King of the Disloyal Jews
My first piece for Medium was written in an attempt to explain why some people thought Representative Ilhan Omar said something antisemitic on Twitter. Today, I am writing about the far worse antisemitism of the President of the United States.
Omar’s statements made being a Jew in America a bit more difficult. Trump made being a Jew in America dangerous. There is a world of difference between the two.
Trump’s supporters refuse to recognize his malicious influence. Only disingenuous actors and bigots trying to hide that fact would deny that Donald Trump is himself a bigot of the worst sort. Recall that he said there were “very fine people” among white supremacists — the same people who shot up Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill Synagogue, murdered Heather Heyer, opened fire in El Paso, and who commit other acts of violence against sexual, racial, religious, and ethnic minorities in this country every day.
Nor can I keep up with the outrage cycle that is his Twitter. It’s too much. Of course he lies. Of course he says obnoxious, outrageous, stupid, crude, and cruel things. He’s been at it for years. But two tweets — about the “disloyalty” of American Jews who vote Democrat, which is roughly 75% of the American Jewish population, and about positioning himself as King of the Jews — make me so terribly afraid, and so grateful that my passports are up to date. It makes me glad I have enough credit to buy a one-way plane ticket out of here, if I choose to leave. It makes me grateful to have the privilege of taking on more debt.
“American Jews” and “King of the Jews” are trending topics on Twitter for all the wrong reasons, and I am terrified.
King of the Disloyal Jews
I’m going to reference my previous essay when I talk about the pernicious nature of dual loyalty and disloyalty tropes when leveled at the Jewish people, in whole or in part. This is a very ancient trope. It is extremely common among the fascist right wing, especially white supremacists. It has been present in mainstream politics in Europe and the USA for the past few years, again, mostly on the right-wing. You can also see its general shape when extremist leftists castigate what some of them perceive as a Zionist global conspiracy. (There’s a reason us Jews — even us leftist, activist, and liberal ones — play a little game called “Nazi or SJW?” The horseshoe is real, and we have no safe space.)
The notion that Jews are sly, conniving, disloyal tricksters who seek to overturn society for their own ends dates back well over 1,000 years, and was common in Christian libels. It was readily adopted into 19th C nationalist rhetoric, woven into 19th and 20th C “racial science,” and was a feature in Nazi propaganda. It remains a feature among the alt-right today. It remains a feature among eschatological Christian theology.
This rhetoric leads to dead Jews.
And yesterday, via Tweet, it was loudly, explicitly uttered by the President of the United States of America, the leader of the most powerful country in the world. He may even have thought that he was paying us a compliment. And yet, violent extremists quote Trump as their inspiration. When more violence erupts against Jewish-Americans, I expect them to quote this noxious tweet. This is stochastic terrorism. It was uttered for the sake of his true base of support, the alt-right. It was meant for their ears. There is no doubt they have listened.
By contrast, this morning’s Tweet was uttered for a different audience, Evangelical Christians. Purveyors of what can only be described as an end-of-days death cult, this is a group that has no problem cheering for this ugly sort of rhetoric. To put it plainly, these are people that don’t see us, Jewish-Americans, as people. To them, we are but pawns in a Passion drama. Ultimately, that means they are perfectly fine with dead Jews used as front-men in a long-desired religious/race war in order to herald the return of their messiah.
These people call themselves allies of the Jewish people and of Israel. Sometimes, there are Jews and Israelis who believe them. But these people cheer for our destruction, and the destruction of much else besides.
Trump followed up by explicitly referencing himself as the second coming of God by doubling down on the religious rhetoric, calling himself “the chosen one.”
This is not a religious man. This is an authoritarian blatantly appropriating the language of Christian theology to anoint himself as an unimpeachable religious avatar, ruling all by Divine Right.
What’s Changed?
Not much. Trump has long seen citizenship as an aspect of tribal affiliation rather than a legal function of being subject to a specific government that exists to protect the rights of its citizens. His tweets fit neatly into that ideology.
This notion is dangerous because it does not allow for assimilation or inclusion in the body politic. It is also the justification to expel members from the body politic — as we have seen in Trump’s America with regard to Muslims, Latin@s, and people of color. It is happening to American Jews. And it’s happened before.
The expulsion of (white) Jews from whiteness and general inclusion in the body politic is precisely what happened in Hitler’s Germany. The process took some time — years, in fact. If you want to understand the conditional nature of Jewish acceptance, you don’t need to look further than the gradual nature of how assimilated, middle-class, educated, inter-married, white-skinned German Jews considered themselves and were considered by their gentile peers between the years of 1933 and 1945.
If you want to know what that process looks like today, look at Trump’s America.
Jews feature heavily in the popular imagination — far more than our actual numbers justify. We are a mere 2% of the American population. Most of us are concentrated in cities on the coasts. The vast majority of us vote Democrat. We are, to put it simply, not likely to swing any but the most local of elections. Most Jews aren’t rich, either, so it’s not like Jewish citizens can buy politicians the way corporations can. (And don’t bother mentioning AIPAC; a lobby influenced by Evangelicals that wasn’t even able to derail the JCPOA is not a match for the truly stunning amounts of money flowing from corporate power.)
But the idea of Jews captures the imagination. This is not a surprise, since Jews positioned as convenient enemy and scapegoat par excellence is a major feature in Western society, and ultimately dates back to the Roman empire. These biases are transferred memetically, as part of the fabric of society. It’s in the water. You don’t have to be consciously malicious to propagate some dangerous tropes or repeat some awful dog-whistles. This is true regardless of your personal political alignment, as history and current events are full of examples of larger political movements across the spectrum seeking to divide Jews into “good” and “bad” examples, and justifying some truly awful behaviour as a result.
But Jews are people, not political props. And that troubles those who wish to use us, weaponize us, or categorize us for their own ends.
If you’re Jewish and you’re worried about how things are going, get your passports in order and make an exit plan. It doesn’t have to be to Israel, though of course, it can be. That would be my advice even when times are good and the presidents are kind. That’s how I was raised. That’s how many Jews have been raised.
I am not convinced we’ve had our American Kristallnacht — though there are strong arguments to be made that the shooting at Squirrel Hill might have been it. I am not convinced that the millions of Jewish Americans are in immediate danger…but I’m not convinced we aren’t either.
Trump’s rhetoric galvanizes the violent members of our society. They feel they have been given permission to engage in the worst of activities, to engage in white supremacist terrorism. But the nature of social media means that some of these tropes also get repeated on the left as well.
That Jews are disloyal rootless cosmopolitans is a trope that featured heavily in Soviet antisemitism, and remains a feature that routinely resurfaces both on the far-right and the far-left. Similarly, other Soviet and Russian imperial propaganda that posits Jews as behind-the-scenes overlords. Jews are, in turn, communist and capitalist, white and anti-white, leeching off society from the bottom and from the top. If you want to know more about it, I again recommend this excellent zine dissecting antisemitism on the activist and anti-Zionist left.
“But Omar!”
There are some who seek to defend Trump by deflecting, mostly to talk about the sins of Representative Ilhan Omar. Omar has said some questionable things about Jews. She’s also apologized for her statements, multiple times. She is but one member of Congress. Her power is real, but it’s limited.
What influence Omar and The Squad have pales significantly before the power and influence wielded by the President of the United States. It doesn’t matter that Trump moved the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and it doesn’t matter that he is chummy with Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. Netanyahu doesn’t live in America, and his opinion on what American Jews live with is worth precisely nothing. It doesn’t even matter that his daughter converted and that he has Jewish grand-kids. He clearly isn’t acting with their best interests in mind.
The President of the United States is a blatant, unapologetic antisemite. What he says matters. And with the push of a button on his smartphone, he has made all of us less safe in our own country.
