Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: Anti-Semitism in Trump’s MAGA America
January 25, 2022
By Bill Berkowitz
As might be expected from Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri -- the January 6th fist-pumping-to-the-crowd scoundrel -- when an armed British man stormed a Colleyville, Texas synagogue taking a rabbi and three worshippers hostage, and was ultimately killed, Hawley would turn his attention away from the attack on Jews to issue a broadside against the Biden administration.
In a public letter, Hawley turned the Colleyville attack on Jews into an attack on admitting Afghan refugees. “I write with alarm over reports that the Islamic terrorist who took hostages at a Jewish synagogue in Texas this past weekend was granted a travel visa. This failure comes in the wake of the Biden Administration’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan and failure to vet the tens of thousands who were evacuated to our country.”
Despite Hawley’s deflection, over the past few years, antisemitic violence has been on the rise. Antisemitism is a core ideology in white nationalist movements.
The most notable attack came in October 2018, when 11 Jews were killed at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, the deadliest mass killing of Jews in American history. The attacker blamed Jews for supporting unlimited non-white immigration.
A year earlier, in Charlottesville, Virginia, torch-carrying neo-Nazi/white supremacist “Unite The Right” marchers chanted, “Jews will not replace us,” as they rallied to protect Confederate iconography. Vox’s Zack Beauchamp recently noted that in Charlottesville, “Armed individuals dressed in fatigues menaced a local synagogue — also named Beth Israel — while neo-Nazis yelled, ‘Sieg heil!’ as they passed by.”
In April 2019, anoht shooter attacked the Chabad synagogue in Poway, California, killing one and injuring three.
“In the past several years,” Beauchamp wrote, “American Jews have been subject to a wave of violence nearly unprecedented in post-Holocaust America. If these anti-Semitic incidents garner significant mainstream attention — a big if — attention to them seems to fade rapidly, erased by a fast-moving news cycle. The root causes of rising anti-Semitism are often ignored, especially when politically inconvenient to one side or the other.”
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization founded to oppose antisemitism, produced a chart of Antisemitic Incidents: U.S.—Over the Last Decade 2011-2020. In 2011 there were 1121 reported incidents; in 2016, there were 1267, and in 2020, there 2024.
Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the ADL, recently wrote a new book called It Could Happen Here, nonfiction argument against authoritarianism. In an interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep, Greenblatt pointed out that while Trump’s authoritarian impulses are of great concern, there is definitely a “creeping intolerance from the far left” as well.
Inskeep asked Greenblatt how it came to pass that the anti-vax movement is also encompassing antisemitic conspiracies. Greenblatt said: “There's no question that the anti-vax movement often will invoke longstanding antisemitic stereotypes. … we saw this … from the earliest days of the virus. Some said that either the Jewish people or the Jewish state had invented the virus to kill gentiles, non-Jews. That's an old anti-Jewish conspiracy. Then others were saying as the vaccines were developed, that the Jews developed them, either the Jewish people or the Jewish state, to profit off the misery of people who are suffering. It's really troubling. In recent weeks, we've seen antisemitic flyers dropped in places like Los Angeles, Calif., Austin, Texas, outside of Chicago, Ill., that say COVID is a Jewish problem.”
The election of Donald Trump and his tacit encouraging of far right groups has no doubt led to the rise in anti-Semitic incidents. Para-military groups were emboldened by Trump’s rhetoric.
However, as Vox’s Beauchamp points out, there have been anti-Semitic incidents from the left as well, although none has produced any carnage.
NPR’s Inskeep asked Jonathan Greenblatt if he thought “that there is a really, really large reservoir of anti-Semitism in the population that is waiting to be tapped?”
Greenblatt was surprising optimistic, responding that while “antisemitic attitudes are at almost a historic low, somewhere between eight and 10% of the population. Now, that's still 30-some-odd million people.”
Greenblatt added: “But the frightening thing is that we've watched antisemitic incidents explode. They're almost double today what they were just five or six years ago.”
What these incidents illustrate, writes Beauchamp, “more than anything else, is the protean and primordial nature of anti-Semitism — a prejudice and belief structure so baked into Western society that it has a remarkable capacity to infuse newer ideas and reassert itself in different forms. Today, we are seeing the rise not of one form of anti-Semitism but of multiple anti-Semitisms — each popular with different segments of the population for different reasons, but also capable of reinforcing each other by normalizing anti-Semitic expression.”
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