Look up! The threat is from the right
The article from Jane Eisner is followed by one from Naomi Zeveloff and links to other Forward articles about Trump and the American right wing.
An image used by Christian Zionists. People pin their hopes on Israel for all sorts of strange and scary reasons.
The Breathtaking Hypocrisy of Jews Who Line Up Behind Steve Bannon’s Twisted Vision of America
By Jane Eisner, Forward
November 16, 2016
For many years now, American Jews have been told to worry about antisemitism from the left, from those whose criticism of Israel veers into rank de-legitimization of the Jewish state. Well-funded efforts have sprung up to defeat this “new antisemitism,” especially on college campuses, and it’s getting to the point where support of the movement to boycott, sanction and divest from Israel is equated with betrayal of the Jewish people.
So obsessed are we with looking for threats from one direction that we have missed the growing danger from another.
Unleashed by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and cemented by the appointment of Stephen Bannon to a powerful position in the White House, the antisemitic sentiments of the far right are closer to the centre of political power than they have been in recent memory.
This “new, new antisemitism” is largely limited to social media onslaughts and is nowhere near as pervasive as the global efforts to isolate Israel and Israelis. (For now.) But ignoring it, dismissing it, excusing it, hoping it will go away — as some Jewish leaders are doing — is not only perilous, it’s hypocritical and self-defeating.
“We now know that there is a coherent threat from the right as well as from the left,” Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and a wise observer of the American Jewish scene, told me. “I don’t know why there isn’t a coherent response to the right.”
“We need to do a serious reckoning,” said Deborah Lipstadt, who is writing a book about antisemitism and as the pre-eminent historian on Holocaust denial, knows of what she speaks. “It’s been so convenient for people to beat up on the left, but you can’t ignore what’s coming from the right.”
Joel Pollack
“I have Saturdays off, Jewish holidays off and Steve Bannon always wishes me a ‘Shabbat shalom’ on Friday afternoon — just in case you were concerned about that,” Joel Pollack, Breitbart’s senior editor at large, told NPR.
Even more, his Israel politics are hawkish enough to make Mort Klein, the very hawkish head of the Zionist Organization of America, boast that Bannon will attend the ZOA’s annual awards gala on Sunday.
Bannon may be, as Klein insisted, “the opposite of an antisemite,” but the news organization he oversaw until he joined the Trump campaign unabashedly embraced the white supremacist movement that is anti-immigrant, anti-feminist, anti-Muslim — and at times, antisemitic. “We’re the platform for the alt-right,” Bannon proudly told Mother Jones last summer.
Some of those pro-Trump alt-right guys are the ones sending horrific antisemitic messages laden with Holocaust imagery to Jewish journalists — and others — around the country.
As our Naomi Zeveloff explained earlier this week, it’s possible to be Zionist and antisemitic at the same time [see article below]. Some, like Bannon, see in Israel a (white) nationalist, anti-Arab country worth supporting — over there. Here, in America, they may accept, even respect, individual Jews, but their ideological aim is to cleanse the country of its multiculturalism and restore privilege to white Christian males.
That is, apparently, much more acceptable than being a proud, devout Jew who doesn’t happen to support the policies of the current Israeli government. That will earn you the title of anti-Semite.
The hypocrisy here is not only breathtaking, it’s self-defeating. The Jews in America who are the target of antisemitic threats and harassment — and here I include many of us at the Forward — must make common cause with other minority groups who are experiencing this and worse in today’s toxic political environment. The undocumented worker fearful of deportation. The Muslim subject to hate crimes.
If, instead, Jews excuse the far right’s hateful behaviour because some of the people doing it happen to favour certain policies in Israel — especially when those policies prolong a near-half century of occupation — then they’ve abandoned the natural allies in the fight for a more tolerant America.
And even worse, they’ve abandoned their fellow Jews.
That is what it means to support Steve Bannon’s America.
How Steve Bannon and Breitbart News Can Be Pro-Israel — and Anti-Semitic at the Same Time
By Naomi Zeveloff, Tel Aviv, Forward
November 15, 2016
Breitbart News, the site chaired by Donald Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon, is widely known as a platform for white nationalism and antisemitism. It is also brazenly Zionist, albeit peddling an exclusively right wing perspective on Israel.
Trump’s Jewish supporters have pointed to Breitbart’s Zionist stance to defend the president-elect’s choice of Bannon, who was painted as an antisemite by his ex-wife in court documents. Bannon denied making the antisemitic comments.
“He was and is and remains staunchly pro-Israel,” said Abe Katsman, the chief counsel for Republicans Overseas Israel, who has written for Breitbart News.
Yet though it would seem impossible to hate Jews but love the Jewish state, these two viewpoints are not as contradictory as they appear.
There is actually “little correlation” between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, according Steven M. Cohen, a sociologist at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. To be sure, anti-Semitism is found among the anti-Zionist left. But it is also found among the Zionist right.
“Many people who dislike Jews like Israel and many people who are critical toward Israel are affectionate toward Jews,” said Cohen.
Breitbart News isn’t the only place where anti-Semitism and Zionism go hand in hand. Anti-Semitic attitudes abound in Poland, for example, even as Poland has a strong diplomatic relationship with Israel.
This duality is a central component of “Trumpism,” said Yael Sternhell, a Tel Aviv University professor of history and American studies. Though Trump has flip-flopped on the Middle East, he has professed an ultra-right view of Israel that would seem to outflank even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He also has a Jewish son-in-law, and a daughter who converted to Judaism. At the same time, many of Trump’s followers spout anti-Semitism.
“As long as Jews are in Israel fighting the ‘good fight’ with the Arab world as a bastion of American ideals and values in the Middle East, then they are very useful and admirable allies,” said Sternhell. “Once they are home demanding a multi-cultural democracy, demanding that the country accommodate their religion, their belief and their custom that is a different story.”
Some on the alt-right, the emerging group of racist activists who support Trump, oppose the close U.S.-Israel relationship as part of a broader critique of U.S. interventionism abroad. Yet they admire Israel as a “model for white nationalism and/or Christianism,” according to the right-wing online encyclopedia Conservapedia. Some also see Jewish immigration to Israel as helping their cause of a Jew-free white America.
The coexistence of antisemitism and right-wing Zionism “in Trump’s world make sense,” said Todd Gitlin, the Columbia University sociologist and cultural commentator in an email to the Forward.
Anti-Semitism and right-wing Zionism are varieties of ultra nationalism, or, to put it more pejoratively (as it deserves to be put) tribalism. They both presume that the embattled righteous ones need to bristle at, wall off, and punish the damned outsiders. They hate and fear cosmopolitan mixtures. They make a fetish of purity. They have the same soul. They rhyme.
Breitbart News, which became a mouthpiece for the Trump campaign, was actually started by a Jewish lawyer and businessman, Larry Solov. In addition to reporters in London and the United States, the site has a small Jerusalem bureau, which is helmed by journalist Aaron Klein. Attempts to reach Klein and two journalists who write for Breitbart Jerusalem were unsuccessful.
In a 2015 post announcing the opening of the Jerusalem bureau, Solov wrote that Breitbart News itself was conceived of in Israel, when Solov traveled to the Holy Land with Andrew Breitbart, now deceased.
“One thing we specifically discussed that night was our desire to start a site that would be unapologetically pro-freedom and pro-Israel. We were sick of the anti- Israel bias of the mainstream media and J-Street,” he wrote.
At the same time, the site trafficked in anti-Semitic tropes. One article called Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum a “political revisionist,” noting “hell hath no fury like a Polish, Jewish, American elitist scorned.” Another called The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol a “renegade Jew.”
Bannon’s ex-wife branded him as an anti-Semite in 2007 court documents, in which she describes Bannon complaining about “whiny brat” Jews at their daughters’ school, according to the New York Daily News. Bannon denied that he made the comments, through a spokeswoman.
Contact Naomi Zeveloff at zeveloff@forward.com or on Twitter @naomizeveloff
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