Donald Trump is attacking both Jews and the left with one clean blow
On Thursday, Donald Trump signed an executive order that defines Judaism as a nationality. In the process, he also effectively defined some 7.5 million American Jews as dual nationals, with dual loyalties. This is an anti-semitic trope with a long, ugly history.
Ostensibly, Trump’s order was a ploy to crack down on the Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement on college campuses. It will enable the Department of Education to ban the protest movement--a solidarity call from Palestinian civil society to bring an help end the Israeli
occupation there--as legally discriminatory under civil rights law, ironically. It’s a throwback of the worst kind to have an attack on Jews and one on the left so clearly intertwined.
Anti-Semitism and anti-communism – and anti-leftism more broadly – share a violent and intimate history that stretches from Nazi Germany to the House Un-American Activities Committee to the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
Charges of Judeo-Bolshevism have been a premise for limiting the scope of who deserves basic rights and citizenship Like racism and sexism, anti-Semitism has oozed through history and as such is hardly limited to one side of the political spectrum.
But despite their bad-faith accusations of anti-Semitism against left-wing politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, today’s increasingly radical right is reviving this nasty trend more plainly than in decades, and making life more dangerous for Jews from Pittsburgh to Germany.
