I know it's been quite a while since I've blogged, but I have this thought rattling around in my brain and I need to get it out.
I want to address the issue of how Jews should respond to Trump and the anti-Semites around him. Yes, I know, he has Jewish grandchildren and he's got other targets, but neo-Nazis are also his biggest fans, and his tendency to retweet anti-Semitic memes is not very comforting to Jews. I keep hearing about how terrified people are, and how as Jews we need to oppose Trump in the strongest terms because when They start coming for the Muslims and the Mexicans, they'll eventually come for us.
Yes, we should oppose Trump, but that's the wrong reason! This dovetails with a book I'm reading now, The Girl from Human Street, by Roger Cohen, a family history of his international Jewish family. He tells of how his ancestors migrated from the Eastern European Pale of Settlement to South Africa, where they found prosperity partly because Jews were considered "white" there under Apartheid. They were safe, because in South Africa all the repressive energy was spent on keeping Black and Colored people down, so Jews could stay on the right side of the line. No pogroms in Johannesburg!
So here in Trump's America, I think that Jews are still pretty safe, and that the alt right has better targets than us to go after for quite a while. But so what?! Should we collaborate with repressive institutions as long as they won't come for us? As Jews, we understand what racists and thugs are capable of, and we take seriously the biblical commandment to protect the stranger, because we were strangers in Egypt. We empathize with Trump's targets today because we have been there, not because we fear for our own lives.
I don't know what lessons others take from the catastrophe of the Holocaust and the subsequent triumph of the State of Israel. But for me, the lesson is this: when we keep our heads down in the shtetl and hope the Bad Guys move on to someone else, we get annihilated. When we're strong and take matters into our own hands, we can do the impossible. This is not a time to return to the shtetl mentality.
I love how Jonathan Chait put it the day after the election:
But I do not believe they will win, at least not over the long run. As the shock of a Trump presidency set in, I told my children Tuesday night that I did not want to hear anything about fleeing. We are not going anywhere. And the America I have raised them to believe in will one day prevail.
