This Trump-inspired anti-Semitism sounds horrible. How many Jews have been slaughtered in this wave of hate? Oh, none. Well, how many Jews have been beat up? This article can’t find any examples of that either.<\/p>\n
If America in 2016 is filled with anti-Semitism, then what was the Holocaust? Super duper bad anti-Semitism? The word “anti-Semitism” is losing all meaning. <\/p>\n
Anti-Semitism is not a useful term. It is a euphemism. If you wish to be precise, say “anti-Jewish.” The challenge for ethnic activists is that the term “anti-Jewish” immediately introduces the idea that different groups have different interests and it is normal, natural and even healthy to have negative views of other groups. Just as some gentile hold anti-Jewish feelings, some Jews hold anti-gentile feelings. Most non-Muslims are not happy with the presence of Muslims in their country and most non-blacks try to avoid living around blacks.<\/p>\n
Anti-Semitism is not a disease. It is not a mystery. It is a fact of life that different groups have different interests and when another group is threatening the well-being of your group, it is normal, natural and healthy to dislike that group. <\/p>\n
The political identities of Jews and gentiles will never knit together for long because they are different peoples with different histories, different average IQs, different predispositions, different strengths and weaknesses, different norms, and different destinies. <\/p>\n
An Israeli academic using the name “Ari Ben Canaan” writes a superb blog called Alt-Zionism<\/a>:<\/p>\n It is a curious fact that in the Current Year, the Alt Right understands the Jews better than the Jews understand themselves. While legions of ersatz Larry Davids and Brooklyn-accented Californian soccer moms gather in the hallways of the ADL to issue hollow, self-abnegating proclamations that what it is to be a Jew is to be a refugee (1,2),it is only the purported anti-Semites who share the common sense of Herzl in recognizing that the Jews are \u201ca people \u2013 one people\u201d (3).<\/p>\n Richard Spencer took this point for granted when, at a recent press conference, he suggested that it would be an insult to call a Jew a European, for to call him a European would be to deny him his heritage (4). To call a Jew a European, on Spencer\u2019s view, is to cut him off from his people, and to suggest that Jews will form a part of a future pan-European ethnostate is do an injustice to the destiny and struggle of the Jews as much as to the struggle and destiny of the Europeans.<\/p>\n Spencer\u2019s view presupposes, of course, that Jewish identity cannot be an instance of European identity in the same way that French identity, for example, is. If this is right, then it must be the case that Jewish identity and European identity are in fact incompatible in such a way that to identify as a Jew is to link oneself to an entirely different people and history than the people and history to which one links oneself in identifying as a European.<\/p>\n There is good reason to think that Spencer is right on this count. To identify oneself as a Jew is to think of oneself as an historical heir to the kingdoms of David and Solomon; it is to think of oneself as kin to Judah Maccabeus, and as having a share in that same historical struggle for independence for which he is remembered; to identify as a Jew is to make the Six-Day War both one\u2019s Thermopylae and one\u2019s Gaugamela. To identify as a Jew is not, however, to think of oneself as kin to Charlemagne and Richard the Lionheart, nor is it to think of oneself as the heir to the dominions of Caesar and Pericles. To attempt to identify oneself both as a Jew and yet also with these hallmarks of European identity would be to identify with such a scattered and confused history that one\u2019s own identity would indeed become incoherent.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This is more profound than the Politico essay. <\/p>\n Ben Wofford writes for Politico<\/a>: “Like many Jewish families in America, the Reizes household has been deliberating in recent months what Donald Trump really thinks of them.”<\/p>\n That’s pathetic. Why would they care? Trump looks at Jews the way Jews look at non-Jews — how useful can they be. <\/p>\n “But millennial Jews and their juniors are another matter. Joelle\u2019s children\u2014ages 19, 14, and 12\u2014have grown up during an unprecedented era of prosperity and assimilation for Jews in America, one in which the struggles endured by an earlier generation is understood as something closer to historical lore than present fact.”<\/p>\n How assimilated can they be if they still have a separate identity as Jews? Jews have been in Europe for more than a millennia and they still have a separate identity. <\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019ve been protected,\u201d says the Reizes\u2019 mother, \u201cto help them to not feel like being Jewish isn\u2019t different.\u201d<\/p>\n As one American academic put it: “American Jews want to maintain a distinct identity and on the other hand want to be fully integrated into broader society and don\u2019t want the distinctiveness to come at a price.”<\/p>\n As an internet commentator put it: “Anti-Semitism is as natural to Western civilization as anti-Christianity is to Jewish civilization, Islamic civilization and Japanese civilization.”<\/p>\n For younger Jews in the United States, that era has suddenly passed. The early months of 2016 brought in a strange tide of online hate speech aimed largely at Jewish journalists who had published articles critical of Trump or his campaign, with all the old ugly epithets on display. Then in July Trump\u2019s Twitter account posted an image of a six-pointed star next to a picture of Hillary Clinton, with a pile of money in the background. Though he deleted the tweet, afterward Trump walked up to a brightly lit podium and defended the image, bellowing that the Jewish star was not a Jewish star. A dim reality descended on American Jews. Yes: Trump had broadcast the message of a neo-Nazi without apology.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n A whole era for American Jews has passed in 2016? Really? I don’t know any American Jews living in fear for their lives because they are Jewish. Jews are as powerful and influential in America today as they have ever been. <\/p>\n How soon is too soon to brush the cobwebs away from an ancient alarm bell? The father, Ofer Reizes, a soft-spoken man of Israeli heritage, wants to discern the source before issuing labels. \u201cMy reservation with how anti-Semitic Mr. Trump really is that he\u2019s playing a game, a very effective game,\u201d he says. His wife prods back: \u201cI don\u2019t care if he\u2019s playing a game or not.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s just part of his campaign, is my point,\u201d Mr. Reizes retorts in plaintive, be-understanding tone. \u201cIt\u2019s the people he\u2019s riling up.\u201d There\u2019s a pause, as his wife quietly considers this. \u201cWhen David Duke thinks he\u2019s the best thing ever,\u201d she intones slowly, \u201cit doesn\u2019t matter what he feels in his heart.\u201d If Trump is the Haman of the Purim story, then Trump and his family and supporters should fear that they will be slaughtered by Jews.<\/p>\n Zach has launched more than words. Last March, when AIPAC invited Trump to its annual conference, Reizes wrote an open letter to AIPAC, cautioning that the organization risked countenancing bigotry by inviting Trump to speak,. \u201cYour organization has…taught me to speak up for myself and for my values,\u201d Reizes wrote. \u201cMy fellow students and I must sit quietly in tacit support of a man who speaks against every value I hold close.\u201d The letter became well circulated in Jewish media; a representative from AIPAC contacted Reizes to make amends.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Make amends to this delicate snowflake Zach Reizes? How precious. How darling. How sweet. How tender. <\/p>\n Trump speaks against every value Zach Reizes holds close? Trump supports immigration restriction and free speech expansion. Trump is the American Netanyahu. Zach finds that offensive? He’s offended that America may be getting a president who’s as nationalistic as Bibi Netanyahu? <\/p>\n Reizes\u2019 AIPAC letter was an illuminating moment in the tangled world of Jewish politics, where anti-Semitism is a topic traditionally lectured from right to left, from older to younger. But Trump\u2019s success\u2014and a white nationalist subculture blooming like algae in the Internet\u2019s unlighted depths\u2014has turned millennial Jews into the new expositors of anti-Semitism at the dinner table: Quietly explaining Pepe the Frog, opaque Twitter memes and dyspeptic forums like Stormfront to frozen audiences of parents and grandparents. It\u2019s thrust young Jews into long-buried questions of assimilation and political position, whiteness and privilege. And it\u2019s heightened a divide between young and old, left and right: Progressive young Jews learning to form the words \u201canti-Semitism,\u201d often for the first time\u2014even while they take umbrage at their right-leaning scolds who, now into October, have kept up a deafening silence on the topic of Trump.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So now it is young Jews who are lecturing old Jews about the dangers of anti-Semitism? All the young Jews I know (they are all Orthodox) are pro-Trump. <\/p>\n Presidential politics has never been entirely immune from this disease, a history for which Irving and contemporaries were present, but the millennial class under 35 was not. In 1935, FDR spoke of \u201cdirty Jewish tricks\u201d to describe a tax maneuver by the New York Times, and ribbed a sitting senator about the lack of \u201cJewish blood in our veins.\u201d Harry Truman\u2019s diary revealed not dissimilar sentiments. Rumors of Richard Nixon\u2019s tirades chased his campaigns long before becoming president. After he won in 1968, White House tapes reveal a president speaking freely of Jewish cabals controlling the media and the IRS. He also included fairly straightforward instructions about his judicial nominees: \u201cNo Jews. Is that clear?\u201d (It was.) …Even as they might march with Black Lives Matter or once lobbied for marriage equality, on campus, says Rabbinovich, \u201cAnti-Semitism isn\u2019t viewed as an important or valid form of prejudice.\u201d Partly for this reason, Reizes suspects more Jewish students are leery of bringing up anti-Semitism, whether in class, on Twitter or in person. \u201cMany of us don\u2019t know how to tackle it,\u201d says Reizes. \u201cThe inability to… to fight back against it comes from a few places,\u201d he adds. \u201cBut I also think it comes from a hesitancy to maybe support Judaism because of Israel.\u201d …Like other European ethnicities, the United States fashioned an immigration quota system during the interwar years that painted immigrant Jews as non-white, writes UCLA professor <\/b>Karen Brodkin in her book<\/a>, \u201cHow Jews Became White Folks.\u201d Such notions endured up to the war, when nearly a thousand Jews fleeing Nazi Germany aboard the St. Louis<\/i> were turned away<\/a>, and a proposal to allow Jewish children to emigrate was swiftly quashed<\/a>. But a different story developed in the post-war era\u2014Jews \u201ccertainly took on whiteness by the sixties and seventies,\u201d says Feld, the historian, a process as traceable in history texts as it is on Mad Men<\/i>, where Jews slowly gain entry into the office setting. It was an assimilation so famously swift that Jewish American culture would soon be presented with the opposite moral dilemma\u2014tested by the darker impulses of full assimilation. Even as Syrian refugees seek sanctuary aboard their own St. <\/i>Louis, it is not purely coincidence that the chief architect of Donald Trump\u2019s scheme to bar them\u2014as well as banning Muslims and deporting Mexicans\u2014is Stephen Miller<\/a>, who is Jewish. <\/p>\n The question of Jewish whiteness is a theoretical dispute, not a real debate in this country. Nevertheless, it presents a thicket of social politics precarious enough to give even Ta-Nahesi Coates pause<\/a>, and the disagreement among Jews runs deep. The debate owes a new twist to Trump. When two Jewish writers recently sparred<\/a> over Jewish whiteness, Trump supporter David Duke rejoiced<\/a>\u2014proof that Jews were coming out as non-white. This election season has highlighted a grim paradox, one that underpins the confusion of millennials: An elder generation of Jews\u2014old enough to remember the St. Louis<\/i>\u2014now shares something in common with David Duke and his white nationalists, two groups invested in prodding a younger generation to reconsider how white they really are. And an incipient alignment between Black Lives Matter and BDS on campus reflects, in part, the same principle that animates Stephen Miller\u2014a modern assumption that Jews are entitled to the trappings of American white supremacy. <\/p>\n This divide between two Judaisms\u2014splitscreen worlds of historical memory, privilege and whiteness\u2014may never be bridged. If it can, millennials may be the ones who bridge it. In July, Jewish activist Carly Pildis penned an essay in Tablet Magazine<\/a>, \u201cI am Woke,\u201d urging activists of the left to accept the reality of anti-Semitism into their sensibility of social justice, without Jews apologizing for Israel. \u201cWe are facing a wave of anger and violence against people of color not seen in my lifetime,\u201d write Pildis. \u201cThe Jewish people are facing that, too, the anger, the violent rhetoric, the Trump supporters demanding Jewish reporters\u2019 heads.\u201d\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Jewish money is going for Hillary 96-4 over Donald Trump, according to this 538 article<\/a>. <\/p>\n Here are three quotes from Sam Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations<\/a>:<\/p>\n \n* The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power. The problem for Islam is not the CIA or the U.S. Department of Defense. It is the West, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the universality of their culture and believe that their superior, if declining, power imposes on them the obligation to extend that culture throughout the world. These are the basic ingredients that fuel conflict between Islam and the West. Vox Day writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n \nSo, if we accept the idea that Western civilization and Islamic civilization are in conflict, what must we logically conclude from the three quotes provided? This Trump-inspired anti-Semitism sounds horrible. How many Jews have been slaughtered in this wave of hate? Oh, none. Well, how many Jews have been beat up? This article can’t find any examples of that either. If America in 2016 is … Continue reading
\nBut while his parents deliberate, it\u2019s 19-year-old Zach Reizes who is most firm in his views. \u201cWhat Trump has brought to the surface is, in many ways, the first blatant anti-Semitic experience for the vast majority of American millennials,\u201d says Zach, an angular and handsome sophomore at Ohio University. On campus, he\u2019s active both with AIPAC, the right-of-center bulwark of Jewish politics, and J-Street, it\u2019s younger and left-leaning rival. \u201cMy little sister,\u201d he adds, thinks that Trump \u201cis the Haman of the Purim story.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nNixon\u2019s became the last tenure of semi-public, anti-Semitic overtures\u2014a political milestone that also demarked a moment of assimilation for American Jewry. By 1970, says Marjorie Feld, a professor who teaches Jewish American history, \u201cAmerican Jews obtained tremendous amounts of power, and they largely assimilated to mainstream American identities,\u201d a development sped along by Jews considerable involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. But just as the political identities of Americans and Jews were knit together, says Feld, Jewish politics itself underwent an unraveling. The catalyst for both trends was the Six Day War in 1967, an event that simultaneously unleashed a rush of Jewish pride and birthed modern American Zionism\u2014while cleaving a rift in Jewish sensibilities about privilege and existential risk that has never relented.
\n\u201cSixty-seven was a watershed year, because American Zionism became much more strident,\u201d says Feld, who also referenced Torn at the Roots, a history of American Jewish politics by Michael Straub. It was, Feld says, a \u201cconservative turn…that came at a high price\u201d: A divide by the late sixties, one in which younger, socially progressive Jews, whose spiritual antecedent was the Civil Rights Movement, increasingly found themselves at odds with an older and right-leaning American Jewry politically moored to Israel. Central to the dichotomy were differing notions of which horizon to watch for the arrival of anti-Semitism: The left, like the American college campus, or the right\u2014like the Trump campaign.
\nThis is the warring dichotomy that white, assimilated Jewish children of the 1990s (including this author) have been dropped into as young adults. As a historic debate unfolds about privilege and race, largely on campus, progressive Jews play the role of allies, not the marginalized. Complicating matters is Israel itself: The burgeoning growth of the Boycott Divest Sanctions movement, and a diminishing generational attachment to the Jewish state. A recent Pew survey finds the number of millennials sympathetic to Palestine has grown from 9 percent to 27 since 2006; support for Israel fell from 51 percent to 43.
\nSuch numbers have fed the encompassing fear of the Jewish right, whose worry over college campuses is boiling near the edge of panic\u2014the culmination of a decades-long narrative that college campuses represent a the main spigot of anti-Israel programming. In 2002, Campus Watch was formed, a website that polices the political opinions of college professors and class offerings, ever alert for perceived anti-Israel leanings. A new project funded by Trump-supporter Sheldon Adelson, the Maccabee Task Force, is now writing grants to intervene on behalf of hapless students, ostensibly blind to the crisis around them. One grantee, \u201cStop the Jew Hatred on Campus,\u201d is a campaign of campus provocateur David Horowitz. Horowitz used the funds to paper the campus of UCLA with posters that read \u201cJew Hater,\u201d under the headshots of UCLA undergraduates. \u201cOur goal is to change the younger generation from neutral, if not opposed to Israel, to support of Israel,\u201d says Task Force director David Brog.
\nWhile Adelon\u2019s Maccabee Task Force funds the hunt for anti-Semites, the pro-Israel pillars of the American right have remained silent on the gargantuan problem of Donald Trump. Young people have not overlooked the irony\u2014a skepticism felt acutely by young people interviewed for this story. \u201cWhat\u2019s most shocking is…how silent the Jewish establishment has been in calling out Trump\u2019s behavior,\u201d Kaplan said. She later added, \u201cThe same people who told me that anti-Semitism was everywhere are now conspicuously silent on Trump. In some cases, they\u2019re supporting Trump.\u201d
\nThose organizations include the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), AIPAC, the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and plausibly a litany of others in the constellation of Jewish advocacy. They have yet to distance, denounce, or in some cases meaningfully comment on Trump\u2019s anti-Semitic rhetoric, even as the indecencies by the campaign pile up with deadening normalcy. (An AIPAC spokesman respectfully declined twice to comment; the RJC did not return the request.) Some have sought to strike a posture of concern: The AJC has condemned Trump\u2019s calls for \u201criots,\u201d but declined to mention Trump by name, and later offered a mushy response about as unhelpful as Trump\u2019s non-denials and Kushner\u2019s op-ed.
\nJewish voters, who consistently vote Democratic, support Trump in numbers of around 19 percent, according to one poll, and 21 percent in Florida (compared to something closer to zero for African American respondents). Not since William Jennings Bryan in 1896 has a candidate united a coalition of American Zionists and a larger anti-Semitic constituency under the same umbrella, according to Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis. (Bryan interweaved his cross-of-gold populism with homilies of Jewish financial control\u2014simultaneously supporting a Jewish homeland for biblical reasons.)
\nThe double standard has not escaped the Jewish left. In an open letter published in Haaretz last month, public intellectual and journalism professor Peter Beinart accused the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations of dodging the question of Trump. \u201cDonald Trump is not a distraction. He is the thing our tradition teaches us to resist,\u201d Beinart wrote. \u201cIn this season of national decision and Jewish self-reflection, please reflect on your silence.\u201d
\n\u201cThe deafening silence [on Trump] is in proportion to how high they feel the stakes are,\u201d says Feld. For one, Trump could become president\u2014and the candidate has made it abundantly clear that his beliefs are dictated entirely by the identities of those who says nice things to him. But the other clear factor is Iran; as the New Yorker reports, Trump is planning to annihilate the Obama administration\u2019s Iran Deal in the first days of office. \u201cThe fact that they are silent speaks to how desperate things have become. BDS is gaining momentum, and Sanders, even, is invoking some criticism of Israel,\u201d says Feld. \u201cThey\u2019re very anxious of what the Democratic party might offer them.\u201d
\nMeanwhile, in Jewish politics, cats are for the moment chasing dogs as left-leaning groups chide their right-wing counterparts for failing to denounce anti-Semitism. This summer, a statement from 28 Jewish action groups, mostly on the left, called on Republican Jewish Coalition leader Matthew Brooks to denounce Donald Trump. In June, a protest organized in New York by the progressive Jewish group Bend the Arc saw young activists chanting \u201cWe\u2019ve Seen This Before,\u201d and hoisted signs that bore the slogan \u201cJews Reject Trump,\u201d a tactic that shared more in common with Horowitz than the Jewish left. The group has since revamped the protest: Last week, Bend the Arc hosted protests across the country, and launched a new website, \u201cWe\u2019ve Seen This Before,\u201d featuring a video with harsh, if playful, warnings from a cast of grandparents.
\n\u201cIt\u2019s a really important phenomenon,\u201d says the New York protest\u2019s organizer, Stosh Cotler, CEO of Bend the Arc, which signed the petition. \u201cThis is a time when we would expect more of the Jewish right to be speaking out against anti-Semitism…and now we\u2019re seeing the progressive side doing it.\u201d Says Logan Beyroff, spokesman for J Street: \u201cThe continued silence of much of the institutional Jewish community on Trump\u2019s candidacy only stands to substantiate claims that they don\u2019t speak for the younger generation of Jews.\u201d
\nThe left has not missed a chance to radiate schadenfreude, a move that does not sit well with Alan Dershowtiz, the longtime expositor of American Jewish politics and famous gadfly of the campus left. \u201cJewish leaders are failing the shoe-on-the-other-foot test,\u201d he told me over the summer, acknowledging the Jewish right had missed an opportunity. But he offered a more circumspect warning, one of a coming stalemate in which both the Jewish left and right \u201csee anti-Semitism when it\u2019s not there against their enemies, and they don\u2019t see it when it is there, from their friends.\u201d Dershowtiz added, \u201cThe issue of anti-Semitism is too important to be politicized\u2014whether it\u2019s a Democrat or Republican.\u201d
\nBut in this moment, the silence on anti-Semitism\u2014at a juncture of world-historical importance, on an international stage\u2014is a problem that afflicts only one side, not two. Millennial Jews have noticed. \u201cA lot of Jews nailed Trump from the beginning,\u201d says Feld, the historian. \u201cIf student don\u2019t hear from the Jewish right on Trump, and soon, she adds, \u201cthere may be a be a price to pay in terms of their own longevity.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nIt would be a mistake to blame BDS for this condition. More likely, efforts like Horowitz\u2019s \u201cJew Haters\u201d have done much to raise the political price of speaking out. \u201cA lot of young Jews don\u2019t have the vocabulary to talk about anti-Semitism, because most of the time the label is levelled against us and those we would align with\u2014like those who called for acknowledging human rights of Palestinians,\u201d says Kaplan. \u201cThat\u2019s language we\u2019ve separated ourselves from.\u201d One Brown University senior told me \u201cthere\u2019s no question\u201d that Trump is peddling anti-Semitism. But there won\u2019t be a \u201cJews Against Trump\u201d rally at Brown any time soon. The charge of anti-Semitism, the senior said, would just \u201cget caught in their throat, because there\u2019s so much psychological baggage about grandma, and psychological baggage about being gas-lighted\u201d by the far right.
\nThe Jewish right has long pushed the message that we can\u2019t talk of Israel without talking of anti-Semitism. Not without irony, then, have they gotten their wish: A generation of left-leaning Jews ready to speak publically against anti-Semitism, yet frozen by fear that it appears disingenuous to do so, convinced it\u2019s viewed as code for Israel. Trump\u2019s rhetoric may be unprecedented. But no one wants to join an inquisition that marks their hall mates as Jew Haters.<\/p>\n
\n* Blood, language, religion, way of life, were what the Greeks had in common and what distinguished them from the Persians and other non-Greeks. Of all the objective elements which define civilizations, however, the most important usually is religion, as the Athenians emphasized. To a very large degree, the major civilizations in human history have been closely identified with the world\u2019s great religions; and people who share ethnicity and language but differ in religion may slaughter each other, as happened in Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, and the Subcontinent.
\n* Religion is a central defining characteristic of civilizations, and, as Christopher Dawson said, \u201cthe great religions are the foundations on which the great civilizations rest.\u201d Of Weber\u2019s five \u201cworld religions,\u201d four\u2014Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Confucianism\u2014are associated with major civilizations. The fifth, Buddhism, is not.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nThe decline of the West is the direct result of the decline of Christianity in the West, both religious and institutional.
\nThe growing power of Islam in the West cannot be halted by secularism, white nationalism, or any sub-civilization-level force.
\nThe preservation of the West requires a revival of Christianity.
\nThe preservation of the West requires the abandonment of some, though not all, secular values, beginning with the freedom of religion, that conflict with the restoration of Christianity<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"