The Vance Dance
“On Sunday, J. D. Vance was presented with the simplest moral test: denounce commentators who traffic in medieval blood libels, who deny the Holocaust, and who endlessly harp on evil Jewish cabals … Vance failed. ‘We have far more important work to do than canceling each other,’ he said, as if anti-Semitism were just one more woke fixation.” The Atlantic (Gift Article): The vice president welcomes anti-Semites into the Republican coalition.
+ How can an administration that portrays itself as defending the Jews be so welcoming of antisemites? Michael Roth explained last April in the NYT (Gift Article): “As the first Jewish president of a formerly Methodist university, I find no comfort in the Trump administration’s embrace of my people, on college campuses or elsewhere. Jew hatred is real, but today’s anti-antisemitism isn’t a legitimate effort to fight it. It’s a cover for a wide range of agendas that have nothing to do with the welfare of Jewish people. All of these agendas — from dismantling basic government functions to crushing the independence of cultural and educational organizations to criminalizing political speech to legitimating petty presidential vendettas — endanger the principles and institutions that have actually made this country great. For Jews, a number of these agendas do something more: They pose a direct threat to the very people they purport to help. Jews who applaud the administration’s crackdown will soon find that they do so at their peril.” Trump Is Selling Jews a Dangerous Lie. “[This] tension — between championing Jews and ridiculing, reviling or in some cases even threatening them — has been visible on the right for some time. Consider first the president: On the one hand, his daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren are Jewish … On the other hand, when neo-Nazis, Klansmen and others marched through Charlottesville, Va., carrying torches and shouting ‘Jews will not replace us,’ Mr. Trump condemned the most extreme elements of the rally but observed that there were ‘some very fine people on both sides.'” (There’s only one side he cares about. His.)
