(Jewish Group) 'Never again' means actually demanding zero tolerance of antisemitic stereotypes
There is something sad, verging on tragic, about the Jewish need for validation from people outside the tribe – like the proverbial playground outcast who smiles shyly when the class bully gives him the time of day.
This attitude is manifested in the unctuous delight that is taken when a celebrity or politician or artist is discovered to be Jewish or even half-Jewish — whether it is Madeline Albright, Paul Newman, or Cardinal John O’Connor, the late Archbishop of New York, whose mother was born Jewish and converted to Catholicism. That Jews revel in this slightly puerile sense of pride, after centuries of being discriminated against in both subtle and extreme ways, is not surprising. But the fact remains that it is hard to know what to call this other than an exercise in collective self-abasement.
I have been thinking about this phenomenon for a long time, and it was underscored in the wake of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago deplorable dinner with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes. The dinner came a week after Trump got a standing ovation at the gala of the Zionist Organization of America, which awarded him its Theodore Herzl Gold Medallion – an honor previously bestowed upon Winston Churchill, David Ben Gurion and Golda Meir. It is impossible to imagine any of them breaking bread with West, the rapper-turned-philosopher who has made a habit of spouting antisemitic remarks (“death con 3 on Jewish people”) and recently allowed that he sees “good things about Hitler;” or Fuentes, a right-wing white supremacist and Holocaust-denier.
Over the years, some Jews had mistaken Trump’s daughter Ivanka’s marriage to Jared Kushner and conversion to Judaism or his largely transactional and, in some cases, purely gestural relationship with Israel — moving the embassy to Jerusalem — as evidence of philosemitism. For them, his embrace of these two openly antisemitic characters felt like a shocking betrayal. When asked to apologize, an aide responded that Trump “didn’t care.” Jewish Republicans, including several former officials in the Trump White House and the head of the very ZOA that had just given him its highest honor, have been running in the other direction.
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