Opinion: U.S. Jews Responding to Donald Trump Should Learn From French Jews and Le Pen

From Haaretz:

The two largest Jewish communities in the West found themselves responding to a far-right racist surge this week. The first, on Sunday night, were the Jews of France, faced with the resounding success of Marine Le Pen’s National Front in the first round of regional elections, in which the party received the largest number of votes and came first in half the country’s regions.
A day later, it was the turn of American Jews, shocked – like the majority of their fellow Americans – by a speech by Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump in which he called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”
In cases like these, silence is not an option. Le Pen has tried, with some success, to “detoxify” the National Front’s image from the proto-fascist party her anti-Semitic and Holocaust-denying father, Jean Marie Le Pen, founded. However, the suspicion continues to linger. The front’s change of focus to France’s Muslim minority may have taken the heat off the Jews, but it has kept the party in its xenophobic corner. Trump himself has no history of anti-Semitism, he even has a daughter who converted to Judaism, but his racist proposal can’t be left without a response. Jews have too much historical memory of the price of not protesting such ideas.
And the responses were swift in coming. The morning after the election in France, French Jewry’s representative body, the CRIF, put out a press release calling on all French voters to “block the National Front” in the second round of voting next week, describing it as “a xenophobic and populist party” and exhorting France to “not let the Republic give way in the face of threats.” Le Pen hit back, calling CRIF a “tool of the establishment” in a radio interview. The French Jewish leadership did not back down. Chief Rabbi Chaim Korsia joined in, calling upon the French to keep “national cohesion” and vote against “obscurantists” and “proponents of exclusion.”
Twenty-four hours later, across the Atlantic, Jewish organizations were just as quick in denouncing Trump. The Anti-Defamation League issued a statement saying that his proposal “singles out Muslims” and is “deeply offensive and runs contrary to our nation’s deepest values.” Other groups, like the American Jewish Committee and Reform Judaism, joined in the condemnation.
But there was a contrast between the Jewish response in France and in the U.S.. While French Jewry’s denunciation was sweeping, coming from the organization and rabbi representing the community’s mainstream, the response in America was largely from groups identified with the more liberal and left-of-center sector of the community.