Here’s a thread on why the president’s Executive Order is a fine thing:
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin. It explicitly DOES NOT protect religious minorities from discrimination.
Why? Because religious groups like to discriminate a bit. Catholic nursing homes WANT to be able to prefer taking Catholic residents, for example. Jewish nursing homes too. So on the basis of those objections, discrimination on the basis of religion wasn’t written into the law.
In all of the responses to my tweet yesterday, one thing that appeared at least a hundred times was that religious minorities are already protected. But this is not correct!
Now, it IS true that for the past 15 years or so the federal government has held that Jews can be considered a nationality.
Why did the Bush and Obama administrations do that? Not to put Jews in camps—as people have been ludicrously suggesting is the ulterior motive of the Trump administration—but to try to shoehorn our complicated Jewish identities into the existing statute.
Indeed, our Jewish identities ARE complex, and I agree with many people who offered in replies to my tweet that *Jews* should be the ones to puzzle out those complexities. Still, I have been shocked by the replies insisting that it is illegitimate to speak of Jews as a nation.
In poll after poll of Jews, a plurality reject identifying as “Reform,” “Conservative,” or “Orthodox,” choosing instead to call themselves “secular.” Where do these people fit into a conception of Judaism that defines it exclusively as a religion?
Now, if it has already been government policy to consider Jews protected under Title VI, what possible benefit did Trump’s EO serve (I mean serve *us Jews*, not the potential electoral benefit it may offer him)?
Many Jewish students face a truly hostile environment on many college campuses. The antisemitism they face comes from both the right and the left, and the Department of Education hasn’t put much pressure on schools to fix that. Now they might.
Won’t this lead to government crackdowns on anti-Israel free speech? No, it won’t. There are only a few instances of Jewish students suing to punish anti-Israel speech (probably because Jewish lawyers are too smart to take those cases), and the courts have generally tossed them.
Is this EO an example of executive overreach? No it is not! It’s actually a fairly modest proposal, that doesn’t even go as far as the bipartisan Anti-Semitism Awareness Act that has broad support in Congress, but is tied up for political reasons.
Just to wrap up, I’m going to be a little vulnerable and make a plea for everyone to, you know, be a little nicer on here. In the past 24 hours, I was called a “kapo” so many times I stopped counting, all because I said I believed in the Jewish people.
I would suggest that there’s something wrong, even sick, about people who talk like that. And I think it’s tragic that this website allows them to lob such bombs from afar, and then rewards their cruelty with likes and retweets.
My sincere gratitude to all those people who disagreed respectfully. I hope this thread helps clear up any confusion about the technical elements of the law. ✌️
עם ישראל חי✡️
עם ישראל חי✡️
