Tim Stevenson is a community organizer with Post Oil Solutions from Athens ([email protected]) and is the author of Resilience and Resistance: Building Sustainable Communities for a Post Oil Age (Green Writers Press), and Transformative Activism: A Values Revolution in Everyday Life in a Time of Societal Collapse (Apocryphile Press).
ATHENS-In September, Donald Trump sent a warning to American Jews that "If I don't win this election, the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss."
Though he has historically stereotyped American Jews in antisemitic ways, often representing them as greedy and money-grubbing, more loyal to Israel than they are to the United States, Trump's latest statement had a sharper edge to it because it was expressed in the context of the antisemitism that is increasingly emerging amongst MAGA politicians and allies.
A blatant example of this was the North Carolina Republicans' nominating as their candidate for governor Mark Robinson, the current lieutenant governor, who owns a notorious history as an antisemite and a Holocaust denier.
Interestingly, in a 2019 Washington Post piece, Yair Rosenberg observes that while Trump has embraced antisemitic stereotypes about Jews, at the same time he admires them as positive features.
"He wants Jews to be his attorneys and manage his money so that he, too, can be rich. […] As a man who has always stood solely for his own naked self-interest, Trump does not see the anti-Semitic conception of the self-interested Jew as a complaint, but rather a compliment."
Not surprisingly, Trump's philosemitic admiration of what are otherwise standard antisemitic tropes only reinforces the poisonous beliefs of bigots who weaponize them against Jews. As such, they contribute to this development on the American right.
In a Sept. 23 Atlantic post, Rosenberg writes, "Anti-Semitism has always existed on the political extreme, but it began to migrate into the mainstream of the Republican coalition during the Trump administration."
Despite what journalist Franklin Foer defines as a "golden age" for Jews in America from the end of World War II to the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attack (for which some accused Israel), antisemitism reasserted itself during the present century with the American right.
Led by Nick Fuentes, an internet personality who expressed support for racial segregation and denied the Holocaust, this emergence was abundantly evident at the 2017 Charlottesville, Virginia neo-Nazi rally, where marchers chanted, "Jews will not replace us."
This chant referenced the "Great Replacement" delusion that Jews were plotting to fill the country with Black and brown folks in an effort to displace the white race. This same paranoia activated white supremacist Robert Bowers a year later to commit the largest massacre of Jews on American soil at a Pittsburgh synagogue.
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While the Republican Party continued to support Israel and oppose antisemitism, this stance was being attacked by an insurgency that was going in a different direction.
The very popular media personality Tucker Carlson hosted a number of anti-Jewish guests on his show, including the far-right podcaster Candace Owens, whose 2.72 million YouTube subscribers and the 5.7 million who received her X feed heard her rants about how Israel was complicit in the 9/11 attacks and killed John F. Kennedy.
And then the world's richest man, Elon Musk, repeatedly shared anti-Jewish propaganda on X, which he now owns.
By 2022, Fuentes was being wined and dined by Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
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In the Sept. 23 Atlantic post, Rosenberg incisively wrote that "Trump has made foundational what was once marginal. Beginning with birtherism and culminating in election denialism, he turned anti-establishment conspiracism into a litmus test for attaining political power."
"As Trump and his allies have coopted the conservative movement, it has become defined by a fundamental distrust of authority and institutions, and a concurrent embrace of conspiracy theories about elite cabals.
"And the more conspiratorial thinking becomes commonplace on the right, the more inevitable that its partisans will land on one of the oldest conspiracies of them all."
Founded upon the fear of how a small group controls world events, antisemitism - like all conspiracies - is grounded in paranoia. Which is why people like MAGA Republicans who feed upon conspiracism are especially susceptible to antisemitism.
The latter, however, has not been confined to the right, as the Times' columnist, Bret Stephens, recently pointed out. While present before Oct. 7, it dramatically increased after that date.
"In 2013 the [Anti-Defamation League] recorded just 751 antisemitic incidents in the United States. In 2023 the organization counted 8,873 incidents, an increase of over 1,000 percent," Stephens wrote.
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Where they expected to find solidarity with liberal and progressive Americans - viz the atrocity of the Hamas Oct. 7 assault - American Jews felt abandoned, instead, as their comrades on the left engaged in anti-Israel protests.
This was compounded by hateful statements toward Jews by some pro-Palestinian activists, particularly on college campuses.
Though not excusable, there is nevertheless a very thin line that separates protests against the right-wing Israeli government and antisemitism, especially in the minds of those where to be a Jew is "to embrace - often as a thoughtful critic but never as a hateful scold - the great, complicated, essential project of a Jewish state," as Stephens put it.
They see Israel as finally their home, a haven from the unspeakable horror of the Holocaust and centuries of pogroms that they, as a people, have suffered.
A criticism of Israel can easily be interpreted as hatred of Jews, especially when some of us pro-Palestinian activists mindlessly direct our otherwise legitimate outrage with the Israeli state at individual Jews, or sloganeer, "From the river to the sea/Palestine will be free," referencing the elimination of Israel.
This is most unfortunate, and decidedly unfair - especially, as Stephens reminds us, "few minorities have been more conspicuously attached to progressive causes than American Jews." I have fond memories, for example, of the numerous Jews who were committed comrades in the civil rights and peace struggles during the '50s, '60s, and '70s.
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Of equal concern, however, is how the charge of antisemitism has become weaponized by our pro-Israeli government and MAGA Republicans to both discredit and suppress the many of us who righteously oppose Israel's genocidal war against the Palestinians.
This is especially galling when this same government is providing Israel with the military wherewithal to commit its unconscionable crimes and violating its own and international laws by countenancing Israel's intentional starvation of Gazans.
And when, in their usual hypocritical ways, Trump's Republicans are increasing engaged in the same antisemitism that they accuse progressives of expressing.
This Voices Viewpoint was submitted to The Commons.
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