Over the years as a teacher in high schools and colleges I have had students ask me on a number of occasions exactly “What is a Jew?” Is it a religion, is it an ethnicity, what is it? I also have to clarify that the term Jew is not an insult, it is what members of a group of call themselves. The question and the confusion often arises when we study about waves of immigration to the United States between 1880 and 1924 when over two-and- one-half million Eastern European Jews arrived in the United States and immigration restriction quotas in 1921 and 1924 designed to sharply restrict Jewish immigration. When you look at immigration charts, they list be by place of origin, not by religion or ethnicity, so they do not mention Jews. The question also comes up when students learn about Nazi Germany, anti-Jewish laws, and the European Holocaust.
American Jews are hard to categorize because many identify with Israel although they are not Israeli; they or their ancestors did not come to the United States from the same countries; some people who identify as Jews also consider themselves atheists while others following different religious practices; and there are different ethnic/linguistic groups who consider themselves to be Jews, the Ashkenazi of Central and Eastern Europe who spoke a Germanic language called Yiddish, the Sephardim from the Mediterranean area who spoke a Spanish-related language called Ladino, and Jews who trace their families to Persia, Uzbekistan, or Ethiopia.
As a shorthand, most people and most Jews, including secular Jews, just consider Judaism to be a religion, even when they don’t practice, attend a synagogue, or even believe in a God. I generally define American Ashkenazi Jews, of which I am a member, as an ethnic group that shares a common history and traditions, although this categorization is weakening as more people of Jewish descent have little connection with the past or intermarry with people from other religious and ethnic groups.
Fortunately, or not so fortunately, Donald Trump and his Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos just solved our identification problem by deciding what a Jew is. I say unfortunately, because the Trump/DeVos definition is too close to the one used by Nazi Germany when it passed anti-Jewish laws in the 1930s and rounded people up, including my relatives, for extermination.
This week Trump signed an Executive Order targeting what he and his advisors see as anti-Semitism on college campuses, but is basically opposition to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian West Bank since 1967, the construction of Israeli settlements there, threatened annexation, and preventing the formation of a Palestinian state. Trump is threatening to withhold federal funding from any educational institution that DeVos labels as insufficiently combating what she and Trump consider to be anti-Semitism.
In a New York Times opinion essay, Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner claimed the President’s goal was to “defend Jewish students in the United States” and that the“executive order does not define Jews as a nationality” or race or color. Apparently Mr. Kushner did not read the Executive Order, or if he did, has problems with reading comprehension. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which the Executive Order cites, prohibits discrimination “on the basis of race, color, and national origin,” but not based on religion, probably to protect religious institutions from charges of discrimination. Trump’s Executive Order clearly states “Discrimination against Jews may give rise to a Title VI violation when the discrimination is based on an individual's race, color, or national origin,” not because of their religion. It continues, “It shall be the policy of the executive branch to enforce Title VI against prohibited forms of discrimination rooted in anti-Semitism as vigorously as against all other forms of discrimination prohibited by Title VI,” on the basis of race, color, and national origin, but again, not based on religion. To be covered under Title VI, Trump has redefined Jews as a “race, color, and national origin,” although it remains unclear which one.
Donald Trump is a surprising Defender of Jews from anti-Semitism. He has frequently been accused of personally making off-handed anti-Semitic remarks and ignoring anti-Jewish tropes. In 2017, he defended people protesting against the removal of Confederate statues in Charlottesville, Va., protests that included white supremacists who shouted anti-Jewish slogans. Trump may also have missed that Nazi Germany, when it passed anti-Jewish laws in the 1930s, also considered Jews a distinct “race” who did not possess “German or kindred blood.”
The U.S. State Department uses a somewhat awkward definition of anti-Semitism adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in 2016. “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”
The State Department considers the following to be examples of anti-Semitism: “calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews”; making “dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations” against Jews; “denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g. gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany”; “accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing”; and “applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”;
However, the State Department does not consider “criticism of Israel, if it is “similar to that leveled against any other country” as anti-Semitic. Using this this definition and explanation, former President Jimmy Carter was not anti-Semitic when he called Israel an apartheid state and compared its treatment of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza with the way South Africa treated blacks. Someone who opposes the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and other Palestinian lands would not be anti-Semitic if they also oppose Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Britain’s absorption of Northern Ireland, or the U.S. occupation of Guantanamo in Cuba or continued colonization of Puerto Rico.
Yousef Munayyer, the executive director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, labels Trump’s order equating opposition to Israeli treatment of Palestinians with anti-Semitism part of a campaign “to silence Palestinian rights activism.” Munayyer believes “Israeli apartheid is a very hard product to sell in America.” “Realizing this, many Israeli apartheid apologists, Trump included, are looking to silence a debate they know they can’t win.” Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, an advocacy group that supports a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, accused Trump of a cynical effort to crack down on his critics and denied it was an effort to defend Jews from bias. A New York Times editorial argues the Trump Executive Order ignores “the larger threat to American Jews . . . fomented most significantly by white nationalist and the far right” while threatening free speech on college campuses. I agree with all three statements.
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