Jonathan Weisman - (((Semitism))): Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump

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To Jennifer

You shall appoint magistrates and officials for your tribes, in all the settlements that the Lord your God is giving you, and they shall govern the people with due justice. You shall not judge unfairly: you shall show no partiality; you shall not take bribes, for bribes blind the eyes of the discerning and upset the plea of the just. Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may thrive and occupy the land that the Lord your God is giving you.

Deut. 16:1820

On a pleasant June day in 2017, two groups of mostly young men, maybe a hundred or so, gathered in separate spots in the nations capital. The new president of the United States was on Twitter, railing against his tormentors like a defenseless victim rather than the most powerful man in the world. The investigation of alleged collusion between Trump associates and Russian intelligence during the 2016 campaign was quietly gaining steam. Trumps political agenda was stymied, his approval ratings at remarkable lows for someone who had been in office for only half a year. But all was not lost for the forty-fifth president. In society at large, far beyond 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a new force was taking hold, at least in part in the presidents nameone that was allowing bigotry to break into the open without fear of censure or shame. On the contrary, a weird kind of heroism was taking shape in certain circles of the countryindeed, of the worldwhere political incorrectness was to be heralded, the more incorrect the better. Donald J. Trump was having an impact.

So it was that at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, a site redolent with meaning, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told the world of his dream and where Lincolns second inaugural address warning that every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword is etched in marble, the leaders of what has become known as the alt-right stood before a hundred or so followers. They were clad in khakis and white polo shirtsthe Brownshirts of our timeand they cheered as the men (and one woman) at the microphone spewed anti-immigrant, racist, and anti-Semitic free speech. At the same time, in front of Trumps White House, a smaller group, derisively labeled the alt-lite by the true believers in the alt-right, railed against the political violence of the Left, obliquely lending its support to the embattled president they revered. The two groups, in fact, hated each otherevidence, perhaps, that the far right was already splintering. But they also had common cause: both gatherings were billed as rallies for free speech, and both saw freedom of speech as license to say any damned thing they wanted. The time-honored notions that one persons free speech ends where anothers safety and freedom begins, that shouting fire in a crowded movie theater is not, in fact, protected speech, had been discarded without thought.

At the Lincoln Memorial, Matthew Lyons, a self-described scientific illuminist, warned against the parasites clinging to the white race. You can leave them be; they die and the organism dies with them, or kill them and save the organism.

Another fixture of the new white nationalist movement, Michael Peinovich, also known as Mike Enoch, cut to the chase: Instead of giving another paean to free speech, yeah, yeah, great, we all love it, Im actually gonna fucking use it. The real battle is fought on the grounds of standing up for white people, he bellowed into the microphone before dishing out the red meat to the faithful. He rattled through the endless signs of the coming white genocide, the diversity imperative that is depriving whites of jobs and admissions to higher education, the hordes of brown and black people fleeing terrible lands to sully ours without invitation from the upstanding white people. Tell me what fucking rule we broke? Sorry for winning, he shouted to cheers. Oddly, a man stood next to him with a sign that read Jews for Trump in English and Hebrew. But that didnt stop Enoch from launching a call-and-response on who controls the media, who controls the Federal Reserve, who controls Hollywood, who controls Wall Street: the Jews, the Jews, the Jews.

You will not replace us! You will not replace us! You will not replace us! the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial chanted.

There it was, a new movement of prejudice and hate largely born in the invisible fever swamp of the Internet, now present in the flesh and claiming a new battleground for the Age of Trump: speech itself.

As the rally wrapped up, its ostensible leader and keynote speaker, Richard B. Spencer, the man credited with coining the phrase alt-right, told the dispersing crowd, Remember everyone, see you in Charlottesville. Clearly, this gathering was a dry run for bigger things.

* * *

As a child, I didnt take hate all that seriously, even though I grew up in the South, where racism remained casual and African American women came to my segregated neighborhood in north Atlanta in the morning, then went home in the evening, exhausted, on what we called the maids bus. My family attended the most liberal Reform synagogue in the city, perhaps in the entire New Souththe Hebrew Benevolent Congregation, known by everyone simply as the Temple. It had a storied history in the civil rights movement and an ongoing relationship with the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the Reverend Dr. King had once preached. But what I remember of my religious education was a near-constant lesson in Holocaust studies with a side of Zionismthe study of a past atrocity and a distant land, neither of which had much meaning to me. At one point in Sunday school, a friend and I put on a puppet show set in Auschwitz, where we joked about the gross and stinky latrines. Hate broadly, and anti-Semitism more narrowly, were that abstract and meaningless. We found it riotous.

And then, suddenly, it was neither abstract nor meaningless. The campaign of 2016 was well under way on May 18 of that year. Donald Trump had not yet won the Republican nomination for president, but he had marauded through most of the primary season by then, crushing Jeb Bush out of the gate, rendering Chris Christie a vassal, making mincemeat of Little Marco Rubio in his home state of Florida, and finally vanquishing Ted Cruz at his Waterloo, the Indiana primary, after mocking the appearance of his last rivals wife and accusing his father of helping to assassinate John F. Kennedy. Much of the cognoscenti still labored under some vague notion that Trumpnot really a conservative, certainly not a liberalwould be stopped at the convention in July, although the mechanics of that engineered coup remained a mystery. He certainly would not be elected president. Meanwhile, pro-Trump and anti-Trump forces were clashing with bloody intensity in San Jose, California, and on the streets of Chicago. Lusty chants of Lock her up! rang out at all of the Republican candidates rallies. Anti-Trump protestersoften black or Latinowere routinely pushed, punched, and kicked, with the politician at the podium growling his approval. Freedom of speech was no longer an inalienable right guaranteed by the Constitution but a concept to be fought over, defined, and redefined, and possessed by either the Right or the Left.