A few weeks after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, I received a group email from an associate who alleged how curious it was that all the Jews who worked at the World Trade Center were mysteriously absent on that fatal day. She was an African-American activist who had participated with me on the 1998 Interfaith Pilgrimage of the Middle Passage. I wrote back, as politely as possible that as a Jew, I found such an accusation to be offensive and asked if she really wanted to post such a comment. I never heard from her again.
The idea that the Jews or Israel was responsible for 9/11 is the latest of blood libels Jews have suffered over the centuries going all the way back to the Middle Ages when entire communities were massacred in retaliation for supposed well poisoning or using the blood of Christian children to make Passover matzos. One can see that the antisemitic lunacy of QAnon is nothing new.
One of the unique aspects about antisemitism is that it exists on both the extreme left and the extreme right. While the latter might not be much of a surprise, attacks from the activist left I find more dispiriting. Whenever the Israelis and the Palestinians engage in their periodic fratricidal craziness, some of the comments about Israel and Jews posted on social media by activists of color could have been written by the Third Reich. Israel has always suffered from a strange and vaguely hypocritical double-standard; being condemned as being created through conquest which pretty much describes every nation on earth including, of course, the United States.
Antisemitism from the right has been inflamed more recently after Donald Trump dined at his Mar-a-Lago estate with notorious Jew-haters Nick Fuentes and Kanye West. While West is degenerating into more of a cartoon character, there is nothing comical about Fuentes. Fuentes is a white supremacist, a Christian nationalist and a Holocaust denier who expresses through his warped ideology that women should be denied the vote and that LGBTQ people are deviants. He has praised the Taliban regime and thinks that their repressive agenda would be just what the United States needs.
Suddenly, Republicans are shocked and appalled, including those who have been strangely silent over the past several years. Trump’s anti-Jewish leanings were made quite clear after the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally where his nice people were filmed chanting “Jews will not replace us” as they proudly carried confederate and Nazi flags. At that time, few if any Republicans rebuked Trump’s bigotry and this included Jewish Republicans and the venal AIPAC lobby, both of which were willing to give him a pass as long as he expressed his love for Israel. It goes without saying that Trump doesn’t love Israel (or anything or anybody else besides himself) one bit but needs to throw red meat to his Christian evangelical supporters who also love Israel for all the wrong reasons.
Evangelicals support Israel only because its creation fits into their “Rapture” superstition. However, according to this same fantasy, after Jesus returns, all Jews will either accept him as their savior or burn in hell. That anyone living in the 21st century can believe such medieval nonsense is a mystery but believe it they do. The Israelis who court them for their own cynical purposes no doubt are aware of this and privately mock their devout allies with choice Yiddish insults. For conservative American Zionists, accepting that the MAGA crowd could love Israel while hating Jews was an exercise in double-think that George Orwell would applaud.
Not anymore. American Jews of all stripes are finally seeing the red warning light on their radar screens. The fact that bigoted extremists like Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Lauren Boebert and Paul Gosar might now head Congressional committees come January is further cause for concern. Antisemitism from the right is dangerous because it has a documented habit of murdering people as we’ve seen in some of the more sordid mass shootings in gun-crazy America where synagogues and individuals have been attacked. Jew-hatred from the left is merely annoying and unfortunate, a violation of their so-called progressive values.
I’ve always believed that Jews are safe in America until they aren’t. It explains why some of us always cast a fitful eye over our shoulders. To have a (hopefully) former president openly court Jew haters should be something every conscious American takes to heart and never forgets.
Daniel A. Brown lived in Franklin County for 44 years and is a frequent contributor to the Recorder. He lives in New Mexico with his wife, Lisa and dog, Cody.