Bad Faith

Take care what you call me. I'm listening.

Donald Trump warned the Israeli American Council that if he is not elected president Israel will be “eradicated” within two years.

Tonight, as I write this, begins Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. It’s one of the two High Holidays. Yom Kippur, the solemn day of atonement, falls late next week. What a laugh riot that is: hours in temple, humbling yourself before God for all your failures and transgressions over the past year. Good times! And it’s a fasting day, so — oy, gevalt — you reflect in misery.

Not me, though. I won’t be in synagogue for either holiday. I’m never in synagogue. It’s been decades. Atheism will do that.

Oh, sure, I love lox and bagels. I laugh at Larry David. I sprinkle Yiddish into my writing and conversations. I’ve never changed my own motor oil. But if you don’t want to get on my wrong side, do not call me a “Jewish person.”

Not that it isn’t factual. I’m Jewish and technically a person. But the phrase gives me shpilkes, a case of the nerves. Why? Because, as poker players say, it's a tell. That is, a tic that betrays what cards you’re concealing. Let me give you an example.

“Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion. They hate everything about Israel.”

Please ignore the fact that Israel and Judaism are not synonyms. And that nothing in Judaism mandates blind support for Zionism or the policies and actions of Israel. And that such an assumption implies divided loyalties, as have antisemitic tropes of traitors in our midst going back centuries. And that Jewish voters aren’t obliged more than any other cohort to be zealots willing to abandon their own values, religious and otherwise, for the sake of one pet issue. Note, too, that even the famous formulation “Is it good for the Jews?” is not phrased “Is it good for Israel?” Those are different questions. As is, broadly, “Is it good?” — the measure that animates me.

So who made that assertion I quoted? Trump, of course. But, once again, ignore my brief digression into truth telling. Focus instead on “Any Jewish person …”

Why would anybody phrase it that way? Nobody says “Catholic person” or “Protestant person,” or “Hindu person” or “Buddhist person.” It’s because, to the speaker, “Jew” smacks of insult. And it can only smack of insult if you consider “Jew” to be an epithet. And for “Jew” to be an epithet, you have to believe at some level Jew-ness is sinister. You are conscious that antisemitism is taboo, so you edit your speech to avoid a word that you yourself associate with malevolence, stinginess, trickery, disproportionate power or whatever stereotype you find objectionable. In other words, in the very effort not to out yourself, you out yourself.

In singular and plural. Here’s a quote from the same creep, this time assessing mass blame if he should lose next month’s election: “Jewish people would really have a lot to do with that if that happens, because ... 60 percent of the people are voting for the enemy.”

Again, ignore all the other depravity, such as identifying the opposing political party not as a political adversary but an enemy. Ignore that. And ignore that Jews represent only 2.5% of the electorate, half of them in solid blue states that cannot swing the election. Just know that he’s saying “Jewish people” so as not to seem antisemitic while making Jews the scapegoats for his own defeat.

The preemptive blame, of course, is meant to both intimidate Jewish voters and rally the violent among MAGA faithful, such as the ones who attacked the Capitol over his 2020 “stolen election” lies, such as the “very fine” neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us,” such as the mass murderers who shot six Jews to death at a deli in Jersey City, NJ, such as Robert Bowers, guilty of gunning down worshipers in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, such as the perpetrators of 8873 antisemitic incidents in the United States last year alone (in 2014, the year before Trump’s first presidential campaign, there were 912, and the number has risen every year since), such as the Proud Boys, Goyim Defense League, Blood Tribe, Ku Klux Klan, QAnon, Black Hebrew Israelites, Atomwaffen Division and other hate groups.

The orange monster uses other coded language, as well. “Poisoning the blood” of America, for instance, is high on his list, applying equally to Jews and dark-skinned immigrants who his MAGA stormtroopers swear will not be permitted to replace them.  And, from one of his 2016 campaign rallies, this:

The Washington establishment and the financial and media corporations that fund it exist for only one reason: to protect and enrich itself … For those who control the levers of power in Washington, and for the global special interests … [i]t’s a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities … This is a conspiracy against you, the American people, and we cannot let this happen or continue. This is our moment of reckoning as a society and as a civilization itself.

To crack the code, simply replace the word “global” with “Jewish.” Don’t credit him, though. The rhetoric is basically lifted from the fabricated antisemitic “smoking gun” document, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the gold standard for Jew hating and Jew baiting since 1903, much cited and adored by conspiracy-theorists for more than a century. I saw a fresh copy of it the other day at a bookseller’s street stand in the heart of Belgrade.

I raged at the vendor, who shrugged. “Big seller,” he said, though Serbia has 10 times more bakeries than Jewish people. What’s global, it turns out, is not a conspiracy of money-grubbing Shylocks. It’s an ever present animus that surfaces periodically to kill 6 people in a deli, or 6 million in Europe. Oh, and none of them cares whether I attend High Holiday services or not. They despise me for my polluted blood, and spare few opportunities to remind me.

But they should know this: I’m not a Jewish person. Secular or not, observant or not, devout or not, I’m a Jew. Proudly and defiantly, indelibly and eternally. Shout it out. Jew. Jew. Jew. That isn’t an insult, asshole.

L’shana tova.