African Americans and Jews cling to one another in the Trump era
Relations between American Jewry and African Americans, to be sure, have had their ups and downs (a good overview can be found here). However, not since the civil rights movement — when Jewish college kids traveled to the South to register African Americans to vote and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, among the greatest modern Jewish philosophers and theologians, marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — have the ties between the African American community and the Jewish community been so emotionally intense and, yes, loving. (From a personal standpoint, I cannot count the number of African American friends, acquaintances and colleagues who have extended sympathy and offered comfort to me, intuiting that Jews far from Pittsburgh are grieving as well.) In adversity, the two communities have rekindled a common mission for social justice, civil liberties and tolerance. In short, they both get what is going on in the Trump era.
Compare two recent columns, one by a prominent African American and the other by a prominent Jewish American writer. Jamelle Bouie writes:
“Trumpism” is a politics of racial demagoguery. America in the age of Donald Trump is more permissive of explicit racism than it’s been at any point since the civil rights era. And because bigotries rarely dance alone, the president’s nativism is accompanied by anti-black racism — first seen in his “birther” crusade against Barack Obama — antiMuslim prejudice, and anti-Semitism.
These ideologies exist on a continuum, with casual prejudice on one end and virulent hatred on the other. . . .
Seen as part of a continuum, the relationship between bigoted rhetoric and bigoted action becomes clearer. The former can facilitate the latter.
In 2017, an eminent academic figure with whom I was having coffee, and who does not wear his heart on his sleeve, leaned over to me and said, “You know, we Jews can smell it” — the atmosphere in which violence incubates and breeds.
The miasma of today is one created by a world in which journalists are described as “enemies of the people,” in which immigrants fleeing chaos or seeking opportunity are accused of harboring terrorists and carrying leprosy, in which a politician aspiring to the highest positions of leadership in Congress says, “We cannot allow Soros, Steyer and Bloomberg to BUY this election!” It is the miasma created by a leader who cheers a candidate for body-slamming a reporter, and whose subordinates’ professed sorrow for bullet-riddled old men and women is swiftly displaced by self-pity and grievance that their boss is being picked on.
It’s in “the air,” as they say. “The Jews can indeed smell it,” Cohen continues. “It is why a disproportionate number of the conservative intellectuals crying out in alarm in 2016 and 2017 were Jews. The People of the Book know that words are powerful, for ill as well as for good. They know that one thing leads to another, and that if someone promises violence they will deliver it. They know that evil never really goes away, but rather remains dormant, ever ready to be awakened, deliberately or unintentionally, retail or wholesale.” Bouie likewise reasons: “A society permissive of rhetorical dehumanization is necessarily more vulnerable to actual dehumanization. Allow racial contempt to spread unchallenged, and racist violence will eventually follow.”
Many conservatives (overwhelmingly white and Christian) bandy about the notion that Trump is overall just a fine and dandy president. (But Gorsuch! But tax cuts!) So, they believe, we can simply overlook his words. They’re just tweets. That’s just Trump being Trump. That sentiment might seem benign and even compelling from the vantage point of groups who are not living with the miasma of hate and the specter of violence. One who does not perceive the danger in the resurgence of bloodand-soil nationalism — the notion that America’s identity lies in being a white, Christian nation — might make such a bargain. For members of the majority group whose president dedicates his administration to fanning white grievance and invoking an era when white males controlled all the levers of power, it takes patriotism and a good deal of empathy to see that Trump’s words are the point, the real threat to the American experiment.
Conservatives used to insist that words matter. Words have consequences! “First you win the argument, then you win the vote,” conservative icon Margaret Thatcher said. We’re now divided between defenders of a closed, reactionary society and those determined to preserve an open, multiethnic democracy. We’re — unbelievably — divided on whether diversity is good or bad. In that context, and after the horror of the killings of (most recently) African Americans in Kentucky and Jews in Pittsburgh, African Americans and Jewish Americans are, to a degree not seen in decades, bound together in fear, in grief and in determination.
To that mix of politically threatened and emotionally wounded Americans, add women, who are flocking to the anti-Trump resistance. Women, regardless of race and ideology, also feel the miasma of hate, contempt, ridicule and resentment that Trump has unleashed. Gains they thought were permanent are now up for debate. Men, we are told, are the ones who should be scared because women might accuse them of sexual assault.
Collectively, the targets of Trump’s anger and bigotry have decided to transcend victimhood, to reaffirm the America of upward mobility, tolerance, openness, rationality and constitutionalism. That, as much as anything, is what the midterm elections are all about. Sure, the elections are about health care and checks and balances, but more than those, it’s the words that matter.
Rubin writes reported opinion from a center-right perspective for The Washington Post.