There’s no going back to communal unity

I write this before election day; as you read this, we may or may not know who won the most votes in the presidential election. We may well not know for months how Congress and the Supreme Court will decide how those votes will be counted.

But the push already is on for the Jewish community to heal its partisan divides, with a rally in Washington called for Sunday to promote “Jewish unity.”

As someone who was delighted to cast a ballot for the Harris/Walz ticket earlier this week, allow me to say: It’s not that easy.

The communal wounds this election highlighted, and horribly exacerbated, can’t be healed with the singing of Hatikvah, a rally, or any other easy-to-imagine band-aid.

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That’s because campaign 2024 was not a debate over how America should balance national defense, social welfare, and fiscal probity, the classic Republican/Democrat divide.

It was, fundamentally, over who counts as American, and who counts as a human, and about who our country’s laws are meant to protect and bind.

If you have advocated for a political party that says women are crazy for not wanting the outcome of their pregnancy to be determined by reactionary Catholic judges rather than by their rabbinic decisors — let alone their consciences — that’s not just politics; that’s very, very personal.

If you have supported a political party that spends tens of millions of dollars on advertisements demonizing trans children and the parents who support them, that’s not just a political divide. It’s a painfully personal rift.

And when you support a political campaign that unapologetically calls it opponents “vermin” — language that historian Anne Applebaum has noted was used repeatedly by Hitler and Stalin but never even by the most racist American politicians — well, don’t expect those political opponents to meet you at the communal table.

When Abe Foxman can be called “a strident propagandist for the far left” by someone willing to sign his name to a letter in the local Jewish newspaper, we are at a place far beyond reasoned political discourse.

And it is a place far too close — depending on election results, of course — to those places where Jews dubbed “far left” were murdered by right-wing thugs who may or may not have been acting under government aegis.

Because the connection between murderous right-wing regimes and Republican campaign rhetoric is much closer than you probably knew on election day. Did you know that Senator J.D. Vance — perhaps vice president-elect as you read this — endorsed a book published this summer called “Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them)” by Jack Posobiec? The book’s title clearly echoes the term Untermenschen, which Nazis used to refer to Jews and Slavs. The book’s argument echoes classic antisemitic tropes of the Nazis and the John Birch Society in seeing insidious, secret communists hiding in every corner, while praising the way dictators like Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet fought their perceived enemies.

Such politics is no surprise coming from Posobiec, who back in 2016 led antisemitic attacks on Twitter on the likes of journalist Wolf Blitzer, leading the ADL to create a “Task Force on Harassment of Journalists.” But the current silence by ADL in the face of a top Republican candidate endorsing someone its own website describes as “a far-right activist, conspiracy theorist and white nationalist sympathizer,” is indeed a surprise. And it is a reminder that when the Republican side of the political divide is willing to harness antisemitic conspiracy theories against liberals, the ADL can be trusted to be discreetly silent.

Even if the liberal has the mild-mannered politics of Abe Foxman.

In a mirror image of the anti-colonialist campus radicals, the elders of the Jewish establishment — the leaders of our defense organizations, our communal groups, even our synagogue associations — have shown us that using antisemitism in pursuit of politically acceptable goals will be quietly countenanced.

Even if those political goals promise death to some and — comical though it seems, but in keeping with the John Birch Society turn of the once grand Republican Party — more cavities for all.

Even if those political goals go against the values of the U.S. Constitution and the Israeli Declaration of Independence.

So what is to be done?

Perhaps it’s simply to accept that unity has become a false idol.

Those who stood with a minority in our community as they threatened the rest of us, in the guise of avoiding partisan division, need to go.

And if not, the rest of us need to walk away.

For that matter, we need to walk away unless the tent is broadened so that it will be obvious that Abe Foxman is not the leftmost person at the table. We cannot say that supporting the liberal New Israel Fund is “too controversial” for a Jewish communal employee and then act surprised when our kids decide that Jewish Voices for Peace is the best way to fight for justice. If groups that represent a minority of Jews continue to veto the accession of much larger groups into the Conference of Presidents, it’s incumbent on all of us to demand that our organizations — our synagogue bodies and our rabbinical associations — walk away from that false unity. It is time to show our devotion to democracy by demanding it from our representatives.

Otherwise, if the Jewish community is going to insist that the tent be big enough to include unapologetic Trumpers but not earnest, nonviolent opponents of the Israeli government, I don’t want to be in it. And I suspect that in this, I speak for a large, silent majority of American Jewish Democrats for whom the rhetorical assaults of MAGA Republicans are not simply “politics.”

Of course, it’s possible that by the time you read these words, Donald Trump’s re-election is already a foregone conclusion. In which case let me extend a promise to my Republican neighbors: Rest assured that if I fear arrest for violating the Comstock Act by publishing books promoting trans activists, or for publicly criticizing the president as a journalist, or for helping someone procure mifepristone, I won’t come knocking on your door. I know too well that in such circumstances, to paraphrase a Lou Reed song, Jewish unity for you will not include me, too.

Larry Yudelson of Teaneck, who reported on Jewish organizations and politics for JTA from 1992 to 1995 and later became the associate editor of the Jewish Standard and the New Jersey Jewish News, is the publisher and editorial director of Ben Yehuda Press.