Perhaps the individual who most spread the lie of Trump-induced anti-Semitism was a previously unknown man named Steven Goldstein, executive director of the previously unknown Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect in New York.
They became famous for a few months when the media had to trot out a Jew with an official title — and no Jewish title is as sacrosanct as one with the name Anne Frank on it.
Goldstein has publicly commented on “the cancer of Antisemitism that has infected his own Administration.” He said: “Make no mistake: The Antisemitism coming out of this Administration is the worst we have ever seen from any Administration.”
And he said to Trump, “The most vicious anti-Semites in America are looking at you and your administration as a nationalistic movement granting them permission to attack Jews, Jewish institutions and sacred Jewish sites.”
Almost as hysterical about anti-Semitism in America was Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of a considerably more significant Jewish institution, the Anti-Defamation League, or ADL.
As reported by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in December, “Anti-Semitic rhetoric in the United States has reached levels unprecedented since 1930s Germany, Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt warned a gathering of Israeli lawmakers in Jerusalem on Monday.
“‘Anti-Semitism has wound its way into mainstream conversations in a manner that many Jews who lived through Nazi Germany find terrifying,’ he said at the Knesset meeting, which was convened to discuss the plight of American Jewry under the incoming Trump administration.”
(Note Haaretz’s inflammatory description, “the plight of American Jewry under the incoming Trump administration,” made six weeks before there was a Trump administration!)
Aside from fomenting hysteria about an almost nonexistent outbreak of anti-Semitism, all Greenblatt’s allusion to Nazi Germany did was diminish the evil of Nazism and the Holocaust.
In December, Greenblatt told NPR, “we found it so deeply problematic when some of the images and some of the rhetoric seemed to evoke longstanding anti-Semitic conspiracies.”
And Greenblatt repeated this charge in February in an op-ed he wrote for the Washington Post. He said: “Trump could have said he condemns anti-Semitism and takes incidents, such as the dozens of threats made to Jewish Community Centers, seriously. But instead, he lashed out against those asking the question. … Last year, we watched as the Trump campaign repeatedly tweeted and shared anti-Semitic imagery and language, allowing this poison to move from the margins into the mainstream of the public conversation.”
Well, guess what. It turned out that President Trump was entirely right: There was no eruption of anti-Semitism in America, let alone one emanating from the White House. Furthermore, “those asking the question” did indeed deserve to be “lashed out” against.
