Everyone should give it a full listen. The main takeaway from their discussion is that these government-sanctioned Holocaust projects are not intended to help Jewish people or even genuinely include Jewish voices. They are intended to serve as a public relations platform for white politicians to present themselves as temporary multicultural empaths while they implement anti-immigrant and austerity policies in their EU member states.
The centrist and right-wing obsession with Antisemitism is not about fighting bigotry or even showing solidarity with actual Jews. It’s a way to say, “Look at me, I’m fighting against a form of intolerance.” Jews are being used.
This idea once again came to mind when US Attorney General Pam Bondi nearly imploded under congressional questioning about her department’s failure to pursue the Jeffrey Epstein case.
In terms of Make America Great Again theatrics, she did her job: Bondi accused lawmakers of “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” tried to brag about how great the economy was doing and whined that Congress had not given the same kind of grilling to her Democratic predecessor, Merrick Garland.
When Democratic Congresswoman Becca Balint of Vermont pressed Bondi–with her central-casting Ayran looks and the smugness of someone who knows she won’t face consequences–accused Balint, who is Jewish and lost a grandfather in the Holocaust, of voting against protections against Antisemitism.
Balint erupted in fury and stormed off.
How is it that the Trump right and the European far-right can claim to be against Antisemitism when they accept every other form of bigotry, from Islamophobia to the anti-trans moral panic? How can they even invoke Antisemitism when the MAGA movement is filled with Turner Diaries-obsessed white supremacists, while nostalgia for Nazism animates the European far right?
The easy answer is that “Antisemitism” is just a cudgel against pro-Palestine sentiment. Use the word enough, and the West can protect Israel, its main military partner in the Middle East.
That is the way the thinking goes. And as many journalists who have covered this subject, Jewish journalists like myself included, can attest, there is a great deal of truth to this.
But something else is going on.
Perhaps Bondi felt a sting of joy saying something so hurtful to Balint, knowing that conservatives would jump for joy as she “owned a liberal”. After all, the infliction of pain and the invocation of moral and hierarchical superiority are what separate MAGA fascism from other forms of politics.
But Bondi also seemed to relish the thought that she and her side have taken up charge of fighting “Antisemitism,” despite the fact that so many of their political enemies–Balint, Bernie Sanders, Charles Schumer, etc.–are Jewish.
Balint, of course, isn’t just a Democrat. She’s also gay.
The fact is, the MAGA right can invoke “Antisemitism” not as a form of solidarity with Jews and Jewish victims of anti-Jewish hate, but as a cleansing ritual for those who claim to defend a “Judeo-Christian” Western tradition against the degradation brought on by non-Western immigration.
MAGA wants a patriarchal family structure. It wants two genders. It’s sick of gay pride flags, and it’s triggered by they/them pronouns. It protects whiteness, from Nike to South African “refugees.”
It’s freaking out about Bad Bunny celebrating Puerto Rico and the rest of Latin America and singing in Spanish at the Super Bowl. Islam is out, obviously, too.
By invoking “Antisemitism”, Pam Bondi can pretend that she and her movement are acting as stalwarts against intolerance while embracing intolerance at the same time, but this time, in defence of a “Western” ideal.
The idea is that Jews are European and a precursor to Christian identity, and thus are under threat from the hedonism of modernity and the anti-colonialism of non-Western thought.
This is far from reality, of course, considering that Jews come from lots of non-Western places and that Jews have suffered under every excess of European chauvinism from the Inquisition to Tsarism to Hitler.
However, for the MAGA audience, which the group Bondi was performing for, the “Jew” is a mythical adjunct of the Christian West.
Bondi and the rest of the Trumpian right, like the conference my Battleground colleagues recently spoke about, are using Jewish emotions to enhance their appeal to a far-right, intolerant base.
Jews, no matter their politics, shouldn’t stand for this.
Photograph courtesy of Gage Skidmore. Published under a Creative Commons license.
