Trump is a danger for Jews like me
When I was a Jewish kid growing up in suburban Los Angeles, we thought being Jewish meant supporting Israel.
There really wasn’t a choice. If you identified as Jewish, as I and most of my friends did, the religious education we got, the youth groups we joined, and the summer camps where we played were all grounded in one thing. It wasn’t God — it was Zionism, the political project of settling Jewish people in Israel.
We never asked — and no one ever taught us in Sunday school — who had already been living on that land, long known as Palestine, when European Jews arrived around the end of the 19th century and started building settlements there.
My own break with Zionism came in my mid-20s, after reading the letters of Zionism’s founder, Theodor Herzl, imploring Cecil Rhodes, the leader of British land theft in Africa, to support his work in Palestine. Their projects were both “something colonial,” Herzl assured Rhodes.
Today, younger Jews are asking hard questions at earlier ages, and more of them have been actively critical of Israel in its assaults on Palestinians and Palestinian rights.
When the Trump White House says that criticizing or boycotting the state of Israel is anti-Semitic and issues an executive order that aims to shut down criticism of Israel on college campuses, many Jewish students aren’t buying it. One 20-year-old Jewish student and Hillel member at the University of North Carolina told the New York Times that she worried the executive order “falsely equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism” and is targeted at eliminating criticism of Israel.
Jared Kushner, Trump’s sonin-law and advisor, claims that the executive order is intended to make sure that Jews are protected by the Civil Rights Act’s “prohibition against discrimination based on race, color, or national origin.”
He says that the executive order does not define Jews as a nationality, but he goes on to proclaim that “anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.” This formulation essentially labels Jews — along with Palestinians and all others — who don’t support Zionism as anti-Semitic.
Jews come in all races, colors and ethnicities. The Trump/Kushner view is an insidious way of claiming that Jews are all somehow linked to or accountable to Israel. That charge of “dual loyalty” is one of the oldest antiSemitic canards around.
Of course, even as the Trump administration tries to silence criticism of Israel, real anti-Semitism is rising, especially during the Trump administration. We know what it looks like.
Anti-Semitism looks like the attack on a synagogue outside San Diego. It looks like Pittsburgh, where the alleged Tree of Life synagogue killer accused Jews of “bring[ing] invaders in that kill our people” by supporting resettlement of refugees. It looks like Klansmen and Nazis shouting “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville.
That virulent anti-Semitism doesn’t come from supporters of Palestinian rights. It comes from the violent white supremacists operating increasingly publicly and proudly across the United States. Those same anti-Semites are still reveling in the support of the president, who called them “very fine people” after Charlottesville.