About A Quarter Of American Jews Voted For Trump-- Will They Live To Regret It?

The Vast Majority Of Hasids Fully Support American Naziism

I’ve always been early on stuff— and it hasn’t always proven to be the smartest move. I was the first person to use drugs in my high school… and not just pot. I booked The Doors to play at my college before their first album came out and the next day the sophomore class president circulated a petition to impeach me for wasting student money ($400 was what I paid The Doors and another $50 for opening band Tim Buckley). And when Richard Nixon stole the 1968 presidential election, I decided to get out of Dodge. The next year I moved abroad and didn’t come back ’til he had been driven out of office. But, God, I’m 74 and don’t want to leave my country again. I’m pretty comfortable where I am right now.

Yesterday, just before Sabbath began the Washington Post published a column by Dana Milbank, American Jews start to think the unthinkable. I don’t even consider myself a Jew… but history proves that when push comes to shove, empowered anti-Semites won’t care what I consider myself. Milbank does consider himself a Jew and celebrated “holiest night of the Jewish year earlier this month,” during which his rabbi posed a question: ‘How many people in the last few years have been at a dining room conversation where the conversation has turned to where might we move? How many of us?’ He was talking about the unthinkable: that Jews might need to flee the United States. In the congregation, many hands— most?— went up.”

The rabbi’s sermon included “a quotation from the Jewish scholar Michael Holzman: ‘For American Jews, the disappearance of liberal democracy would be a disaster… We have flourished under the shelter of the principles behind the First Amendment, and we have been protected by the absolute belief in the rule of law. Without these, Jews, start packing suitcases.’ Milbank speculated that “The fear of exile has become common as Jews see the unraveling rule of law,” very much part of insipient classical fascism. Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, told Milbank Jews are always frequently him where would be a good place to move.

Incidents of antisemitic harassment, vandalism and assault nearly tripled between 2015 and 2021, the ADL reports, and it says 2022 attacks are on pace with last year’s record level. This week was the fourth anniversary of the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, which was followed by other synagogue attacks in 2019 and earlier this year. One in 4 U.S. Jews has experienced antisemitism in the past year.

Now we have Kanye West, who now goes by Ye, unleashing a torrent of filth on social media (“death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE”), white supremacists applauding him (and giving Nazi salutes to Los Angeles motorists), Elon Musk’s Twitter preparing to welcome white supremacists, and the Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial nominee deploying antisemitism against his Jewish opponent.

The leader of the Republican Party, who remains the top presidential contender for 2024, reacted to Ye’s attacks on Jews by saying, “He was really nice to me.” Donald Trump compared Jews unfavorably to “our wonderful Evangelicals” and warned Jews to “get their act together and appreciate what they have in Israel— Before it is too late.”

The threat was the latest of many Trump claims that Jews have a dual loyalty and are not fully American. As usual, Republicans were mostly silent.

For Jews, just 2 percent of the population but the targets of 55 percent of reported religiously motivated hate crimes, the trend revives centuries-old fears. This is not to compare Jewish victimhood to other groups that have had it much worse in this country; most Jews are White and benefit from associated privilege. But until the American experiment, Jews in the diaspora were marginalized, ghettoized, persecuted and eventually converted, exiled or killed. “As Jews, we know at some point the music stops,” Greenblatt said. “This is burned into the collective consciousness of every Jewish person.”

The United States has until now been different because of our constitutional protections of minority rights: our bedrock principles of equal treatment under law, free expression and free exercise of religion. Now, the MAGA crowd is attacking the very notion of minority rights. Ascendant Christian nationalists, with a sympathetic Supreme Court, are dismantling the separation between church and state. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), for example, calls the principle “junk that’s not in the Constitution” and claims “the church is supposed to direct the government.” Red states, again with an agreeable Supreme Court, are rolling back minority voting rights and decades of civil rights protections. And leading it all is Trump, threatening violence and going to “war with the rule of law,” as Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) puts it.

Without these protections, there is no safety in the United States for Jews— or, really, for any of us. In a perverse sense, Trump’s MAGA movement shares the fear of becoming a persecuted minority. The whole notion of the bogus “great replacement” conspiracy belief is that some nefarious elite is scheming to import immigrants of color to marginalize White people.

In reality, it will be almost a quarter-century before White people are no longer a majority in this country— and they should remain a plurality well into the next century, at least. But if white nationalists truly fear becoming an oppressed minority, the best way to guard against that is to fortify minority rights. The rule of law protects us— all of us— from tyranny.

I admit I’ve thought about where my family might go if the worst happened here. But we’re not going anywhere. The only choice is to stay and fight for our liberal democracy. As my rabbi, Danny Zemel, put it on Kol Nidre: “If there is a Jewish message for our time, it is to support our great experiment with every fiber of our being.”

If it isn’t safe here, it won’t be safe anywhere.

Bah! I'm all for staying and fighting but just because it isn't safe in this political insane asylum doesn't mean it won't be safe elsewhere-- like Germany perhaps. And we'll see what happens in Brazil tomorrow. And isn't that what Israel is supposed to be for?

In his column this morning, The Stochastic Ex-President: How Trump set up the Pelosis for Attack, Juan Cole wrote that the Trumpist who attempted to assassinate Nancy Pelosi and nearly killed her husband was screaming “Where’s Nancy Pelosi?” Just like the Trumpist mob that sacked the Capitol on Jan 6, 2021 did. Cole blamed Trump for systematically vilifying and de-humanizing Nancy Pelosi while defining her as a traitor. “ISIL,” wrote Cole, “specialized in what has been called ‘stochastic terrorism,’ whispering to unbalanced people on social media that ‘wouldn’t it be nice if some pious person blew up X?’ Stochastic is a fancy way of saying ‘random.’ Basically, rather than running a terrorist cell with a hierarchy of command and control and direct agents carrying out the deed, the stochastic terrorist puts out a call for lone wolves to do their thing. They then cannot be traced immediately back to the origin. Molly Amman and J. Reid Meloy explain, ‘Stochastic terrorism has been defined as the incitement of a violent act through public demonization of a group or individual. Stated another way, the term has been said to mean “acts of violence by random extremists, triggered by political demagoguery.’ Trump unleashed the mob on Jan. 6 with his tweets, in one of the most serious acts of stochastic terrorism in modern U.S. history. In essence, the San Francisco assailant was part of the same operation, only he acted later than the others.” Trump has been skirting around doing the exact same thing to American Jews.