On Long Island, my Mom and I golfed at public courses. We couldn’t afford country club memberships, and they wouldn’t have taken us anyway.
When I entered the Ivy League in 1966, its institutional antisemitism was finally breaking apart. For decades, Brown University and the other private Ivies had deliberately limited Jewish admissions. Allowing Jews to matriculate beside the Christian private school elite in numbers representing their academic merit was unthinkable. Brown had a Jewish fraternity, because brothers in the long established fraternities did not want to mingle with the few Jews outside of class.
Much was changing among young people in 1966. I remember no antisemitic interactions with my classmates. My fraternity welcomed me as the third Jewish member. I also remember no institutional efforts to admit past antisemitism, much less to deal with that legacy or oppose antisemitism at home or abroad. I was simply pleased by the absence of overt prejudice.
Although I had no plans to make the history and nature of antisemitism a major focus when I began graduate school, for the past 40 years I have studied and written about antisemitism and its consequences.
I am repelled by today’s apparently widespread need, by both Jews and non-Jews, to perform public anti-antisemitism. I do wish that everyone would oppose antisemitism, but I don’t want to constantly hear the voices of people who never before had anything useful to say about antisemitism. Being Jewish doesn’t make one an expert on antisemitism, which contributes to the impassioned and often thoughtless arguments among Jews about our current crisis. The sudden use of public anti-antisemitism as a political tool to win votes alarms me, because of where the loudest voices come from: a Republican Party which collectively doesn’t like American Jews.
That’s not an exaggeration. Trump is their spokesman and a prime example. He has repeatedly exhibited his distaste for American Jews. Inviting a famous public antisemite, Kanye West, and his Holocaust-denying friend, Nick Fuentes, to dinner at his home is simply the worst recent expression of Trump’s snide and patronizing attitude toward American Jews.
But he skated away unscathed in his own Party. After the dinner, PBS asked dozens of Congressional Republicans if they thought the meeting was appropriate. 39 out of 57 gave no response. The few who commented avoided direct criticism, except the known anti-Trumpers like Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney. Kevin McCarthy claimed falsely that Trump condemned Fuentes.
Other Republican leaders have voiced their antisemitism publicly. In 2018, Kevin McCarthy and Tom Emmer each denounced three prominent Jewish philanthropists, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, and Tom Steyer, and nobody else, for “buying” Congress for the Democrats. The House Judiciary Committee tweeted “Kanye, Elon, Trump” in October 2022, then two months later deleted the tweet after Kanye “launched a lengthy antisemitic tirade” on Alex Jones’ show. Then chair Jim Jordan lied about it. Marjorie Green’s repeated public antisemitic displays, including cozy gestures to Holocaust deniers, were supported by 199 House Republicans, who voted against removing her from committees for her racist actions and remarks. There are no internal penalties for overt antisemitism among Republicans. But liberals like Ilhan Omar are welcome targets.
Suddenly Elise Stefanik promotes herself as the scourge of antisemitism. She “didn’t utter a peep of protest” about Trump’s dinner with West and Fuentes. When challenged on Trump’s association with antisemites, Stefanik excused him on the grounds that he had recognized Israel’s illegal occupation of Syria’s Golan Heights. The Anti-Defamation League criticized Stefanik as one of the propagators of the “great replacement theory”, saying her campaign’s posts “strategically play on extremist rhetoric to stoke growing fears that white Americans are under attack and minorities seek to eject them.” She said nothing when Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar promoted an antisemitic website that denies the Holocaust and praises Adolf Hitler as “a man of valor”. Now she’s outraged at university leaders who never said or did anything antisemitic in their lives. Ironically but characteristically, Stefanik plagiarized three paragraphs of a letter that criticized college presidents written by Rep. Kathy Manning, a Jewish North Carolina Democrat.
In the decades since I went to college, liberals, not conservatives, some of the Republicans, have gradually dismantled antisemitic structures with long American traditions. Academics have explained the sources and power of antisemitic prejudice and practice in America.
But today’s Republicans don’t
like liberals or America’s universities. We vote for the wrong people and teach
the wrong things. We talk about the structural racism of Christian antisemitism
as the cause of the Holocaust. We talk about white supremacy and structural
racism as fundamental to American history.
Republicans have been denying the existence of racism in contemporary America, both anti-Black and anti-Jew, for decades, and opposing every attempt to combat it. Antiracist programs in American higher education are a particular target of Republican politicians at the federal and state levels.
Republican anti-antisemitism is fake, a ploy of the moment to take particular advantage of the difficulty of finding a reasonable position on the war in the Middle East. The clumsiness of academic leaders has allowed Congressional Republicans to perform love of Israel for their voters. But those voters consistently say that white Christians are the real targets of discrimination in America.
I practice and support anti-antisemitism as both self-defense and moral righteousness. I don’t look to suddenly “woke” Republicans and evangelical conservatives, dreaming of the Second Coming and the final convert-or-die choice for the world’s Jews, to dismantle antisemitism.
Republicans are not anti-antisemites, they are anti-liberal and anti-university. Republican leaders traffic in antisemitism and their colleagues excuse it. Neo-Nazis and white supremacists are not “very fine people”.
With friends like Stefanik and Trump, who needs enemies?
Steve Hochstadt
