Trump’s proposition to Jewish Americans: Submit to “protection” from the mob-boss- or face consequences

In 1988, the Saturday Night Live crew performed a skit about a game show hosted by Tom Hanks called “Jew, Not a Jew.” Contestants would look at a photo of a celebrity with an anglicized name and guess whether that person was a “Jew or not a Jew.” It was great comedy, written by the Jewish comedian and future senator Al Franken. Now we have this same question voiced by Donald Trump, and it’s deadly serious. Trump has long maintained that there are good Jews and bad Jews. The good Jews fund his campaign and worship him for being, in his words, the Jews’ “big protector.” In contrast, any bad Jew, one who opposes him, “should have your head examined.” Last year, he said menacingly, “If we were to lose in 2024, Jews would be to blame.”

A week ago, Trump threw more kindling on the fire, saying that Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, an enthusiast of the Israeli occupation, was not only “not Jewish”; he was “a Palestinian.” I asked Rabbi Alissa Wise, the founder of Rabbis for Ceasefire, about the implicit threat in this cocktail of bigotry. “Trump in one fell swoop used Palestinian as a derogatory slur and—as a non-Jew—elevated himself to arbiter of who is the right and wrong kind of Jew,” Rabbi Wise said. “This has gotten Jews murdered by authoritarian leaders like himself. Woe to the Jewish institutions, like the Anti-Defamation League, that continue to kiss his ring, playing Russian roulette with both Jewish and Palestinian lives.”

Schumer’s response, suffice it to say, was not to reply, “No, I’m not Palestinian. I don’t have that privilege.” Instead, after gutting the Democratic caucus, he hightailed it out of the Capitol for his book tour, a book about antisemitism. This is, of course, Schumer’s version of antisemitism, personified more by college students fighting for Palestine than the authoritarian denying his claim to his faith. Either way, he shouldn’t have rushed. The tour has now been postponed due to fear of protests organized by what was until recently his own base.

Today’s Christian nationalist sees Judaism not as a faith or culture but as a political marker. Step on the wrong side, and these Christian Zionists—a group that outnumbers Zionist Jews—will nullify your Judaism.

Trump’s mentor Vladimir Putin is fond of saying that Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy and “ethnic Jews” are “not Jewish.” This sentiment that our Judaism is fraudulent has also long been echoed by far-right Jewish Zionists who feel attacked in our critique of autocracy. Trump’s former Israeli ambassador David Friedman once informed me, much to the surprise of my bubbe, that I am not, in fact, Jewish. These pompous, self-appointed arbiters of Judaism agree with what Trump said last year to former White House adviser and fascist sympathizer Sebastian Gorka: “Any Jewish person who votes for Democrats hates their religion.”

People like Ambassador Friedman reject the proud Jewish saying that we are “two people, three opinions.” They prefer one opinion and will disappear the other person if necessary. Rabbi Brant Rosen, whose anti-Zionist Tzedek Chicago (tzedek meaning justice in Hebrew) congregation was recently profiled on NPR, said to me, “The ‘good Jew/bad Jew’ trope has been a hallmark of Christian antisemitism for centuries. Now we’re seeing it revived by Christian nationalists, with fealty to a Jewish ethno-state serving as the new inflection point. What I find truly chilling is the extent to which some Jewish leaders, politicians, and organizations are willfully playing into it. This is a sick form of collaborationism—and certainly won’t keep Jews safe.”

It beggars belief that anyone thinks shuffling like a nebbish into the strongman’s embrace while sacrificing a sizable portion of our community will ensure our survival. But our safety as Jews—and the safety of all of us—is even more imperiled now that “fighting antisemitism” has become the rationale for Trump’s post-constitutional order. This regime’s basis for having a secret police disappear Palestinian rights activists without due process for criticizing Israel is “fighting antisemitism.” The defunding of universities, the outlawing of academic departments, and the firing of Jewish professors is all part of its struggle to “fight antisemitism.” Then, clearly feeling itself after the extrajudicial arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, the White House tweeted with a bully’s swagger, “Shalom Mahmoud.” It read like a nightclub comic, pimping our faith for a cheap laugh.

“The right-wing theft and misappropriation of the language of antisemitism has emptied it entirely of concern for Jewish safety and turned it inside out so the fascists and antisemites can use as a shield for their own violent agenda,” Stefanie Fox of Jewish Voice for Peace told me.

Jewish Voice for Peace has been a frontline organization against the Israeli occupation. But even Israeli publications like Haaretz are pointing out that these policies endanger us.

When Trump tells Schumer that he, as Great Leader, has revoked the senator’s Jew card, it is a warning aimed well beyond the senator. When Elon Musk financially backs Germany’s far-right Alternatif für Deutschland party, it is a warning. When the Sieg Heil–saluting Musk says that George Soros is behind the protests at Tesla dealerships, it is a warning. And especially when the Trump administration hires and appoints brazen antisemites, it’s a warning to every Jew in the United States who rejects his protection racket.

Consider the deputy press secretary for the Department of Defense, a 26-year-old nepo-baby named Kingsley Wilson. The daughter of the former Trump adviser who was too much of a conspiracist for NewsMax, Steve Cortes, Wilson has tweeted out Nazi slogans and even praised the lynching of Leo Frank. In case your knowledge of antisemitism only extends back a century, Frank was a Jewish factory owner who was hanged in 1915 in Georgia on false charges of raping and murdering a young girl. He was posthumously pardoned in 1986. Frank’s murder spread fear throughout immigrant Jewish communities who thought they had found safe harbor from the anti-Jewish violence of Eastern Europe. “Get him like Leo Frank” was the sort of thing my immigrant grandfather heard walking the streets of Brooklyn as a child—and Frank’s guilt is still maintained on neo-Nazi message boards. Both the Department of Defense and Wilson have refused to comment on the contention that the deputy press secretary’s Leo Frank obsession has been drawn from the darkest corners of the Internet.

The people whom Trump has chosen to run the military are telling us what they think through their silence. They are saying that their Christian-nationalist acceptance of us is conditional upon fronting for the lie that this group of antisemites are shredding the Constitution to fight antisemitism. That is why it’s so threatening to their project when Jews refuse to have our faith weaponized, and we chant, “Not in our name!”

We need to amplify testimonials like that of Columbia student Jonathan Ben-Menachem, who wrote an article titled, “I Am a Jewish Student at Columbia. Mahmoud Khalil Is One of the Most Upstanding People I Have Ever Met.” Ben-Menachem reminds us of what Khalil told CNN last spring: “I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-by-hand, and you cannot achieve one without the other.”

When Jews and Jewish organizations occupied Trump Tower last week, leading to 100 arrests, Fox News was beside themselves. Anchor Harris Faulkner fumed on-air that these Jewish protesters “