Now is the time to value Jewish critics of Israel

Articles from 1) Emma Green, The Atlantic; 2) Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian; 3) Chemi Shalev, Haaretz;

A sign posted in Oakland, California, during riots following Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States. Photo by Noah Berger / Reuters

The Jewish Struggle to Understand Trump’s Election

Synagogues hosted prayer and healing services on Wednesday for congregants grappling with the outcome of the U.S. presidential election.

Emma Green, The Atlantic
November 10/15, 2016

PHILADELPHIA—On November 8, 1938, Nazi paramilitary soldiers and German civilians looted and vandalized thousands of Jewish businesses and synagogues. Jews were murdered. Up to 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and taken to concentration camps.

On November 8, 2016, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. The next day, a man discovered that someone had painted swastikas on an abandoned storefront in South Philly, placing the symbols next to Trump’s name and the words “Sieg Heil,” a salute used by Nazis during World War II. Maybe it was an anti-Trump protester. Maybe it was an anti-Semite. Either way, it underscored the ways in which Trump’s election has evoked the persistent Jewish nightmare: That America will become like Germany in 1938. Jews, who have a keen eye for the repetition of history, might be forgiven for worrying about the fragility of American democracy.

This is the scale of fear, grief, and anger about Trump in some Jewish communities across America. In Philadelphia, at least three synagogues held prayer services on Wednesday; congregations in a number of other cities, including Durham, North Carolina, and Washington, D.C., held similar events. “No matter who we voted for and how we are feeling this morning, we all know that we and our country are in desperate need of healing,” read the Facebook invite for an event at the Germantown Jewish Centre in north Philly. “We will sit together, sing together, pray together, and have a chance to share what is on our hearts with the support of the community.”

A woman was crying when I walked into the cavernous sanctuary of GJC on Wednesday night. Roughly 100 people were gathered in a circle of chairs toward the front of the room; the cream ceiling and warmly brown furniture gave the space a living-room feel. In the center of the gathering, a single candle sat burning on a small round table. The space was still except for the occasional baby squeal or patter of toddler feet at the side of the room; people had brought their children because, as someone on Facebook observed, they need to heal, too.

Trump’s daughter Ivanka came up—whether Jews would be safe because one of the president’s children is an Orthodox convert. The congregants were concerned about the racism and sexism revealed during the campaign, and discussed the stages of grief. They talked of making aliyah, or emigrating to Israel—not as a plausible possibility, but as a back-of-mind option in case things get really bad. And yes, people brought up Nazi Germany.

Unlike Muslims, Mexicans, African Americans, the disabled, and women, Jews have not been directly insulted by Donald Trump during this election. Anti-Semites have arguably been empowered by his campaign: Jewish journalists have been consistently threatened and harassed on Twitter since the election got underway, often by people who self-identify as Trump supporters. But the fear seems to be less that Trump will specifically persecute Jews than the sense that America under Trump will become an increasingly hostile space for Jews and other minority groups. Trump doesn’t have to be an antisemite to bear responsibility for antisemitism.

While exit polls suggest that roughly 25 percent of American Jews voted for Trump—fewer than voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, but more than voted for John McCain in 2008—the group as a whole is overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic. Adam Zeff, the rabbi at GJC, said in an interview that the synagogue’s neighbourhood, Mt. Airy, is so left-wing that it’s almost “self-parody.” Most Jews live in cities or stay concentrated in “little enclaves,” as Zeff called them—he pointed out that on the map of the election results, there are tiny blue spots even deep in Trump country. “That’s where Jews live,” he said, along with other minority groups.

The US will no longer feel like a haven for Jews under Trump

By Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian
November 16, 2016

To the long list of things that Donald Trump’s election has upended, we should add one more: the way Jews see the world.

For most of the last century, Jews have regarded America as a safe haven. While Europe had inflicted on its Jewish population a history of expulsion, persecution and eventually industrialised slaughter, the United States had given them a place where they could survive, and thrive.

The words on the base of the Statue of Liberty welcomed refugees like them: “Give me your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free” – words, incidentally, written by Emma Lazarus, herself a Jew. Not for nothing, did Jews refer to the US as the goldene medina, a golden land, a place of comfort after centuries of suffering.

In recent years, that sense had only sharpened. Reports of rising antisemitism, as well as a surge in xenophobic nationalism, in Europe confirmed for many Americans their sense that the old world was still haunted by its old, Jew-hating demons. For many US Jews, Europe seemed permanently stuck in 1938, on the brink of an antisemitic catastrophe. In this conception, the US remained comfortably immune from the virus of Jew-hatred.

That certainty has vanished in the last week – and the appointment of Steve Bannon as the most senior adviser to the incoming president has deepened the anxiety. For Bannon is the boss of the far-right Breitbart website, which as well as attacking women, Muslims and African-Americans has targeted Jews. A recent column denounced the journalist Anne Applebaum: “Hell hath no fury like a Polish, Jewish, American elitist scorned.” Another slammed the Republican editor of the Weekly Standard as a “renegade Jew”. Of course, one should always be wary of the accusations divorcing spouses make against each other, but Bannon’s ex-wife testified that he once objected to her choice of school for their daughters because “he didn’t want the girls going to school with Jews”. (Bannon denies this happened, pointing to the fact that his wife prevailed in her choice of school.)

If it were just Bannon’s back-catalogue that was at issue, perhaps the concern could be contained. But the problem is that Trump’s campaign trafficked in the full range of antisemitic motifs and tropes. It’s not just that Trump himself retweeted neo-Nazis, or that his campaign put out an image of Hillary that had been lifted from an antisemitic site – depicting Hillary Clinton against a giant backdrop of cash and a six-pointed star uncannily like a Star of David. It’s that last month Trump warned that Clinton “meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of US sovereignty” – a line that could have been lifted straight from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious Tsarist-era forgery that purported to be evidence of a global Jewish conspiracy.

Trump pushed the same age-old canard in his closing TV ad. It featured a gallery of three villains, all of whom were Jews: philanthropist George Soros, the Federal Reserve chair, Janet Yellen, and the Goldman Sachs boss, Lloyd Blankfein. The narrator’s words used as each of those faces appeared came from the lexicon of classic antisemitism. Soros: “those who control the levers of power”. Yellen: “global special interests”. Blankfein: “global power structure”. Trump supporters have taken their cue and bombarded Jewish journalists with the vilest form of abuse.

None of this has ended with the campaign. The conspiracy theorist and propagandist Alex Jones says Trump has phoned him since his election, promising to appear on his radio show “in the next few weeks”. Last month Jones ranted against “the Jewish mafia in the United States”.

It’s worth stressing two things. This is not antisemitism of the subtle variety. Nor is this antisemitism of the kind that we have got used to debating in Britain in recent years: an obsessive hostility to Israel that draws on the language or imagery of anti-Jewish racism. This is old-school, hardcore, Jews-are-taking-over-the-world antisemitism. And it is being voiced not by European leftists or Muslims – who, until last week, many American Jews held to be the chief source of modern antisemitism – but by America’s next president and his allies.

Of course some have tried to reassure themselves that there’s nothing to worry about. They point to the fact that Trump is close to his Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and that indeed Ivanka Trump has converted to Judaism. This is to ignore the fact that antisemites have often exempted those they deem to be “good Jews”, exceptions to an otherwise robust rule. They forget that antisemites frequently boast that “Some of my best friends are Jewish”, that those denouncing Jews will often place a friendly hand on the arm of the Jew in the room and say, “I don’t mean you, of course.”

Others have sought comfort in the fact that Trump has made some positive noises towards Israel, and that Binyamin Netanyahu has given him a friendly welcome. But this is to forget what European Jews learned long ago: that nasty rightwing nationalists can be pro-Israel – for reasons utterly alien to Jews’ own feelings about the country. So ultra-nationalists might admire Israel either because they see it as standing up to those they deem the Muslim enemy or because they like the idea of a country far away that might take the Jews off their hands. Neither of these sentiments makes them pro-Jewish.

This distinction has set European Jewish communities at odds with Israeli governments repeatedly over the years. It’s happening again now in Austria, as the local Jewish community fears the far-right presidential candidate Norbert Hofer even as Israeli officials have engaged with him.

Small European communities have been saying for years now that pro-Israel is not the same as pro-Jewish. But they were too small to be listened to. Now that same argument is playing out on a much bigger stage, as America’s Anti-Defamation League bravely denounces the president-elect, while others say Trump should be given a chance.

Either way, this is unfamiliar and unwelcome territory for American Jews. They are discovering that antisemitism is not a thing of the past, nor confined to distant Europe. It is alive and active in their own, golden land – and now it is endorsed from the very top.

Aftershock: President Trump Has Shattered Jews’ American Idyll

American Jews have transformed virtually overnight from insiders to outsiders; the appointment of ex-Breitbart CEO Steve Bannon, an accused antisemite, as chief strategist, is bound to exacerbate the tensions.

By Chemi Shalev in Washington, Haaretz
November 14, 2016

WASHINGTON – Those were the best of times, arguably, but these may be the worst of times. That’s the way most American Jews must feel as they wake up with a massive hangover from the shock election results and the reality that Donald Trump will soon be President of the United States.

Whatever differences American Jews may have had with Barack Obama over the Iran nuclear deal and Middle East peace, they’ve never had a president who was more in tune with their Jewish and liberal essence.

Obama was the realization of the American Jewish vision of a multicultural society, a dream come true for a generation of civil rights activists. He promoted and embodied the liberal ideals that American Jews are more attached to than any other religious group in America. And he was more knowledgeable about American Jewish culture and Yiddishkeit than any previous president, bar none. Even when they disagreed with him, most American Jews, with the exception of the vocal minority that hated his guts, viewed Obama as a mensch.

It is probably no coincidence that during his tenure, American Jews reached a pinnacle of social and cultural acceptance. Being American Jews was hip. It was cool. It was the thing to be. From Jon Stewart to Jerry Seinfeld, from Joe Lieberman to Bernie Sanders, Jews seemed to be more entrenched than ever before in the American mainstream.

Pew Research Polls repeatedly confirmed that Jews were the most loved and most admired religious group in all of America. Mashiach-zeit, old timers would say, but with a note of caution, because if Jewish history teaches anything, it is that all things must pass.

The election of Donald Trump has shattered the Jewish idyll, all across the board. Although one must give the president-elect the benefit of the doubt that he is not an anti-Semite himself, he has frequently promoted disparaging Jewish stereotypes in his personal statements.

Sunday evening’s appointment of former Breitbart CEO Steve Bannon as chief strategist in the White House is bound to exacerbate Jewish tensions. He is considered the standard bearer for the racist, anti-immigrant alt-right movement and has been accused of harboring antisemitic sentiments himself.

Trump has repeatedly and unapologetically disseminated white supremacist tweets. His campaign has used antisemitic symbols that Trump has failed to disown even when advised of their offensive content. He has distanced himself from his neo-Nazi supporters only under duress. And under his wings, America has seen an unprecedented outburst of blunt and naked hatred of Jews, which has only gotten worse since his election.

In recent months, most prominent Jewish journalists and other public critics of Trump have been harassed by antisemites on social media, in their mail at home and, in some cases, in close physical contact. Swastikas have been painted at schools. Jewish students have been threatened, taunted, told that Adolf Hitler was right all along. Along with Muslims, Hispanics, and African Americans, they are being targeted as the sworn enemies of the America First Weltanschauung that Trump is bringing with him to the White House.

The shock that many Jews are feeling now is partly of their making. In recent years, the American Jewish establishment has willingly enlisted in the Israeli government’s effort to depict ever-widening circles of anti-Israeli agitation on the left as antisemitism. The fight against BDS and the efforts to portray it as hatred of Jews in another form has consumed the time, energy and resources of the American Jewish leadership, with the possible exception of the Anti-Defamation League.

Meanwhile, virulent and classic antisemitism lurking just under the radical right’s surface was virtually ignored, concealed by the mainstream right-wing’s overwhelming support for Israel. Even mentioning it was considered to be an anti-Israeli provocation.

Trump’s triumph has unleashed the pent up resentment against Jews. His reluctance to tackle manifestations of racism and white supremacism among his supporters has energized and empowered it. If he and his advisers don’t take assertive steps soon, anti-Jewish agitators will feel they have a license from the White House to do as they please. They will get bolder, grow stronger, recruit new adherents and increasingly resort to violence: we’ve seen it before.

But even if brazen antisemitic incidents are quelled or die down by themselves, there is no denying that Jews have transformed virtually overnight from insiders to outsiders. Not only did they vote overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton, prominent conservative Jews who could have allayed their concerns are the ones who have distanced themselves from Trump over the course of the campaign and will play no role in his administration.

American Jewish liberals are bound to feel alienated from their own government in way they’ve never felt before. Most of the values, goals and policy objectives of the Trump administration, even if they turn out to be a paler and more palatable version of his campaign rhetoric, are diametrically opposed to those of most American Jews. They support immigration, pluralism, multiculturalism, social reform, government intervention, separation of church and state, gay marriage, abortion rights and on and on. It is easy to see, in fact, why so many of Trump’s radical supporters would view the Jews as their mortal enemies.

As Shmuel Rosner rightly points out for the wrong reasons, Trump may ultimately divide Israeli and American Jews. But the reason for that is not limited, as Rosner asserts, to the yet to be proven assumption that American Jews will resent their Israeli counterparts for liking Trump because he is pro-Israel.

It is because Trump’s core message, his reactionary, nativist, chauvinistic, anti-foreigner, anti-immigrant and mainly anti-Muslim worldview is shared by far too many, though far from all Israelis, and is embraced by its ruling coalition. And because many Israeli Jews are indifferent to right-wing anti-Semitism and indeed share right-wing disdain toward the liberalism of American Jews.

Of course, all may not be bleak. Perhaps Trump will fight the antisemitism on his radical fringe with increasing vigour. Possibly his policies will be less offensive to American Jews. Perhaps the American Jewish establishment will produce a leadership capable of meeting these trying times. Who knows, maybe some American Jews will finally realize they should support Israeli Jews who share their worldview rather than a government that doesn’t.

And if worse comes to worst, to paraphrase Casablanca, liberal American Jews will always have Israel itself.  Moderate, liberal Israelis, beleaguered and on the point of despair, will flock to the airport to welcome them with open arms. Mashiach-zeit [time of the Messiah], they will tell themselves, in awe.

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See also Jewish establishment confounded by Trump’s team