Letters
A fan of Republican values
“Hateful, racist, cruel, autocratic.” Et al. Ad Nauseum. The descriptions of Trump in the liberal Jewish media just keep going well after the election.
When will this end? Foxman, Englemayer, Skopf, Lazarus and others need to come to grips with the following: America voted Red. Not just for the President, but for the Senate, and for the House. In both the Popular Vote and in the Electoral College. What is so difficult to comprehend?
Though I am not a fan of President Trump, I AM a fan of today’s Republican values, and that’s what this election was about. I do not identify with the values espoused by the Democratic party in the year 2024. Latino men, Black men, and a bevvy of other demographic groups all made a strong statement about the misdirection of our USA, yet my liberal brothers and sisters refuse to see themselves as outliers. Traditional and Observant Jews also voted heavily (approximated at 65/35) in favor of the Republicans. In this specific election, the liberal Jewish vote was a demographic outlier.
Do they know something the rest of America doesn’t? Are they more intelligent? More intuitive? I sincerely hope they don’t think so. It’s time to move on, and accept the critical role of the Opposition. We all know, that on both sides, there’s a voluminous amount of work to be done. Please begin.
Robert Katz
Fair Lawn
Hatred spawns more hatred
It is no secret that the frequency of antisemitic incidents in the United States has increased dramatically over the past several years. Likely, we’d all be hard-pressed to explain why. Taking a 10-year perspective of the number of antisemitic incidents in the United States, as per the ADL, those numbers are as follows:
2014 – 912; 2015 – 941; 2016 – 1,267; 2017 – 1,986; 2018 – 1,879; 2019 – 2,107; 2020 – 2,024; 2021 – 2,717; 2022 – 3,700 (est); 2023 – 6,535
As to 2023, for purposes of this analysis, we can discount some of that huge increase as being partly due to the post-October 7th insanity. Allowing for that, what we have, over the past 10 years, is a huge, dramatic, increase in the number of reported antisemitic incidents in our country.
Here’s where my approach gets a bit controversial. In trying to determine why, it occurred to me that there is one national situation (and I would suggest to you there is only one) that can explain this increase in hatred. If you look at the chart above, you will see the dramatic increase started in 2016 and just kept on going. What is notable in that timeframe is that it was in 2016 that Don the Con essentially burst onto the national stage in a high-volume way. In early 2016, when he started to make waves about the Republican nomination for president, his presence became a significant factor in the daily news. His habit of spewing hatred can be directly connected to this dramatic increase. Granted, a good part, perhaps even most, of his vocal spewing of hatred was not directly aimed at Jews, but you get the idea.
Hatred spawns more hatred — and who is a better target than us? And a dangerously substantial part of his support comes from groups (people) who rejoice in antisemitism.
We now have this hatemonger back in the White House. As sort of a cliché, the above would suggest we need to fasten our seatbelts for the terror yet to come.
Kalman A. Barson
Somerville
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