Jewish Privilege

(...)  At the time of my visit to [Highland Park], the memorial was 30 feet away from the nearest police tape. It consisted of bouquets and hand-drawn signs addressing gun violence piled deliberately in front of seven white-painted vertical beams, arranged in an inward-facing semicircle. Atop each beam was a single electric tea candle and mounted on each were blue hearts on which victims’ names and brief, heartfelt messages were written in Sharpie. Orange ribbons, a symbol of gun violence prevention advocacy, were tied to nearby trees and bushes.

I initially thought nothing of the display beyond its obvious disconcerting solemnity. It struck me as a typical assemblage of things and people in response to a type of event which also has become all too typical in the United States. But for a notably Jewish suburb (estimates range from 30% to 50%), any evidence of Judaism or Jewish memorial practices was absent.

Not one stone. Not a single “BDE” sign. No printed copies of the Mourner’s Kaddish.

In fact, in front of each of the seven white poles were small wooden model imitations of church facades, each replete with two tiny crosses on miniature spires and an American flag front and center. On each pale-blue heart were vertical ichthys — colloquially known as “Jesus fish.” Amid the heap of flowers, signs, notes, and the occasional stuffed animal were Christian devotional candles, with images of Christ, angels and various saints on the glass cylinders surrounding the candle wax.

Seeing such explicit Christian imagery in a public space in such a Jewish town initially confused me, then annoyed me. Ari Glassenberg, a cousin of one of the victims, Jacki Sundheim, had a similar reaction upon seeing the mini churches and crosses two days after the shooting, when she visited to leave flowers in memory of her relative. “It kind of shocked me,” Glassenberg wrote to me in a text message.

“It made me a little mad that someone who cared enough to make all those little churches didn’t care enough to Google search Jacki’s name and see that she was Jewish.”

(...)  In all, five of the seven people fatally shot on Monday were either married to Jews and the parents of Jews, or Jews themselves.

As Jews living in the United States, we are accustomed to having our traditions and beliefs put in overtly Christocentric terms. It isn’t uncommon to hear Hanukkah referred to as “Jewish Christmas” or bat and bar mitzvahs labeled erroneously as the Jewish version of baptisms or confirmations.

The ubiquity of Christian imagery, ranging from the explicitly religious like crucifixes and Nativity scenes to the more secular like Christmas trees and Easter eggs, is unavoidable to American Jews. These symbols and cultural norms are generally non-threatening, but they still perpetuate a sense of Jewish otherness.

(...)  This persistent and sinister trend represents an uncomfortable and damaging American norm whereby Jews are Christianized even in death — whereby Christianity is at best assumed or at worst forced upon dead Jews. Even in a predominantly Jewish suburb. Even for people with names like Sundheim and Goldstein.

Jews should not have to forcefully assert their Jewishness in order to prevent the erasure of their identities. Though it seems that both in life and even in death, we must do just that.

(...)

The notion that such a minuscule and unmanageable minority secretly controls the world is comical, which may be why so many responsible people still do not take the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory seriously, or even understand how it works. In the moments after the Texas crisis, the FBI made an official statement declaring that the assailant was “particularly focused on one issue, and it was not specifically related to the Jewish community.” Of course, the gunman did not travel thousands of miles to terrorize some Mormons. He sought out a synagogue and took it hostage over his grievances, believing that Jews alone could resolve them. That’s targeting Jews, and there’s a word for that.

(...)

“Anti-Semitism has real impact beyond just hate crimes,” the civil-rights activist Eric Ward once told me. “It distorts our understanding of how the actual world works. It isolates us. It alienates us from our communities, from our neighbors, and from participating in governance. It kills, but it also kills our society.”

(...)

“Anti-Semitism isn’t just bigotry toward the Jewish community,” Ward explains. “It is actually utilizing bigotry toward the Jewish community in order to deconstruct democratic practices, and it does so by framing democracy as a conspiracy rather than a tool of empowerment or a functional tool of governance.” In other words, the more people buy into anti-Semitism and its understanding of the world, the more they lose faith in democracy.

...

[October 6, 2021] - (...) “On that day I may have shot some 150 to 250 Jews. The whole shooting episode went off without a hitch. The Jews surrendered to their fate like sheep to the slaughter,” reads the description of the slaughter by SS man by the name of Viktor Trill. “I saw a huge hole that looked like a riverbed that had dried up. Inside it were layers of bodies. The Jews had to lie down on the bodies and were shot in the neck.”

Trill's testimony was published by the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center now under construction but open to the public in Kyiv. The center has documented the names of 159 SS and Wehrmacht soldiers and police who perpetrated the massacre, which occurred September 29 and 30, 1941, on the eve of Yom Kippur, by the Nazis and their local collaborators, in a valley near the old Jewish cemetery in Kyiv. It took place 10 days after the Germans conquered the city.

Approximately 100,000 people were murdered, one third of them Jews, and the rest Ukrainians, Roma and the disabled. According to the center’s researchers, some 2,000 people took part in the slaughter, most of them Germans between the ages of 20 and 60. The Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial says Ukrainian auxiliary units helped the Germans with the killings. Moreover, according to Germans who took part in the massacre, “a great many” Ukrainian civilians “informed on Jews who were in hiding.” The evidence also states that so many Jews were betrayed that “due to lack of manpower they couldn’t deal with them all.”

“The murderers were educated people – professionals, teachers, engineers, salesmen and drivers. Some of them were married and some got married during the war. They wrote letters home, and decades after, in the 1960s, they gave evidence of their participation in the massacre in court,” according to the center.

However, except for senior commanders, most of them were never convicted of a crime. “Although many confessed their involvement in the murder, they lived quiet, normal lives after the war,” says Andrej Umansky, a historian who works at the center.

(...)

Father Patrick Desbois, of the center, who researches mass graves in Eastern Europe, explained that the testimonies reveal the pattern of action. “Firing squads [were] working in shifts throughout the day, from morning until 5 P.M., and in the evening there were drinking parties, including women, whose role was to make the murderers forget what had happened,” he explained. According to Desbois, in some cases there are even descriptions of murder squads who were sent to “relax” in a spa town before returning to complete the massacre.,

“The Jews lay close to each other, so that the whole bottom was filled. Then the same thing began again. Some had to lie on the bodies of Jews who had already died. In two days, there were six or seven layers,” SS officer August Hafner, testified.

“Some had wheelbarrows, baby carriages and a great deal of luggage with them. Their clothes and luggage piled up as high as the treetops. They were told that their luggage would arrive after them by train,” policeman Anton Lauer said in his testimony. “Afterward, they were brought to the edge of the valley, where they were told to strip. After that, group after group was led to the edge of the pit .... The Jews were told to go down into the pit and lie on top of Jews who had already been shot, like sardines.”

(...)

[September 27, 2021] - In the run-up to the 80th anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre, we asked several young Russian-speaking North American Jews to interview Holocaust survivors from the Soviet Union.

The stories they brought back are unlike most of what American Jews’ collective memory of the Holocaust contains. Most take place in the summer and fall of 1941—the chaotic first months of the German-Soviet war and occupation, and the early stage of the Jewish genocide. The Holocaust at this point is far from the well-oiled machine we remember it as. At this point, the most high-tech solution to the “Jewish problem” is still Einsatzgruppen commander Friedrich Jeckeln’s “sardine method” of packing people as tightly as possible in the shooting pits before murdering them.

The absence of streamlined mass murder solutions, however, did not prevent the Germans, their allies, and local collaborators from murdering 2.7 million Jews in these territories. Fewer than 120,000 Jews are estimated to have survived the genocide here.

(...)

Some 250,000 Jews were murdered [in Transnistria, an administrative entity established by the Romanians in southeastern Ukraine] by starvation, brutal forced marches, disease, forced labor, and mass executions. And yet, this horrific place offered an ever-so-slightly higher chance of survival if one was, perhaps, a bit stronger and healthier, a bit more resourceful, and much, much luckier than most. By contrast, virtually no one survived mass shooting events such as Babi Yar in the German-occupied Soviet territories.

(...)

[Efraim Donitz] was only 3 when his family moved to a ghetto in Transnistria some 80 years ago. I doubted he would remember much. But I was wrong. “I remember everything,” he said. “That’s the problem.”

Despite his vivid memories, he spoke of the period like he was giving a history lecture, rather than relaying personal experience. But there were brief moments in which Efraim was overcome with emotion. They happened most frequently when he spoke about how the world remembers—or, rather, doesn’t remember—those events rather than the events themselves.

A few years ago, he and his wife embarked on a pilgrimage through the sites of the occupation. He wanted to show these places to his children and grandchildren because he had been there: “I lost my mother there, and I lost my sister. It’s a part of my life.”

When they were looking for Babi Yar in Kyiv, their tour guide took them to the wrong memorial. For a long time, they couldn’t find a driver who would be willing to take them to the actual site of the massacres. When they finally got there, they found it desecrated. Later, they were told that their tour guide and the drivers likely knew exactly where Babi Yar was, but refused to take them. It made them angry.

Back home in Los Angeles, Efraim tried to get others to hear about it. “I’ve tried everywhere, nobody wants to listen,” he said. He volunteered to teach at the Holocaust museum, and though the museum’s donors appeared very enthusiastic about the idea, he never got a call back.

“I’m just disappointed in the whole thing.” This time, the crack in his demeanor was almost a sob.

Most of the world didn’t have an obligation to remember Babi Yar, he said. But Jews do.

“That is why this is the Holocaust that never happened.”

(...)

Amid all this anxiety and uncertainty surrounding Covid, I’ve found it incredibly difficult to get into the High Holiday spirit. In a season in which we’re supposed to be atoning for our sins and apologizing for ways we might have wronged others, I’ve found that I just can’t forgive the anti-vaxxers, the anti-maskers, the people who decided that they didn’t need to quarantine or get tested. The people who demanded that everything reopen, resume, who so wanted to get back to life as usual that they didn’t care how many lives were lost. It’s the season of teshuvah, of repentance, of trying to wipe the slate clean for a new year. But it’s not that easy when I need to stay home with my kids and stream services online — again — because it isn’t safe for them to be back with their community.

(...)

This is a season of forgiveness, but also of self-evaluation and trying to become better in the new year. And it’s really hard to do that, to teach my children to do that, when so many people flaunt their selfish behavior by refusing to wear masks or get vaccinated, revel in the freedom to put others at risk and receive praise for their defiance.

Most of all, I can’t forgive people who don’t seem to be in the least bit sorry. Or if they are, it’s only to regret what’s happened to them or their loved ones. And even if there was some remorse, I can’t feel like it’s my place to forgive on behalf of those who are  most hurt by their actions. After all, as an adult, I was able to get vaccinated. I know that doesn’t mean that I’m 100% safe from getting Covid — as long as this virus is allowed to hang around in a large enough unvaccinated population, it’ll generate new variants. Rather, it’s my pre-vaccinated children whose lives are interrupted every day. They are the ones who are unable to visit family and friends. They are relying on other parents to do the right thing and not send their maybe-sick-but-I-have no-child-care student to sit next to them at school. They’re the ones hoping school administrators will care more about keeping them safe than about their own PR, or appeasing the political theater that’s once again turned children’s safety into a plot line.

(...)

This is genuinely one of the most well-written things I’ve ever read about Anne Frank and the universalization and dehumanization of the Holocaust and its victims.

A self-professed "good Jewish boy from New Jersey," Rabbi Michael Elkohen had come a long way.

In the ultra-Orthodox enclave in Jerusalem where Elkohen now lives, he was often called on to perform marriages, circumcisions and other sacred Jewish rituals. He was even hired to write Torah scrolls, handwritten copies of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, in a task typically reserved for the most devout and highly trained scribes.

But for 15 years, Elkohen was apparently living a lie. The father of five with the black hat, beard and side curls was fluent in Judaic texts and traditions but living a double life: Born Michael Elk in Salem County, he was actually a Christian missionary sent to the Holy Land to convert Jews, according to two anti-missionary groups whose accusations have captivated Israelis in recent days.

Elk's tale has grabbed headlines across the Jewish state, where religious leaders see a growing trend of covert missionary work by evangelical Christians.

(...)

Elk "was a clearinghouse for missionary activity," [Rabbi Tovia Singer, director of Outreach Judaism, a counter-missionary group in Jerusalem. ] said in an interview. "He was able to guide missionaries on where to go in Israel. The idea of these messianic groups is to blur distinctions in order to lure Jews who would otherwise resist the Christian message."

(...)

The revelations have also raised questions about Elk's late wife, Amanda, who claimed to be the daughter of Holocaust survivors and died of cancer in February. Her ties to the faith also appear to have been faked, meaning her Orthodox funeral in a Jewish cemetery would defy religious law.

Michael and Amanda Elk emigrated to Israel using forged documents and with the help of South Carolina-based Morningstar Missions, according to Beyneynu and Outreach Judaism.

(...)

Elk's path to missionary work isn't completely clear, but he appears to have served as a minister for a time in Olympia, Washington, according to Alan Brill, a professor of Jewish-Christian Studies at Seton Hall University. He published an online interview with Elk in 2012.

(...)

Michael Elk eventually ran a yeshiva for Messianic Jews and sought to raise his prominence in the Jewish community, said Beyneynu founder Shannon Nuszen. His five children attended ultra-Orthodox schools, and Elk worked as a scribe, rabbi and mohel, performing circumcisions. He claimed to be a "kohen," a descendant of Aaron, the biblical high priest.  

All the while, he was working to coordinate missionary work in Israel, according to the watchdog groups. While living as a rabbi, Elk authored a book and anonymous blog posts about his work as an undercover evangelist, according to the Jerusalem Post.

(...)

"He's the leader of this new variety of infiltrators who portray themselves perfectly as very religious Jews," Nuszen said. "He teaches them everything from how to pronounce things correctly, how to dress, to the intricacies of Jewish law .... Michael has students and online followers all over."

She estimates that there are about 30,000 missionaries in Israel, 300 organizations focused on evangelizing Jews and 200 websites dedicated to converting them.

Elk authored a book under the pseudonym "Orthodox Jewish Rabbi" for Morningstar Ministries, based in Fort Mill, South Carolina. In an interview, the group's founder, Rick Joyner, recalled Elk attending Morningstar conferences and praised his "remarkable" religious knowledge.

"When people hear the word 'missionary,' they often think it means someone who is trying to convert them to Christianity, but that was not Michael's intent," Joyner said. "He was in Israel to help and to learn." [Alexis’s note: That’s because that’s LITERALLY the definition of missionary.]

(...)

The controversy is likely to set back efforts to build bridges among Jews and Christians in Israel, said Jonathan Feldstein, a former Teaneck resident whose Jerusalem-based Genesis 123 Foundation focuses on such work.

“The deceit of a Christian family living literally in disguise as Orthodox Jews will only serve to highlight the long and sadly very bad history of Christians persecuting and forcefully converting Jews," he said.

The NYPD's Hate Crime Task Force is investigating six different incidents in which a suspect threw rocks at windows and doors, shattering them, at four different Jewish institutions in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx.

Sometime after midnight on April 23rd [2021], a man threw two rocks at the front door, shattering the glass, at the Riverdale Jewish Center on Independence Avenue, according to an NYPD spokesperson, Officer Arthur Tsui.

Around the same time that night, a man threw two rocks at the center's synagogue nearby on West 246th Street, the Chabad Lubavitch of Riverdale. Both of the Riverdale buildings were damaged again on Saturday night after 11 p.m., according to the police spokesperson.

The windows at the Conservative Synagogue Adath Israel of Riverdale (CSAIR) were also smashed that Saturday night. In a sixth incident, someone broke the windows at the Young Israel of Riverdale on Henry Hudson Parkway, though it is not clear when exactly it occurred.

The Riverdale Jewish Center's Senior Rabbi Dovid Zirkind and president Marc Spear said nobody was hurt in either incident at the center.

"The fact that someone would specifically and repeatedly target houses of worship is of great distress to us all," they said in an email. "An act of hate such as this is simply unacceptable."

They are working with the police department to find the individual who smashed the windows.

(...)

"Fortunately, no one was in the building at the time," the spokesman said. "We greatly appreciate the response of the NYPD to protect our community from further acts of senseless hatred. Our local Jewish community, interfaith partners, and elected officials are a source of strength. We stand against hate of any kind and will continue to celebrate being Jewish and supporting one another."  

Other synagogues targeted did not immediately respond to emails.

(...)

Governor Andrew Cuomo has directed the state police's hate crimes unit to offer assistance to the city's investigation, similar to the governor's announcement regarding the beating of an older Asian man in East Harlem this weekend.

(...)

צדק צדק תרדף.

Justice, justice you shall pursue. This wasn't quite justice but this is the beginning of accountability.

May George Floyd's memory be a blessing.

One day in 2009, Wendy Lower, historian of Nazism and the Shoah, was hard at work in the archives of the U.S. Holocaust Museum when a librarian handed her a photograph dated Oct. 13, 1941, depicting the deaths of Jews in Miropol, Ukraine, a shtetl near Kiev.

The photo Lower saw that day is shocking. A woman in a polka dot dress is leaning over from the waist, her head wreathed in smoke from the rifle blasts that are killing her. She is holding the hand of a small boy, who leans backward, his face turned slightly away from her, as if he can’t bear to look into her dying face. The woman grasps his hand tightly. She cannot calm his terror, but she won’t ever let go of him. She is pulling the boy forward with her into the mass grave, along with another child hidden in her lap.

We may feel guilty about looking at an image like this, worried that our gaze strips the victims of their humanity. But we are not guilty: It is our duty to look. The photograph that spurred Lower’s search is not mere “atrocity porn,” satisfying an appetite for horrors. Instead, such a photograph wants us to be troubled by the terror it depicts, and to inquire further. The crumpled bodies bend away from the viewer, their pain hidden along with their faces.

The shooters in the photo are a German and a Ukrainian—we can see this from their uniforms—and the Ukrainian’s rifle is just a few inches from the woman’s head. Another Ukrainian in the foreground has a rifle in his hands, and there is another German in the back. There is someone else too. “A civilian onlooker in a wool cap stands alert, ready to assist,” Lower notes in The Ravine, the book she has written about the photo and her efforts to find the story behind it.

Lower writes that during each interview she conducted with Miropol’s elderly Ukrainian citizens she showed them Škrovina’s photograph of the mother being shot. Did they recognize anyone? Every time, she says, when she “presented the photograph at the end of an interview, the subject looked and, with a shake of the head, turned away.”

The photograph depicts only the instant of death. Soon neighbors will come to strip the corpses, carrying away clothes, gold teeth, and other valuables. They will cart away furniture from the Jews’ houses. Some will remember how the Germans came looking for Ukrainian volunteers; how the Jews screamed when they were marched off to the killing site; how the shots rang out for hours. Others will pretend that the Jews simply disappeared one day, and that the lives and deaths of Jews and Ukrainians had nothing at all to do with each other...

[Read David Mikics’s full review of Wendy Lower’s ‘The Ravine’ at Tablet]

U.S. Capitol Police suspended an officer Monday after a copy of an infamous antisemitic tract was found near a Capitol Hill security post Sunday, alarming a congressional aide who viewed the document in plain sight at the checkpoint.

Photographs provided to The Washington Post show a printed copy of the Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion on a table inside an entrance to the Longworth House Office Building.

(...)

“We take all allegations of inappropriate behavior seriously,” [acting Capitol Police chief Yogananda D. Pittman] said in the statement. “Once this matter was brought to my attention, I immediately ordered the officer to be suspended until the Office of Professional Responsibility can thoroughly investigate.”

A House staff member spotted and photographed the document around 7 p.m. Sunday while leaving the South Capitol Street entrance to the Longworth Building, one of the few 24-hour entrances on the House side of the Capitol campus.

It is unclear from the photographs who was in possession of the document, which was held together by a binder clip with its pages tattered and stained. A date stamp indicated it was printed in January 2019.

The staff member who spotted the document, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to a fear of potential abuse or reprisal, described being “extremely rattled” by the content, particularly in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Rioters were spotted that day wearing antisemitic garb, including one person photographed wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” shirt.

(...)

Videos from that day showed some officers taking selfies with rioters and allowing them to bypass security in some places as they descended on the Capitol. One officer allegedly shook hands with rioters and told them, “It’s your house now,” as they rushed the Capitol building, according to court documents.

The department said last month that it was investigating 35 officers for their actions during the insurrection, with six of those officers placed on paid suspension pending the outcome of the internal probe.

The tract, also known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is a virulent fable with a century-long provenance that purports to be the account of a meeting where Jewish masters concoct a plan for world domination. The “protocols” they discuss reflect a variety of ancient antisemitic tropes, with a shadowy cabal orchestrating control of the banking system, the media and government in service of their own sinister ends.

The Anti-Defamation League calls it “a classic in paranoid, racist literature,” and scholars have traced its origin to late imperial Russia, where security forces eventually circulated the tale to sow suspicion about revolutionaries challenging the czarist regime.

It has since been translated into multiple languages, fomenting antisemitic sentiment around the world — including in Germany ahead of the Nazi genocide and more recently in majority-Muslim countries. One version was published in 1920 in a U.S. newspaper owned by auto magnate Henry Ford, and it has since become a staple text of white-supremacist groups.

(...)

(...)

I was a 12 years old when I was attacked by a mob of children and called "Christ killer" — the same age Jesus was, according to the Gospel of Luke, when he lingered in the Temple of Jerusalem and impressed the elders with his intellect — so this issue is undeniably personal. That wasn't the first or last time I was bullied for being Jewish, but it was the only time I nearly died because of it: Those kids held my head underwater, chanting, "Drown the Jew!"

This incident sprang back to mind  this month as Republicans tried to figure out what to do about Greene, a particularly obnoxious Christian right-winger who has suggested that a "space laser" affiliated with Jewish banking families caused the 2018 Camp Fire in California, expressed sympathy for the anti-Semitic QAnon fantasies, promoted a video that claimed Jews are trying to destroy Europe, posed for a picture with a Ku Klux Klan leader and liked a tweet linking Israel to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

(...)

None of this is surprising for anyone who is familiar with the history of American anti-Semitism. Greene is not an aberration, some inexplicable pimple of hatred that blemishes the American right's otherwise Jew-friendly visage. The American right has long had an anti-Semitism problem, and she's just the latest symptom.

This history of hatred "tells us much more about the anti-Semite than it tells us about Jews," Dr. Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University, told Salon. After citing an Israeli historian who refers to anti-Semitism as a "cultural code," Sarna explained that beliefs that vilify Jews as malevolent plotters who secretly control the world have a long history in American political life. "These ideas, which I think many on the left frankly had thought were done and over with, we suddenly see them full blown," he said

Before the 19th century, Sarna explained Jews were stereotypically depicted as being cursed: They were "wandering Jews" for their supposed role in killing Jesus Christ. In the modern era, however, the stereotype emerged that Jews secretly controlled the world and were responsible for everything that a given anti-Semite might regard as sinister. During the Civil War, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant blamed the Jews for cotton smuggling and expelled the entire Jewish community from areas he controlled in Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi. When the populist movement arose to address agrarian economic concerns in the 1890s, Jewish bankers like the Rothschilds were a frequent target among ideological leaders like William Hope "Coin" Harvey.

(...)

There's a direct line between those conspiratorial fantasies ideas from previous decades and the anti-Semitic attacks of the 21st century. "Conspiratorial thinking, by its nature, argues that everything is connected," Sarna explained. "There are no coincidences and it eschews complexity. It believes there are simple explanations based on sinister individuals who are manipulating the universe. Unsurprisingly, in a Christian setting, those are Jews."

Those ideas can evolve — Sarna pointed out that the QAnon belief in a giant child abuse ring run by Jews is analogous to the "blood libel," the medieval myth that Jews used the blood of Christian children for rituals — but the underlying assumptions have been consistent. It just so happens that, in the modern right-wing incarnation, Donald Trump's cult-like following believes that "all the enemies of Mr. Trump are now child molesters."

(...)

[Jewish comedian Larry Charles] brought up community organizer and political theorist Saul Alinsky, a favorite target of the right. "He is almost like the devil in a way," Charles observed. "He's like this radical leftist Jew, he fits all the categories. He checks all the boxes."

"Shooting some of these movies, we would see reasonable people who have this blind spot," Charles said. "They have this crazy belief, and there were all different applications and manifestations of it, that the Jews control everything. That is like a mantra amongst a certain segment of the population."

(...)

With the election of Trump in 2016, those ingrained belief systems — which for many years had been kept outside the American political mainstream — became more prominent, and their adherents more emboldened. David Weissman, a military veteran and former conservative Republican who stopped being a self-described "Trump troll" after a 2018 conversation with comedian Sarah Silverman, told Salon about his encounters with anti-Semitism on the right.

Back when he still supported Trump, Weissman recalled, he got into a "little spat" with an alt-right commentator who calls himself Baked Alaska, who was recently arrested after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Ultimately they moved past it, Weissman said: "We both realized we were Trump supporters" who believed "Democrats were the bad guys." Once he left MAGA world, however, Weissman said "the anti-Semitism definitely escalated" in interactions with his former allies.

"When I became a Democrat, I was called 'the k-word'" and targeted by "anti-Semitic slurs and tropes," Weissman said. Trump supporters sent "memes of me being Jewish in the oven," and "put my name in parentheses," a common tactic used by the far right to target someone for being Jewish.

(...)

"Anti-Semitism certainly did not start with Marjorie Taylor Greene, nor did it start with Donald Trump, but we have seen an exponential increase in violent anti-Semitic incidents during Donald Trump's presidency," Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, told Salon. "That is no doubt related to the fact that he emboldened and aligned himself with white nationalism." She mentioned Trump equating the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville with the peaceful protesters by "commenting that there were very fine people on both sides," refusing to denounce white nationalism and telling the right-wing Proud Boys during one of the campaign debates to "stand back and stand by."

"White nationalism had existed in our country prior to that, and anti-Semitism as an element of it, but white nationalists had never had an ally in the White House until Donald Trump," Soifer said.

(...)

Donald Trump's supposed pro-Israel policies were closely aligned with those of Benjamin Netanyahu, and did nothing to correct for Trump's history of anti-Semitic words and actions. He accused Jewish Democrats of "great disloyalty" toward Israel (feeding into the stereotype that Jews have dual loyalties), removed any specific reference to Jews from a 2017 State Department statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day and has frequently used anti-Semitic dogwhistle terms by opposing "globalists" and describing himself as a "nationalist." When I interviewed Charlotte Pence, the daughter of former Vice President Mike Pence, she talked about her family's love of Israel but refused to answer a question about whether she believes Jews are going to hell — or discuss the creepy messianic theories underpinning the Christian right's support for Israel.

When I asked Larry Charles whether, based on his experiences, there's an opportunity to build bridges with anti-Semites, he was skeptical. "I have not seen a lot of opportunities for bridge building in the situations that I've been in," Charles explained. "The people that I've met through Sacha [Baron Cohen] were very rigid and dogmatic in their prejudices. There was no crossing that gulf with them. There might be tolerance, temporarily. There might be patience, temporarily. But there's no changing that belief."

I hope that Charles is wrong but suspect he is right, which raises the question of how American Jews should react to the Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the world. For want of a better alternative, I think the only solution is to be intolerant toward intolerance. House Democrats were right to strip Greene of her committee assignments, but that is not nearly enough. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter need to do more to limit hate speech, even if conservatives cry foul in bad faith (the First Amendment only protects people from government censorship, not consequences from private corporations). Right-wing politicians who attack prominent Jews in ways that can be plausibly construed as anti-Semitic, or by denouncing "globalists," need to lose their funding. People who oppose anti-Semitism must lead boycotts against right-wing media figures who cover for people like Greene, such as Fox News' Sean Hannity.

On a broader level, critics of anti-Semitism must recognize that this form of bigotry is part of America's long history of hate — a history which holds that only white, straight Christian "manly" men have a right to rule — and recognize our responsibility to be allies to African Americans and the Latinx community, Muslims and the LGBT community, women suffering under the patriarchy and the poor struggling to make ends meet. If we limit our empathy merely to other Jews, the implicit message is not that systemic oppression is wrong, but only that we happen to dislike it when our group is targeted. The Jewish tradition at its best instills a moral responsibility to see all the layers of oppression, and align ourselves with its victims.

[Read Matthew Rozsa’s full piece in Salon]

What this article doesn't really touch on (and that you don't get unless you watch the clip from his livestream) is that he paused and appeared to be searching for the best word to use between saying "fucking" and "bitch." And when he said it, it was with a verbal stress. In other words, regardless of him now claiming he "didn't know what the word meant at the time" (cough bullshit cough), he deliberately chose a word he obviously knew was at the very least disparaging. Also, you don't have to know the etymology and history of a word to know it's a slur.

(link to Zito Madu's tweet)

Thank you to everyone who let me know I put 2020 instead of 2021 in my International Holocaust Remembrance Day post reblog today. Please reblog the correct reblog!