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OCTOBER 27, 2022
Meyerson on TAP
**The GOP Gentiles Judging Jews**
At a moment of resurgent antisemitism, how did Donald Trump and Doug
Mastriano become authorities on who's really Jewish?
Intolerance takes lots of forms, including the construction of border
walls, physical and categorical. Israel has not only presented obstacles
to Palestinians (and I'm putting that very mildly), but also has
erected barriers to certain categories of Jews. The largely secular
state has long empowered Orthodox rabbis to rule on questions of
Jewishness and Jewish observance, which, if it's not Orthodox, may as
well be
**treyf** (the antonym of kosher).
Lately, Republican leaders
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have also taken it upon themselves to rule on Jewishness, chiefly as a
way to castigate the substantial majority of American Jews who are
liberal or progressive and thus pose a threat to right-wing values and
Republican candidates. Recently, Donald Trump cautioned American Jews to
"get their act together ... before it's too late" by showing more
support for Israel and its policies, adding that Christian evangelicals
were "far more appreciative" of Israel. Self-described Christian
nationalist Doug Mastriano, the Republican opposing Democrat Josh
Shapiro in Pennsylvania's upcoming gubernatorial election, criticized
Shapiro for sending his children to a Jewish day school, which he said
was a sign of Shapiro's elitism. (He issued no such condemnation of
parents who send their kids to Catholic and other Christian day
schools.) Responding to criticism of this particular attack, Mastriano
adviser Jenna Ellis, a former lawyer for Trump, dismissed Shapiro as "at
best, a secular Jew"-which, among other things, is simply inaccurate:
Shapiro is religiously observant, though not Orthodox.
The MAGA line that's emerging is that they have nothing against Real
Jews, only the Actually Existing American Jews, increasing numbers of
whom are indeed secular, supporters of minority rights, civil liberties,
and immigrants. The ultra-Orthodox are fine, as they bloc-vote
Republican, don't accept the notion of human equality, favor the Word
over the Enlightenment-in short, are politically interchangeable with
most Christian evangelicals.
During his recent interview with Kanye West, which covered West's
views on Jews, the redoubtable Tucker Carlson (by "redoubtable," I mean
his every word and facial expression should be subject to doubt) failed
to challenge any of Ye's views. That comports with Carlson's job
description, which is to stoke fear and rage among his viewers by
warning darkly of the threats, which range from the inflated to the
imaginary, to the untroubled reign of white Christian supremacy.
When you get right down to it, what the right feels threatened by and
antagonistic toward is Jews in the diaspora. Jews are fine in Israel,
now that the country has substantially abandoned its socialist roots and
is acting like any good occupying (that is, abusive) power. The
ultra-Orthodox of Williamsburg and elsewhere aren't really in the
diaspora, either: They live in cocoons of pre-scientific anti-modernity,
in Dark Age shtetls of the mind. But Jews who've accepted
Enlightenment values-rationality, equality, freedom of speech, the
whole liberal
**megillah**-they're the Bad Jews. In a time when scapegoating "the
other" has become the foremost political strategy of right-wing
movements and parties the world over, Bad Jews are being returned to
their time-honored place on the list of available targets. Other groups
have it far worse, to be sure, but, speaking in my Bad Jew capacity to
those other groups, it's an honor to be in your company.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
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The Progressive Misstep on Ukraine Diplomacy
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