Mary Altaffer/AP Photo
Former President Donald Trump greets Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano onstage at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, September 3, 2022.
Intolerance takes lots of forms, including the construction of border walls, physical and categorical. Israel has not only presented obstacles to Palestinians (and I’m putting that very mildly), but also has erected barriers to certain categories of Jews. The largely secular state has long empowered Orthodox rabbis to rule on questions of Jewishness and Jewish observance, which, if it’s not Orthodox, may as well be treyf (the antonym of kosher).
Lately, Republican leaders have also taken it upon themselves to rule on Jewishness, chiefly as a way to castigate the substantial majority of American Jews who are liberal or progressive and thus pose a threat to right-wing values and Republican candidates. Recently, Donald Trump cautioned American Jews to “get their act together … before it’s too late” by showing more support for Israel and its policies, adding that Christian evangelicals were “far more appreciative” of Israel. Self-described Christian nationalist Doug Mastriano, the Republican opposing Democrat Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania’s upcoming gubernatorial election, criticized Shapiro for sending his children to a Jewish day school, which he said was a sign of Shapiro’s elitism. (He issued no such condemnation of parents who send their kids to Catholic and other Christian day schools.) Responding to criticism of this particular attack, Mastriano adviser Jenna Ellis, a former lawyer for Trump, dismissed Shapiro as “at best, a secular Jew”—which, among other things, is simply inaccurate: Shapiro is religiously observant, though not Orthodox.
The MAGA line that’s emerging is that they have nothing against Real Jews, only the Actually Existing American Jews, increasing numbers of whom are indeed secular, supporters of minority rights, civil liberties, and immigrants. The ultra-Orthodox are fine, as they bloc-vote Republican, don’t accept the notion of human equality, favor the Word over the Enlightenment—in short, are politically interchangeable with most Christian evangelicals.
During his recent interview with Kanye West, which covered West’s views on Jews, the redoubtable Tucker Carlson (by “redoubtable,” I mean his every word and facial expression should be subject to doubt) failed to challenge any of Ye’s views. That comports with Carlson’s job description, which is to stoke fear and rage among his viewers by warning darkly of the threats, which range from the inflated to the imaginary, to the untroubled reign of white Christian supremacy.
When you get right down to it, what the right feels threatened by and antagonistic toward is Jews in the diaspora. Jews are fine in Israel, now that the country has substantially abandoned its socialist roots and is acting like any good occupying (that is, abusive) power. The ultra-Orthodox of Williamsburg and elsewhere aren’t really in the diaspora, either: They live in cocoons of pre-scientific anti-modernity, in Dark Age shtetls of the mind. But Jews who’ve accepted Enlightenment values—rationality, equality, freedom of speech, the whole liberal megillah—they’re the Bad Jews. In a time when scapegoating “the other” has become the foremost political strategy of right-wing movements and parties the world over, Bad Jews are being returned to their time-honored place on the list of available targets. Other groups have it far worse, to be sure, but, speaking in my Bad Jew capacity to those other groups, it’s an honor to be in your company.
