Anti-Semitism shockingly back with a vengeance
On July 2, 2016, Donald Trump, then the presumptive Republican nominee for president, tweeted a picture of Hillary Clinton next to a Star of David. Hundred dollar bills littered the background. “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever” was printed inside the star.
At the time, I was somewhere along Interstate 40 with my two best friends from high school. We had recently graduated college and were undertaking a road trip through the Deep South. Immediately and without hesitation, we knew the context of the message. The Jewish cabal, with its shadily nefarious funding, had Clinton in their pocket. At the time, we chalked up this message to Trump’s ineptitude and were almost giddy at the prospect of how it would decimate his already-remote chances of becoming president.
What happened subsequently was what began to scare us. Despite deleting and replacing the tweet, Trump then doubled down, stating that it was merely a “sheriff ’s star.” (A ridiculous explanation.) The star on the Israeli flag, the one I wear around my neck, Trump said it was not what I knew with my own eyes. And the American people ate it up. Friends, colleagues, co-workers, family — people who absolutely knew better got sucked up into the hate, or perhaps that is how they had always been.
When Steve Bannon took over the campaign in August, things went into overdrive. Slurs against Jews became commonplace at rallies. Eerie threats to “globalists,” a dog whistle to anti-Semites, were ratcheted up by the candidate himself. My own email and Twitter direct messages started filling with death threats and other assorted Neo-Nazi apologia.
Someone threatening to kill me because of my religion was nothing new, of course. It started as a teenager, when I campaigned to rename Houston Independent School District campuses named for Confederate figures. A Jewish kid seeking to limit the influence of white supremacy in town was a little on-the-nose for some folks. But those individuals always felt like a fringe, outside the mainstream of society and politics. No longer.
Anti-Semitism felt obsolete in my childhood. There were the little things, of course. I took off my Star of David necklace before swimming in public. There are certain law firms I knew wouldn’t ever give me the time of day. Groups of people with whom I’d always lead by highlighting my mother’s gentile bona fides.
But I felt pretty strongly until the summer of 2016 that anti-Semitism was a thing of the past in this country, something we vanquished because of our assimilation into this country, like prejudice against Italians or Irish. I got into pretty heated arguments with my parents about it. But now I know I was wrong. Throughout my life, a lot of doors opened for me, doors that in the past had been opened for few others with my type of name. I can’t escape the feeling that, post-2016, many of the doors have again slammed shut.
I do not blame Trump for a white supremacist shooting 11 Jews in Pittsburgh. But words have consequences. And the words, just in the past week, coming from the president, words like “nationalist” or “globalist,” affect people.
The terrorist in Pittsburgh allegedly went on his rampage because of fear of billionaire philanthropist George Soros bankrolling a migrant caravan from Central America, to come here and wreak some type of havoc on white people. That is an idea in the mainstream of Trumpism and the Fox News bubble. I know a lot of people who believe that type of stuff and the appurtenant conspiracies it launches.
Other religions and races face tremendously more severe prejudice and animus than Jews in this country. I’ve always felt anti-Semitism occupied a unique position, because anyone who has ever taken a history class knows just how bad the consequences may be when left unchecked.
I do not know how bad it will get this time around, but the difficult news is that anti-Semitism is back with a vengeance in the mainstream of our politics and our culture. Three years prior, I would have argued vociferously this was a problem that had been fixed in this country. Today I’m not particularly optimistic.