Monday, February 17, 2025
From Ian:
Seth Mandel: A Watershed Moment in American Jewish History
Seth Mandel: A Watershed Moment in American Jewish History
Jon Ossoff is Georgia’s first Jewish senator. And the Jews of the Peach State are doing something remarkable: refusing to be taken for granted.How America’s Jews Became America’s ‘New Blacks’
Though this drama is playing out behind the scenes, it represents a watershed in American Jewish politics.
The New York Times has obtained a letter sent privately in December to Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, urging him to run for Senate against Ossoff. The twist: The signatories of the letter included prominent Jewish Democrats.
“I took great pride to see a young Jewish man find the successes that he has,” Isaac Frank, one of the signatories, told the Times. “I just feel like he’s somewhat disconnected from where our community is, given post-Oct. 7.”
The letter to Kemp, as quoted by the Times, says: “As a bipartisan group of leaders in the metropolitan Atlanta Jewish community, we humbly ask you to consider running for the United States Senate in 2026… Should you decide to run in the 2026 election, you would find no better friends, more loyal allies or stronger supporters than us and our community.”
The signatories, especially the Jewish Democrats among them, have done their community a great act of service by insisting that being Jewish does not chain one to either party, that a vote has to be earned, and that a last name alone does not amount to true representation.
What’s their beef with Ossoff? The senator’s vote to withhold U.S. weapons transfers to Israel seems to have been the trigger. This was made worse by watching Ossoff preen on the Senate floor in an eight-minute rekindling of ugly Hamas propaganda in support of withholding those weapons.
Ossoff started off with an ahistorical—but popular—comparison to when President Reagan’s relationship with Prime Minister Menachem Begin was strained by the 1982 war in Lebanon. Contra Ossoff, the moral of that story, when viewed in context, was that Reagan’s anger was based on false reporting and Begin corrected the record with the president. Reagan’s open-minded response to Begin’s insistence that he was being fed a false picture of the conflict contrasts with the Biden administration’s refusal to correct its own misinterpretation of the reality on the ground. Ossoff, too, falls into this category: Unlike Reagan, Ossoff believes the worst conspiracy theories pushed by Hamas and its supporters about the Jewish state and closes his ears to Israel’s counterarguments.
Ossoff spends the first couple minutes of his speech attacking straw men, lazily swatting away nonexistent arguments rather than engaging the actual criticism of his words and actions, both of which were based on false information.
But eventually Ossoff lets loose on the Jewish state. He accuses Israel of “policies that are gratuitously brutal.” Then he jumps into the child-killer blood libel with both feet: “The American people are rightly horrified by the lack of sufficient concern for innocent Palestinian life, that has left so many children unnecessarily dead in Gaza, without limbs or riddled with shrapnel.”
He returned again to the child-killer narrative: “We are talking about precious, innocent children and other innocent civilians who might otherwise be alive or without grievous wounds today.”
He called Israel’s war conduct “horrific” and then, with a false mawkishness unworthy of the United States Senate, implored Israel to “have mercy for the innocent.”
Ossoff’s speech was in November, and it was an agonizingly grotesque spectacle. It was delivered amidst a shocking rise in anti-Semitism, displaying Ossoff’s penchant for rumormongering at a time of genuine danger for American Jews.
Raise the specter of anti-Semitic racism and you are immediately challenged by those who want to highlight Islamophobia or racism against Arabs. The two are simply not comparable. The response in America to the radical Islamists’ attacks of 9/11 was a culture-wide defense of Islam and the rights of Muslims, and great care was taken to ensure they were protected from mobs.At Yad Vashem, Rubio says antisemitism is embedded in ‘international organizations’
Nearly a quarter century later, those early efforts have become institutionalized and tenured. Unlike Jews today, Arabs and Muslims are not being systematically excluded from cultural events or academic panels, nor are Muslims prevented from entering schools or workplaces by violent protesters taking advantage of their First Amendment protections.
Muslim student groups have not been picketed like the myriad Hillel chapters on campuses across the nation—including, in late November, at Columbia, where protesters demanded Hillel be shut down. And unlike the calls to divest from Israeli companies, there have been few, if any, student-led divestment demands against Arab or Islamic financial and cultural institutions, despite the billions donated over the past decade by Gulf States to universities—and despite the clear role that wealthy nations like Qatar have played in harboring terrorists.
Indeed, the post–October 7 period has seen a strengthening of cultural and institutional support for Muslim and Arab causes just as such support has eroded for Jews. Last February’s “uncommitted” campaign during Michigan’s Democratic primary, for instance, not only resulted in more than 100,000 voters withholding their ballots for President Biden; it placed Arab and Muslim grievances at the center of the entire presidential race in ways that far exceeded Muslim population numbers. No, racism against so-called Semites (the category was invented by 18th-century German racialist thinkers to include Jews as well as Muslims, since Hebrew and Arabic are both considered “Semitic” languages) isn’t about Muslims and Arabs. It’s all about Jews and Israel.
And, of course, Zionism.
Anti-Semites love to explain away their bigotry due to a justified animosity—an animosity not toward Judaism, but toward Israel. If anything, they believe, it is Zionism that is racist—as codified by the UN’s odious General Assembly Resolution 3379 of 1975, which “Determines that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.”
Resolution 3379 will mark its 50th anniversary this November, a milestone (despite its revocation in 1991) bound to be exploited by the enemies of Israel to maximum effect—arriving, as it will, so close to the second anniversary of the October 7 massacre. By then—two years into America’s anti-Semitic deluge—both the consequences of anti-Semitic racism and Zionism’s role in its contours will be even more fully defined.
As I think about the ways in which American Jews have become the focus of the nation’s new racist tide, I can’t help thinking about my own sons, who via unexpected twists of genetics are far lighter-skinned than myself. They’re unlikely ever to experience the type of racism I’ve known my entire life—including from Jews. Nor might they face the risk of violent (if not deadly) police encounters that have led most African-American families to have “the talk” with their children about how to comport themselves around law enforcement.
Perhaps because my mother is white—or maybe because I was just preternaturally obedient as a teen—we never had that conversation in my home, and I’ve managed to reach far into adulthood without ever tussling with the cops. Still, I am certain I will sit down soon with my boys for our own type of “talk.” That talk will not be about how to handle themselves around police officers. Rather it will center on how to emerge unscathed from the equally dangerous encounters that many American Jews will now inevitably endure as they face anti-Semitic racists.
I’m certain I will be among many Jewish parents having such talks with their kids—the first generation of American whites who will begin to understand much of what it feels like to be black. The first generation of American Jews to have unexpectedly become America’s new blacks.
In remarks during his visit to Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio says the “ancient poison” of antisemitism “hides behind geopolitics and embeds itself in international organizations, and in the curriculums of our colleges and universities.”
The accusation is one of the most far-reaching lobbed by a Trump official to date.
“We stand here today reminded why it can never be ignored, why it always starts with what some believe as the wild ideas of a random person with no power and no influence; but left unchecked and unchallenged, it can turn into the tragedy that is commemorated here in this building today,” Rubio says.
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