Fiends on the Patio

Like most American Jews my age, I think, I have mostly only been exposed to anti-Semitism in its least virulent versions: an insulting joke overheard in the locker room at the gym, a hostile slogan painted on a wall I was driving past, an unmistakable chill from some idiot at the registration desk in some low-grade motel when I offered my (unmistakably Jewish) last name to confirm my previously-made reservation. Stuff like that.

Even when I left the Jewish cocoon in which I was raised (and it didn’t get more cocoon-like than Jewish Forest Hills in the 1960s), I experienced nothing like the virulent hatred for which my own lifelong task of reading everything of importance relating to the Shoah prepared me almost to expect. My first foray into the non-Jewish world was in my junior year of college, when I suddenly found myself the only Jew (and the only American) in a men’s dormitory in eastern France where the large majority of the other residents were from French-speaking West Africa or French-speaking Southeast Asia. (If anything, I was a kind of a curiosity: the guy across the hall, Jean from Niger, seemed vaguely surprised I didn’t know Jesus of Nazareth personally, us being cousins and all.) And when Joan and I lived in Germany itself in the mid-1980s, we experienced, if anything, a weird and slightly creepy version of philo-Semitism, as though our neighbors were consciously vying with each other to prove just how unreasonable it would be to consider them as having anything to do with the Nazis merely because they spoke the same language, lived in the same country, and were directly descended from the people who put Hitler into office in 1933. Our strange upstairs neighbors invited us over as we were preparing to leave Germany to show us a life-size bust of, of all people, Golda Meir that they kept in a kind of living-room shrine devoted to her memory. (Being invited over was a very big deal—Germans generally invite guests into their homes only after having known them for decades, if then. If I remember correctly, that was the sole invitation to a German home that we received in our two years in Heidelberg.)

Even my one encounter with vicious Jew-hatred itself came with a silver lining. I came to our synagogue in Richmond (in British Columbia on Canada’s Pacific coast) one Sunday morning in 1987 to discover that it had been defaced overnight by vandals painting horrific things on the front wall of the building, including at the center of the effort, the horrific words “Six Million Wasn’t Enough.” We called the police, of course, but were amazed when the RCMP officers who responded dismissed the whole thing—six-foot high bright red swastikas and all—as just some sort of dopey teenagers’ prank. (Richmond doesn’t have its own police force, so policing is the job of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the national Canadian police force. I particularly remember the officer basing his dismissive analysis of the situation on the fact that an adult would have written “weren’t enough,” not “wasn’t enough,” as though no serious adult anti-Semite would have less than impeccable grammar skills.) So that was horrific. But an hour or so later there arrived at our congregation dozens and dozens of Sunday-morning worshipers from the Catholic church down the block, St. Joseph the Worker. Father Pascal, a friend, had told his people that they had something more important to do than conducting their own worship service, then asked them to go home and regroup at our synagogue with brushes, turpentine, ladders, and rags so that they could assist us in removing the hateful slogans from the front wall of the building. We took pictures. The RCMP guys took their own million pictures. And then our friends from next door got to work. Within a few hours, the building was presentable. But what followed was even more amazing than Father Pascal’s call-to-arms in the first place: we began to receive letters of support and cash donations from all across Canada…and mostly from Christian churches of various denominations and sizes. We ended up with hundreds of such letters and thousands of dollars in gifts. The whole incident, instead of making me terrified, left me feeling supported and encouraged, secure that, even if there are bad people in the world, there are also very good people who loathe prejudice and hatred, and who are willing to put their money where their mouths are. The Reverend Dr. Ed Searcy, known to all Shelter Rockers from his place of permanent prominence on the list of people for whose recovery from illness we pray every Shabbat, was one of the local ministers who came forward to offer his public support and his assistance, and who later also became a good friend.

So that is my story with respect to anti-Semitism. For a Jew born in the middle of the twentieth century, it’s pretty benign stuff. And I think my experience mirrors the experiences of a majority of Jewish Americans of my generation. Yes, of course, there are exceptions, including some gigantic ones. But for the most part, the years of my life in this place have been characterized by slow, but distinctly noticeable, progress towards considering overtly expressed prejudice based on religion, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender more or less taboo in the public square. I have never felt afraid to be who I am, and to be so overtly and without feeling the need to hide. In this way, among many others, I feel blessed to be of my time and place.

But so did the Jews of the Weimar Republic. Indeed, it was precisely because they felt so at ease, so much a part of things, so fully integrated into the society in which they lived…it was because they were so fully German that they somehow failed to take note of the rising tide of anti-Semitism that eventually became a full-fledged tsunami that left only death, destruction, and exile in its horrific wake. And so I, who feel so fully integrated into the world in which I live, try not to replicate their mistake. When those fascist goons appeared out of nowhere to march in Charlottesville a few years ago while chanting overtly anti-Semitic slogans, I took it more than seriously. (To read my thoughts on that whole incident, click here.) When a bad man came to a synagogue in Pittsburgh one Shabbat morning just a year later with a semi-automatic rifle and three Glock pistols with the intention of murdering as many Jews as he could kill before anyone stopped him, I took that even more seriously. (To revisit my analysis from that week, click here.) As I know so also did all of you.

But, paradoxically, the tide of public feeling isn’t substantially altered by big-ticket events like Charlottesville or Poway or Pittsburgh, incidents that are widely deplored by all. Instead, what marks the end of civility in a given place is the slow erosion of sensitivity to prejudice, to hatred, to bigotry. It can begin innocently enough with tasteless jokes that even thoughtful people like myself feel embarrassed to make a big deal about. B-list celebrities like Kyrie Irving, whom I admitted a few weeks ago to never having heard of, are suddenly famous for making anti-Semitic comments in public. A tidal wave of protest follows. But the barrier has been breached. When Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, threatens in public to murder Jewish people when he’s a bit more rested, there is a similar uproar. He loses some very lucrative contracts. He is ridiculed as a bigot and as a fool. But the uproar dies down and, as it does, the barrier is yet again thinned. When, a few weeks later, a famous comedian like Dave Chapelle speaks resentfully about Jews in the entertainment industry from the very public stage of Saturday Night Live, there is almost no response at all. After all, isn’t it true that lots of Jews work in Hollywood?

And now we have the latest incident to attempt to unpack. A former President of the United States has dinner last week on the patio of Mar-a-Lago with Ye and Nick Fuentes. (Milos Yiannopoulos, the former Breitbart News editor who was forced to resign after being accused of promoting pedophilia, was also present.) Ye is the one who is “going to go death con 3 on Jewish people.” Fuentes is a relatively unknown anti-Semite and racist who denies the truth of the Shoah, doesn’t think women should be allowed to vote, marched in Charlottesville, believes men should have the legal right to beat their wives, and would like January 6 to become a national holiday honoring the insurrectionists’ riot at the Capitol. All three, but particularly Ye and Fuentes, represent and actively promote views that should be anathema to all Americans, yet there they were both dining in full view with Donald Trump, who is actively pursuing a bid to win the Republican nomination for President.

Yes, there was a huge outcry. Some of the negative comments came from expected sources. Senator Schumer, for example, said clearly that he considered the former President’s behavior “disgusting and dangerous,” and that the whole incident was one redolent of “pure evil.” So that’s pretty clear. But also expected. As also was the very clear and pointed comment on Twitter by Elan Carr, Trump’s own State Department anti-Semitism monitor, who wrote that “No responsible American, and certainly no former President, should be cavorting with the likes of Nick Fuentes and Kanye West.”  Less expected was the blanket condemnation of the former President’s decision to host Ye and Nick Fuentes at his home from groups like the Zionist Organization of America and the Republican Jewish Coalition. Some actual Republican congressmen and senators also voiced extreme distaste. Senator Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), for example, went on record as saying that “President Trump hosting racist anti-Semites for dinner encourages other racist anti-Semites. These attitude are immoral and should not be entertained.” Representative James Comer (R-Kentucky) commented simply that President Trump “certainly needs better judgment in who [sic] he dines with.” Eventually, Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy weighed in, the latter apparently comfortable only with condemning the act but not the actual actor.

So that’s all satisfying to hear. But, yet again, the wall is breached, the barrier thinned, the taboo more ignorable. It would be easy to focus on the image of an ex-President dining on his own patio with a Nick Fuentes and to use it to condemn former President Trump himself. But the real challenge is to understand that this isn’t ultimately “about” Donald Trump. It’s about the tenor of American society with respect to anti-Semitism, about the degree to which the water in which we swim has warmed up a notch without us knowing what precisely to do. The incident with Ye and Nick Fuentes will be gone from the headlines almost immediately. But that incident has made slightly thinner the wall that protects Jews from the vandals at the gate. In the end, the incident will be remembered as a footnote. But as a footnote in the story of the rising tide of anti-Semitism in the world, not as one primarily “about” the former President’s bid for his party’s nomination to run in 2024.