Kaddish
Alexandra Schwartz in The New Yorker: The Tree of Life Shooting and the Return of Anti-Semitism to American Life. “It is the ancient Jewish expectation of persecution—when, where, has it not been with us?—married to American reality: a country saturated with guns and habituated to quotidian massacre, plagued by age-old racism and bigotry, which have lately been expertly inflamed by the holder of the highest office in the land. For the past few years, American Jews have glanced warily at Western Europe, where anti-Semitism, never dormant, is once again on the rise. The British Labour Party has been riven by accusations of anti-Semitism among its leadership. French Jews have emigrated to Israel in unprecedented numbers. In Sweden, synagogues and Jewish centers have been firebombed. After 9/11, American synagogues and community centers became barricaded spaces, outfitted with concrete sidewalk barriers and metal detectors, so that going to services felt like going to the airport. The concern then was an external threat.” (The concern during the Trump era has been about an internal threat. That threat became reality in Pittsburgh over the weekend.)
+ “There is no national emergency; there is no ominous threat. There is only a group of desperate people looking for a better life, who have a right to request asylum in the United States and have no right to stay if their claims are rejected. Trump is reportedly aware that his claims about the caravan are false. An administration official told the Daily Beast simply, ‘It doesn’t matter if it’s 100 percent accurate … this is the play.’ The ‘play’ was to demonize vulnerable people with falsehoods in order to frighten Trump’s base to the polls.” The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer on how Trump’s caravan hysteria led to this.
+ “Any strategy for enhancing the security of American Jewry should involve shunning Trump’s Jewish enablers. Their money should be refused, their presence in synagogues not welcome. They have placed their community in danger.” Franklin Foer: A Prayer for Squirrel Hill—And for American Jewry. It’s not just Jewish enablers. It’s all of his enablers. I wrote about this, after Charlottesville, in a reflection on my parents’ experiences in the Holocaust: The Looking Glass.
+ NYT: HIAS, the Jewish Agency Criticized by the Shooting Suspect, Has a History of Aiding Refugees. (What would make a person look at a helpful agency that’s been around since 1881 and see an organization that “brings invaders in that kill our people?” That’s not a rhetorical question…)
+ “President Donald Trump falsely claimed Saturday that the New York Stock Exchange re-opened the day after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in an effort to justify holding a rally on the same day that a mass shooting occurred at a synagogue in Pittsburgh.” (The last of the holdouts hoped that there would be a moment of depravity so low that Trump’s enablers would be sickened enough to speak out. This weekend, when Trump gave his usual rally hours after the Tree of Life massacre, even the most ardent optimists learned the cold, hard truth.)
