Republican rhetoric about immigrants violates a core Jewish principle
Lashon hara — speech that degrades others — is verboten in Jewish law. But it shapes our public discourse
An attendee at the 2024 Republican National Convention holds a sign reading “Mass Deportation Now!” Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images
Contributing Columnist Emily Tamkin July 18, 2024
I surprised myself while watching the second night of the Republican National Convention: I began crying during a speech about immigration by Vivek Ramaswamy, entrepreneur and former presidential candidate.
Legal immigrants like his parents, Ramaswamy said, deserved opportunities. “But our message to illegal immigrants is also this: We will return you to your country of origin.” Sure, not all are bad people, he said, but “you broke the law. And the United States of America was founded on the rule of law.”
Alarming, painful Republican rhetoric about immigration is nothing new. But something about the way Ramaswamy assigned different moral weight to legal and illegal immigrants — people who are, in reality, often only separated by the accident of birth or the luck of the bureaucratic lottery — and the way the crowd cheered that division made me feel like something had been broken.
There’s a Jewish concept that helps to explain why: that of lashon hara, or “evil talk.”
In Jewish law, lashon hara refers to speech about others that is derogatory or potentially damaging. Engaging in it is a serious violation. And Talmudic scholars have described it as harmful to not just the speaker and their subject, but also, critically, the listener.
Over the last nine years — since former President Donald Trump came down the escalator of Trump Tower and, in a speech announcing his presidential campaign, accused Mexican immigrants en masse of being rapists — we have been inundated by reflections on how horrible it is to describe groups of people the way that Trump and this iteration of the Republican party describe immigrants. How they have embraced racism, sexism and rampant conspiracies.
But this kind of speech isn’t just harmful to immigrants — or to Republicans, whose embrace of it has turned them into a party with a blatantly rotten ethical core. (Many of the families separated at the Mexican border under Trump’s administration have not been reunited, and, at this point, likely never will be.) As the idea of lashon hara shows, this kind of speech corrodes and degrades all of us.
To hear, over and over again, for years, whole groups of people spoken of as though they’re not even human — what does that do to a listener? What does that do to a society?
It isn’t that U.S. immigration policy under President Joe Biden, who has imposed exacting asylum restrictions, is particularly humane. But the tone of almost gleeful rage Republicans employ adds a new dreadful layer to things: Trump’s promise that he’ll deploy the military on U.S. soil to enforce deportations is terrifying in part because he takes such evident satisfaction in it.
And so, listening to Ramaswamy, I cried, feeling the effects of this near-decade of corrosion on myself. How sad it is to hear people spoken of like this, and how much sadder, still, that it wasn’t new or surprising anymore. I felt alienated from my own humanity.
This week’s convention has made it clear that this rhetoric is now the defining principle of the Republican party. Sen. Ted Cruz offered a dystopian vision of undocumented immigrants coming in droves to harm America’s wives, daughters and sisters, and accused Democrats of deciding “they wanted votes from illegals more than they wanted to protect our children.” In his debut speech as a vice presidential candidate, Sen. J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, blamed the state of the housing market and inflation on immigrants.
Recent Harvard Divinity School graduate Shabbos Kestenbaum made the crowd whoop when he suggested that pro-Palestinian student protesters would be deported under a Trump administration — a suggestion Trump himself has made many times. Kari Lake, who is running for Senate in Arizona, told the media they had worn out their welcome.
The implication: This is our space, not yours. Go back to where you belong. Any political problem, in this view, can be solved by treating the offender like an outsider to the nation.
And even when deportation isn’t the solution, the rhetoric of otherness — the evil, threatening specter better cast out of society — was everywhere. Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancee, took a swipe at transgender teenagers, insisting girls’ bathrooms at schools shouldn’t be used by “biological men.” Teachers were accused of “indoctrinating” children with progressive ideas on gender and sexuality. Trump has taken to using the word “Palestinian” as a slur. Considering only some to be insiders, and demonizing anyone seen as an outsider, has become the norm.
One particularly influential Talmudic passage says, “One who speaks lashon hara is like one who denies God.” To degrade others through speech is an act so profound that, in Jewish law, it is seen as an offense against the entire moral structure of the world. Those who have committed lashon hara, the passage goes, “have said, ‘Because of our tongues we will prevail … who is master over us?’”
Watching the RNC, I realized, with horror and sadness, that, in fact, this kind of vile, disingenuous, violent language is master over us. And there are consequences to living under such a rhetorical regime.
What does it do to us, as a country, to think of people seeking a better life as hordes of violent criminals? To have a sitting governor lead a crowd chanting and cheering for mass deportations and arrests? Each time we listen to a group of people described as less than human, undeserving of dignity, we give up a bit of our own humanity, too. We surrender our dignity. We’ve been doing it for years.
I don’t know how we begin to get it back. But perhaps a start is to realize that, when Ramaswamy and Cruz and Abbott and Vance and Trump speak this way, it is not only themselves they are degrading, and not only immigrants they are attacking. It’s the rest of us, too.
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