...justifications for abusing Jews have a way of metastasizing. Permission structures for anti-Semitism are rarely restricted to their original target. Once a society starts accepting attacks on entire swaths of Jews—for being too liberal, too religious, too secular, too pro-Israel, too anti-Israel, too whatever—that acceptance will grow. And when Jewish existence becomes conditional on staying in the good graces of a non-Jewish actor or movement, it becomes an impoverished existence—provisional and precarious, forever looking over its shoulder.
This is why true friends of the Jewish people don’t pick which half of the world’s Jews are the good ones and which half are the bad ones, like some sort of anti-Semitic Santa Claus. They do not paint millions of Jewish people with Manichaean moral strokes, but rather grant them the dignity of their diversity and judge individuals as individuals, not as avatars for their group. Those who, like Trump and King, make lists of bad Jews or suggest that Jews aren’t proper Jews if they don’t adopt a certain ideology are not allies of the Jews. They’re the people laying the groundwork for persecution.
- Yair Rosenberg
9/19/23
The former president’s anti-Jewish remarks follow an old pattern.
