By PHILIP GOLDUS Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks at his final campaign event at the Devos Place in Grand Rapids, Michigan November 8, 2016. (photo credit: REUTERS)
Long ago, in a think tank far away, I had a conversation with a colleague that has proven both prescient and ironic. My colleague, member of a prominent Jewish philanthropic family, said, in essence, this: “Since the 1950s, the American Jewish strategy for fighting antisemitism has been to ferret out every instance we can find, scream bloody murder, then step back and let the decent gentiles handle it. But the politics and mind-set of most American Jews have been undermining the very decencies we’re depending on. Someday, we’ll need this decency and it won’t be there anymore.”By “politics and mind-set” he meant, specifically, liberalism, with its moral relativism and nihilism, its contributions to America’s “anything goes” culture, its inability to articulate compelling reasons why people shouldn’t be antisemitic – beyond “it isn’t fashionable.”The conversation was prescient. As American antisemitism continues its steady rise in both virulence and volume, many gentiles don’t seem to mind. But the conversation has also proven ironic, in that maybe, just maybe, the prime destroyer of gentile decency has been the Right, not the Left.OK, readers, I’m sure you’re already ready to refute everything you think I’m going to say, starting with, “It’s all President-elect Trump’s fault.” Calm down.Nothing is ever Trump’s fault. Ask him. He is no more personally responsible for the 2016 upsurge in antisemitic incidents than Barack Obama has been personally responsible for African-American malfeasance.But Trump has created, and profited mightily from, an election year atmosphere of “say whatever you want; anything goes.”Now hark unto the venerable “broken window” theory of crime. Someone breaks a window in your neighborhood, or sprays graffiti, and the window stays unfixed, the tagging unerased. You’re simply inviting more of the same, and worse, until things get out of hand.Antisemitism is a fact of life. But it takes different forms in different eras. The fact that the current form is unusual does not make it less virulent. Indeed, in some ways it makes the current form more deadly because things can get out of hand. And they will, especially as it becomes clear that Trump cannot deliver on his multitudinous promises.Not so long ago, antisemitism was restricted to a few professional Jew-haters and their hangers-on, the “not our kind, dear” country-club types, and many Judeophobes who might want to get more aggressive, but who felt themselves (more or less) isolated in their animus. The Internet changed all that. Browse the hate sites and blogs, if you doubt. These people have found each other, empowered each other, gotten organized, gotten loud. And when you have, by very rough estimate, half a billion (that’s a “b”) firearms in private hands in the United States... things have a tendency to get out of hand.But are things getting out of hand? The Anti-Defamation League keeps track, chronicling and evaluating increasing harassment (cyber and physical) of Jewish journalists, and the post-election “spike” in antisemitic incidents. It also provides a convenient form to fill out, should you wish to report something. But as valuable as these services are, they miss several important indicators.
First, if an incident is reported to local law enforcement, what action, if any, is taken? Have local police and district attorneys, some of them staunchly white-supremacist, investigated or followed up? This is hard to judge. Incidents may occur in seconds or minutes; inaction stretches out interminably.An additional indicator at the local level: all those “citizen militias” we used to laugh about. Over the next few years, will they come increasingly out into the open, flaunting their weapons, perhaps even becoming some sort of police “auxiliary”? At the national level, what will the Justice Department do or not do? This awaits the Trump administration.So far, all that is clear is another negative indicator – Trump’s deafening silence on the subject of hate.So that’s the “gistification” (neologism alert) of it. Antisemitism rising and the conspicuous absence of decent gentiles. Once again, the Jews are on their own.But maybe not entirely.The following is anecdotal, based upon personal relationships and a meander through social media.There seems to be one gentile group that is especially appalled by events: families whose children have married Jews, interfaith couples who have half-Jewish children – in short, those who may not have expected to find antisemitism disturbing their lives and kin and consciences yet find that it is happening.And they seem to understand, perhaps better than the 30% of American Jews who voted for Trump, that things have a way of getting out of hand.Next: The makings of a political alliance: Is anybody paying attention?