The driving force behind Trump’s alleged “love” for Israel is to strengthen his hold on the Evangelical community; not the Jewish one. That has driven what Republican support there is for Israel since Christian Zionists took over the party beginning in the 1980s. Trump argues that Jews have an obligation to support him because he’s been Israel’s “best friend;” when in reality, he has abetted and enabled Israel’s political-economic suicide by granting PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s (Bibi) entire wish list. This includes appointing David Friedman as ambassador to Israel, whose understanding of Israel-Palestine history is limited to Temple Sunday School myths, which ignores and whitewashes the Palestinian Nakba (Holocaust). It includes Trump and Bibi’s evil political alliance, all but positioning them as running mates on the same ticket. 

Trump earned his popularity among wealthy, Republican Jews by pandering. Except when he said, “You have to support me because you’re all brutal killers.” But they forgave that because they believe his con about “loving Israel,” and also buy the myth that he’s been good for the investment economy. There can be destructive ignorance among intelligent people, as not all bright and successful people are deep thinkers.

Many progressive Jews have abandoned support of Israel over the genocide in Gaza and fascist elements of Bibi’s government. The alliance between Bibi and Trump is as destructive as the alliance between Elon Musk and Trump. It’s become a Fascist Axis among very wealthy entrepreneurs and deeply corrupt politicians, more interested in their wealth and political survival, rather than the health, wealth and security of the countries and corporations they govern. Or in Trump’s case, want to govern again from a purely statist, Fascist standpoint.

Trump is already forecasting his upcoming electoral defeat, and pro-actively placing blame on outside agents, including Jews who don’t vote for him and even Taylor Swift. While he whines about “all he has done for Israel,” the reality is that his policies have severely weakened Israel by granting impunity to its most self-destructive elements, and thus helped turn it into a global pariah by pledging support for the genocide in Gaza, and promising to grant Bibi his wish list of being free to terrorize and murder innocent Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. It was Trump who initiated the move of the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, in violation of International Law. Jerusalem is just as much a Muslim and Orthodox Christian city as it is a Jewish one. (There, I said it!)

“Demagoguery,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024

The alliance of Trump and Musk has dragged American political discourse to an all-time low. Trump has brought the Republican Party to an unprecedented low of dysfunction, abetted by Musk buying Twitter/X. As Trump has marginalized the Republican Party into a clownish state of lurid sensationalism, Musk has turned Twitter/X into a platform for unfettered defamation, hate, racism and divisiveness. Musk is allied with Trump to better secure his wealth, and is investing $45M per month in his campaign.

Why is Musk so deeply invested in Trump’s return to the presidency? Because like Russia in Ukraine, Trump will let Musk “do whatever the hell he wants.” Trump will let Russia take over Ukraine and bully other European countries. He’ll let the Israeli Likud Party continue its reign of terror over Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank; thereby placing more kindling and gasoline onto an already-explosive situation. And he’ll let the Supreme Court continue to undo many generations worth of protective and progressive judicial rulings.

Trump’s campaign strategy is to tell so many lies so fast and furiously, that it’s hard to keep up, and impossible to address and debunk each one in the time allowed for rebuttal? As Hannah Arendt wrote, “If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer,” enabling totalitarianism. Part of Trump’s strategy is also to undermine the free press, and depict journalists as “the enemy of the people.” That’s the dynamic of gaslighting. Or is it an effort to befuddle and flummox the mases to the point that people don’t know what to believe and stop caring?

Since October 2023, American Jews have been engaged in an intense, fractious debate over Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip.

Media reports say that American Jews are experiencing “the great rupture,” widening “rifts,” and stand at a “moral, political crossroads.”

While most American Jews remain broadly supportive of Israel, others have protested vigorously against U.S. support for Israel and are demanding a cease-fire in the Gaza war. They carry signs saying “Not in Our Name.”

Their slogan highlights the fact that American foreign aid to Israel has long relied on the support of American Jews. Unqualified U.S. support for Israel was built, in part, on the promise that Israel kept American Jews – and all Jews – safe, especially after the Holocaust.

But American Jews have never been entirely unified in their support for Israel or in their visions of what role Israel and Palestine should play in American Jewish life.

No consensus

My new book, “The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism,” analyzes a century of debates among American Jews over Zionism and Israel.

My account begins in 1885, when elite Reform Jews, with a goal of full integration in Jim Crow America, composed the Pittsburgh Platform, which rejected Jewish nationalism out of fear that it would make them targets of antisemitic accusations of dual loyalty.

Two years later, Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl founded the modern Zionist movement, relying on European powers for support for a modern Jewish state.

The genocide of Europe’s Jewish population in the Holocaust fundamentally altered American Jews’ perspectives on Zionism.

Many believed that only a Jewish national homeland in what was then Palestine could prevent another genocide. Others insisted that the lessons of the Holocaust meant that Jews must not contribute to making refugees of another group of people: the Palestinians who were then living on the land.

The Majority Report with Sam Seder Video: “Jewish Voice For Peace Grows In North Carolina ”

There were other issues that contributed to a new understanding of Zionism in the 1950s and 1960s within American Jewish communities. Among them: the Nakba, which was the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians during the 1948 founding of Israel; Israel’s treatment of immigrant Jews from the Arab and Muslim world known as Mizrahi Jews; and the rise in Israel’s militarism.

Across the 20th century, mainstream Jewish leaders manufactured an American Jewish so-called consensus on Zionism and Israel, in part by silencing American Jewish critics of Zionism.

From the late 1940s through 1961, journalist William Zukerman edited The Jewish Newsletter, a publication that captured some of the voices of Jewish dissent from Zionism, including his own. He reported on Israel’s human rights abuses against Palestinians and documented how American Jewish funds fueled Israel’s military campaigns instead of supporting vibrant American Jewish communities.

Because Zukerman dared to publish this criticism, he faced campaigns of steep resistance, eventually losing funding and support from Jewish communal organizations.

Anxious that Zukerman’s dissent would cause “increasing trouble” for American support for Israel, Israeli diplomats wrote to American Jewish leaders, and together they convinced some Jewish journalists to exclude Zukerman’s writings from their publications.

Liberation movements, American Jews and Zionism

Into the 1960s, as mainstream Jewish leaders emphasized the urgency of Jewish unity on Israel and Zionism and showed growing intolerance for dissent, anti-colonialist activists gained momentum across the world. From 1948 through 1966, Israel held all Palestinians citizens under martial law, limiting their movement and access to opportunities and resources. Across the 1950s, Israel excluded Palestinian workers from the Histadrut, the state’s largest labor union federation.

Activists allied with the cause of Palestinian rights noted Israel’s alliance with colonial power France during the Algerian war of independence from 1954 to 1962 and criticized Israel as an occupier after the 1967 war. They spoke, too, of Israel’s growing alliance with apartheid South Africa in the 1970s.

Black and Arab leaders in the U.S. taught within, and learned from, these anti-colonial movements. Civil rights and anti-war activists offered new perspectives to debates over Israel and Zionism.

Raised in a liberal Zionist family, student Marty Blatt was learning to fight for justice. Blatt was born in 1951 in Brooklyn, New York. His grandfather had died in a Nazi prison camp. In 1970, he joined the anti-war movement at Tufts University in Massachusetts.

“The Vietnam war was a horrible injustice,” Blatt said. From the movement and from members of the Israeli left, he learned that “Israel/Palestine was another great injustice.”

With no access to the history of Palestinians in school, at home or at the synogogue, young American Jews like Blatt who joined the civil rights and anti-war movements learned these lessons for the first time. When they then criticized Israel and American Zionism, they, too, met with hostility from the mainstream Jewish world.

Blatt sought to teach his fellow students at Tufts with a course in 1973 titled Zionism Reconsidered. In it, he taught the history of Zionism, Palestinian resistance and Israel’s Cold War alliance with the United States. He taught students that anti-Zionism was not antisemitism.

On March 13, 1973, in the midst of the semester, members of the Jewish Defense League, a far-right, anti-Arab, Jewish nationalist group founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane,disrupted Blatt’s class. They called it an “anti-Jewish outrage” and passed out a flyer that read, “Not since Germany in the days of Hitler has any university dared to offer a course presenting a one-sided view of any national movement.”

Boston-area Jewish leaders urged community members to write to Tufts leadership to shut down Blatt’s class. These letters used apocalyptic language to describe the damage wrought by his course, likening it to the destruction of the Jewish people. During this controversy, Blatt picked up the phone one day to hear someone who clearly knew his family history in the Holocaust tell him: “Your parents should not have been saved.”

An article about Blatt and his course in Boston’s Jewish Advocate was headlined “Tufts Anti-Zionist Course Seen as Abuse of Academic Freedom.” Though Tufts stood behind Blatt’s right to teach the class for another term, which it still touts on the university website, angry responses to the class appeared in community forums for years.

Divided on campus and beyond

In the current moment, college campuses have been riven with debates over the boundaries between student safety and free speech and whether criticism of Israel constitutes antisemitism.

Young Jews dismayed by the unconditional Zionist agenda of Jewish campus organization Hillel and who founded Open Hillel in 2013 are now active in Gaza protests as “Judaism on Our Own Terms.” They might be surprised to learn that in late 1972, even before his course began, Blatt and others founded the Tufts Hillel Non-Zionist Caucus. Hillel subsequently expelled them from the organization.

For over a century, some American Jews have modeled the idea that unqualified support for Israel and Zionism was “not in our name.” They prioritized justice as a Jewish value and were motivated not by self-hatred or antisemitism but by abiding commitments to human rights and to Jewish safety and community.

Today’s activists protesting over the devastation in Gaza are testing the threshold of dissent and the limits of free speech and academic freedom. They embrace what they view as more just visions of Israel and Palestine and more inclusive visions of an American Jewish community, one with space for dissent and earnest conversations about Israel and Zionism, and one in which Jews stand in solidarity with groups working for justice in Palestine, Israel and around the world.

Marjorie N. Feld, Professor of History and Society, Babson College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

I learned about Anne Frank from my mother and grandma, and read parts of her Diary when I was about the same age as she had been when she was murdered. The Holocaust documentary shows how her family’s backstory illustrates the “slow creep” of Fascism, which I view as a mischaracterization. In the context of history, it happened in a flash, after a creeping build-up that accelerated after the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

Hearing accounts of Anne Frank from survivor Susan Helsinrath Warsinger, we learned that Anne was brighter, more thoughtful and more mischievous than most girls her age. We found out that her father owned a successful business in Berlin, and moved his family to Amsterdam as he recognized the growing threat in Germany. The Netherlands seemed like a safe place until Hitler stormed all of Europe. Borders shifted rapidly during this period, as refugees’ sought safe havens that became more ever more elusive.

The United States did not form such a haven for Jews in the age of the Holocaust. The American State Department was run by a WASPY clique of anti-Semitic bigots. Their prejudices were enforced by the residual economic pressures of the Great Depression, which fed the existing xenophobia towards all immigrants, but Jews in particular because so many of them would have fled to the U.S. if they could have. It was argued that with 25 percent unemployment, letting in large numbers of immigrants would produce riots in the streets by workers afraid for what few jobs were available to them, but it is hard to disentangle this convenient narrative from the anti-Semitic prejudices of those who most often offered it.

Sadly, the anti-Semitism that infected the State Department was never extinguished in the U.S. It has been nurtured back into prominence by Donald Trump and his followers, as has brazen racism toward other groups.

Watching the excavation by Burns, Novick and Botstein of the slow creep of an unbalanced far right in Germany reminded me vividly of what we have seen happen in the United States over the past half-decade. The Fascism of Trump’s political movement has taken over the Republican Party, and threatens to destroy the Republic. The MAGA denial of the results of the 2020 Election and its determination to rig future elections are undeniable, sinister dynamics. Their canonization of Trump leaves them with no respect for democratic outcomes. He has fueled their fears of the Great Replacement Theory and anti-Semitism in America, while trying to insult Jews into supporting him. The farther Jews become removed from the Holocaust, the greater is our tendency to euphemize and sugar-coat bad news, and even to be enticed into far-right politics. Jews who cater to Trump are a mystifying lot, ignorant as to how they contribute to our own demise by supporting him. Consider:

The basis of Hitler’s persecution was that Jews were a “race,” to be extinguished. The idea that Jews are a single race is refuted by the differences in ancestry between Ashkenazi Jews, mostly from Europe, and Sephardic Jews from North Africa and the Middle East. Trump declared Judaism to be a race, in a 2019 Executive Order. His pretext was that Jews were being persecuted on college campuses by pro-Palestinian activists. At the time, he condescended to American Jews saying, “You’re brutal killers; you’re not nice people, but you have to vote for me; you have no choice . . .” Yet this blood libel did not dissuade right-wing American Jews from supporting him.

This week, he upped the ante saying, “No President has done more for Israel than I have. Somewhat surprisingly, however, our wonderful Evangelicals are far more appreciative of this than the people of the Jewish faith . . . , U.S. Jews have to get their act together and appreciate what they have in Israel — Before it is too late!” The dramatic teachings from the Burns documentary illustrate this sort of rhetoric is no trifling matter.

Trump has exploited decades of white nationalist frustrations and taken the Republican party to the outer fringes of the far-far right. His followers now appear to view the outcomes of the Civil War and WWII as objectionable, as witnessed by their unapologetic racism and growing allegiance to right-wing dictators such as Vladimir Putin and Victor Orban in Hungary. That CPAC held their conference in Hungary speaks volumes about the Republican mindset under Trump.

Trump’s insidiousness lies in the fact that his movement is gaining strength without him. As part of the America First coalition, there are 299 Republican candidates for federal, state and local offices, who deny the results of the 2020 Election. Their goal is to rig elections, restore Trump to power and stack every level of government with people friendly to their agenda. The fall of Liz Cheney and rise of Marjorie Taylor Greene underlines the extent of the threat.

People can no more be a little bit fascist than women can be a little bit pregnant. The parallels of our present dysfunction to Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here are haunting. Donald Trump is a real-life Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip. MAGA fulfills Lewis’s prophecy, depicted in his novel, of the League of Forgotten Men, while the army Trump commanded to storm the capital is the realization of Lewis’s Minute Men, a paramilitary force intervening in politics. His followers’ intent is to delegitimize any election results they don’t like and to take over every level of government. It IS happening here, and it must be stopped to prevent Civil War II, or the breakup of the United States.

This finding puts the leaked draft opinion of Judge Samuel Alito into stark relief as an outlier and raises questions of whether the conservative majority on the US Supreme Court is Establishing religion in taking a stance against any constitutional right to abortion. The religions in question are Catholicism and Evangelicalism, both of which, along with Mormonism, contain a majority or plurality that opposes abortion.

About 30% of Americans are religiously unaffiliated, up from 8% in 1990. They overwhelmingly believe abortion should be legal (73%). So Alito and the Republican Party are imposing their religious beliefs on these secular Americans who see no secular purpose in an abortion ban. This is nearly 100 million Americans we are talking about.

MSNBC: “For Religious Right, Abortion Was A Means To Power As Segregation Lost Political Potency”

Mainline Protestants — Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, etc., make up about 10% of Americans, down from 30% in 1970. Still, that is 33 million people. Some 60% of them think abortion should be legal in most or all cases, and 5% say they don’t know, so that I think we may conclude that 65% of these denominations’ members don’t think it should be illegal. That leaves 35% who do, of course, but they could not win a vote at a national convention of any of these churches.

About 70% of African-Americans identify as Protestant, and 52%, a majority, believe abortion should be legal. Note that 28% of African-Americans are evangelicals, so that explains why the support isn’t higher. About 6% are Catholic.

There are roughly 74 million Catholics in the US, about 30% of the population. This Pew Research Center poll found that 48% of them believe abortion is for the most part legal, whereas 47% disagreed. American Catholics are far more liberal than their church hierarchy, and a higher percentage of them gets abortions than is true among Protestants. The Supreme Court is effectively siding with the American Catholic minority against the more numerous abortion supporters.

Pew says of American Jews that it classifies “5.8 million adults (2.4% of all U.S. adults) as Jewish. This includes 4.2 million (1.7%) who identify as Jewish by religion and 1.5 million Jews of no religion (0.6%).” Another 2.8 million American adults have at least some Jewish background, through a parent or other relative.

Based on polling, Pew finds that 82% of Jewish Americans think abortion should be legal in all or most cases. For the Catholic Alito, four of his Catholic colleagues, and one conservative Protestant (Gorsuch) to de facto deprive Jewish women living in states controlled by Republican legislatures of the right to control their own bodies in accordance with their religious beliefs is surely a triumph of some religious traditions in the US over others, and is discriminatory. See for further on this argument today’s IC column by H. Scott Prosterman.

Buddhist Americans are something like 1.2% of the population and are a mix of white converts and Asian-Americans. 82% of them believe abortion should be legal. This result is wildly at variance with what most Asian Buddhists would say. The Dalai Lama, for instance, has called abortion a form of killing. But Buddhist Americans have their own distinctive approach to this issue.

Muslim Americans are about 1.1% of the population. On the order of 56% of them believe abortion should be legal, and another 9% don’t know. So 65% of them don’t have a strong objection. I have pointed out that ten Muslim-majority countries have abortion on demand, and another 19 allow it under certain circumstances.

So Alito is taking a position more conservative than that of a majority of Muslim Americans.

So who wants to ban abortion? 63% of Evangelicals, who are 17% of the population, about 35 million people, and 47% of Catholics, roughly 34 million people. Even if you add all abortion critics in all the religions together, they are a minority of the country. Some 69% of Americans over all want to maintain Roe v. Wade.

Other organizations arose in reaction to this tragedy, and have organized Torah studies, musical tributes, and service projects including blood drives and collections for food banks. That the Tree of Life complex also hosts two other congregations impacted by the tragedy, Dor Hadash and New Light Congregation, speaks to the unusual inclusivity of the Pittsburgh Jewish community. It was my pleasure to live there for three years, and attend services at Tree of Life. So it’s personal.

An ugly irony is that the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA also occurs this week. This is a right-wing demonstration of solidarity with the organizers of the deadly 2017 rally, who are defendants in Federal civil trials for inviting and staging these criminal acts. Nine plaintiffs injured in 2017 are suing 14 men and 10 groups that sponsored the rally, for violating their civil rights. The Civil complaint is in play because there was no federal or state effort to hold them accountable for criminal action, while Donald Trump was president. The defendants fecklessly argue that their actions constituted “free speech,” and that violent acts were self-defense. This is yet another Republican effort to hijack the concept of “free speech” protections, and twist into a counterintuitive, wrongful application.

It occurs in the wake of Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson pushing his own “replacement theory,” arguing that the “Democratic Party” (a dog whistle for Jewish Americans) is “trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters, from the third world.” His objection is that naturalized Americans are “diluting” the electoral power of “conservative” white voters. Carlson claimed, “The power that I have as an American, guaranteed at birth, is one man, one vote. And they are diluting it.” No Tucker, the Electoral College dilutes the votes of California and New York, but ALL votes count as one regardless of the voters’ skin color or birthplace. Perhaps Carlson wants non-white votes to count as three-fifths, which was the original Electoral College intent, to appease white plantation owners. And non-white people also have natural rights “guaranteed at birth.”

Those murders were a consequence of former President Donald Trump’s hyper-partisan divisiveness. Anti-Semitism comes in two forms these days: From the left there is a misunderstanding of the distinction between Judaism the religion; and Zionism, the political ideology, which has morphed into a brand of nationalism. Right-wing leaders in the US and Israel have promoted nationalism as a call to arms against “the other.” The unholy alliance between former Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and former president Trump resulted in exclusionary, toxic elements becoming a central part of their political ideology in both countries. Both men poisoned their political systems to an extent that makes it difficult to repair.

The Tree of Life killer was not interested in history or confused about Judaism and Zionism. He just hated Jews, motivated by one of Trump’s “Big Lies” – that the Jews were “funding” the caravan of poor people on an Exodus from Central America through the venerable Hebrew Immigration Aid Society (HIAS). He represents a continuation of the anti-Semitism that arose in during the Crusades, and included 1000 years of brutal pogroms, murderous sprees, and expropriation of property and art throughout Europe, into the late 19^th Century. At times, Muslims protected Jews from the Christian invaders, and had a period of strong collaboration centered in Southern Spain and North Africa around the time of Moshe ben Maimon (Maimonides). He collaborated with noted Islamic philosopher ibn Rushd, and built on the teachings ibn Sina (Avecina), with whom he shares credit as a forbear of modern medicine. Church-sponsored and Roman oppression made allies of Muslims and Jews at various times throughout history.

The victims were all vulnerable, and many were elderly. 97 year-old Rose Mallinger was known for endless volunteer contributions, including preparing breakfast for the congregation. Cecil and David Rosenthal were mentally disabled brothers, who lived in a group home and showed up every Saturday. The lives of Joyce Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Jerry Rabinowitz, Bernice and Sylvan Simon, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax and Irving Younger also mattered. All except the Rosenthal brothers were senior citizens, and all were killed while at prayer, in a state of rest and repose.

Trump had the audacity to make an unwanted appearance at the scene three days later, defying requests from Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto and Allegheny County Chief Executive Rich Fitzgerald to stay away. He inflamed and exacerbated the trauma, by making a phony show of care and condolence. To some, it was like a murderer showing up at a victim’s funeral to say, “Oh this is horrible; why all this senseless hate,” which he stoked and fueled. He further inflamed the situation by arguing that it illustrated a need for easier availability of guns, as he did with the Sandy Hook massacre.

Trump’s presidency was characterized by disingenuous acts that served to both 1.) Placate (or con) right-wing Jews into believing his support for all of Netanyahu’s excesses showed an affinity for Judaism, and 2.) Issue code words to Jew-hating Nazis to come out and act out with the same comments. They add up to a campaign of “Trojan anti-Semitism” and included:

–Declaring Judaism to be a nationality, in direct conflict with our spiritual and cultural history.

-Falsely declaring that Democrats are disloyal to Israel, ignoring the maxim that “friends don’t let friends commit suicide.”

-The destructive Abraham Accords, which created “peace” between Israel and countries it never had a war with, while dismissing Palestinian claims. By writing Palestinians out of the equation, he sowed the seeds for another generation of conflict.

-His open support for the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, and his profane equivocation of “very fine people on both sides.”

-Recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel was a sop to right-wing Jews and an incendiary gesture to Palestinians and the rest of the world. It was also a sop to the Evangelical community. Trump said last year, “We moved the capital of Israel to Jerusalem . . . That’s for the Evangelicals.” So he’s playing to the “Apocalypse Soon” crowd.

Despite this open Republican embrace of Jew-hating, race-baiting Fascism, some Jewish Republican elected officials continue to support his agenda, and ongoing effort to overturn the 2020 Election. Elected officials such as Rep. David Kustoff (R-TN) have contributed to the toxicity, AND our implicit demise by turning a blind eye to the most visceral threat to free exercise of religion and voting rights in our history. They have aided and abetted these crimes. Under Trump’s presidency, anti-Semitic violence and expressions have rose at an unprecedented rate in the US. This is not an accident, and Jewish Republicans who dismiss the connection reflect an unhealthy brand of myopia and denial.

To Trump and Republican leadership, the 11 murder victims were statistics, and fodder for political opportunity. But they were all good Jews with families, careers and vital, interesting lives. Each had his or her own unique Soul Print:

“Healing 10/27” spawned a consortium of other organizations that offer support, counseling and healing therapies: 2 for Seder, Squirrel Hill Stands Against Gun Violence and Love Like the Boys. The latter is dedicated to the memories of victims David and Cecil Rosenthal,” inseparable brothers known for their innocent kind-hearted nature.” Their tribute page on Facebook notes:

“We can’t make sense of the events at the Tree of Life but we can choose how we react to them:

React with love.

Offer a smile.

Reach out to those in need.

Treat the next person in line.

Lend a helping hand.

Include someone new.

Live cheerfully.

Trust others.

Don’t wait for happiness. Create it.

Let’s show we are stronger than hate.

Live like the Rosenthal’s.

Love like the boys.”

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Donations can be made to the Tree of Life Synagogue here.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

CBS Pittsburgh: “Commemoration Planned For Tree Of Life”

One of the many horrifying images from the Jan. 6 rampage on the U.S. Capitol shows a long-haired, long-bearded man wearing a black “Camp Auschwitz” T-shirt emblazoned with a skull and crossbones, and under it the phrase “work brings freedom” – an English translation of the Auschwitz concentration camp motto: “Arbeit macht frei.”*

These and related images, captured on television and retweeted on social media, demonstrate that some of those who traveled to Washington to support President Donald Trump were engaged in much more than just a doomed effort to maintain their hero in power.

As their writings make clear to me as a scholar of American anti-Semitism, some among them also hoped to trigger what is known as the “Great Revolution,” based on a fictionalized account of a government takeover and race war, that, in its most extreme form, would exterminate Jews.

Extreme anti-Semitism

Calls to exterminate Jews are common in far-right and white nationalist circles. For example, the conspiracy theorists of QAnon, who hold “that the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who are plotting against Mr. Trump,” traffic in it regularly.

The anonymous “Q” – the group’s purported head who communicates in riddles and leaves clues on message boards – once approvingly retweeted the anti-Semitic image of a knife-wielding Jew wearing a Star of David necklace who stands knee-deep in the blood of Russians, Poles, Hungarians and Ukrainians and asks with feigned innocence, “Why do they persecute me so?”

Images of long-nosed Jews dripping with the blood of non-Jews whom they are falsely accused of murdering have a long and tragic history. Repeatedly, they have served as triggers for anti-Semitic violence.

More commonly, including in recent days, QAnon has targeted Jewish billionaire philanthropist and investor George Soros, whom it portrays as the primary figure shaping and controlling world events. A century ago, the Rothschilds, a family of Jewish bankers, was depicted in much the same way.

QAnon members also mark Jews with triple parentheses, a covert means of outing those whom they consider usurpers and outsiders, not true members of the white race.

‘White genocide’

Another website popular in white nationalist circles displayed photographs of Jewish women and men, downloaded from university websites, so as to help readers distinguish Jews from the “Aryan Master Race.” “Europeans are the children of God,” it proclaims. “(((They)))” – denominating Jews as other without even mentioning them – “are the children of Satan.”

The website justifies rabid anti-Semitism by linking Jews to the forces supposedly seeking to undermine racial hierarchies. “White genocide is (((their))) plan,” it declares, again marking Jews with triple parentheses, “counter-(((extermination))) is our response.”

Members of the Proud Boys, another group that sent members to Washington, likewise traffic in anti-Semitism. One of the group’s leaders, Kyle Chapman, recently promised to “confront the Zionist criminals who wish to destroy our civilization.” The West, he explained “was built by the White Race alone and we owe nothing to any other race.”

Chapman, like many of his peers, uses the term “white genocide” as a shorthand way of expressing the fear that the members of the white population of the United States, like themselves, will soon be overwhelmed by people of color. The popular 14-word white supremacist slogan, visible on signs outside the Capitol on Wednesday, reads “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

Composed by David Lane, one of the conspirators behind the 1984 assassination of Jewish radio host Alan Berg, this slogan originally formed part of a larger document entitled “The White Genocide Manifesto.” Its 14 planks insist that Jews are not white and actually endanger white civilization. “All Western nations are ruled by a Zionist conspiracy to mix, overrun and exterminate the White race,” the manifesto’s seventh plank reads.

While influenced by the infamous anti-Semitic forgery known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the document goes further, blaming members of what it euphemistically calls the “Zionist occupation governments of America” for homosexuality and abortion as well.

QAnon followers, the Proud Boys and the other far-right and alt-right groups that converged on Washington imagined that they were living out the great fantasy that underlies what many consider to be the bible of the white nationalism movement, a 1978 dystopian novel, “The Turner Diaries,” by William Luther Pierce.

The novel depicts the violent overthrow of the government of the United States, nuclear conflagration, race war and the ultimate extermination of nonwhites and “undesirable racial elements among the remaining White population.”

Symbolism outside the Capitol

As opinion writer Seyward Darby pointed out in The New York Times, the gallows erected in front of the Capitol recalls the novel’s depiction of “the day of the rope,” when so-called betrayers of their race were lynched. Unmentioned in The New York Times article is that the novel subsequently depicts “a war to the death with the Jew.”

The book warns Jews that their “day is coming.” When it does, at the novel’s conclusion, mass lynchings and a takeover of Washington set off a worldwide conflagration, and, within a few days “the throat of the last Jewish survivor in the last kibbutz and in the last, smoking ruin in Tel Aviv had been cut.”

“The Turner Diaries”’ denouement coupled with the anti-Semitic images from the Capitol on Wednesday serve as timely reminders of the precarious place Jews occupy in different corners of the United States. Even as some celebrate how Jews have become white and privileged, others dream of Jews’ ultimate extermination.

Jonathan D. Sarna, University Professor and Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History, Brandeis University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

*This article has been corrected to remove an unsubstantiated reference to a T-shirt with an anti-Semitic acronym.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Jewish Dems: “Jewish Community Response to Capitol Siege – Voices from the Hill”

Human beings are a very young species, perhaps 300,000 years old, and have not had time to differentiate much. There is no significant genetic difference among human populations, from Ireland to China. Skin color is a very minor adaptive mechanism driven by the need to get enough but not too much sunshine to embryos to make vitamin D. Being starved of ultraviolet rays will cause lighter skin to be selected for over thousands of years. There is nothing intrinsically superior about it. A black complexion is better adapted to high UV ray environments like those at the equator.

Anyone who knows the history of Nazi (and other racist) science is chilled to the bone at what Trump said, and at its implications.

Just to make sure they understood what he was driving at, Trump threatened the Minnesotan Republicans with a flood of “Somali” immigrants, which he said Joe Biden was conniving at — i.e. he depicted Black immigrants of Muslim heritage as threatening undesirables. The Minnesota demographer’s office estimates about 52,000 Somalis in Minnesota, a state of 5.6 million, i.e. they are less than 1%.

Trump’s fixation on pigeon-holing people by race has caused him to denigrate most Americans. Trump’s lazy bigotry, of stereotyping and projecting his own narcissism on everyone else, is infuriating, but it is also very dangerous, because the president is a role model and people follow his cues.

Under Trump’s watch, Nazis in Charlottesville chanted “Jews will not replace us,” as they retailed, zombie-like, the bizarre conspiracy theory that Jewish Americans are engineering international immigration to the US for cheap labor to replace white people. Trump called the Nazis very fine people.

Apologists have tried to imply that he did not mean it. But he did.

Greg Miller at the Washington Post reports that

“After phone calls with Jewish lawmakers, Trump has muttered that Jews “are only in it for themselves” and “stick together” in an ethnic allegiance that exceeds other loyalties, officials said.”

It is the most monstrous thing about Trump that he seeks political advantage by trying to make Americans hate one another and fear one another.

It is obscene that Trump said this about our Jewish American brothers and sisters in the wake of the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who gave unstintingly of herself to better the lives and expand the rights of all Americans.

Trump just attacked Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) again at a rally, in his own version of Orwell’s “Two minutes hate.”

Trump said of Omar, “She’s telling us how to run our country. How did you do where you came from? How is your country doing?”

Omar is an American citizen who was elected to Congress, she pointed out in response. Trump, she says, doesn’t seem to get it. If the people elect you to represent them, you get to help run the country. It doesn’t matter where you were born. Seven of the 39 men who signed the Constitution were foreign-born. Two of them were born in the West Indies, and we know what Trump thinks of Caribbean countries.

Donald “Bonespur” Trump, who got deferments to avoid serving in Vietnam might consider that 269 Jewish American soldiers died fighting in Vietnam.

Trump knows nothing of this account of Jewish Americans in our country’s major wars. It notes, “In World War I, there were more than 250,000 Jews who answered America’s call to action: over 3,500 were killed; over 12,000 were wounded; and they received over 1,100 decorations for bravery.”

Or consider this poignant list of Jewish American service personnel who have died in America’s wars since 9/11. Here are a few heartbreaking entries:

Wolfer, Stuart A.
Major, Army,
Florida 4/6/08
Baghdad, Iraq

Rosenberg, Mark E.
Major, Army,
Florida 4/8/08
Baghdad, Iraq

Yelner, Jonathan A.V.
Senior Airman, Air Force,
California 4/29/08
Near Bagram, Afghanistan

Farkas, Daniel
1st Lieutenant, Army National Guard,
New York 7/4/08
Kabul, Afghanistan (Camp Phoenix)

Weinger, Robert M.
Sergeant, Army National Guard,
Illinois 3/15/09
Jalabad, Afghanistan

Pine, Shawn
Lieutenant Colonel, Army Reserve,
Texas 5/20/09
Near Kabul, Afghanistan

Schulte, Roslyn L.
1st Lieutenant, Air Force,
Missouri 5/20/09
Near Kabul, Afghanistan

As for Trump, he had bone spurs when his time to serve came.

Jewish American physicians and nurses have been at the front lines fighting Covid-19, as have first-generation immigrant medical personnel, including Muslims. They have risked their lives. Some came out of retirement to be of service. Some have died.

Trump has run his presidency as a grifter, and would not recognize sacrifice if it fell on him from a great height.

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Bonus Video:

THE JEWISH JOURNEY: AMERICA | March 2015 | PBS

This February, more than 100 gravestones were vandalized at the Chesed Shel Emeth Society Cemetery outside of St. Louis, Missouri and at the Jewish Mount Carmel Cemetery in Philadelphia.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has called anti-Semitism in the U.S. a “very serious concern.” An ADL task force confirmed that 800 journalists in the U.S. have been targeted with more than 19,000 anti-Semitic tweets. The organization also reported an upsurge in anti-Semitism on U.S. college campuses.

Most disconcerting, however, is the ADL’s admission that, although this increase in anti-Semitism is troubling, “it is essential to recognize that, for both positive and negative reasons – we are not alone.” In the 10 days following the presidential election in 2016, nearly 900 hate-motivated incidents were reported, and many on college campuses. Many of these incidents targeted Muslims, people of color and immigrants as well as Jews.

White supremacist groups like Identity Evropa, American Vanguard and American Renaissance have also been more active on college campuses.

I am a Jewish studies scholar. Research shows that this outpouring of anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic sentiment is reminiscent in many ways of the political climate during the years between the first and second world wars in the U.S. – known as the interwar period.

America as the ‘melting pot’

In its early years the United States maintained an “open door policy” that drew millions of immigrants from all religions to enter the country, including Jews. Between 1820 and 1880, over nine million immigrants entered America. By the early 1880s, American nativists – people who believed that the “genetic stock” of Northern Europe was superior to that of Southern and Eastern Europe – began pushing for the exclusion of “foreigners,” whom they “viewed with deep suspicion.”

In fact, according to scholar Barbara Bailin, most of the immigrants, who were from Southern, Central and Eastern Europe, “were considered so different in composition, religion, and culture from earlier immigrants as to trigger a xenophobic reaction that served to generate more restrictive immigration laws.”

In August 1882, Congress responded to increasing concerns about America’s “open door” policy and passed the Immigration Act of 1882, which included a provision denying entry to “any convict, lunatic, idiot or any person unable to take care of himself without becoming a public charge.”

However, enforcement was not strict, in part because immigration officers working at the points of entry were expected to implement these restrictions as they saw fit. In fact, it was during the late 19th century that the American “melting pot” was born: nearly 22 million immigrants from all over the world entered the U.S. between 1881 and 1914. They included approximately 1,500,000 million European Jews hoping to escape the longstanding legally enforced anti-Semitism of many parts of the European continent, which limited where Jews could live, what kinds of universities they could attend and what kinds of professions they could hold.

Fear of Jews/immigrants

Nativists continued to rail against the demographic shifts created by the United States’ lax immigration policy, and in particular took issue with the high numbers of Jews and Southern Italians entering the country, groups many nativists believed were racially inferior to Northern and Western Europeans. Nativists also voiced concerns about the effects of cheaper labor on the struggle for higher wages.

These fears were eventually reflected in the makeup of Congress, since the electorate voted increasing numbers of nativist congresspeople into office who vowed to change immigration laws with their constituent’s anti-immigrant sentiments in mind.

Nativist and isolationist sentiment in America only increased, as Europe fell headlong into World War I, “the war to end all wars.” On Feb. 4, 1917 Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1917, which reversed America’s open door policy and denied entry to the majority of immigrants seeking entry. As a result, between 1918 and 1921, only 20,019 Jews were admitted into the U.S.

The 1924 Immigration Act tightened the borders further. It transferred the decision to admit or deny immigrants from the immigration officers at the port of entry to the Foreign Services Office, which issued visas after the completion of a lengthy application with supporting documentation.

The quotas established by the act also set strict limits on the number of new immigrants allowed after 1924. The number of Central and Eastern Europeans allowed to enter the U.S. was dramatically reduced: The 1924 quotas provided visas to a mere 2 percent of each nationality already in the U.S by 1890, and excluded immigrants from Asia completely (except for immigrants from Japan and the Phillipines). The stated fundamental purpose of this immigration act was to preserve the ideal of U.S. “homogeneity.” Congress did not revise the act until 1952.

Why does this history matter?

The political climate of the interwar period has many similarities with the anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic environment today.

President Trump’s platform is comprised in large part of strongly anti-immigrant rhetoric. A Pew Charitable Trust survey shows that as many as 66 percent of registered voters who supported Trump consider immigration a “very big problem,” while only 17 percent of Hillary Clinton’s supporters said the same. Seventy-nine percent of Trump supporters embrace the proposal to build a wall “along the entire U.S. border with Mexico.” Moreover, 59 percent of Trump supporters actively associate “unauthorized immigrants with serious criminal behavior.”

I argue that much like the claims of interwar period nativists that Southern and Eastern European people were racially inferior, the assertions of President Trump and his supporters about immigrants and the dangers they pose are nothing more than demagoguery. The allegations about the high crime rate among immigrants are not borne out by statistical evidence: Immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes than people born in the U.S.

President Trump’s claims about the dangers posed by immigrants may not be supported by facts; but they do indicate the U.S.’ increased isolationism, nativism and right-wing nationalism. His most recent travel ban blocks immigrants from six predominantly Muslim nations, and includes a 120-day freeze on Syrian refugees specifically. And yet like the Jews of Europe from the interwar period, many of these refugees seek entry into the U.S. because their very lives are at stake.

For many scholars like myself, Trump’s “America First” approach is a reminder of the interwar period; all over again, we see anti-immigrant sentiment and anti-Semitism, going hand in hand. In the current climate, Muslims are also easy targets for a new generation of nativists, whose fears are used to justify turning away refugees and immigrants.

Ingrid Anderson, Lecturer, Arts & Sciences Writing Program, Boston University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Some Jewish groups see the vandalism and threats as a sign that anti-Semitic groups have been emboldened by Trump’s election.

Jewish community centers and schools in at least 13 U.S. states reported receiving bomb threats on Monday, the fifth wave of such threats this year that have stoked fears of a resurgence of anti-Semitism.

The threats, all of which appeared to be hoaxes, were received in Alabama, Delaware, Florida, Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Virginia, the JCC Association of North America said. For some centers, it was the second or third time this year they had been targeted.

Police in Mercer Island, Washington, also reported a community center was targeted by a bomb threat.

“Members of our community must see swift and concerted action from federal officials to identify and capture the perpetrator or perpetrators who are trying to instill anxiety and fear in our communities,” David Posner, a director at the JCC Association, said in a statement.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department’s civil rights division have said they are investigating the threats alongside police, but little information has been made public about any perpetrators.

Some Jewish groups see the vandalism and threats as a sign that anti-Semitic groups have been emboldened by Trump’s election. His campaign last year drew the support of white supremacists and other right-wing groups, despite his disavowals of them.

Via TeleSur

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

CBS This Morning: “New wave of threats to Jewish centers across U.S.”