Even before the results were known in this most divisive of campaigns, the push was on for the Jewish community to heal its partisan divides, with a rally in Washington called Sunday to promote “Jewish Unity.”
As someone who was delighted to cast a ballot for the Harris/Walz ticket earlier this week, allow me to say: It’s not that easy.
The communal wounds highlighted, and horribly exacerbated, by this election, can’t be healed with the singing of “Hatikvah,” a rally, or any other easy-to-imagine Band–Aid.
That’s because campaign 2024 was not a debate over how America should balance national defense, social welfare and fiscal probity, the classic Republican/Democrat divide.
It was, fundamentally, over who counts as American, and who counts as a human, and about who our country’s laws are meant to protect and bind.
If you have advocated for a political party that says women should allow the outcomes of their pregnancy to be determined by reactionary Catholic judges rather than by their doctors or rabbinic decisors — let alone their conscience — that’s not just politics; that’s very, very personal.
If you have supported a political party that spent tens of millions of dollars on advertisements demonizing trans children and the parents who love them, that’s not just a political divide. It’s a painfully personal rift.
And when you support a political campaign that unapologetically calls it opponents “vermin” — language that historian Anne Applebaum has noted was used repeatedly by Hitler and Stalin but never even by the most racist American politicians — well, don’t expect those political opponents to meet you at the communal table.
When Abe Foxman, the director emeritus of the Anti-Defamation League who penned an oped in support of Harris, can be called “a strident propagandist for the far left” by someone willing to sign their name to a letter in the local Jewish newspaper, we are at a place far beyond reasoned political discourse.
And it is a place far too close — depending on election results, of course — to those places where Jews dubbed “far left” were murdered by right-wing thugs (think of Argentina’s “self-styled ‘Western and Christian’ military dictatorship” during the “Dirty War” of the late 1970s) who may or may not have been acting under government aegis.
Because the connection between murderous right-wing regimes and Republican campaign rhetoric is much closer than you probably knew on Election Day. Did you know that Sen. and now Vice President-elect J.D. Vance endorsed a book published this summer called “Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them)” by Jack Posobiec? The book’s title clearly echoes the term Untermenschen, by which Nazis referred to Jews and Slavs. The book’s argument echoes classic antisemitic tropes of the Nazis and the John Birch Society in seeing insidious, secret communists hiding in every corner, while praising the way dictators like Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet fought their perceived enemies.
Such a screed is no surprise coming from Posobiec, who on Twitter back in 2016 led antisemitic attacks on the likes of journalist Wolf Blitzer, leading the ADL to create a “Task Force on Harassment of Journalists.” But a top Republican candidate endorsing a book by someone ADL describes as “a far-right activist, conspiracy theorist and white nationalist sympathizer”? That is indeed a surprise, or should be, as is the silence from Jewish organizations about it. Similarly, when the Republican side of the political divide was willing to harness antisemitic conspiracy theories against liberals and spew hate against other minorities, the ADL response was tepid.
Jewish groups defend this reluctance to criticize the excesses on the right by invoking their “nonpartisan” political status, or, indeed, by saying they prioritize “unity” in a divided community over “taking sides.” In urging people to come to the Nov. 10 rally, its main organizers write, “No matter the outcome [of the election], we will display to America that the Jewish community stands united.”
But if “standing united” means silence in the face of bigotry and conspiracy-mongering, perhaps unity has become a false idol. If “unity” means indulging a minority in our community who support those who threatened the rest of us, perhaps the very notion of unity is the problem, and the rest of us need to walk away.
If groups are really committed to “unity,” they would broaden the tent to include those to the left of historic moderates like Abe Foxman. They wouldn’t tolerate a Jewish activist calling Chuck Schumer a “kapo” over his handling of the Columbia University protests. They wouldn’t have allowed the demonization of a liberal group like the New Israel Fund and then act surprised when our kids decide that joining an actual anti-Zionist group like Jewish Voice for Peace is the best way to fight for justice. If the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations has no room for a liberal, Zionist group like J Street, it’s incumbent on all of us to demand that our organizations — our synagogue bodies and our rabbinical associations — walk away from that false unity. It is time to show our devotion to democracy by demanding it from our representatives.
If the Jewish community is going to insist that the tent be big enough to include unapologetic Trumpers but exclude earnest, nonviolent critics of the Israeli government, I don’t want to be in it. And I suspect that in this, I speak for a large, silent majority of American Jews for whom the rhetorical assaults of MAGA Republicans are not simply “politics.”
Of course, by the time you read these words, Donald Trump’s re-election will already be a foregone conclusion. In which case let me extend a promise to my Republican neighbors: Rest assured that if I fear arrest for violating the Comstock Act by publishing books promoting trans activists, or for publicly criticizing the president as a journalist, or for helping someone procure mifepristone, I won’t come knocking on your door. I know too well that in such circumstances, to paraphrase a Lou Reed song, there’s no Jewish unity enough for me and you.
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