What Jonathan Chait Gets Wrong about the Threats Facing American Jews

By Tal Fortgang

Saturday, September 17, 2022

 

Jonathan Chait of New York magazine has discovered a troubling trend within the Republican Party, though he has “discovered” it only in the same sense that Christopher Columbus “discovered” America: The GOP establishment, having lost or abandoned its traditional gatekeeping role, has allowed some antisemites into its ranks and embraced some of the conspiratorial thinking that always comes with hatred of Jews.

 

Chait is not wrong about this, though he marshals an odd slate of evidence to support his argument. He begins with an anecdote about a recent Trump rally at which the leader of a group called the Patriot Freedom Project bemoaned that her nephew had been convicted of a crime related to his role in the rioting of January 6, 2021. It turns out that said nephew has said some unsavory things about Jews, which his aunt declined to mention in the course of her speech. Chait’s takeaway from this omission is that an antisemite “has become essentially a martyr figure championed by the Republican Party’s leader.” A stretch, to be sure, and Chait’s use of the story as his hook — as if it’s the paradigm of antisemitism run amok — is a bit suspicious.

 

Nonetheless, we may grant that Chait — like many anti-Trump observers, including conservative critics of the populist Right, before him — is on to something. There is enough discomfiting evidence from Marjorie Taylor Greene alone — talk of space lasers and Rothschilds, endorsements of videos that bemoan “Zionist supremacists” — to indict the GOP for its failure to drive her from its ranks. And Chait is not wrong that the party has become less willing to define itself in opposition to such extremist kookery.

 

Yet Chait errs in his framing of the story, which displays an unfortunate naivete toward ongoing threats to American Jews. He writes, “No recent development in American life has done more” than the GOP’s playing footsie with antisemites “to throw American Jews’ safety and civic equality into doubt.” That Marjorie Taylor Greene and her ilk represent the biggest threat to American Jews’ safety is nonsense; that they represent the biggest threat to our civic equality is nonsense on stilts.

 

As the New York Times reported in April, Orthodox Jews have borne the brunt of a new wave of antisemitic attacks, particularly concentrated in American cities. “We had Jews beaten and brutalized in broad daylight in Midtown Manhattan, in Brooklyn, in the Diamond District,” Anti-Defamation League president Jonathan Greenblatt told the Times. “What was remarkable about it was people acted with impunity. These were Jewish people wearing a kipa or who were visibly Orthodox being assaulted for being Jews, and that is brand-new.”

 

These vicious assaults, which constitute a large portion of the violent incidents perpetrated against Jews, are not committed by people taking their cues from Republicans. They are mostly the work of habitual offenders who’ve cycled in and out of state custody and often have histories of drug abuse or mental illness. What precisely motivates someone to punch a Hasidic yeshiva student on his way to synagogue is unclear, but it is safe to say that Trumpy conspiracy theorists have little to do with it.

 

Jews have also suffered as anti-Israel sentiment has boiled over into violence, with notable incidents occurring this past spring in New York and Los Angeles. While progressives continue to insist that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism — and to elect to Congress anti-Zionists who have trafficked in antisemitic conspiracies — anti-Zionists continue to have trouble with the distinction.

 

What really puts Jews at risk of violence is the turn among “progressive prosecutors” to keep violent offenders out of prison and back on the streets where they are likely to re-offend. In the pursuit of abstract ideals of justice and fairness, urban officials overseeing lax enforcement of the criminal-justice system put the most vulnerable targets — the elderly, children, and Jews among them — at risk.

 

But more broadly, what accounts for the routine and systematic downplaying of violence against Jews is the analytical framework that has become ubiquitous on the left. According to the principles of anti-racism and intersectionality theory, Jews cannot be oppressed, because our skin is generally on the paler side and we tend to have college degrees and good incomes. And when an analytical framework only takes seriously violence against those who are oppressed, those who subscribe to the framework continue to downplay violence against what they perceive as un-oppressed groups, and pursue policies that allow such violence to continue in the interest of countering oppression as they see it — policies such as letting violent felons out of prison.

 

One cannot help but be embarrassed on Chait’s behalf that he did not give even a perfunctory nod to these long-running trends, which are well-known and the source of a great deal of consternation within the Jewish world. But his mention of “civic equality” is even more puzzling, given that the progressive Left has unleashed a cultural assault on the civic equality of traditional Jews in recent years. (It also remains unclear how the partial takeover — to be generous — of a party to which most Jews do not belong is an obstacle to Jews’ civic equality writ large.)

 

There are actual systemic threats to Jews’ full participation in American life, and they are currently being posed by progressive institutions. The violence against Jews enabled by progressive policies is one such threat, but it’s certainly not the only one. Progressive lawmakers have held hearings about withholding tax benefits from houses of worship that do not conform to progressive social orthodoxies. Judges interpreting anti-discrimination statutes “progressively” are in the process of writing Orthodox Jewish institutions’ religious liberty out of existence. And all the while, progressive academics and activists continue to advance the view that Jews are just white people — never victims, only oppressors.

 

Jews who want to maintain their own subculture and their own mores, a desire the Left seems happy to grant to every other minority group, are quite explicitly told that they better get in line with secular orthodoxies, or they will no longer be welcome in polite society. If that’s not a threat to civic equality, what is?

 

Chait laments that now “the door is open” to antisemites in American politics. But he should know that that’s only because progressive cultural forces kicked it down.