Here is Andy’s self-description: “Andrew Silow-Carroll is the editor in chief and CEO of the New Jersey Jewish News, an award-winning weekly newspaper published in four editions and on the web. He was previously the managing editor of the Forward newspaper, and host of “With the Editors,” a public affairs roundtable broadcast on The Jewish Channel. A Mandel Jerusalem Fellow and former Spielberg Fellow at CLAL, Andrew has spoken, taught, moderated, or served as scholar-in-residence at the invitation of many of North America’s largest Jewish organizations.”
Trump’s America is bad, very bad, for the Jews
Two of my favorite television shows are about what I think it’s fair to call the “New America.” In Master of None, on Netflix, Indian-American comedian Aziz Ansari plays a struggling actor in a very real and diverse New York. His best friend is the son of Chinese immigrants. His girlfriend is white. And the plots have revolved, pointedly but never heavy-handedly, around the portrayal of minorities in mainstream media, and the struggles of immigrants chasing the American dream.
In Transparent, on Amazon, an alarmingly and hilariously dysfunctional Los Angeles family comes to terms with their father’s late-life realization that he (she) is transgender. Jeffrey Tambor plays Maura Pfefferman, the aging Jewish college professor who ditches a lonely suburban life for one in which gender and sexuality are fluid. Both of his daughters enter into same-sex relationships, and the question of whether they are gay, bi-, or adventurous seems to be left intentionally ambiguous. A son, Josh, is straight, promiscuous, and desperate for love.
Both shows represent a multicultural, urban America in which differences of all kinds are not just tolerated but celebrated. The immigrant characters in Master don’t need to prove themselves to the American “mainstream,” whatever that is, and don’t apologize for expecting America to live up to its promises. The LGBTQ characters in Transparent don’t suffer for their natures or their choices — at least when it comes to gender and sex (the Jewish characters mostly suffer from one another, but that’s an old story).
…”Mr. Trump’s popularity with white, working-class voters who are more likely than other Republicans to believe that whites are a supreme race and who long for the Confederacy may make him unpopular among leaders in his party. But it’s worth noting that he isn’t persuading voters to hold these beliefs. The beliefs were there — and have been for some time.”
And that, ultimately, is why I see Trump as a threat, not just in what his candidacy means for America as a whole, but what it means for us as Jews. His message — of distrusting the foreign, of rejecting the new, of abhorring pluralism — is directly opposed to our history in this country and our best interests as a minority. And it is empowering people who reject the very notion of racial and ethnic diversity.
It’s not immaterial that Transparent is immersed in a deeply Jewish environment. The Pfeffermans stock up for the Yom Kippur break-fast at Canter’s Deli, Josh falls in love and impregnates his mother’s rabbi, a daughter is haunted by a grandmother’s youth in Weimar Berlin. The sexual and gender journeys taken by its characters are on a continuum with the social and religious upheavals experienced by their forebears. Jews flourished in this country because we had the freedom to shed the burdens of the past and embrace a future of opportunity.
