American Jews, caught between Ilhan Omar and Donald Trump, are lost in a wilderness by alexnazaryan
WASHINGTON—The day after several major Democratic candidates announced that they would not be attending the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which begins in Washington on Sunday, President Trump did what he always does, pouring accelerant on an already hot-burning fire of public debate.
One of those leaders happens to be my own rabbi at Temple Micah, a progressive synagogue in Washington, D.C., that sits almost in the shadow of the National Cathedral. That rabbi, Josh Beraha, first felt something amiss in the summer of 2017. That July, several participants at the Chicago Dyke March were expelled from the parade for displaying a rainbow flag adorned with a blue star of David, the symbol of Israel.
Beraha says that among members of Temple Micah, there is “anxiety [and] fear” about the new hostility, with the Anti-Defamation League reporting that 2017 saw the single greatest year-over-year increase in anti-Semitic incidents since 1979. There is “a lot of uncertainty about how seriously we should take the resurgence of anti-Semitism,” Beraha says. “We are only just beginning to think about it.
And if the Women’s March was once a potent symbol of the anti-Trump resistance, it has since devolved into incoherence and intolerance, with its founders openly embracing Farrakhan, one of the most noxious anti-Semites on the American scene. As one of those founders explained to the New York Times, “white Jews, as white people, uphold white supremacy.”
“I always knew this could be something special, but now I have no doubts,” Pipko told me an an email. Boris Epshteyn thinks so. “The growing anti-Semitism within the Democratic Party is real, and it is scary,” says Epshteyn, who is Jewish, worked on the Trump campaign, served in the Trump White House and is now the chief political commentator for the Sinclair Broadcast Group. Epshteyn says that the bonds forged in the civil rights era between the Jewish community and the Democratic Party are less relevant to younger Jews than to their Baby Boomer parents.
Susannah Heschel, a prominent voice in Jewish progressivism who chairs the Jewish studies program at Dartmouth, warns that the current moment could be akin to Weimar Germany, when many blamed socialists for the ills of the post-World War I era and thus failed to notice the rise of Adolf Hitler. “There’s too much worry about the left and not enough worry about the right,” says Heschel, whose father was the prominent ally of Dr. King pictured at Selma.
Some Jews have even praised Omar for bringing into the open issues that have been relegated to darkness and silence for years, if not decades. “All of this stuff has never been debated,” says Aaron David Miller, a Middle East expert who now serves as the vice president of the Wilson Center. It is thanks to Omar, he explains, that we are finally seriously discussing the influence of the Israeli lobby, as well as the treatment of Palestinians.
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