Is Trump Good for the Jews? Part 1 of 2
How did Islamists capture liberals? You'll see Y soon...
Last week I went to a debate “Is Donald Trump Good for the Jews” with Bret Stephens, Rahm Emmanuel and Jason Greenblatt (Trump exec and 1.0 admin staffer) at the 92nd Street Y, a Jewish cultural organization on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
In a follow up essay I’ll get into why Rahm Emanuel’s perspective about Trump being bad for the Jews is obsolete, yet popular, in shrinking blue bubbles. Before we get there, for this essay, I’ll show how “Y” movements help explain why there’s widespread left-wing support in North America and Europe for violent Islamism, which will only worsen for liberals since they forbid themselves from thinking critically about their behaviors that target fellow humans. When you feel a carte blanche to target anyone, you will soon target everyone.
I know it sounds crazy, but I’ll share insights about why student activists at elite institutions feel justified attacking staff members, and why Dutch authorities don’t conduct mass expulsions of Arab Muslim immigrant rioters after mass attacks on civilians in Amsterdam. These are emblematic events, there are thousands more like them. Attacks on Jews in Amsterdam by immigrant Muslims and attacks on blue collar workers by wealthy college students are closely linked. Both demonstrate the quixotic and suicidal pairing of Western liberals with Middle Eastern illiberals. Both groups spread their ideologies, by violence and by elections, to conquer the world. Smells like… colonialism?
(Speaking of violent illiberalism, January 6th was atrocious and none of the guilty should have been pardoned. It was also, thankfully, one event. The attacks I’m describing happen constantly across the Western world. They either aren’t reported by mainstream media as we’ll see below, or they’re rationalized as one-offs. A thousand times over. And over.)
All of this relates to the Y. Seriously.
In response to the Young Men’s Christian Association founding in London, 1844, which took off in the USA a few years later in the period of early modernity, Jews in Baltimore and New York created the Young Men’s Hebrew Association in 1874 to modernize and assimilate new immigrants. The 92nd St Y eventually spun off while the parent organization evolved into the highly successful JCC that millions of families enjoy every day. Why am I talking about this? Who cares?
No, I’m not going to dissect why Trump supporters dance to the gay anthem, “Y.M.C.A.,” other than to say it’s hilarious and sweet seeing Americans of all backgrounds have fun. The Yankees also play the song in the 6th inning. It’s a big world.
I’m talking about the origins of the various “Y” movements because they mark cultural conversations in modernity for Jews and Christians in the West that would, during the Cold War era, be called Judeo-Christian values. That’s on the one hand. On the other hand, a different but related Y movement informs the chic anti-Westernism of progressive politics, multicultural dead ends and almost all of academia everywhere. (Try studying the Western Canon at a top tier school; see if you can survive the sneers and lectures on privilege—or find a class in the catalog.)
While Jews and Christians were making hyphens and teaching kids how to swim, Islam was also engaged in the Y movement in the Middle East. Instead of building classrooms to teach Western civics, Arab Muslims used the Y framework to develop death cults inspired by the Nazis.
Hamas, ISIS, Al Qaeda and its many offshoots, Islamic Jihad, Muslim Brotherhood, and Shia analogues in Hezbollah, Yemeni Houthis and the Islamic Republic of Iran, are totalitarian Islamic movements where you either join or you die. Conveniently, they will offer to kill themselves while forcing you to join them. That’s a lot of death for no reason. I think it’s fair to call them death cults.
It's all connected to the YMCA and the JCC.
In the early 20th century, Arab Muslim activists were inspired by the YMCA as the Arab Muslim world modernized into independent nation states after the UK and France defeated the Ottoman Empire in 1919.
So yes, it was literally white straight cis-male Western colonizers who sponsored Arab nationalism, not the darker-skinned indigenous Muslim rulers in Turkey who sought imperial domination. So much for the binary simplicities of Settler-Colonialism taught at every academic institution and blue state high school.
In Egypt, a charismatic religious leader, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, formed the Young Men’s Muslim Association (YMMA) in 1926. Two years later, that turned into the Muslim Brotherhood. Young men are fraternal, get it?
This popular Arab liberation movement noted Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and studied Mein Kampf, which journalists in Baghdad and Cairo translated into Arabic as early as 1934.
The Muslim Brotherhood grew in stature and coherence. Soon it became the ideological underpinning for Hamas, Al Qaeda and ISIS—and, even more troubling, all Middle Eastern studies departments at elite universities in Europe and America by the late 1990s. Why tweedy professors chose totalitarian Arab Islamism over Western classical liberalism is a longer discussion, but ancient antipathy to Jews, trendy multicultural critiques of Western values (not for nothing, those Western values created the concept of critique) by people like Edward Said, and the white elite noblesse oblige to reflexively defer to people with minority backgrounds, like Edward Said, regardless of their beliefs or ideological mission, helps summarize why Harvard in 2025 partners with an extremist Palestinian school, Bir Zeit University, while denying Jews access to classrooms in Cambridge, MA.
It also shows why Georgetown University has a campus in Qatar, a 15-minute drive to Hamas HQ. Oddly, this doesn’t trouble it’s Jesuit leadership. Money doesn’t hurt, just ask Donald Trump what he thinks of his new airplane.
Today, the Muslim Brotherhood and close affiliates have offices in London, Cairo and yes, Doha, but you can’t Google that location as easily as you can find Hamas.
Fun fact: CAIR, the Council of American Islamic Relations, is close enough to the Muslim Brotherhood to be banned in the UAE because Brotherhood-inspired Arab Islamists, like Al Qaeda, assassinate Sunni political leaders and murder civilians. The New York Times and like-minded news outlets frequently quotes CAIR when covering Arab American affairs.
While Jews and Christians in the West built gyms and classrooms for citizens in the name of fostering liberal societies that seek wealth, the successors of the YMMA sponsored a hundred years of regional impoverishment and global terrorism.
All three Y movements continue, but only one claims ideological supremacy at our elite institutions that tell us they are the good guys promoting social justice by obliterating Western pedagogy in favor of indigenous narratives of persecution.
Those narratives of persecution have been helpfully articulated by indigenous writers such as Adolf Hitler and his later Arab allies like Osama bin Laden. I’m no Princeton historian, but they may have pointed their societies in the wrong direction and caused harm along the way.
For the Princeton professors, all those troubling questions and linkages evaporate if you simply fight the Trump administration so you can teach young adults the virtues of jihad, I mean, liberation resistance movements.
Now perhaps you can understand the animus against Jews in the pro-Palestine movement on college campuses. You’ll note that, unlike the 1960s Vietnam War protests, Palestinian activists don’t march for peace, love and understanding. What they do call for isn’t reported in the mainstream press.
This is from yesterday in the New York Times, Sunday May 18th 2025:
The months following the Hamas attack on Israel… saw college campuses descend into a state of chaotic division and turmoil... Pro-Palestinian advocates called for an end to the Israeli occupation and its retaliatory war campaign, while supporters of Israel defended the country’s right to self-defense and said they were harassed by their classmates and didn’t feel safe on campuses.
According to Katie Baker of the Times, and her editors, Palestinian college activists called for an end to the Israeli occupation (in land it seized after being attacked in 1967 by Egypt, Syria and Jordan), no retaliation to 10/7 and… nothing else?
What really happened is what we all saw, but which the journalist didn’t seem worthy of mentioning: pro-Palestinian advocates across North America called for the destruction of Israel and intifadah everywhere, which is how Gen Z spells murder of Jews. Helpfully, protesters adopted the iconography of Hamas and Hezbollah to clarify their point. Maybe Katie Baker, a graduate of UC Berkeley, missed those encampments? Perhaps she was too busy reporting on Covid dangers to children or Biden’s mental sharpness? (I’m being anachronistic, but it’s hard to resist when the Times tells me to be wary of misinformation while it spreads… misinformation.)
Curiously, pro-Israel, pro-Jewish counter-protesters, who were in the minority, didn’t have encampments, didn’t take over buildings, didn’t attack janitors, didn’t wear taunting symbols like, say, IDF uniforms, and they didn’t call for the mass murder of Arabs living in between one body of water to another.
The Times, which is entirely staffed by graduates from universities like UC Berkeley that adopt the same indigenous, anti-Western viewpoints of the founders of the Young Men’s Muslim Association, continues to elide the truth we all witnessed for months.
When Christians once inspired Jews to build civic institutions as the world modernized in the late 19th century, they also inspired Muslims to do the same in the early 20th century as the Middle East formed nations out of a defeated caliphate. Two movements evolved very differently from the latecomer, but only one of them won the hearts and minds of our scholars, journalists and street activists.
Perhaps Trump’s call for viewpoint diversity isn’t so crazy?
More on Trump on the Jews in the next essay. Thanks for reading.