Is Trump Good for the Jews, or Anyone?
This is part 3 of 4
Thanks for being on this journey with me as I try to find my footing for fast-shifting American politics, how they relate to Israel and Jewish affairs, and why Jews are an indicator constituency so impactful to the rest of the country. It’s a cliche for sure, but we’re proving once again to be the canary in the coal mine for DEI bigotry, trans identities that often align with Hamas, and many more threats, this time, mostly coming from the left. In other words, the left threatens everyone.
Jews are a tiny minority, there are only 14 million of us in the world vs, say, 1.4 billion Catholics. Why are Jewish affairs relevant to anyone else? In America, we seem to be the fulcrum for the culture wars and perhaps, your and your kids’ physical security. DEI, trans, terrorism, West vs Islam… Jews are involuntary key players in these issues.
I try to shed light to non-Jewish readers what Jews are seeing as we act as antennae for Western civilization. (Islamic terrorists came for America only after attacking Israel for decades.) Do Jews have an exclusive role to play? I’m not sure, but we certainly have a funny position as both ethnic minorities and white people, which gives us unique insights.
In other words, we’re both highly vulnerable as a historically oppressed minority, and also deeply empowered as “regular white Americans” on the condition that we drop our religious behaviors and affinities for Israel — like, say, the president of Harvard, Bernie Sanders, Larry David and many other famous Jews who are secular and ignore Israel.
Judaism is an ethnicity and a religion. We’re better described as “members of a multi-ethnic belief system.” It’s clunky but accurate. We’re less like Christians who can choose to believe in Jesus or not. We’re more like Navajos, a people with a belief system specific to their language, food, culture, genetics, geography, wisdom literature and their narrative as a people who lost sovereignty and now live as diasporic underdogs.
Or just ask Jews what we call ourselves. We don’t say religion, that term wasn’t invented until well after the spread of Christianity in Europe. We say “people” and “nation” in Hebrew, or when we’re feeling poetic, we say we’re the “children of Israel” — meaning both the man, Jacob, who sired the 12 tribes, and the land which we have lived in on and off since circa 1,900 BC.
I don’t use BCE/CE because they’re not honest. In the West we date our timeline from the birth of Jesus. Just say what it is. If that offends someone, they need therapy, not euphemisms.
The other week at the 92nd St Y Rahm Emanuel and Jason Greenblatt debated if Donald Trump is good for these sons and daughters of Israel.
In the first essay about the debate I discussed how early 20th century Islam evolved in a deadly direction departing radically from modernizing Christian and Jewish societies in the West. Look to the “Y” movements, like the YMCA, to track this.
Another example of this is how Americans used to talk about “Judeo-Christian values” after World War II. Back then, America became more hospitable to Jews by dropping university quotas and de facto housing bans against us in the north, and dropping semi-official segregation against us and a rare instance of lynching in the south. In many ways, we were the last group to become white—because of the Civil Rights Movement, American awareness of the horrors of the Holocaust, and, to a lesser extent, the rise of Israel. The American left has now ended that period of tolerating Jews, at least within their diminishing and radicalizing movement, while the right becomes more inclusive of non-whites like Latinos, blacks, Hindus and so on.
For instance, American schools now have DEI quotas against Jews (and Asians) that echo earlier discrimination policies. Meanwhile, all minorities shift their votes to Republicans. This kind of easy math should tell Democrats that if they’re less racist, they’ll get more votes. But since they won’t acknowledge their racism, they won’t.
Earlier I looked at Rahm Emanuel’s defense of Democrats and his criticism that Donald Trump is bad for the Jews.
Now let’s explore what’s happening in America with a lens not distorted by the left, which has profoundly warped legacy news reporting to the point that you can’t rely on “the news” to know what’s happening.
As of last week, with the revelation about Biden’s unfitness for office dating back to as early as 2021, we’re at the point that legacy news organizations outside the Wall Street Journal are simply propaganda operations for a vanishing political party. Yes, that vanishing is now being reported in the New York Times, which seems to have rare glimmers of objectivity when its interests are threatened. Hopefully they drop the extreme partisanship, but that seems unlikely.
These are the bells of liberal media that I can’t unring: Biden’s ability to be president ever, the dangers of Covid for healthy folk under 65, the characterization of Israel as the perpetrator as it fights a multi-front war it didn’t start, ranking people based on racial preferences, and the promotion of gender norms that were once anti-men (toxic masculinity, gender-selective workplace discrimination) that has now spread to be anti-women—by allowing men to compete in and sometimes attack women in women-only spaces, and to encourage permanent surgical and medical mutilation of children and teens.
To understand which party is better or worse for the Jews, and for this country, let’s actually look at how the Trump administration handles antisemitism in America without relying on media narratives. Not for nothing, the left won’t acknowledge or take responsibility for trending antisemitism, even after the murder of two Israeli diplomats in Washington DC (a Jewish Kansan and Christian Israeli about to be engaged) and the attempted assassination of Governor Josh Shapiro, to say nothing of mass college protests endorsed by faculty that target Jewish students.
For argument’s sake, let’s say you agree that we’re facing increased antisemitism. The spate of violence we’re now seeing is the manifestation of the progressive call to “globalize the intifada.”
Intifada is a specifically Palestinian term for violent attacks on unarmed Jewish civilians to achieve Islamist political goals, AKA, terrorism. Based on non-enforcement of hate speech codes on campuses, calls for terrorism are acceptable.
If this isn’t like yelling fire in a theater, what is? Meanwhile, the liberal media mounts free speech defenses of Pro-Palestine activism and under-reports their illiberal behavior.
Trump’s muscular attack on antisemitism is unfortunately not bipartisan, which is ironic considering the Democratic party says fighting discrimination has been their political mission since passing the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
About a month ago, there was another violent protest at Columbia University where agitators injured staffers, vandalized property and blocked students from studying.
Instead of mostly encouraging these people like in 2024; in 2025 Columbia called the police. The school later says it expelled or temporarily suspended some of the students.
It’s not known if progressive Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg will prosecute. Last year, he dropped charges against almost all protesters. Bragg seems to think equal rights can be administered selectively, which is paradoxical.
Whatever you may think of my analysis, Columbia’s response is a major shift from the last administration, when schools canceled classes, canceled commencement ceremonies, created segregated gatherings, negotiated with occupiers of buildings and told Jews they were making it all up.
According to Rahm Emanuel, it’s a coincidence that agitators now face sanctions and arrest. He said it has nothing to do with Trump.
It’s likely he’ll run for president in 2028.
Shocked to learn that Biden wasn’t fit for office in 2020? Why would you believe anything a Democratic leader has to say in 2025?
Jason Greenblatt, the even-handed and well spoken Trump employee and 1.0 admin advisor, is not a professional politician with a huge ego. Emanuel dominated the show for a friendly dyed-in-the-wool liberal crowd.
Nor is Greenblatt an investment banker who designs opaque financial instruments to benefit the 1%, which is how Rahm spent his time after the Clinton administration. In 2.5 years, Emanuel earned $16.2 million. You’ll note Emanuel didn’t prosecute bankers who tanked the global economy while he was chief-of-staff in 2008.
Now he says he tried to but failed. Whatever the spin, prosecutions didn’t happen.
Must be another coincidence.
Greenblatt, who earned money by constructing buildings during an ongoing housing crisis, made another observation: Trump is a father, grandfather and long-term close colleague of Orthodox Jews.
He said Trump’s dining with professional antisemites was a terrible mistake, which I’m noting hasn’t happened since, but, and this is now my argument since Rahm isn’t here to interrupt me, how is the left better?
Have you paid attention to the “intellectual” discourse at all our colleges? The bigotry and misinformation that passes for pedagogy is endemic in our nation's schools, even at the elementary-school level.
While a dinner with antisemites is awful, millions of hours of indoctrination by tenured antisemites seems far worse.
How do you know I’m not exaggerating? Ask the schools themselves about their own behavior. Read the 300-page report on antisemitism by Harvard or the 148-page report on antisemitism by Stanford. (The former published during the Trump administration since they slow-walked it during Biden.) From coast-to-coast, we have a bigotry pandemic that’s highly contagious. If you’re a Democrat.
Trump lacks a moral center, or a moral anything. He’s publicly corrupt, which is as revealing as it is terrifying. He craves attention from the worst people, he’s been convicted in a civil court for sexual abuse. He’s also one, albeit very powerful, man.
The left has doubled down on settler colonial theories to justify the most atrocious form of racism: indoctrinating millions of children and young adults to hate people based on their ethnicity or national origins. This is the problem the left won’t acknowledge, so if they won’t acknowledge it, they’ll keep doing it.
We’ll pick up next with the final wrap of the debate and see if Rahm Emanuel is relevant for the future of the party as they twist themselves into knots to respond to mass defection by voters.