Joshua Seidel writes for the Forward:
Liberal Journalists have had a tough couple of months. Liberal Jewish journalists? Even tougher. Nothing seemed to work this year. Trump was the worst person ever to run for President, they said. The mainstream media and Hollywood pulled out all the stops. Celebrity videos, polemics by noted thinkers like George Takei and Lena Dunham, CNN panelists; they all tried to tell us Trump hates women, Jews, Black people, and the Constitution.
To no avail.
Perhaps nothing stings so much as “defections” from trusted minority groups. Some in the Jewish community are engaged in furious reprisals against fellow Jews who dared support the “Orange Fuhrer”. Ivanka Trump was harassed on an airplane, Jared Kushner’s Judaism was questioned. I knew my turn was coming, and indeed, enter Jamie Kirchick (not really a “liberal”, but very anti-Trump) and his recent Daily Beast piece, “The Jews Begging to Join the Alt-Right”, targeting myself and fellow contributors to our website “The Jewish Alternative”.
Despite Kirchick’s title, the “alt right” doesn’t constitute something one can “join”. There’s no organized alt-right political party, no organization that can lay complete claim to the title. There’s just people, who have come to their political conclusions in the same manner that Kirchick has. Some of them hate Jews. My fellow contributors and I are Jewish, and therefore, they hate us. It’s really that simple. We may share some political positions with these anti-Semites, we may agree on some issues, but we are not the same thing, not in the same “group”, and never will be. Kirchick’s semantic games, repeated so many times by the media (all alt-right are Nazis, alt-right supports Trump, therefore Trump = Nazi) failed to influence the election or shut yours truly up.
