Trump’s antisemitism has nothing to do with people being Jewish. That doesn’t make it less dangerous.
. Sprinkle in some elderly Fox News watchers, and you likely round out his Jewish base, albeit one which does not include seven out of every 10 Jews.,” to borrow a Twitter phrase from right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro. These wayward Members of the Tribe, according to conservatives like Shapiro, have the revolting tendency to vote for Democrats and are accused of not supporting Israel .
As I see it, Trump has crafted a variant of antisemitism all his own, so to speak. His frustrations aren’t primarily based on the idea that Jews murdered Christ . They aren’t centered on the idea that Jews possess distinctly inferior blood or racial characteristics . Nor on the notion that Jews are either marauding communists or rapacious capitalists . No, Trump’s anger is based on the fact that the overwhelming majority of Jews did not cast their ballots for Trump.
The danger of this rhetoric to the American Jewish community is threefold. First, there are Trump’s devotees whose capacity for violence is not hypothetical. Second, as we saw above, it emboldens others to chime in with their own antisemitic effusions. A final problem has to do with the stresses that Trump’s hectoring creates within the community. Anyone familiar with Jewish America knows there are internal tensions . Say what you will about Trump, but he has a unique genius for finding a crack, a seam, a fissure in the social landscape and then ripping it open into a belching canyon of digital rage.
Jewish reactions to Trump’s Truth Social tirade shadowed some of these tensions. The Anti Defamation League slammed the remarks as