The Jewish centre cannot hold


December 3, 2016
Sarah Benton

Two articles from Haaretz, the first from after the election, the second from before.


Tel Aviv, Nov. 14, 2016. Photo by Baz Ratner/Reuters

Trump Era Heralds Final Collapse of American Jewish Centre

Crushed between rising extremes, the establishment’s wish to stay liberal but support Netanyahu is no longer sustainable.

Peter Beinart, Haaretz premium
December 01, 2016

To understand what American Jewish politics will look like in the age of Donald Trump, look closely at what happened at New York’s Grand Hyatt Hotel on the evening of Sunday, November 20. Inside the hotel, the Zionist Organization of America held its annual gala. Never heard of the ZOA? You’re not alone. For decades, it has been overshadowed by its larger and more moderate “Pro-Israel” rival, AIPAC. But in the Trump era, ZOA’s influence is set to grow for three reasons.

First, it draws heavily from the Orthodox community, a community that because of its demographic growth and lack of assimilation is likely to supply the bulk of “Pro-Israel” activists in the years to come.

Second, it does not pretend to support the two state solution, which puts it in line with Israel’s prime minister and America’s president-elect.

Third, it’s comfortable with Trump’s takeover of the GOP. Other mainstream American Jewish organizations – The Anti-Defamation League, and the leaders of the Conservative and Reform Movements, for instance – have expressed alarm about the GOP’s increasingly naked embrace of anti-Muslim bigotry. They’ve denounced Trump’s call for a ban on Muslim immigration. They’ve condemned his appointment of Steve Bannon, whose former website, Breitbart, published headlines like “Man Bites Dog: Muslim is Nice to Non-Muslim” The ZOA, by contrast, has no problem with anti-Muslim bigotry; it peddles such bigotry itself. Among the speakers invited to address the ZOA’s November gala was Bannon himself.


#JewishResistance activists protest outside the ZOA gala against Steven Bannon and the racism and Islamophobia of the Donald Trump camp, New York City, November 20, 2016. Photo by Naomi Dann/Jewish Voice for Peace – NYC

Bannon didn’t come. But the expectation that he would brought a very different set of Jewish organizations onto the streets outside the Grand Hyatt in protest. These organizations – which included If Not Now, T’ruah, Jews for Racial & Economic Justice and Jewish Voice for Peace – have also resided on the margins of organized American Jewish life. If the ZOA has been too far to the right, they’ve been too far left.

But in the age of Trump, these progressive groups are set to grow too. First, because they can militantly oppose Trump. Some establishment Jewish groups have criticized his policies and appointments, but their need to appear bipartisan and work with whomever is in power limits their public opposition. Leftist groups like If Not Now and T’ruah, by contrast, need not muffle their outrage. Organizing under the hashtag #JewishResistance, they’re well positioned to attract some of the Jews frightened and repulsed by Trump’s victory.

The second reason they’ll likely grow is that their Israel agenda matches their American agenda. Centrist American Jewish organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League and American Jewish Committee have a split personality. Domestically, they champion human rights and anti-discrimination. But when it comes to Israeli policy in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, they ditch these values in the name of security. Some older American Jewish liberals are comfortable with this moral schizophrenia. But American Jewish millennials overwhelmingly reject it. The right leaning, disproportionately Orthodox millennials who support Israel’s occupation generally support illiberal policies at home too. The progressive Jewish millennials who want to resist Trump generally want to resist Netanyahu too.

Trump is accelerating a trend that’s been underway for decades: The collapse of the American Jewish centre. Religiously, the Conservative movement embodied that centre. Today it’s withering. The growth is on the religious extremes: among the Orthodox and among those secular Jews who don’t affiliate with any denomination. Politically, the American Jewish centre was embodied by moderate Democrats like Charles Schumer and Ben Cardin: domestic liberals who theoretically supported the two state solution but opposed any pressure on the Israeli government. That centre is dying too. What’s rising is ZOA-style Jewish Republicans who don’t support two states even in theory and Bernie Sanders-style Jewish progressives who oppose Trump and Netanyahu alike.

The losers in all this will be organizations like AIPAC that can neither support Trump nor actively oppose him and which can neither celebrate permanent Israeli control over the West Bank nor try to stop it. The losers will be those American Jews who feel comfortable on neither side of the barricades outside the Grand Hyatt. Trump, who has done so much to weaken the American political establishment, will weaken the American Jewish establishment too.

In both America and Israel, nationalism is eroding liberal democracy in horrifying ways. In the years to come, some American Jews will cheer that erosion; others will resist it. Those who do neither will gradually consign themselves to irrelevance.



Donald Trump with [Orthodox] Jewish reporters at his offices at Trump Tower, April 2016.  Photo by  Uriel Heilman JTA Photo Service

“But he’s good for Israel!” So goes the mantra repeated among Donald Trump supporters, many in the Orthodox Jewish world, both in the United States and Israel.

That the Republican candidate for president of the United States has long shown that he is a bigot, a racist and a sexist has not seemed to faze this demographic of supporters. But will the pro-Trump mantra survive “TapeGate” and the revelation that he is not only vile and vulgar but also a self-avowed sexual predator?

Cynicism abounds: Nigel Farage of Britain’s hard-right pro-Brexit UK Independence Party has scoffed that Trump is not running for pope, while Trump’s campaign manager in Israel, Tzvika Brot, has helpfully pointed out that Trump is not running for chief rabbi.

Heads of state, apparently, are free to joke about groping women. This is what alpha males do, Farage went on to say, to paraphrase of Trump’s own excuse: a harmless bit of locker-room humour.


March 2016, Sheldon Adelson announces his backing for Donald Trump – and pledges a few squillions to the man who said he would not depend on donors as he had enough money to do without them. Photo by Steve Mack/Getty Images

In the meantime, Rabbi Shmuely Boteach, who has been promoting an anti-pornography campaign (with Pamela Anderson!), tweeted that in the spirit of “the ten days of repentance” preceding Yom Kippur, Trump’s recent recorded conversation — kibitzing with Billy Bush about grabbing women’s genitals — should serve as a “wake-up call to the growing American pandemic of the exploitation of women.” However, Boteach, who has been called one of Trump’s top Jewish surrogates, has not withdrawn support, claiming to have publicly pleaded with Trump to run a “values-based campaign.” Apparently, as Trump confided to Bush, his fellow alpha male: “When you’re a star… you can do anything.”

Boteach of course is not the only figure in the Jewish world who continues to embrace The Donald. The day after “TapeGate,” Israel Hayom, the newspaper backed by the right-wing American newspaper magnate Sheldon Adelson, led with Trump’s apology and “regret,” seguing quickly into a diatribe against the “hypocrisy” of his critics.

Being Trump means never having really to say you’re sorry. Indeed Trump himself used his apology to pivot to an attack on Hillary: “Clinton has actually abused women and Hillary has bullied, attacked, shamed and intimidated his victims.” Not surprising, given the confluence of stories, that Trump recently gave a shout-out to Adelson at a Nevada rally – “a great guy, Sheldon, Sheldon, Sheldon Adelson” – who put together a five million dollar donation for Trump’s Super-Pac, some suggest in exchange for a shifting of policy towards Israel.But putting aside “ethos,” the Aristotelian notion that good character is necessary for a good ruler, or, for that matter, the Biblical association of modesty and humility with both leadership and kingship, Orthodox Jewish advocates of Trump — sometimes with no awareness of Western political traditions — fail to see how Trump deviates from the most basic standards of liberal democracy.

 Jews should know about

 the history of  demagogues

 like Senator Joe McCarthy

 in order to evaluate Trump.

 Trump, like demagogues before him,

has no principles. Photo by AP.

Of course, Jews have an awareness of Hitler and the Holocaust, but the latter occupies such a singular place in Jewish consciousness that leaders with similar totalitarian instincts, like Trump, are not even seen to be on the same continuum. You don’t have to read the Federalist Papers by America’s founding fathers, or John Locke’s Treatises, but if you don’t know the history of demagogues — for example, Huey Long, the dictatorial governor of Louisiana in the 1930s, or the anti-communist witch-hunter Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s — then you are in no position to evaluate Trump’s politics as manipulative thuggery, a betrayal of democratic principles.

The sociopath

This Orthodox lack of political sophistication is often combined with a cocktail of sexism (against the prospect of Hillary as President) and racism (against the memory of eight years of Obama as President), with a splash of general cynicism, indeed fatalism, about the efficacy of politics (“it can’t get any worse”). But what Jewish supporters of Trump miss — and here’s where knowing a demagogue when you see one matters — is that their words are only as good as the political moment they serve. Trump happily took Adelson’s money — though only last December, he snorted to a gathering of Jewish Republicans: “You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money.”

Trump prides himself on being a negotiator, but the ghostwriter of Trump’s “The Art of the Deal,” Tony Schwartz, says that if he had to retitle the work today, he’d call it “The Sociopath.” Israelis may be familiar with a prime minister seemingly motivated only by the preservation of his own power, but say what you want about Benjamin Netanyahu, he does have a political agenda.

In contrast, Trump, a would-be leader with sociopathic tendencies whose own lawyers will only meet with him in pairs so as to later verify his words, has only the aim of self-glorification. Positions on political issues — is there one that Trump has maintained a consistent position on? — only serve what Schwartz calls Trump’s “stomp, stomp, stomp” need for attention.

Trump has no principles — only the desire for personal power.

Those Jews who today continue to utter the Trump mantra, somehow overlooking the principles of decency and morality originating at Sinai and codified in Jewish law, should take note: The demagogue cannot be trusted to keep his word. Trump, like demagogues before him, has no principles — only the desire for personal power. He will make deals, not for the benefit of Israel, nor for the Palestinians, but only for himself. So during these ten days of repentance, Orthodox Jews should indeed take stock and repent, stop hiding behind their pro-Israel mantra, and disavow Donald Trump.

William Kolbrener is Professor of English Literature at Bar Ilan University, author of Milton’s Warring Angels (Cambridge 1996), and Open Minded Torah: Of Irony, Fundamentalism and Love (Continuum 2011); his The Last Rabbi: Joseph Soloveitchik and Talmudic Tradition has been recently published by Indiana University Press. Follow him on Twitter: @OMTorah

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