The Cruelty Is the Point by Adam Serwer

Author:Adam Serwer [Serwer, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2021-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

10

THE CRUELTY OF

PHILO-SEMITISM

American Jews were not one of the religious or ethnic minorities that Donald Trump explicitly demonized on his path to victory in 2016. At least on the surface, Trump seemed favorably disposed. His son-in-law and a trusted adviser were Jewish, and his daughter Ivanka had converted.

Yet most American Jews were wary of Trump, and in neither 2016 nor 2020 did the perennial speculation about the Jewish vote going Republican because of left-wing anti-Semitism pan out. That’s because most American Jews are liberal, sure, but it’s also because Trump’s style of demagoguery, despite not being directed at American Jews, was nevertheless resonant of the Jewish experience in the Diaspora with leaders who don’t like Jews very much. And Trump’s frequent invocation of anti-Semitic stereotypes, even as bizarre compliments, confirmed that instinct.

“A lot of you are in the real estate business, because I know you very well. You’re brutal killers, not nice people at all,” Trump told the Israeli-American Council in Florida in 2019. “But you have to vote for me—you have no choice. You’re not gonna vote for Pocahontas, I can tell you that. You’re not gonna vote for the wealth tax. Yeah, let’s take 100 percent of your wealth away!” The assumption that Jews are both rich and greedy is classic anti-Semitism—even as Trump apparently finds such traits admirable.

What Trump did have was a coterie of right-wing pro-Israel Jewish advisers, whose contempt for liberal American Jews mirrored the stereotypes Trump was familiar with. Setting aside for a moment the fact that Trump was an inspiration to Jew-haters globally, he was also being advised by the kind of extremists who believe liberal Jewish nationalists are worse than people who aided the Nazis in wiping out a third of global Jewry. When Trump intervened in the internal Jewish American debate over Israel by accusing American Jews of “disloyalty,” he was echoing the rhetoric of Jews he is friendly with.

I wrote this piece because I felt that part largely got lost in the ensuing uproar over Trump’s remarks—in keeping with the tendency of minority communities to keep their internal disputes, well, internal. But the ongoing confusion over both Trump’s motivations and the reasons for uncritical Republican support of Israel—as well as their increasingly strident deployment of Jewish stereotypes against their liberal and left-wing opposition—were worth exploration. Jewish American liberalism is often characterized as hopeless naïveté, and I also wanted to show that it represents a mixture of idealism, pragmatism, and faith that long predates contemporary arguments over Israeli policy.

If you’re rolling your eyes at yet another angsty piece on internal Jewish politics over Israel, I don’t blame you at all. A great deal of American coverage of the conflict is seen through that prism, and the Palestinian view is rarely received with as much charity or understanding. There are other writers who are more qualified to explore that perspective.

What I can do is offer a historical argument for why pluralism became so central to the political identities of American

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