The Coming Jewish Civil War Over Donald Trump
Trump is offering American Jews a kind of devil’s bargain: throw in with us against the antisemitic universities and campus rabble-rousers, but pay no attention as we dismantle the traditions and institutions that Jews value.
https://newrepublic.com/article/194674/trump-antisemitism-universities-jewish-civil-war?fbclid=IwY2xjawKKwV9leHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETFpTlpoVVVEWDNNQ0l1dlBOAR7WDku0bK8RPCuwnRRWuCPIlRC4l0rhylvmkyn1pdh_wr6yfd380jnePuf4NA_aem_lqlrBuG1GZeL-EPzmOODKQ
The war has exacerbated a burgeoning conflict between the country that Israel is becoming and the values of the majority of American Jews. To put it in familiar terms, Israel has grown politically bright red while American Jews, alone among ethnicities that code as “white,” remain proudly deep blue. Two-thirds of Israelis questioned told pollsters they preferred Donald Trump over Kamala Harris; the exact opposite held true among American Jews. (“Trump gets nothing but praise here,” the Tel Aviv–based pollster and political analyst Dahlia Scheindlin told me.)
Legacy Jewish organizations are throwing in with a president and political movement that seek to destroy the democratic pillars and educational institutions that have helped to make Jews secure and successful in the United States and are shot through with neo-Nazis.
Despite this, the leaders of the large “legacy” American Jewish organizations, without exception, have chosen to side with Netanyahu, defending Israel against all critics and demonizing as “antisemitic” anyone—especially other Jews—who they believe threatens it. In doing so, however, they face the problem not only of opposing the views of the vast majority of American Jews, but also of throwing in with a U.S. president and political movement that seek to destroy the democratic pillars and educational institutions that have helped to make Jews secure and successful in the United States and are shot through with neo-Nazis and Jew-haters of all sorts.
The net result is that we are in the early stages of a Jewish civil war unmatched since the early battles over Zionism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In essence, Trump and the forces arrayed behind him—the legacy organizations, a new and well-financed right-wing Jewish media, and the Christian evangelical world that blindly supports Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu—have offered American Jews a kind of devil’s bargain: throw in with us against the antisemitic universities and campus rabble-rousers, but pay no attention as we dismantle the traditions and institutions that Jews value and that have provided the foundation for all they have been able to accomplish as Americans. Who’s in?
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