Nazis at our door

I proudly carried my “Democracy is a Jewish Value” banner when I joined my local No Kings Day anti-dictatorship event. I got dozens and dozens of thumbs up from the many cheerful people who passed by. My rabbi came too, and another prominent rabbi spoke from the stage.

In all honesty, I don’t think there was any way I would not have taken part in No Kings Day to protest the autocratic takeover in our country. But if I needed any further motivation, I found it in this New York Times story earlier in the week: “Trump Considers Overhaul of Refugee System That Would Favor White People.” Reading beyond the headline, with its suggestion of a very racist new policy, I saw that “white” was itself defined in a very peculiar way. “The proposals [from officials in the Department of State and Homeland Security] also advise Mr. Trump to prioritize Europeans who … support … ‘populist’ political parties.” That’s a euphemistic but unmistakable nod to groups like the far-right neo-Nazi-linked Alternative for Germany (“AfD”) which both Vice President JD Vance and the former DOGE head Elon Musk have publicly promoted at different times during the last year.

Any self-respecting Jewish American should feel their head exploding with that report. There have been a number of troubling public incidents over the last several years linking President Donald Trump and those around him to antisemitic figures and groups, but this is antisemitism as pure policy.

As Jews, we have already become collateral damage in Trump’s national war against diversity, as the administration has attacked the funding of major universities using “protection of Jewish students” as a pretext. Just how little the administration is concerned with the actual problem of antisemitism in our country became clearer when Kash Patel, the FBI director, announced that he was cutting ties with the Anti-Defamation League and another civil rights group over their work to track domestic extremism, and he maligned the ADL as “functioning like a terrorist organization.”

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The Trump administration’s heavily promoted war against immigration — a war on both legal as well as undocumented residents, and now also against the small number of heavily vetted participants in the United States Refugee Admission Program — has increasingly become another attack on diversity in our society. The Trump crew is now attempting to reverse the long and hard-fought history of progress in our country toward greater equality for minorities, going as far as to claim the power to nullify the fundamental rights of citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

An increasing number of prominent voices in the MAGA movement, including Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, have proclaimed themselves as “Christian Nationalists,” now often saying the quiet part of the anti-diversity agenda out loud.

The latest development was a speech by Eric Schmitt, Missouri’s junior senator, at the National Conservatism Conference. Schmitt used the occasion to dismiss the Americanness of those of us who aren’t descended from “Christian pilgrims.” He ridiculed equality as an American value and mocked what he referred to as “a poem on the Statue of Liberty.” The poem in question, of course, was an allusion to the stirring words of Emma Lazarus, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” the welcome that so many of our grandparents and great-grandparents saw when they entered New York Harbor.

The idea that German neo-Nazis could be welcomed as “refugees,” while many other truly persecuted and fully vetted actual refugees who have spent years on waiting lists to come here are turned away, is simply obscene. It’s a single policy now on the administration’s drafting board, but it’s closely related to the upside-down grievance politics promoted by Trump’s movement, which sees Christian whites as victims who must be protected at any cost from the Jews and other unfavored minorities.

The sometimes complicated issue of immigration and refugees has figured heavily in the upsurge of antisemitism in our country. The deranged shooter at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, who murdered eight people and wounded six, was under the influence of far-right propaganda targeting Jewish Americans as central to imagined conspiracies to bring non-white immigrants into the country — the so-called “Great Replacement” fantasy. The Tikkun Olam work of the venerated Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society was the declared target of his murders. The words of Mark Hetfield, the president of HIAS, are as relevant today as when he spoke them after the 2018 massacre. “There is simply too much space out there for hate, and it’s hatred against refugees, hatred against Jews, hatred against Latinos,hatred against transgendered people, hatred against African-Americans; hatred against the other.… Everyone has to stand up to it now.”

Hetfield understood what some leaders of other legacy Jewish institutions perhaps haven’t fully grasped about antisemitism. It thrives in the atmosphere of hate against the other, which also goes along with the politics of authoritarianism. I scratch my head when I hear some Jewish leaders focus, with tunnel vision, on efforts to enact into laws a particular definition of antisemitism, even as our laws do not define other forms of discrimination, like racism or sexism. The great need of our Jewish community now is for relationships with partners to fight antisemitism and all forms of bigotry.

The Trump administration’s overture to German neo-Nazis and the MAGA movement’s attempts to redefine American patriotism as white Christian nationalism spotlight the urgency of the moment.

The participation of many millions around the country in the non-violent No Kings Day rallies and marches was a welcome breath of fresh air and hope that our country need not be stolen out from under us if we pull together as Americans. Jewish Americans, for our own wellbeing and that of our principles, can’t afford to be absent from this common fight. Democracy is a Jewish value.

Mark Lurinsky of Montclair recently retired from a career in public accounting. He is an activist in local politics and a member of the steering committee of J Street’s New Jersey chapter.