal democracies is bad for the Jewish people, period.’ —Jonathan Greenblatt, Anti-Defamation League
“Liberal democracies have been good for the Jewish people. Civil rights have been critical to our success in societies which, in the absence of these rights, over centuries and millennia systematically discriminated against and marginalized Jewish people,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the director of the Anti-Defamation League in New York. “The trend away from liberal democracies is bad for the Jewish people, period.”
As anti-Semitic discourse again becomes normalized in the West, the number of incidents targeting Jews has surged in the U.S. and Europe.
Until the past few years, the biggest threat came from Islamists and disaffected Muslim youths, particularly in the troubled banlieues at the edges of French cities. France, home to Europe’s biggest Jewish community, has suffered a string of killings of Jews, including the deadly 2015 assault on a Paris kosher supermarket claimed by Islamic State. Anti-Jewish harassment remains commonplace in distressed neighborhoods where working-class Muslims and Jews live side by side. “The Jews who lived in the banlieue have been leaving. Daily life has become impossible there,” said French Sen. Esther Benbassa, who represents many suburbs of Paris.
3 The West’s new wave of anti-Semitism, however, is increasingly coming from new quarters: from the nativist far right, with its fear of “the other” and dreams of racial purity, and from the extreme left, which often identifies Jews with the capitalist elites it seeks to destroy and glorifies Palestinian militants.
Sen. Benbassa, who supported the Yellow Vests’ economic demands, said that skinhead far-right activists twice assailed her with anti-Semitic insults during the recent demonstrations; other Yellow Vests—who, like many in the movement, can’t abide anti-Semitic prejudice—came to her rescue.
When another far-right extremist shouting anti-Semitic slurs and seething over immigration gunned down 11 worshipers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh last October, he claimed more lives in one swoop than an entire decade of Islamist violence against Jews in France. Including that shooting—the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in American history—the total number of reported physical assaults on Jews in the U.S. more than doubled last year to 39, according to the Anti- Defamation League. In April, another far-right extremist opened fire in a synagogue in Poway, Calif., killing a 60-year-old woman.
In the U.K., the number of anti-Semitic incidents has been rising for each of the past four years, reaching 1,652 in 2018, compared with 960 in 2015, according to the Community Security Trust, which monitors threats to British Jews. (Most of the identified perpetrators were white and non- Muslim.) And in France, the number of reported anti-Jewish incidents rose 74% to 541 last year, according to the country’s interior ministry. That may be just the tip of an iceberg: Last year, a European Union survey of European Jews found that 79% of those who experienced anti-Semitic harassment didn’t report it to authorities.
A critical difference between today’s anti-Semitism and its pre-World War II iterations is the existence of Israel—a prosperous democracy and an undeclared nuclear power that is nearing the historic threshold of being home to the majority of the world’s Jews. On one level, Israel represents a guarantee of security should things get dramatically worse—a “life insurance policy” for diaspora Jews, as Mr. Kalifat of CRIF puts it. Already, tens of thousands of French Jews have invested in property in Israel or acquired Israeli passports.
4 But on another level, Jews in Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere are regularly blamed for Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians—a minority within one country being held accountable for the policy decisions of the government of another. Sometimes this dynamic can take on softer forms, such as when Jewish students on American college campuses—where the movement to boycott Israel is strong—face pressure to repudiate any connection to the Jewish state. Sometimes, it can become violent. During the 2014 Gaza war, some pro-Palestinian protesters in France—unable to attack Israeli interests—burned down several Jewish-owned businesses instead. “When you diabolize the state of Israel, you end up diabolizing the Jews,” Mr. Kalifat said.
The diabolization of Israel certainly lies at the heart of the crisis in Britain’s Labour Party—a movement that used to attract the bulk of the U.K. Jewish vote and that 85.6% of British Jews now see as harboring significant anti-Semitism, according to an August-September 2018 poll for the Jewish Chronicle, a London-based Jewish newspaper.
In nearly four years of being led by Jeremy Corbyn, a fierce critic of Israel and Zionism, Labour has experienced so many anti-Semitic incidents within its ranks that in May, the party found itself under formal investigation by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, an antiracism watchdog created by a previous Labour government. Mr. Corbyn has described leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah as “friends” and was recorded saying that “Zionists” don’t “understand English irony” despite spending their entire lives in the country. He vigorously denies that he or his party are anti-Semitic.
“Jews in this country are held responsible for the actions of the Israeli government in the way we wouldn’t demand for, say, British Pakistanis. It’s the way that is not applied to any other minority,” said Luciana Berger, a member of Parliament who had to be protected by police at last year’s Labour conference and quit the party in February.
Several people—from both the far right and the left—have been arrested and sentenced for making anti-Semitic threats against Ms. Berger, a former parliamentary chair of the Jewish Labour Movement. Ms. Berger said that she is often asked whether Jewish life in Britain could continue under a Corbyn government. “It comes up all the time: Do we have to leave the country?” she said. “It’s terrifying.”
5 In the U.S. Democratic Party—which attracted 72% of the American Jewish vote in last year’s midterms—rising criticism of Israel’s policies has also sometimes spilled into anti-Semitic language. In February, Rep. Ilhan Omar tweeted, “It’s all about the Benjamins baby,” suggesting that money from a pro-Israel group helps dictate U.S. foreign policy; she apologized after condemnation by her fellow Democrats in Congress.
Though President Donald Trump has expressed hope that such incidents would prompt a “Jexodus” toward him and his party, so far, there is little evidence of it happening: Some 71% of American Jews hold an unfavorable opinion of Mr. Trump, according to a surveycarried out in April-May for the American Jewish Committee, or AJC—a figure unchanged from the year before.
Several American Jewish organizations have repeatedly criticized Mr. Trump’s own remarks, such as saying in 2017 that the anti-Jewish protesters in Charlottesville included “very fine people” and, in October 2016, that Hillary Clinton “meets in secret with international banks” to enrich “global financial powers.”
Mr. Trump strongly denies any anti-Semitism and points to his staunch support of Israel. Indeed, unlike among traditionally liberal American Jews, Mr. Trump has become widely popular in Israel, where 79% of Jews approve of his handling of the relationship with their country, according to a poll conducted for the AJC in April. Building strong bonds with Israel’s right- wing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Mr. Trump has pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by President Barack Obama, moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, where a planned new town has been named Ramat Trump in his honor.
In addition to cultivating Mr. Trump and the Republican Party, Mr. Netanyahu has wooed nationalist and populist governments in Hungary, Austria, Brazil and elsewhere that have defended Israel in international forums. As with Mr. Trump, that has made Israel even more of an issue in many countries’ domestic politics—and created unusual strains in the ties between the Jewish state and those countries’ overwhelmingly liberal Jews.
6 “It’s something new for us: We have never been in a situation of big tension between the governments of very friendly countries and their Jewish communities,” said the veteran Israeli politician Natan Sharansky, who until last year headed the Jewish Agency, a body responsible for Jewish immigration and ties with the diaspora.
Some of the West’s new nationalist and populist forces have embraced Mr. Netanyahu’s Israel because of political calculations, including the need to mask anti-Semitism in their own ranks. Many others, however, admire the Jewish state’s successes and values, from growing its economy and building up its military to elevating tradition, culture and faith.
Hungary’s authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has made protecting Europe from a “Muslim invasion” the cornerstone of his policies, is a case in point. “In the world today, there are basically two types of leaders: There are the globalists and the patriots,” Mr. Orban, a frequent visitor to Jerusalem, said in 2017. “And it is beyond question that the current prime minister of the state of Israel is a member of the club of patriots.”
Yet Mr. Orban has also sought to rewrite Hungary’s history, portraying his country as an innocent victim of Nazi Germany and playing down its participation in the Holocaust. That has opened up a rift between the leaders of Hungary’s Jewish community and Mr. Orban’s government. “They want a proud Hungarian nation without black spots,” said Andras Heisler, president of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Hungary, whose mother was deported to Auschwitz by Hungarian police.
Mr. Heisler, who has frequently criticized Mr. Orban’s rhetoric targeting Muslims and his attacks on the Jewish billionaire George Soros, acknowledged a paradox: Despite their apprehension about Hungary’s political course, Jews walking through Budapest in religious garb are much safer today than those in the liberal democracies of Germany or France. “In Hungary, there is anti-Semitism, but there are no physical attacks,” Mr. Heisler said. “We can go with a kippah in the street.”
Contrast that with Germany, where the government’s commissioner on anti-Semitism warned Jews in May not to wear kippahs for their own safety—advice that sparked an uproar and was withdrawn.
7 In Sarcelles, a town north of Paris with a large Jewish community and a much larger population of Arab and African Muslim origin, Rene Banon’s pharmacy in the Flanades shopping center was burned down during anti-Jewish riots sparked by the Gaza war in 2014. These days, he frets about local Jewish youths wearing prayer shawls and yarmulkes as they walk to the local synagogue on Sabbath. “This could be seen as a provocation,” Mr. Banon said in his rebuilt pharmacy on a recent afternoon. “They shouldn’t be doing it in such a difficult period.”
Such fears—and experiences—of daily harassment, often perpetrated by Muslim youths, have pushed a fraction of French, German or Austrian Jews to support far-right, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim parties, disregarding these movements’ anti-Semitic overtones. That is a dangerous mistake, warned Mr. Kalifat, the head of France’s CRIF.
“The best bulwark against Islamists is not the far right. It is democracy,” Mr. Kalifat said, pointing to the torrent of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial that has poured from far-right activists within the Yellow Vest movement in recent months. “If the extreme right wants to fight Islamists, that doesn’t make it our friend—because I know that it will be Islamism and Muslims at first, but then it will be the Jews.”
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2. How Liberalism Loses -- An inflexible agenda and a global retreat
By Ross Douthat, The New York Times, May 25, 2019 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/25/opinion/sunday/how-liberalism-loses.html
In Australia a week ago, the party of the left lost an election it was supposed to win, to a conservative government headed by an evangelical Christian who won working-class votes by opposing liberal climate policies. In India last week, the Hindu-nationalist prime minister, Narendra Modi, won an overwhelming electoral victory. And as of this writing, Europeans are electing a Parliament that promises to have more populist representation than before.
The global fade of liberalism, in other words, appears to be continuing. Right-wing populism struggles to govern effectively, but it clearly has a durable political appeal — which, as Tyler Cowen points out in a Bloomberg column, has not yet been counteracted by the new socialism, the new new left.
The global context is useful for thinking about how American liberals understand their own situation. Since the shock of Donald Trump’s election, many liberals have decided that their own coalition is the real American majority, victimized by un-democratic institutions and an anti- democratic G.O.P. Their mood is one of anger at the System, and confidence in their unacknowledged, temporarily-impeded mandate: They’ve got the structures, but we’ve got the numbers.
But what if American liberals, while unfortunate in the Electoral College, are luckier than they think in other ways? The fact that populism is flourishing internationally, far from the Electoral College and Fox News, suggests that Trump’s specific faults might actually be propping up American liberalism. If we had a populist president who didn’t alienate so many persuadable voters, who took full advantage of a strong economy, and who had the political cunning displayed by Modi or Benjamin Netanyahu or Viktor Orban, the liberal belief in a hidden left-of- center mandate might be exposed as a fond delusion.
That liberal belief may also misunderstand the real correlation of forces in our politics. We had an example this week on our op-ed podcast, The Argument, where my colleague and co-host David Leonhardt interviewed Pete Buttigieg, the Midwestern mayor running for president with promises to build bridges between the heartland and the coasts. Leonhardt pressed Buttigieg on whether that bridge-building might include compromise on any social issues, and the answer seemed to be “no” — in part because Mayor Pete argued that on abortion and guns and immigration most middle Americans already agree with Democrats, that the liberal position is already the common ground.
The strategic flaw in this reading of the liberal situation is that politics isn’t about casually held opinions on a wide range of topics, but focused prioritization of specifics. As the Democratic data analyst David Shor has noted, you can take a cluster of nine Democratic positions that each poll over 50 percent individually, and find that only 18 percent of Americans agree with all of
9 them. And a single strong, focused disagreement can be enough to turn a voter against liberalism, especially if liberals seem uncompromising on that issue.
A pattern of narrow, issue-by-issue resistance is also what you’d expect in an era where the popular culture is more monolithically left-wing than before. That cultural dominance establishes a broad, shallow left-of-center consensus, which then evaporates when people have some personal reason to reject liberalism, or confront the limits of its case.
None of this needs to spell doom for liberals; it just requires them to prioritize and compromise. If you want to put climate change at the center of liberal politics, for instance, then you’ll keep losing voters in the Rust Belt, just as liberal parties have lost similar voters in Europe and Australia. In which case you would need to reassure some other group, be it suburban evangelicals or libertarians, that you’re willing to compromise on the issues that keep them from voting Democratic.
Alternatively, if you want to make crushing religious conservatives your mission, then you need to woo secular populists on guns or immigration, or peel off more of the tax-sensitive upper middle class by not going full socialist.
But the liberal impulse at the moment, Buttigiegian as well as Ocasio-Cortezan, is to insist that liberalism is a seamless garment, an indivisible agenda that need not be compromised on any front. And instead of recognizing populism as a motley coalition united primarily by opposition to liberalism’s rule, liberals want to believe they’re facing a unitary enemy — a revanchist patriarchal white supremacy, infecting every branch and tributary of the right.
In this view it’s not enough to see racial resentment as one important form of anti-liberalism (which it surely is); all anti-liberalism must fall under the canopy. Libertarianism is white supremacy, the N.R.A. is white supremacy, immigration skepticism is white supremacy, tax- sensitive suburbia is white supremacy, the pro-life movement is white supremacy, anxiety about terrorism is white supremacy … and you can’t compromise with white supremacists, you can only crush them.
Which liberals may do in 2020, because Trump remains eminently beatable. But in the long run, the global trend suggests that a liberalism that remains inflexible in the face of variegated resistance is the ideology more likely to be crushed.
10 3. Antisemites to the Left of Me, Nazis to the Right: Stuck in the Middle With Jews
By Bruce Stockler, November 7, 2018 https://www.algemeiner.com/2018/11/07/antisemites-to-the-left-of-me-nazis-to-the-right-stuck- in-the-middle-with-jews/
We enjoyed a wonderful 60-year run, we American Jews. The postwar boom of the 1940s and 1950s heralded a Golden Age of Jewish cultural acceptance and influence. The 1950s marked the end of Jewish quotas for Ivy League admissions, Albert Einstein spoke out on social issues until his death in 1955, TV comedy rested in the hands of actor/writer/producers like George Burns, Milton Berle, Carl Reiner, and Sid Caesar, and Sandy Koufax was starting his ascent into baseball history.
In the 1960s, Jews became deeply involved in the civil rights movement, Abbie Hoffman played a central role in the formation of the counterculture, Lenny Bruce changed the face of stand-up comedy, Betty Friedan ushered in the second wave of feminism, and Bob Dylan shook up American music. From the 1950s until today, Jewish political thinkers of every stripe, from Henry Kissinger to Bernie Sanders, from Norman Mailer to Andrea Dworkin, from William Kunstler to Irving Kristol, enjoyed the freedom to launch heated intellectual debates across the political spectrum without having to suffer ad hominem attacks simply for being Jewish.
Those days are over.
The slaughter of the congregants of the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh was carried out by a right-wing extremist who soaked up the hate speech of President Trump, Fox News, right-wing media, the GOP, and all the other supporters, enablers, and apologists of our hate-based political ecosystem. The killer was angry about the manufactured “foreign invaders” theory this administration has been peddling for three years now and he decided that the Tree Of Life synagogue, which supported refugees from around the world, was an “enemy of the people,” as Trump so giddily labels any who stand in opposition to his policies. “They’re committing genocide to my people,” the shooter said, as per an FBI affidavit. “I just want to kill Jews.”
New ‘Brave’ Approach to Combating Antisemitism on College Campuses JNS.org - A new project called “Brave” is bringing together veterans of the IDF and the US military with Jewish...
Trump’s response: Continue to attack Jewish philanthropist George Soros, long the favorite target of antisemitic conspiracy theories from the GOP and the hard right — just days after Soros was the target of the Trump-rally-attending pipe-bomb terrorist in Florida.
Trump and his unhinged rhetoric present a clear and present danger to Jewish life in America. But this essay is not a jeremiad against one side in this bitterly divided nation, because antisemitism is on the rise all around us.
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Today, right-wing trolls use Twitter to spread images of Jewish journalists Photoshopped into ovens, Jewish college students suffer hate crimes disguised as anti-Israel protests, a Washington, DC Democratic councilman claims wealthy Jews control the weather to make money off of the poor, and armed neo-Nazis, holding swastikas aloft, march proudly around our village squares while receiving winks and nods of support from the White House.
The election of Donald Trump has divided American Jews more profoundly than any political crucible since World War II. But antisemitic incidents from the right and the left are at 50-year historic highs. This is a poor time to be a moderate Jew. It is a terrible moment to be a moderate Jew who refuses to speak up about the hatred that confronts us on all sides.
Nazis On The Ballot Let’s start on the right. In North Carolina, Russell Walker, a white supremacist running for the state House of Representatives as a Republican, proclaims that Jews “descend from Satan.” In Illinois, Arthur Jones won the GOP primary for the 3rd Congressional district after bragging of his membership in the American Nazi Party. John Fitzgerald, who claims the Holocaust is a hoax and appears regularly on neo-Nazi podcasts, finished second in the June “top-two” GOP primary in California’s 11th Congressional District. He will be on the ballot against the Democratic incumbent in November’s general election.
As in every other anti-Jewish period in world history — from the Spanish Inquisition in the 1300s and 1400s, to the Russian pogroms in the 1800s, to the Third Reich in Germany — organized anti-Jewish hatred starts at the top. President Trump’s governing theme, “America First,” was famously used by a powerful group of American antisemites (including Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford) during the run up to World War II to attack President Roosevelt for his plans to join the war against Germany. During the 2016 Presidential campaign, after KKK leader David Duke endorsed him, Trump played dumb and pretended not to know anything about Duke and repeatedly dodged questions about the KKK. “I know nothing about David Duke. I know nothing about white supremacists,” Trump insisted — even though he spoke out against Duke in 1991 after Duke ran for governor of Louisiana as a Republican. (On Memorial Day, 1927, Trump’s father, Fred Trump of Jamaica, Queens, was one of seven members of the KKK arrested after 1,000 white-robed Klansmen marched through Jamaica and caused a number of riots.)
Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, worked with Trump to define the Trump Doctrine, as explained by journalist and author Josh Green: “The power of demonizing immigrants as a way of motivating grassroots voters.” The other facets of that vision — white supremacism, hard-core nationalism, isolationism, racism, attacking the pillars of liberal democracy — all served the same goal of stoking resentment. The battle was always Us vs. Them, even if the boundaries could be changed at will to stoke the anger as needed per the issue at hand. The campaign focused on white grievance over anything and everything that could tossed on the bonfire. To activate that game plan, the campaign portrayed Hillary Clinton as part of a global conspiracy made up of political, financial, and media “elites,” the same messaging strategy that fascist, communist, and authoritarian regimes use to warn of the supernatural influence of Jews. The Trump campaign and its acolytes have repeatedly invoked Hungarian billionaire George Soros as
12 a Jewish left-wing boogeyman, right through Trump’s wild-eyed lies that Soros paid women to protest the Brett Kavanaugh nomination — not the first time that Trump, whose campaign actually paid extras to show up at early campaign events, accused Democrats of staging fake protests.
During the 2016 campaign, Trump tweeted a photo of Hillary Clinton next to a Jewish Star of David, Photoshopped on to a pile of cash, emblazoned with the words “Most corrupt candidate ever!” Trump’s former policy adviser Sebastian Gorka proudly wore a medal from Vitézi Rend, a group linked to World War II Nazi collaboration. Gorka tried to explain that he wore the medal to honor his father, who belonged to the “Order of Vitéz” because of its conservative Christian values, but this group of Hungarian politicians, paramilitary, and military officers worked with the Nazi regime in helping to send hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews to death camps and was labeled by the US State Department at the time as an organization “under the direction of the Nazi government of Germany.”
A video shot by a reporter shows a room full of khaki-clad Trump supporters in DC performing the Hitler salute and yelling “Hail Trump!” after listening to alt-right leader and neo-Nazi organizer Richard Spencer blather on about white nationalism right after Trump’s election. Studies by data scientists showed that the volume of racist and antisemitic content online — from fringe hate sites such as 4chan — spiked around Trump’s inauguration and crossed over into mainstream Internet news and social feeds. Trump’s election provided a green light for every hate group, conspiracy theorist, misogynist, and white supremacist to crawl out of the underbrush and take a stroll down Main Street.
When Melania Trump criticized a 2016 GQ profile written by journalist Julia Ioffe, the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer exhorted its followers to tell Ioffe what they thought of “her dirty kike trickery.” Ioffe was bombarded by antisemitic abuse online — including images of Holocaust- era Jewish stars and a gruesome cartoon of a Jew being shot in the head — and received multiple death threats, including warnings that that she would be sent back to the Nazi ovens. When this fusillade of hate speech was shared with Trump by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Trump replied: “I don’t have a message to the fans. … There is nothing more dishonest than the media.” When Trump was forced to comment after the disastrous 2016 Unite The Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia, where swastikas flew, neo-Nazis in khakis marched with Tiki torches, and banners screamed “Jews will not replace us!” he tried to turn the ugliness of the event upside down. Trump blamed the counter-protesters and said “both sides” were responsible for the violence. But the counter-protesters were local Virginia residents who vowed to outnumber the bused-in neo-Nazi marchers to show the world that Virginia does not countenance racism. These counter-protesters defended a Charlottesville synagogue and its staff from being violently attacked by the neo-Nazi mob.
Since one of the Charlottesville Nazi marchers rammed his car into a group of anti-Nazi protesters, killing one woman and injuring many others — using the same tactic employed by both jihadists and white supremacist terrorists — the only logical conclusion from Trump’s analysis is that being murdered by a neo-Nazi while protesting neo-Nazi activities is morally equivalent to being a violent neo-Nazi. That is some stable genius logic right there.
13 On Twitter, Donald Trump Jr. shared a photo of himself, his father, and other members of the administration dressed in combat gear as “The Deplorables,” a jab at Hillary Clinton, which might have been amusing (on a radically curved grading scale) but for the fact that the photo included Pepe the Frog, the beloved anti-Jewish meme of the alt-right and neo-Nazis. More recently, Eric Trump attacked journalist Bob Woodward, whose bestselling book details the inside workings of Trump’s chaos presidency, for trying to earn a few “extra shekels.” This ham- handed reference to Israel’s currency is all the more stupid because Woodward is not Jewish; but even for lazy, weekend fascists, the media is always Jewish.
Republican Jews excuse or dismiss this Trump cyclone of antisemitism because Trump is a “friend of Israel.” Superficially, Trump’s strong support of Israel could be seen as a meaningful counterpoint to the clear and unprecedented bias against Israel long demonstrated by the United Nations. The ugly irony is that the UN’s obsessive and farcical fault-finding of Israel is driven by rampant antisemitic sentiment across Europe. Physical attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions across Europe have soared in the last two years as Trump-style populism has gained traction across the continent. More Jews have emigrated from France to Israel than at any time since World War II. Some Jewish leaders warned that most of Europe is unsafe for Jews.
Does Trump’s support for Israel derive from any real understanding of Israel’s religious and geopolitical history, culture, economy, or role as a US ally? Or is it just a blatant favor to Protestant Evangelicals, who are increasingly supportive of Israel? It is impossible to tell what Trump really thinks of Jews as human beings. It is true that Ivanka Trump converted to Judaism; Trump has Jewish friends in New York and Mar-A-Lago; and he hires Jews in positions of authority.
But all of that is less material than his core political strategy of using hate to divide Americans. Trump rallies his base around hatred, distrust, and fear of The Other: Muslims, Mexicans (and Hispanics generally), blacks, women, feminists, Hollywood, the LGBTQ community, academics, athletes, socialists, journalists, and anyone outside his angry white base. And Jews are always on the list when angry white nationalists start making lists.
And Now For Something Completely Similar As a lifelong liberal, I find it shocking to watch the steady growth of antisemitism on the far-left. While we have swastika-toting neo-Nazis marching in our streets and making death threats to Jewish journalists, encouraged by Trump’s Fascism 101 vilification of the free press, the far left has adopted the intellectually bankrupt and morally degenerate position that Zionism equals Nazism. The American far-left — aligning with the ugly, antisemitic far-left all across Europe — holds it as an article of faith that Jews are enemies of democracy and freedom. Because Israel. This essay is not an analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Like the majority of American Jews, I support a two-state solution. I am focusing on domestic antisemitism.
The far-left has embraced the calculation that the conflict is a black-and-white, medieval Passion Play in which Israel is evil and the Palestinians good. This conflict is as complex as any geopolitical and religious conflict on Earth and is a good example of Hegel’s definition of “tragedy” — a conflict in which both sides are right — but the far left has adopted the puerile absolutism that Israel equals evil, so all Jews equal evil unless they are avowedly anti-Zionist.
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As a moral equation, Zionism equals Nazism is the same reductive claptrap as any right-wing dogma that claims all Muslims are terrorists, all blacks are criminals, all Mexicans are illegal, and all Catholics take orders from the Pope.
As a zero-sum political calculation, Zionism equals Nazism would act as an equivalent to: Gay rights equal the end of straight rights, freedom of religion equals persecution of Christians, women’s rights equal the enslavement of men, Black Lives Matter equals white genocide.
This political math has been poured into the highly-effective PR tactics of anti-Israel pressure groups, a movement based on college and university campuses. While I am repelled by almost all Republican identity rhetoric, I find it hard to ignore this glaring example of how America’s campuses can sometimes be guilty of warehousing rigid and orthodox left-wing ideologies.
Groups likes the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) have recruited many American students to the anti-Israel cause. I have no problem with groups of students joining fractious political debates. That’s a college rite of passage. And I know well-meaning, well-intentioned students who joined BDS to express their legitimate support for Palestinian statehood.
But BDS, SJP, and their affiliated groups have moved far beyond politics and are playing a game of bait-and-switch. They now use their political organization and social influence to launch hate- based attacks on Jewish students, Jewish faculty, and Jewish religious and cultural institutions on campus using politics as camouflage.
On April 11, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jewish students at Columbia University in New York erected a booth to honor the memory of the six million. But they were attacked by anti- Israel student groups who screamed, shouted at, and taunted the Jewish students with hate speech, including: “From Gaza to the plaza, globalize the Intifada” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”
This is pure hate speech. What’s more, the slogans cited above quote the founding ideology of the terrorist organization Hamas, whose charter explicitly calls for the obliteration of Israel and the murder of every Jew in the nation.
That incident is not isolated — it is part of an organized, intelligent, and insidious campaign to demonize, terrorize, intimidate, and silence Jewish students, faculty, and administrators, no matter where they fall on the spectrum of support for Israel.
Why do I believe that the far-left’s current anti-Israel position is based on antisemitism and not Middle East politics?
Polling shows that support for Israel among Democrats has slowly and steadily declined since 1978, when Egypt and Israel signed their historic peace agreement. At the time, US Democratic support for Israel (over Palestinians) stood at 44 percent. Today, that support has dropped to 27 percent, with 25 percent of Democrats supporting Palestine over Israel.
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Overall American support for Israel is at an historic low. If the BDS and SJP were legitimately dedicated to promoting a two-state solution, the eight years of the Obama administration provided the most fertile opportunity for progress since the 1970s. President Obama was friendly, but cool, to Israel, and often critical of President Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing rhetoric, the lack of progress in peace negotiations, and West Bank settlement building. One of Obama’s final acts in office was to sneak in the delivery of a $221 million aid package to the Palestinian Authority, which had been held up in the Republican-controlled Congress.
But instead of agitating for a Palestinian state or pushing for peace negotiations, the BDS, SJP, and their cohorts used their political capital to attack and intimidate Jewish students, spread hate speech, and share the doctrine that Zionism equals Nazism. They doubled down on hate when they could have created movement toward political dialogue and a regional peace process.
The public mission of the BDS movement — to create economic penalties against Israel in the form of boycotts, divestments, and sanctions — is a piece of political deception, because the founding documents of BDS call for compliance with United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194, which was passed just after the UN voted to establish the state of Israel in 1948 and during the first Israel-Arab war. Resolution 194 contained disputed language that Palestinians and their supporters interpret as a right of return for all refugees. But 194 is not binding and has been superseded by Resolution 242, which calls for the refugee question to be settled as part of an overall peace process.
In other words, BDS does not wish to fight Israel with sanctions, but to abolish Israel as a Jewish state through an unlimited and undefined “right of return,” and then re-argue the terms of statehood based on 1948 political language.
BDS claims it “advocates for Palestinian rights,” but its parent group, responsible for fundraising, has helped to raise tax-exempt donations to Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and other groups designated by the US State Department as terror organizations. Both Iran and its military wing Hezbollah, which has assumed control over the government of Lebanon and launched hundreds of terror attacks against Jewish civilians around the world, have financial and logistical connections to BDS, especially across Europe.
Columbia University has been ground zero for antisemitism disguised as Middle East political theory. (Of course, the entire University of California network puts up very big numbers in the antisemitism game.) Hamid Dabashi, a Columbia professor who teaches Iranian studies and comparative literature, wrote two Facebook posts in May directed at Israel and Zionists. He called Israel a “key actor” in “every dirty treacherous ugly and pernicious act happening in the world” and criticized “diehard Fifth Column Zionists working against the best interests of Americans.”
Columbia’s long and hate-filled syllabus includes poet Tom Paulin, who was given a visiting professorship in 2002 despite declaring that American Jews who reside beyond Israel’s 1967 boundaries “should be shot dead.” Jewish students were routinely intimidated and discriminated
16 against by Joseph Massad, a Columbia professor of modern Arab politics who — guess what? — compared Israelis to Nazis. And there was the 2009 campus visit by Iran’s Holocaust-denying and wannabe-Israel-obliterating president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, which Columbia President Lee Bollinger defended as “an affirmation of freedom of speech.” Asked if he would invite Adolf Hitler to campus, John Coatsworth, dean of the School of International and Public Affairs, actually said: “If he were willing to engage in a debate and a discussion, to be challenged by Columbia students and faculty, we would certainly invite him.”
I don’t understand why American Jews haven’t boycotted Columbia University.
At NYU, members of SJP harassed students in Washington Square Park who gathered to celebrate Israel’s 70th anniversary by burning an Israeli flag. The group waved the Palestinian flag and chanted, “Displacing lives is ’48, there’s nothing here to celebrate.” Swastikas have appeared multiple times this year on the NYU campus and on the doors of student dormitory rooms — although, it must be noted, NYU’s Muslim students came together to express solidarity with Jewish students after the most well-known of these hate incidents.
One of the few bright spots in all of this hatred is that Trump has motivated American Muslims to support Jewish groups and communities that have been attacked. And Jewish groups have denounced – and fought against — the Muslim travel ban, and supported Muslim groups who have been victims of hate crimes. Despite our deep, tribal differences on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, American Jews and American Muslims know that antisemitism and anti-Muslim rhetoric travels in a circle and burns everyone inside it. A closer relationship between our two communities would be a silver lining to the current environment of hate and distrust.
Antisemitic incidents on US college campuses increased sharply in 2018, with at least 380 reported in the first half of this year, according to the AMCHA Initiative, which tracks antisemitic activity on college campuses. Their report explains that these antisemitic incidents are largely the result of anti-Israel activities that routinely deploy swastikas and other hate symbolism and include calls for the death of the Jewish people.
The FBI, the ADL, and other groups that track hate speech report that hate crimes against Jews — swastikas painted on synagogues, Jewish cemeteries, and private homes; assaults on Jews; threats against Jewish individuals; hate speech, etc. — increased astronomically in concert with Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016. The hatred of Jews on the left is neatly in sync with hate speech on the right.
The American far-left, and a small but growing number of Democrats, continue to embrace or ignore political speech that attacks the basic humanity of Jews. Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan has spent his career preaching that Jews are primarily responsible for the oppression of blacks in American society. The Anti-Defamation League ranked Farrakhan as “the leading anti-Semite in America” multiple times; in 2015, he spoke from the pulpit to proclaim that Jews were responsible for 9/11.
Farrakhan delivered a long sermon at Mosque Maryam in Chicago this May that was dense with attacks on Jews. Farrakhan said, “Satanic Jews … have infected the whole world with poison and
17 deceit,” and claimed he studied Jewish religious texts to justify his conclusions. Farrakhan said Jews promote child molestation, misogyny, police brutality, and sexual assault; and that modern Judaism is a “system of tricks and lies” used to control non-Jews. There was muted denunciation from elected Democrats. And during a recent speech to mark the anniversary of the “Million Man March” in 1995, Farrakhan lashed out at his Jewish critics, and said that he is not an “antisemite,” but “anti-termite,” effectively saying Jews are not human.
Palestinian activist Linda Sarsour, a prominent organizer of the anti-Trump Women’s March, has been an enthusiastic Farrakhan ally for years. Sarsour argues that Jews are the common denominator between violence against Palestinians and violence against American blacks. She has appeared at events with convicted Palestinian-Arab terrorist Rasmea Odeh, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, convicted for murdering two Jewish college students in a 1969 terror attack in Israel that also maimed nine civilians. Sarsour has posed for photos with a member of the terrorist organization Hamas, expressed admiration for Saddam Hussein as a Muslim hero, supports sharia law, and, in photos, joyfully makes a hand gesture (popular with ISIS) that signals support for jihad.
Sarsour is a pioneer in co-opting protest movements with a tactic that can only be called hate- bundling. She has repeatedly attempted to tie her anti-Israel and anti-Jewish views to the anti- Trump Women’s March, to Black Lives Matter, and to other left-wing protest actions.
I find Sarsour’s tactics despicable and as ugly as anything concocted by the crazy, Alex Jones wing of the far-right. Her strategy is to use the Israeli-Palestinian issue to divide American blacks and Jews. Her actions are deeply offensive because of the deep historical ties that bind American Jews and blacks. While Millennial and Gen Z blacks and Jews might not be aware of our shared history, and our connections are not as vital as they once were, Jews and blacks have stood together for years. According to a survey by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, 57 percent of American Jews support Black Lives Matter; only Muslims rank higher in their support among all religious groups in the US.
American Jews were the earliest supporters of the Urban League, founded in New York in 1911 to help black migrants from the rural South. Julius Rosenwald, who built Sears Roebuck, was a passionate philanthropist dedicated to the cause of Southern blacks. From the early 1900s until his death in 1932 — and after, when his family continued his legacy — Rosenwald built more than 5,300 schools in the deep South.
When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began his rise to national prominence in Montgomery, Alabama during the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, some black newspapers began to call Dr. King the “Moses of Alabama.” During those protests, Alabama black citizens sang spirituals, including “Go Down Moses, Way Down In Egypt Land.”
After the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Congress submitted amicus curiae briefs on behalf of the cause and filed legal briefs in subsequent civil rights cases on housing, employment, education, and other rights issues. Rabbi Ira Sanders of Little Rock testified against segregation before the Arkansas Senate in 1957. Rabbi Perry Nussbaum of Jackson, Mississippi joined the integration
18 effort, along with Rabbis Jacob Rothschild of Atlanta, Emmet Frank of Alexandria, and Charles Mantinband of Birmingham.
The Southern KKK responded to Jewish support of Southern desegregation with violence. In 1957 and 1958, Jewish temples and community centers were bombed in Atlanta, Nashville, Jacksonville, and Miami; undetonated bombs were found at synagogues in Birmingham, Charlotte, and Gastonia, North Carolina.
Jewish graduates of Ivy League law schools flocked to Mississippi in the 1960s to register black voters. Jews made up about 30 percent of all the white volunteers who trekked to the south in the 1960s. Jews rode freedom buses and picketed segregated businesses. Dozens of Reform rabbis marched in Selma and Birmingham.
Two young Jewish New Yorkers, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, registered voters in Meridian, Mississippi, working closely with a young black Mississippi man, James Chaney. In 1964, the KKK in Mississippi ran a vehicle the three men were traveling in off the road, murdered them in cold blood, and dumped their bodies in a secret grave. The discovery of their corpses became a media sensation and helped force Congress and President Lyndon Johnson to push through the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a Jew from a Hasidic family in Poland that escaped the Nazi death camps, became a close friend of Dr. Martin Luther King after the two men met at the 1963 conference on “Religion and Race” in Chicago organized by the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Rabbi Heschel delivered a barn-burning speech. He said: “It was easier for the children of Israel to cross the Red Sea than for a Negro to cross certain university campuses.” Black academic Cornel West called the speech “the strongest condemnation of racism by a white man since William Lloyd Garrison,” the prominent 19th-century abolitionist.
Rabbi Heschel and Dr. King became friends and allies; each man influenced the other. Rabbi Heschel appeared with Dr. King in several of the most iconic photos of the Civil Rights era: Crossing Edmund Pettus Bridge arm in arm in March 1965 and standing together outside Arlington Cemetery in silent protest of the Vietnam War in 1968.
Dr. King spoke often about his belief in Israel and his support for Zionism. In 1958, at the American Jewish Congress, Dr. King said: “My people were brought to America in chains. Your people were driven here to escape the chains fashioned for them in Europe. Our unity is born of our common struggle for centuries.”
The ties that bind American Jews and blacks are profound. The cynical and self-serving attempts by Farrakhan and Sarsour to poison the relationship between our two communities — using Islam as a wedge — is hateful, dishonest, and tragic, and must be rejected by Jews, blacks, and Muslims alike. Sarsour’s attempt to co-opt the Women’s March and make it a corporate partner of BDS should be denounced by all groups within that coalition. If you are organizing a march for animal rights or farmer’s rights or union rights, and Linda Sarsour shows up, your cause is being hacked.
19 Sarsour is a cynical opportunist, and her tactics again resemble those of Trump, who for years blathered on about his support for New York after 9/11 when, in fact, he lied about making a $10,000 donation to the Twin Towers Fund in 2001. Worse, he actually pocketed $150,000 of New York State grant money intended to help struggling small businesses in Manhattan. He has played the faux-donate game with other charities for years just to get a photo-op in The New York Post.
Speaking of co-opting: In the last year or so, the tactic of calling Jews “Nazis” has begun to backfire. Many on the anti-Jewish left have shifted tactics and now call Israel an “apartheid state,” which is a clever, if sophomoric, piece of propaganda that hijacks the historical suffering of South Africa’s black population, misreads all of African history, and ignores the larger questions of who lived where first in present-day Israel and Palestine, an archaeological debate that ranges back some 2,500 years and predates both Islam and Christianity. For millennia — since at least the height of the Roman empire, when Cicero publicly attacked Jews to help support one of his legal arguments — Jewish minorities have been used as scapegoats during times of political, social, and economic conflict. Those times are here again.
American Jews must navigate an environment in which some Republicans, proud to be called Nazis and Holocaust deniers, brazenly run for public office. Meanwhile, the far-left wing of the Democratic party compares Jews to Nazis and uses social media to package that hate as a geopolitical argument. Jew-haters on the left and Jew-haters on the right both enjoy quoting their First Amendment rights to defend their attacks on our union and both groups whine about being mistreated and oppressed when called out in the press or by the opposition.
Democratic Jews must denounce the antisemitism of the Zionism equals Nazism movement. Republican Jews need to pull their heads out of the sand and challenge the racism, white supremacy, antisemitism, anti-Islamism, and all-purpose hate speech that provides Trump’s populist ballast.
This is no time for moral equivalency. No Sarsour or Farrakhan has occupied a position of prominence in the Democratic party or been elected to public office — so far, we have no Democratic equivalent to Britain’s vile Jeremy Corbyn. And no high-ranking Democrat has ever sought to divide America like Trump; you have to reach back to the Dixiecrats who broke away from the Democratic party after 1948 to find levels of racial and religious intolerance that even lap at Trump’s ankles.
But hatred is hatred and cannot be left unanswered. As Jews, we have no choice but to call it out everywhere we see it, no matter our political allegiances, and fight it from every direction.
20 4. When the right and left fight over anti-Semitism, Jews are caught in the middle
By David Schraub, February 13, 2019, Jewish Telegraph Agency https://www.jta.org/2019/02/13/opinion/when-the-right-and-left-fight-over-anti-semitism-jews- are-caught-in-the-middle
I lived in Minnesota for five years. My wife is from there; her family still lives there. When we return to visit, we have to reckon with a frightening reality: My in-laws’ newly elected congressional representative is deeply implicated in anti-Semitism. We are not dealing with minor missteps that can be overlooked. We’re dealing, after all, with a person who, when asked what motivated Sen. Joe Lieberman’s vote for the Iraq war, boiled it down to a simple question: “Jew or Arab?” We’re dealing with a person who ran campaign ads stating that the opponent was “owned” by wealthy Jewish financial backers. When the representative was elected last November, we could no longer avoid confronting anti-Semitism from the elected officials in Congress tasked with representing our family.
I’m referring, of course, to Rep. Jim Hagedorn – a Republican representing Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District.
Was that not the lawmaker you thought I was talking about? Of course it wasn’t. You thought I was talking about Rep. Ilhan Omar, who recently came under fire for claiming that attacks on her by GOP leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy regarding anti-Israel statements that allegedly crossed into anti-Semitism were actually motivated by “the Benjamins” (that is, big money) and “AIPAC!” (She has since apologized.)
Like any elected official, Omar absolutely deserves to be held accountable for her statements. We must call out politicians on both the left and the right who twist ancient anti-Semitic tropes to win votes and vilify our own.
But it’s important to notice the fundamental hypocrisy in allowing those who have a terrible track record on anti-Semitism or any other form of bigotry to co-opt the conversation. We can’t allow the loudest voices on both sides of the political spectrum shout over the vast majority of Jews.
For Jews who are Democrats (which is to say, the vast majority of Jewish Americans), it’s been hard to keep track of where Omar stands on Israel and anti-Semitism. In August, she went to a synagogue and expressed her opposition to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement – only to flip-flop after the election and endorse BDS. Then, rather than acknowledging the switch, she insulted everyone’s intelligence by insisting that saying the BDS movement is “not helpful in getting that two-state solution … I think that pressure really is counteractive” did not actually preclude her from endorsing BDS.
An old tweet accusing Israel of “hypnotizing” the world was dug up, and for a while Omar dug in. But then she apologized with one of the single best responses to anti-Semitism allegations
21 that I’ve ever seen from a non-Jewish politician. And yet, too soon after that, she was “chuckling” at how we can call Israel a democracy when we attack Iran for being a theocracy. And then came the “Benjamins” comment. She asserted that McCarthy, who has threatened to take action against her and Rep. Rashida Tlaib because of their positions on Israel, was only making a fuss because “AIPAC!” is paying him to do so.
Others have explained succinctly how the last comment raises anti-Semitic tropes (and for that matter misrepresents how AIPAC operates). I have no quarrel with their analysis, and I have little patience with those who seek to minimize what Omar did as anodyne “criticism of AIPAC.”
But that is only half the story. Even those of us who have been sharply critical of Ilhan Omar also see that many of her critics are not exactly equal opportunity in their attentions. Few politicians implicated in anti-Semitism receive the torrent of scrutiny and the ceaseless pile-ons that Omar endures from the right.
Examples of mainstream right-wing anti-Semitism abound. The central play in the 2016 Republican campaign playbook was to cast the Democratic Party as in the pocket of Jewish financiers pushing an agenda of “globalism,” open borders and foreign invasion. President Donald Trump himself pointed out that the neo-Nazi marchers included some “very fine people” in Charlottesville and used “sheriff’s stars” that looked suspiciously like Jewish stars to vilify Hillary Clinton on his campaign literature.
Indeed, a bevy of Republican politicians – including Rep. Matt Gaetz, Sen. Chuck Grassley, Gov. Ron DeSantis and Rudy Giuliani, as well as the aforementioned Hagedorn – have all promoted Soros-centered anti-Semitic dog whistles and have received nowhere near the attention that Omar gets. Gaetz even brought a Holocaust denier to the State of the Union. Among such stiff competition, there’s not a lot of mystery as to what makes Omar stand out in the crowd.
There is a familiarity to Omar’s case – of needing to acknowledge genuine wrongs worthy of critique, but also needing to acknowledge that the obsessive focus on these wrongs stems from baser instincts. The real parallel of how we talk about Muslim women like Omar is to how we talk about Israel itself – where real misdeeds and wrongdoings nonetheless cannot explain or justify the never-ending torrent of abuse, opprobrium and conspiracy theorizing.
The aforementioned McCarthy may not be scrutinizing Omar’s behavior based on the promise of financial reward, but what right has he to accuse anyone of anti-Semitism after tweeting that George Soros was trying to “buy” the 2018 elections just days after a bomb was planted at Soros’ house?
Other Republicans seem similarly inclined to cast stones at liberals while ignoring the literal Nazi apologists in their midst. Rep. Lee Zeldin, who is Jewish, has been almost singlemindedly harassing Omar in demanding that she condemn random bits of anti-Semitic conduct with which she had absolutely no association, including asking if she “disagreed” with a hate-filled anti- Semitic voicemail that lamented the failure of the Nazis to finish their extermination of the Jews.
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Say what you will about Omar, but she’s never said anything that could be remotely construed as expressing sympathy for Hitler. Yet in Zeldin’s own party, from Trump’s praise of “alt-right” protesters to Rep. Steve King’s endorsement of a far-right nationalist party founded by a former SS member to, most recently, Candace Owens’ declaration that Hitler would’ve been fine if he’d contained himself to Germany, Nazi sympathizing remains a decidedly Republican phenomenon.
The entitled demand that Omar must nonetheless answer for literal Nazi apologists smacked of Islamophobia and racism. Omar’s graceful reply to Zeldin’s unreasonable haranguing was even more impressive when you remember that Zeldin was a public backer of Trump’s nakedly Islamophobic Muslim ban. Those in bigoted glass houses should not throw stones. Of course, the bigotry and anti-Semitism of these conservative politicians does not excuse Omar’s. But the fact is we are, in effect, excusing a lot of anti-Semitism and a lot of bigotry – and the distribution of who gets a pass or a day’s worth of bad press versus who remains forever under the microscope is clearly neither random nor innocent.
To be clear, some have been calling out the double standard. Rep. Max Rose, a Jewish Democrat who was among the first to condemn Omar’s anti-Semitism, lit into the media for gobbling up the Omar story while displaying no interest in covering analogous anti-Semitism by McCarthy and other Republicans. Leah Greenberg of the progressive Indivisible group leveled a similar critique. The fact is, Omar apologized and has been responsive to Jewish concerns. McCarthy and his ilk remain unrepentant. So who really deserves more ire?
Yet there is palpable frustration within the Jewish community over how little our efforts on this score seem to matter. Our public discourse about anti-Semitism seems almost immune to being influenced by what the actual Jewish community wants to talk about.
As noted, the majority of the Jewish community is politically left of center. We welcome a more robust and nuanced conversation about Israel entering American politics – including the need to mobilize to counteract Israel’s increasingly right-wing drift. Yet we do not endorse those who wish to wipe Israel off the map, and we see the trap when Jewish efforts to participate in American politics are cast as “proof” that we exert a nefarious sway over the polity.
When liberal members of Congress evoke anti-Semitic tropes, we have no desire to let them go unchallenged. But neither do we have any interest in having our criticisms lumped in with cynical and hypocritical denunciations emanating from the political right.
We understand that the most tangible threats to Jewish lives and livelihoods in America – the anti-Semitism that sheds actual blood in America – emerges from the political right, including (especially via Soros conspiracies) the mainstream Republican Party. But we also claim special pain at anti-Semitism coming from inside our home and our political community – an anti- Semitism that hurts us directly precisely because it comes from those we are in coalition with.
There is no conceptual difficulty in holding to these positions together. A great many of us are wholly comfortable in our own skins on these issues. But to the extent these distinctions are impossible to maintain in practice – to the extent that “criticism of Omar” simply is encoded as
23 part of a right-wing campaign, to the extent that “supporting Omar” simply is an endorsement of extreme-left anti-Israel politics – the net effect is that most Jews are silenced. We may speak the words, but they go unheard.
For all the talk about the Israel Lobby this and Jewish Power that, the clearest takeaway from this whole ordeal is the striking disempowerment of the Jewish community. Spoken about and spoken over, the Jewish community is being systematically stripped of our ability to contribute to the dialogue happening over our own lives. We are “represented,” if you can call it that, by Glenn Greenwald on the one side and Lee Zeldin on the other (surely, this is the definition of Jewish hell), both of whose elevated stature in public discourse about Jews is almost exclusively a feature of gentile, not Jewish, interests.
Indeed, in a real way, Omar’s conservative critics and progressive defenders stand in a symbiotic relationship: They are united in their desire to silence the message most Jews want to send. The right insists on condemning the Democratic Party and any progressive conversation about Israel as institutionally anti-Semitic, never mind that most Jews are committed Democrats and often share the progressive critique of Israel’s rightward drift that Republicans are so eager to tar. Many of Omar’s progressive defenders, for their part, are happy to simply dismiss all talk of left- wing anti-Semitism as conservative agitprop; they are content to rely on the usual assortment of fringe voices who – so long as Israel is on the docket – will offer to kasher even the clearest instances of anti-Semitic discourse.
It makes for a crushing feeling of powerlessness. The nation is having a conversation about Jews virtually impervious to the input of Jews themselves.
This, above all else, is what makes so many Jews want to scream in frustration. The right loudly proclaims it’s standing up to anti-Semitism – but Jews know their 24/7 Omar coverage does us no favors, and that in any event, conservative solidarity with Jews runs out precisely at the point it requires challenging the sort of anti-Semitic conspiracy mongering that gets Jews shot. The left self-righteously insists that it is saving its ammunition for combating the “real anti- Semitism” – but Jews have long seen that for too much of the left, cases of “real anti-Semitism” beyond the most obvious murderous varieties seem almost as elusive as O.J.’s “real killer.” Both sides are silencing Jews in the guise of allyship. Both sides need to step back and knock it off.
We need to break this pattern at its root. That means taking Jewish testimony seriously and resisting the impulse to dismiss efforts to combat anti-Semitism – including anti-Semitism related to Israel – as hasbara. And it equally means calling out those who purport to be allies in the fight against anti-Semitism, but in reality use anti-Semitism for political purposes while further marginalizing the Jewish community the moment we’re inconvenient to the ideological narrative.
In short, we need to have a conversation about anti-Semitism. But we also need to have a conversation about how, when we talk about anti-Semitism, we seem to always talk about Ilhan Omar and never about Jim Hagedorn.
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