After George Floyd, there was an obligation in some progressive circles to prove you were sufficiently against racism by defining yourself as anti-racist. Now it’s President Donald Trump’s turn to demand linguistic fealty in a fight against the prejudice du jour.
The problem is that Trump’s war on antisemitism seems antisemitic.
Don’t get me wrong. Antisemitism is real, odious and deadly, and a sincere effort to diminish it should be commended. But contrary to recent Justice Department claims, antisemitic statements aren’t illegal in a country with free speech. Germany is a country that curtails antisemitic speech, particularly in reference to the Holocaust, but Vice President JD Vance has criticized Germany for this practice, claiming that its government is limiting the rights of Nazis.
So perhaps that’s why I question the sincerity of the administration’s efforts to oppose bigotry. Or perhaps it’s because the administration seems to revel in bigotry towards many other groups. There have been outrageous stabbings, shootings and bomb threats against Jewish American congregations in recent years, but the same is true for Muslim American congregations. Yet there has been no effort by the administration to combat that and no House committee investigating anti-Muslim bias. Why are elected officials, who represent all citizens, so deeply concerned about threats to one minority community and not others? Unless the true goal is setting one group against another.
Singling Jews out for special treatment seems an unlikely way of preventing prejudice against them but a tried and true method for increasing it. In the 17th century, there was something called a Court Jew. Though it was a time of open hostility toward Jews, often resulting in massacres, Court Jews were granted special privileges in exchange for providing revenue to the members of the royal court by lending them money and collecting taxes for them. This served the dual purposes of circumventing church prohibitions on moneylending while providing a scapegoat for anger about excessive taxation.
Trump is likewise accomplishing two goals: He’s successfully raising millions of dollars from people delighted by his ersatz philosemitic bludgeoning of elite universities, while he’s simultaneously inflaming antisemitic sentiments on those very same campuses. And there’s reason to believe he’s taking equal pleasure from both, because unlike some of the students he’s attempting to deport, Trump has a documented history of antisemitic rhetoric and support for neo-Nazis, including the white supremacists who rallied in Charlottesville and the pardoned January 6th “patriots” who proudly brandished signs with Nazi slogans.
Speaking of Nazis, those deportation efforts by the Trump administration have an implicitly reprehensible and hypocritical precedent in the Third Reich. Discriminatory expulsions with no due process are what Jews have experienced repeatedly for millennia before arriving in the United States. In the name of defending Jews, the Trump administration is removing one of the greatest protections they’ve ever had.
This week happens to be the Jewish holiday of Passover, when Jews celebrate the foundational liberation story of Moses leading the ancient Hebrews out of Egyptian bondage. Coincidentally, Trump recently defined “liberation” as the ability to impose tariffs. In this season of renewal for three major faiths, perhaps it’s a good time to contemplate how we each define freedom and what we're willing to pay for it.