The Cruelty Is the Point

by Adam Serwer

  Accusing Jews of “disloyalty” is a classic anti-Semitic canard, a justification for repression and violence. But the president turned the canard on its head when he explained that what he meant was that American Jews were insufficiently loyal to Israel, affirming not only that he believes American Jews are fundamentally citizens of a foreign country and guests in the United States but that Jewish “dual loyalty” is both expected and admirable.

  Only publicly, however. Privately, the president’s staffers have overheard him angrily complaining that Jews “are only in it for themselves.” Trump spent much of his administration attacking two Muslim congresswomen, Democratic representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, for holding anti-Semitic beliefs, even though Trump fundamentally agrees with the sentiments Omar and Tlaib were accused of expressing—that American Jews are loyal to Israel rather than the United States.

  Attacks on religious and ethnic minorities are a predominant theme in Trump’s speeches and policies. But his relationship to Jews is unique, in that, as the writer Yair Rosenberg puts it, Trump believes anti-Semitic stereotypes—like the idea that Jews are clannish and miserly—to be positive traits. He has courted the American Jewish community by pursuing a close alliance with the Israeli government and received scorn from most Jewish voters in return. Trump’s enthusiastic reception from the Israeli right misled him into believing that American Jews would be a natural addition to his nationalist coalition. But the majority of American Jews, despite their support for Israel, identify with the cultural and political pluralism that has allowed them to live relatively safe and prosperous lives in the United States.

  All Trump’s crude entreaties have done is highlight the contradictions between the experiences of American Jews and their Israeli cousins, baffling a president who thinks in broad ethnic stereotypes, despite the fact that his daughter and son-in-law are both Jews. The reason for Trump’s eruption is that, having given Jews what he thought they wanted, he finds it baffling that they do not literally worship him; in 2019, Trump quoted a right-wing conspiracy theorist dubbing him the “King of Israel,” a title similar to the one the Gospels applied to Jesus. Trump only understands certain kinds of loyalty: fealty to him, which is paramount, and ethno-nationalism, which he understands as a kind of self-interest. Left-leaning American Jews, in the eyes of the president, fail both tests, for reasons he finds incomprehensible. Even so, Trump is still looking out for number one: In Trump’s reasoning, by being “disloyal” to Israel, American Jews are being ungrateful to Trump for all he’s done for them.

  The disconnect, however, is easy to explain: The geostrategic interests of the right-wing party governing the state of Israel are not the same as the political interests of American Jews—in fact, they are increasingly divergent. Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, has made a tactical decision to ally with illiberal, even anti-Semitic parties and governments in Europe, betting that right-wing ethno-nationalist governments will be less likely to object to Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian territory. That has extended to the United States, where much to the horror of liberal Zionists—those who have an ideological commitment to a Jewish state but also want an end to the occupation—Netanyahu has made a strategic bet that the Republican Party’s Evangelical base will be a stronger source of uncritical support for Israel than American Jews are. This has led to, among other bizarre Trump-era spectacles, the now-common absurdity of right-wing gentiles attacking their left-wing Jewish critics as anti-Semites for being insufficiently supportive of Israel.

  The moral implications of such a strategy aside, Netanyahu’s basic calculus appears to be correct. There is a wider range of opinions about Israel at the average American or Israeli seder table than there is in the U.S. Congress. The bipartisan American consensus on Israel is less a product of Jewish influence than of Israel’s popularity among American gentiles, including the Evangelical Christians who are a crucial Republican constituency. Most American Jews support Israel but disapprove both of the current Israeli government and of Trump’s policies on Israel; a foreign policy toward Israel that catered to the preferences of the majority of American Jews would be significantly to the left of the one that exists today. As Trump later acknowledged ruefully, “Christians are more excited by [the embassy move] than Jewish people.”

  But Netanyahu’s strategy means that the Israeli prime minister is willing to enable the erosion of the American pluralist tradition that has made the United States a safe haven for religious and ethnic minorities of all kinds, but particularly for Jewish people, if that advances his own international strategy. That strategy runs parallel to that of the Republican Party, which hopes to split the Democratic coalition over support for Israel, even if that means scuttling bipartisan support for the Jewish state. That strategy has yet to succeed, and Israel may rue pursuing it if it does. At the center of both strategies stands Donald Trump, whose uncritical support for Israel and belief that America is fundamentally a nation for white Christians exacerbates a divide between the two largest Jewish populations in the world.

  The president’s frame, then, has it exactly backward. It is not American Jews who have betrayed their Israeli cousins. It is the Netanyahu-led Israeli government that has betrayed Jews outside Israel, by aligning itself with nationalist parties in countries like Poland and Hungary, who are hostile to the ideals that make it possible for Jews in the Diaspora to live free of persecution. Chief among those betrayals is Netanyahu’s role in helping Trump erode the religious and ethnic pluralism to which most American Jews have devoted themselves for decades, seeking to preserve the United States not just as a haven for Jewish people but for persecuted minorities of all backgrounds.

  That ideal was born, much as the idea of multiracial American democracy was, in the conflict over slavery and abolition. Contrary to the assumptions of the Israeli right and their American allies, for American Jews this is not a question of blind faith but a strategy for survival that has helped move the United States closer to its founding principles. Jewish Americans have maintained a commitment to pluralism that has helped make the United States among the safest places in the world to be a Jew.

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  As the Civil War loomed, American Jews had many reasons to distrust the abolitionists and their crusade for social justice. Fervently Christian, some of the most ardent abolitionists were given to age-old expressions of anti-Jewish rhetoric. The abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison referred to the pro-slavery Mordecai Noah as a “Shylock” and a “miscreant Jew,” describing him as a “lineal descendant of the monsters who nailed Jesus to the cross between two thieves.” Garrison’s colleague Edmund Quincy, the sometime editor of his newspaper, The Liberator, commented that if Noah was “a fair specimen of the race, it is no wonder they have been an insulted and despised people.”

  Long before the large-scale immigration of Jews to the United States, in antebellum America the center of Jewish life was arguably in Charleston, South Carolina, the first state to secede. Two Southern senators, Judah Benjamin of Louisiana—later the treasury secretary of the Confederacy—and David Levy Yulee of Florida, were Jews. Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio once described Judah Benjamin as an “Israelite with Egyptian principles,” while the anti-slavery newspaper tycoon Horace Greeley described him as an “oily Jew.”

  As the nation teetered on the brink of war, the Jewish community in America was also divided. Jews in the South, having fled persecution in Europe, were largely accepting of the nation’s racial hierarchy—the American color line was more welcoming to Jews than the sectarianism of the old world. And in the North, past persecution encouraged Jews to avoid political conflicts, lest the oppression they fled follow them to their new home. The last thing America’s small community of Jews must have wanted was to insert themselves into a bitter political conflict over slavery—the kind of national upheaval that frequently led to Jews being slaughtered in
their former homelands. But much like the rest of the country, the American Jewish community could not avoid becoming divided over the question of slavery—and it is arguably here, in the tumult of the Civil War, where the modern American Jewish community and its commitment to social justice was born.

  That divide split open when a New York rabbi named Morris Raphall gave a widely publicized sermon that was both pro-Union and pro-slavery, offering a theological justification of slavery while mildly chastising Southern slaveowners for not adhering to the standards for human bondage set by the Bible.

  “Slaveholding is no sin, and that slave property is expressly placed under the protection of the Ten Commandments,” Raphall declared, adding that “the unfortunate negro is indeed the meanest of slaves. Much has been said respecting the inferiority of his intellectual powers, and that no man of his race has ever inscribed his name on the Pantheon of human excellence, either mental or moral.”

  As a path forward, Raphall offered a sensible centrism—Southern slaveholders should moderate the cruelty of the institution, and abolitionists should stop advocating for the end of human bondage.

  Two hundred miles away in Baltimore, the abolitionist Rabbi David Einhorn was disgusted. Calling Raphall’s sermon a “deplorable farce,” he offered a detailed and witheringly sarcastic rebuke to the argument that slavery was divinely sanctioned. “The Jew, a descendant of the race that offers daily praises to God for deliverance out of the house of bondage in Egypt, and even today suffers under the yoke of slavery in most places of the old world, crying out to God,” Einhorn wrote in a tone of disbelief, “undertook to designate slavery as a perfectly sinless institution, sanctioned by God. And the impudent persons who will not believe this are met with fanatical zeal, with a sort of moral indignation.” Responding to Raphall’s assertion that the curse of Ham justified slavery, a favorite argument of Southern theologians, Einhorn wrote, “God created man in His image. This blessing of God ranks higher than the curse of Noah.”

  Einhorn believed Jews, in fact, had an obligation, despite their fear of drawing attention to themselves, to fight on behalf of other oppressed people. “Israel, the people of peoples, is called upon to fight against the whole world for the whole world,” he wrote in 1861. This was both a religious moral obligation and a matter of political self-interest. “Once we start to evaluate people by the country of birth, next will come an evaluation by religion and in this case surely, the Jews, the so-called crucifiers of the crucified, will be in great danger.”

  Einhorn’s sermon, delivered in the slave state of Maryland, was not well received. After the buildings housing two abolitionist publications were destroyed, his congregation asked him to leave town, fearing that he would be the target of mob violence. Einhorn left Baltimore and never returned.

  Einhorn’s beliefs were not “assimilationist” in the sense of abandoning Jewish religious practice, despite the fact that they were infused by the spirit of the abolitionist strain of American liberalism. Rather, they were rooted in what he saw as the religious obligation of Jews to fight for justice on behalf of others—even if some of those others were not exactly friendly to Jews. For the majority of American Jews, that commitment persists to this day.

  Einhorn “challenged the long-held concern among Jewish leaders that their Judaism was their business and that they had better not speak out collectively as Jews and jeopardize their sense of belonging in the United States,” the historian Steven Weisman wrote in The Chosen Wars: How Judaism Became an American Religion. “His beliefs were a foreshadowing of the emerging doctrine that Jews were exponents of universal ethical precepts, and that it was their ‘mission,’ their duty, to disseminate them to the world.” These beliefs were no doubt influenced by the fact that Jewish immigrants were among the “forty-eighters,” German immigrants who were expelled following the liberal revolutions of 1848, and saw an opportunity to realize those ideals in their new homeland.

  Although in the argument between Raphall and Einhorn, the former is the traditionalist, it would be a mistake to therefore see Einhorn as assimilationist. On the contrary, the religious obligations of Jews as imagined by Einhorn restricted Jewish Americans from accepting one of the most important elements of American assimilation—its traditional racial hierarchy. Einhorn’s beliefs are now the prevailing interpretation of Jewish values in America, one whose tenets continue to confound nationalists of all stripes who believe that loyalty to blood and soil are paramount commitments. Not only nationalists like Donald Trump, but their Israeli cousins who built a garrison state on the banks of the Jordan River after millennia of exile.

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  Since the Civil War, American Jews have built a place for themselves here much the way other minorities have—by holding the United States accountable to its own principles. The survival of American Jews in the West was secured through pluralism and civil rights for all. American Jews opposed the racist immigration restrictions of the 1920s and led the fight for their repeal in 1965, they helped battle Jim Crow in the 1950s and ’60s, and they remain a crucial part of the liberal coalition today. This is as much the idealism of American Judaism’s liberal ethos as it is a matter of self-interest—only in a truly pluralistic nation could American Jews be secure as less than 5 percent of the population.

  The lesson of the Jewish experience in the United States is, as Einhorn wrote, that when the rights of other minorities are threatened, American Jews are threatened. The rise of a nativist demagogue at the head of one of the two major parties, a man whose rhetoric resonates with the kind of men who walk into synagogues and gun down Jews at worship, has only solidified that conviction among the majority of American Jews.

  Israelis have learned, if anything, the opposite lesson. The terrorist attacks during the Second Intifada, the escalation of Israel’s regional rivalry with Iran, and the failure of negotiations between then–prime minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat scarred the Israeli electorate. Just as the ideological perspective of Jewish American immigrants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was shaped by the nature of the illiberal right-wing governments they fled, Israel’s politics are informed by the experiences of Jewish immigrants who left other nations in the Middle East and parts of the old Soviet Union.

  “Israel feels under siege and sees its very survival as at risk. In this situation, questions of identity become crucial,” wrote the Johns Hopkins professor Raffaella Del Sarto in Israel Under Siege, her exploration of the political dominance of the Israeli right. That sense of siege produced a domestic political consensus that “combines the perception of an inherently hostile environment—hence the need for forceful policies and deterrence—with ethnoreligious conceptions of politics and the principle of territorial maximalism.” Nevertheless, she writes, “Israel’s prevailing sense of besiegement remains remarkably at odds with the country’s military superiority and regional power status.” That its standard military might is less effective against asymmetric tactics may further contribute to that sense of “besiegement.” But it is also the case that any society that spends decades denying people their fundamental political rights will talk itself into previously unfathomable cruelties in order to perpetuate that injustice.

  Where in the United States the younger generation of Jews has proven resistant to a nationalist right inclined to define American identity in racial and religious terms, a great deal of Israeli youth have grown more nationalist and more intolerant. Where most American Jews have found safety in a multiracial, multireligious coalition, many Israeli Jews have found theirs in defeating or destroying their enemies. Most American Jews have found refuge in pluralism, many Israeli Jews in nationalism.

  Perhaps nowhere is this divide clearer than on the issue of West Bank settlements: Only 28 percent of American Jews believe Israel should dismantle none of the settlements, compared to fully 50 percent of Jewish Israelis. Netanyahu
himself has proclaimed his intention to annex large portions of the West Bank, dooming the possibility of a Palestinian state, but without committing to equal rights for all people between the river and the sea.

  American Jews have typically resolved the tension between their universalist values and Zionism by seeing Israel as a necessary exception, due to thousands of years of anti-Semitism, the post-1948 expulsion of Jews from Arab countries, sectarian violence endemic to the region, and the Holocaust. The United States was also born in blood and fire, and at incalculable cost to North America’s indigenous population. Sure, there’s bigotry against Palestinian citizens of Israel, the thinking goes, but like the United States, that country deserves the chance to evolve into a more perfect union.

  But this vision of a more accepting Zionism is increasingly in tension with Israel’s political trajectory: not just the occupation but Israel’s treatment of African refugees, its subsidizing and construction of settlements on Palestinian territory, its adoption of a “nation-state” law implicitly downgrading the status of non-Jewish citizens, and the explicitly racist politics of its longest-serving prime minister. Trump and Netanyahu’s relationship forced American Jews to confront the contradiction between the pluralism they support at home and the Jewish nationalism they have made peace with abroad. This does not mean that the long-predicted erosion of American Jewish support for Israel is imminent—but it made those tensions harder to dismiss or ignore than they once were.

  If you’re an American Jew from my generation, you remember a time before Netanyahu’s ironclad grip on Israeli politics. In the mid- to late nineties, it looked like peace between Israelis and Palestinians might be possible. I remember Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shaking hands in front of Bill Clinton, and the sneering face of Rabin’s assassin, Yigal Amir. I remember Netanyahu’s disgrace and defeat at Barak’s hands and the feeling that, despite the Israeli left’s history of violent land grabs, peace might actually be within reach.