US Jewish criticism of Trump expands; some voice support
Ivanka Trump’s rabbi denounced President Donald Trump for blaming “both sides” in a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, as the number of American Jewish leaders willing to criticize him grew.
Rabbi Haskel Lookstein of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, and other rabbis from the prominent modern Orthodox synagogue in Manhattan, said in a Facebook message late Wednesday that they were “deeply troubled by the moral equivalency and equivocation” of Trump’s reaction. Lookstein oversaw Ivanka Trump’s conversion to Judaism. He has only rarely commented on the president.
Separately, the Republican Jewish Coalition, which has supported Trump through earlier controversies, urged him “to provide greater moral clarity in rejecting racism, bigotry and anti-Semitism.”
“The Nazis, the KKK, and white supremacists are dangerous anti- Semites,” the Republican Jewish Coalition said in a statement Wednesday. “There are no good Nazis and no good members of the Klan.”
The rebukes are the latest from American Jews outraged and frightened not only by Saturday’s march, which drew neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members ostensibly to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
American Jews vote overwhelmingly Democratic, but some have praised how Trump has handled the fallout from the Virginia rally.
Rabbi Yaakov Menken of the Coalition for Jewish Values, an Orthodox Jewish public policy organization based in Baltimore, said the president was right to call out bigotry on “many sides.” Menken said he sees anti-Jewish bigotry coming from the right and the left, including from parts of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, a Holocaust education institution that fights anti- Semitism and other prejudice, said Trump failed when he didn’t single out the white nationalist marchers as “haters and bigots.” Still, Hier said Trump has had some strong accomplishments in office, pointing to the president’s handling of North Korea and Saudi Arabia.