Evan Vucci/AP Photo
Jared Kushner, left, with President Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon in December 2016
American Jews got very lucky, in that our neofascist president spared one group that is reliably scapegoated by history’s haters. Trump demonized Blacks, Muslims, foreigners, Mexicans, immigrants generally, and “globalists.” Why not Jews?
In the early days of his campaign and his presidency, classic anti-Semitic tropes (as well as classic anti-Semitic thugs) were indeed part of Trump’s storm-trooper army. The original alt-right included neo-Nazis. Breitbart was fond of passing along anti-Semitic material.
There was the infamous incident in July 2016, when Trump retweeted a photo of Hillary Clinton with the phrase “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!” imposed on a Star of David swimming in a sea of money. White House spin doctors disingenuously claimed that it was meant to be a sheriff’s star.
The Trump association with overt anti-Semitism came to a peak in the Charlottesville mayhem of August 2017, when marchers chanted, “Jews will not replace us,” and Trump declared that there were good people on both sides.
This happened to be the same week when Steve Bannon incautiously telephoned me and said some unflattering things about his boss, leading to Bannon’s dismissal soon after my story ran.
Bannon, as it happens, is a central character in Trump’s intermittent footsie with anti-Semites. As Michael Wolff’s book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, makes clear, Bannon and first son-in-law Jared Kushner were engaged in an ongoing power struggle for control of the West Wing, and Kushner regarded Bannon as a flagrant anti-Semite.
Kushner, of course, is Jewish. And this fact alone served to damp down Trump’s temptation to get into bed with explicit anti-Semites. After Bannon was forced out, the anti-Semitism largely evaporated.
The use of court Jews and well-placed relatives to protect the wider Jewish community from the anti-Semitic tendencies of hostile rulers is a story as old as the biblical tales of Moses and the Book of Esther. In Germany under Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor relied on his banker and financial adviser, Gerson Bleichroeder, who became only the second Jew to be admitted to the Prussian aristocracy, as von Bleichroeder. But as the subsequent history of Germany revealed, court Jews are not always sufficient protection.
Trump not only had Jews in his extended family. His lawyers, accountants, financial advisers were heavily Jewish. As a New Yorker, he was comfortable in a Jewish milieu.
He had Jewish donors and benefactors, often around the common cause of a far-right agenda for Israel. Among the most perverse of Trump’s perversions was his role as matchmaker for right-wing American Jews, right-wing evangelicals, and right-wing Israelis.
But the next version of Trump might not have a Jewish son-in-law and Jewish advisers. As the Book of Exodus fatefully begins, “Now there arose over Egypt a new king who knew not Joseph.”
A 2019 poll by the Anti-Defamation League found that 61 percent of Americans agreed with at least one anti-Semitic stereotype. The next aspiring neofascist president might be willing to break one of the last taboos.
In that respect, the recklessness of Israel’s Netanyahu in stealing Palestinian land and then equating criticism of Israeli policy with anti-Semitism only makes the job of real anti-Semites easier. Tragically, even in Germany, which has gone to great and heroic lengths to make amends for the Hitler era, a recent conference of cultural intellectuals on the issue of Israel and anti-Semitism was bitterly divided on whether criticism of Israel is per se anti-Semitic.
This is not because Germany is backsliding—but because Netanyahu is shamelessly backsliding from the most fundamental of Jewish ethical teachings.
Philip Roth, in his 1986 novel The Counterlife, invents a dialogue in which an Israeli liberal laments to the Roth character, “In the Diaspora, a Jew like you lives securely without real fear of persecution or violence, while we are living just the kind of imperiled Jewish existence that we came here to replace.” For Jews, the promised land has been America.
So far, anyway. The next American fascist might not be a buffoon with a Jewish son-in-law.
And if Joe Biden wants to do his bit to keep American Jews safe, the road to that safety paradoxically leads through Jerusalem. A good start would be to save Netanyahu from himself, so that Israel, and by extension world Jewry, does not become the world’s whipping boy.
