Don’t ignore antisemitism’s march into mainstream
Tom Stoppard’s wrenching drama “Leopoldstadt,” which I recently saw on Broadway, begins in 1899 at a Christmas party in the Vienna apartment of Hermann Merz, a prosperous and assimilated Jewish businessman who is married to a Catholic. Merz is convinced that the antisemitism that plagued his forefathers is fading into the past.
There’s still plenty of anti-jewish prejudice around, he acknowledges, but nothing comparable to what prior generations endured. “This is the promised land, and not because it’s some place on a map where my ancestors came from,” he says to his anxious and pessimistic brother-in-law. “We’re Austrians now.”
The rest of the play chronicles how misplaced this confidence was. Seen in 2022 in New York, it felt like both an elegy and a warning. Jews are thriving in America, and even with the violent resurgence of antisemitism, I’ve rarely felt personally threatened.
Over the past week, though, I’m reminded that well-off Jews in other times and places have also imagined that they’d moved beyond existential danger, and been wrong.
At this point, there is no excuse for being shocked by anything that Donald Trump does. Yet I’m astonished that the former president dined last week with one of the country’s most influential white supremacists, a smirking little fascist named Nick Fuentes.
There’s nothing new about antisemites in Trump’s circle, but they usually try to maintain some plausible deniability, ranting about globalists and George Soros rather than the Jews. Fuentes, by contrast, is overt. “Jews have too much power in our society,” he recently wrote on his Telegram channel. “Christians should have all the power, everyone else very little.”
Fuentes was brought to Trump’s lair by Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, who was evidently serious when he threatened to go “death con 3” on the Jews last month. According to Axios, at one point during the dinner Trump turned to Ye and said of Fuentes: “I really like this guy. He gets me.”
Since then, Trump has claimed he didn’t know who Fuentes was. I find this unlikely. But even if Trump’s ignorance was sincere, he still didn’t denounce Fuentes after learning his identity.
Most Republicans, in turn, spent days declining to criticize Trump, though former Vice President Mike Pence and several senators finally spoke out Monday.
Ye is launching a vanity presidential campaign run by far-right provocateur
Milo Yiannopoulos, who recently wrote on Telegram, “We’re done putting Jewish interests first.” After buying Twitter, Elon Musk enthusiastically welcomed both Trump and Ye back to the platform.
On Sunday, Musk tweeted that Alexander Vindman, the Jewish retired Army officer who testified about Trump’s attempt to extort Ukraine’s president, is both “puppet & puppeteer,” echoing an old antisemitic trope about Jews pulling the strings behind world events. On Monday, Musk tweeted an image of the alt-right symbol Pepe the Frog.
For most of my adult life, antisemites have mostly lacked status.
Now, however, anti-jewish bigotry, or at least tacit approval of anti-jewish bigotry, is coming from people with power.
Such antisemitism still feels, at least to me, less like an immediate source of terror than an ominous force offstage, as it was for the comfortable Austrian Jews in Stoppard’s play. Maybe this time, for the first time, it won’t get worse.