1939 Revisited

Trump even went so far as saying that Jews who vote for Democrats had “a total lack of knowledge” or “great disloyalty.” Ouch.

I gather from his citation of formerly Jewish talk show host who said that “the Jewish people in Israel love him like he’s the King of Israel,” Trump can’t figure out why most Jews here at home just don’t feel the same way.

Before I help explain why we don’t, the president’s assumption that Jewish people all think the same thing because we are Jewish shows that he really doesn’t know very much about Jews.

Yes, we all tend to like lox and bagels and we talk with our hands, but that is where the commonality ends. Jews throughout history have been arch capitalists, socialists, neo-cons, neo-liberals, Marxists and every ideology in between. We have a diverse set of views about international relations. We disagree, a lot, about Israeli politics and the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

And by the way, most other religious and ethnic groups in America are equally diverse and don’t really like it when others assume them to be a monolith.

For this reason, I realize I can’t speak for the 79 percent of American Jews who voted Democratic in the 2018 midterms. But I can explain why I voted that way and I think that many Jews like me did so as well

✦ Bottom line: We don’t share the president’s values

First of all, most American Jews have a close connection to immigrants. Many of us are second, third or fourth generation immigrants. We feel strongly that refugees escaping persecution should be able to seek safety and shelter in America because throughout our history we have been persecuted and forced to flee to save our lives.

We have been on many refugee caravans. Ferdinand and Isabella evicted us from Spain, the tsars used pogroms to chase us out of Russia and we fled on boats and trains and by foot from the Nazis. We support today’s refugees because we know they could have been us.

We also support civil rights and diversity. We know what it’s like to be an oppressed minority for we “were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

We may feel very comfortable and secure in America, but we recoil when any American is targeted as “the other” — whether it be the Mexican you accuse of being a rapist or the Muslim you stereotype as being a terrorist — because so often we have been “otherized.”

The Jew with horns, the Jewish moneylender, the Jew with dual “loyalties.” We know that a frenzied mob calling for an American citizen of color to be kicked out of the country might be chanting to kick us out too one day soon. For there is one thing we know for sure: Those folks who don’t like people because they are black, brown or Muslims don’t like Jews much either.

American Jews are deeply suspicious of any whiff of authoritarianism. We know the places we have thrived the best have been pluralistic democracies: America, Great Britain and Israel. But we also know the signs of an eroding democracy: demonizing of a free press, false claims about a rigged electoral process, the undermining of an independent judiciary, to name a few. When a charismatic leader scapegoats minorities for society’s ills and claims that “I alone can fix it,” our deeply engrained Jewish warning lights start flashing red. We have seen this play before.

Trump can order a Star of David be placed on the American flag, but I will never vote for someone with values so antithetical to mine. These values I consider essential to me as a Jew.