“This feels like the closest thing to the type of anti-Semitism that my grandparents talk about experiencing in Poland.”
Kushner’s extended family fired back, launching an internecine war of words: “Please don't invoke our grandparents in vain just so you can sleep better at night,” seethed one Kushner cousin. “It is self-serving and disgusting.”
“When you stand silent and smiling in the background, his Jewish son-in-law,” she wrote to her boss, “you’re giving his most hateful supporters tacit approval.”
“Donald Trump,” Reizes says, “has put the Jewish community in a turmoil that I don’t really think we’ve experienced in a long time.”
31-year-old Andrew Aglin, founder of the Daily Stormer—a bigot and racist who refers to his presidential candidate by nom de guerre, “Glorious Leader.” College undergraduates from California, leisurely attending white nationalist conferences, have also shown up; and 25-year-old Matthew Heimbach, dubbed the “next David Duke.” (“Hail, Emperor Trump and hail victory.”) Trump has opted to wink and nod at such “deplorables” (as Hillary Clinton has called them) when given the chance.
“What’s most shocking is...how silent the Jewish establishment has been in calling out Trump’s behavior,” Kaplan said. She later added, “The same people who told me that anti-Semitism was everywhere are now conspicuously silent on Trump. In some cases, they’re supporting Trump.”
“Donald Trump is not a distraction. He is the thing our tradition teaches us to resist,” Beinart wrote. “In this season of national decision and Jewish self-reflection, please reflect on your silence.”
“It’s a moment when both you and your grandma get to be right about this,” Harpo Jaeger, 25, tells me, an experienced campus activist in Jewish politics and a faith-based organizer. “She gets to be right that anti-Semitism is alive and well, and Jews should be worried about it,” he adds. “And the left gets to be correct, in that the anti-Israel or anti-Zionist left doesn’t have a monopoly on anti-Semitism. These people really are everywhere.”
“Why the Jews? I don’t know,” says Zach Reizes. “It’s a very scary thought, that maybe all those horror stories we’ve been told about Jewish persecution are right.” The nineteen-year-old adds, “Maybe they’re still foreshadowing a future that we thought had died.”
