Jews. And Pacific Islanders. And Gay People. And Hispanics....

As everybody surely knows by now, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a resolution last week that condemned more or less every conceivable kind of prejudice imaginable…including anti-Semitism. It was, admittedly, a bold move forward for our courageous Congresspeople. But this is only the beginning! Reliable sources have informed me (yes, me personally) that Congress is thinking of granting women the vote within the next few weeks. And then, possibly, of outlawing chattel slavery as well in our great land. Who knows where this could all end? Eventually, they might even repeal Prohibition. Hardy-har-har!

I’m not really laughing. And neither is anyone who takes the moral foundation of the republic seriously and worries, as any thoughtful homeowner should, about cracks and fissures in the once-rock-solid foundation of democratic ideals and republican principles upon which the structure yet stands. It would be impossible to say that the resolution was not a good thing. But the background against which that good thing was accomplished is suggestive of harsh winds blowing through our land and our nation’s capital. And that part of the story is extremely worrying to me.

The resolution was originally formulated as a single-barreled rebuke specifically of anti-Semitism and was widely understood to constitute an effort by the Democrats in the House of Representatives to distance themselves from the anti-Semitic tweets of Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota). She herself was delicately left unmentioned in the text of the resolution. But that seems not much to have mattered, as her supporters all understood easily whom this was all about. And so, feeling unable publicly to oppose anti-Semitism, they opted for Plan B…and ended up insisting that the resolution be rewritten to condemn not only irrational prejudice against Jews, but also against Sikhs. And Hindus. And black people. And non-black people of color. And Hispanic people. And Muslims. And Pacific Islanders. (Is that even a thing, prejudice against people born in the Pacific?) And the LGBTQ community. And Asian Americans. To read the resolution, which is seven pages long, click here. Or, read ahead and let me talk you through it.

The resolution duly mentions some non-anti-Semitic incidents and makes specific reference to the horrific attack in 2015 on the church in Charleston in which nine innocent black worshipers were murdered. But mostly it was about anti-Semitism. The text makes specific reference to the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017. And it makes mention of the attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh last October in which eleven people were killed by a shooter who declared openly that his ultimate wish was for “all Jews to die.” The text then goes on to take note of a truly unbelievable statistic, that a stunning 58.1% of all “religious-based” hate crimes are directed against Jewish people or institutions. (Pretty good for a group that makes up something like 2.1% of the national population!) Even I, whom no one could possibly accuse of excessive optimism, was shocked by that statistic. Maybe there really is more of a problem here than any of us wants to admit.

 The resolution defines anti-Semitism in an interesting way too, specifically noting that anti-Jewish prejudice includes “blaming Jews as Jews when things go wrong; calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or extremist view of religion; or making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotyped allegations about Jews.” I’m not sure who wrote those words, but it all sounds right to me. Still, it’s the first clause that seems the worthiest of taking seriously: blaming Jews as Jews when things go wrong was precisely what the Nazis did to garner public support in the 1930s and it is, of all the specific versions of anti-Jewish prejudice mentioned, probably—at least in the long run—the most pernicious. Good for the House to have recognized that!

The text goes on to talk briefly about the appearance of anti-Semitic tropes of various sorts in the media, the public promotion of the bizarre fantasy that American Jews control the U.S. government or seek world domination, and the scapegoating of Jews by racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and the America First Committee. And then, finally, we get down right to it as the text of the resolution leaves the general and focuses specifically on the matter at hand, rebuking Ilhan Omar’s tweets without mentioning their source by name.

This is the crux of the matter because, by unmistakably referencing the tweets, the resolution is equally clearly addressing the (unnamed) tweeter when it unambiguously condemns the practice of “accusing Jews of being more loyal to Israel or to the Jewish community than to the United States” and specifically categorizes that as constituting anti-Semitism “because it suggests that Jewish citizens cannot be patriotic Americans and trusted neighbors,” which opinion, we read, is particularly offensive given the fact that “Jews have loyally served our Nation every day since its founding, whether in public or community life or in military service.”

And then the text, again without mentioning names, turns to a different congressperson, Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) and addresses the topic of dual loyalty. (To access my letter about Representative Tlaib and her willingness to raise the dual loyalty canard, click here.) First, we are given a number of instances in which the dual loyalty canard has been brought out by people eager to malign one or many who belonged to a minority faith. Specific mention is made of Alfred Dreyfus and John F. Kennedy, of the interment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War and instances of anti-Muslim prejudice. (Some of the statistics in that regard are also shocking: a 99% increase in hate crimes directed against Muslim Americans between 2014 and 2016, mosque bombings in three different states, and, most alarming of all, actual planned mass attacks against Muslims in Kansas in 2016, Florida in 2017, and New York in 2019.)

When the resolution finally gets to say what it is actually proposing, it returns to the dual loyalty issue by formally rejecting “the perpetuation of anti-Semitic stereotypes in the U.S. and around the world, including the pernicious myth of dual loyalty and foreign allegiance, especially in the context of support for the United States-Israel alliance.” Special reference is made to the fact that the United States government maintains an individual designated as the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism. And the document wraps up with a call to all public officials to live up to the “transcendent principles of tolerance, religious freedom, and equal protection as embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the first and 14^th amendments to the Constitution.” (The Fourteenth Amendment is the one that guarantees all citizens equal protection under the law and protects against the deprivation of life, liberty or property, without the due process of law.)

That all sounds almost intensely uncontroversial. So why was the resolution not unanimously adopted? Yes, it passed handily. But twenty-three members of Congress voted against it, all Republicans. A twenty-fourth, Steven King (R-Iowa), who was stripped of his committee assignments following comments endorsing white supremacy, voted “present.” A quick survey of the nay-sayers’ websites yields the conclusion that none voted against it because he or she is in favor of bigotry or prejudice, but because of a sense that there was something peculiar and intensely worrisome about the inability of the House just to condemn anti-Semitism without feeling obliged concomitantly to condemn every other conceivable form of prejudice they could think of. (To see an interesting survey of the twenty-three by Ewan Palmer that was published on the Newsweek website earlier this week, click here.) Is anti-Semitism not something worth condemning without reference to other forms of prejudice? Would any decent person ever say that about racism directed against black people, that it feels somehow wrong just to condemn it on its own demerits without buttressing the sentiment with reference to other kinds of prejudice as well? No one would! Nor should anyone. And yet…we had people saying precisely that last week about a resolution condemning just anti-Semitism.

I find myself on both sides of that argument. On the one hand, I feel eager to find good in a resolution that, after all, loudly and clearly condemns anti-Jewish sentiment and the violence such sentiment all too often breeds. But I am also made extremely uneasy by the apparent fact that the Democratic leadership in the house felt it impossible to condemn anti-Semitism at all unless the condemnation included references to what reads like a list of every other kind of bigotry imaginable.

Ilhan Omar, the congresswoman at the center of the controversy, seems to spend her day sending out anti-Semitic tweets and then apologizing for inadvertently offending anyone. She responds to criticism, including sharp criticism by members of her own party, by presenting herself as a naïf who keeps accidentally using anti-Semitic tropes to make the point that Israel’s supporters in the Congress are the unwitting dupes of their masters at AIPAC (standing in here for the Elders of Zion in more traditional anti-Semitic literature) rather than accepting that people of intelligence, moral maturity, and political insight choose to stand with Israel because it is our only reliable ally in the Middle East and, even more to the point, because the right of Jewish people to chart their own destiny forward in a Jewish state in their own Jewish homeland is reasonable and just. Israel has more vicious enemies to deal with than Ilhan Omar. But the fact that it was deemed impolitic to bring a resolution featuring a simple, forceful condemnation of anti-Semitism to the floor of the House is a troubling comment on how things are in these United States as we move past the eightieth anniversary of Kristallnacht and ask ourselves, yet again, why the Jews of Germany didn’t respond more vigorously to the tides that would eventually engulf them utterly.