Former president Donald Trump addresses the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas, Sept. 5, 2024. (Luke Tress)

By Rob Eshman September 5, 2024

Donald Trump threatened me.

Not me, personally, but the 70% of American Jews like me who didn’t vote for him in 2020 — the majority of whom remain unlikely to vote for him now, in 2024.

“I only ask you, who are the 50% of Jewish people that are voting for these people that hate Israel and don’t like the Jewish people?” Trump asked the crowd at the annual convention of the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas on Thursday, “Why are they? Why are they voting? Why? How do they exist?”

To read that question as a threat is not a stretch. Trump has long demonized Jews who support Democrats, saying on various occasions that “They ought to have their head examined.” But “how do they exist?” is new, and the rhetorical leap from that question to “why do they exist?” — and then to “they shouldn’t exist” — is really more of a stroll. 

The more charitable way to read that question is to see it as one of genuine bafflement. Trump believes he has done more for Israel than any other U.S. president. He officially recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, formally recognized Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, and withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal. He negotiated the Abraham Accords between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, bringing a longstanding economic relationship out of the shadows and paving the way for a treaty between Israel and Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations. 

So, incapable of understanding that most American Jews are not single-issue voters — with that issue being Israel — Trump wonders: Why don’t American Jews reward these achievements with their votes? How is that possible?

And yet, it’s hard to read charitably into Trump’s rhetoric. From what I could tell by watching the livestream of Trump’s speech, the RJC crowd applauded wildly when he described Vice President Kamala Harris as someone “who hates Jews and who hates Israel,” and implied their fellow Jews who support her as doing the same.

“You must get them to vote for a Republican,” Trump said, the “them” being Jews like me. “You must get them to vote for Trump. And if you don’t, you’re not going to have a country.”

For centuries antisemites have depicted Jews as existential threats lurking inside the countries they inhabit. Trump makes the same charges, not against all Jews, just against the ones who refuse to vote for him — which is most Jews.

Trump has cast us as existential threats to Israel and America. He has accused some of us, like the Jewish financier George Soros, of bankrolling America’s enemies — recall the six-pointed star the Trump campaign slapped on an image of his 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton. Now, he’s wondering aloud how some half of us dare to even exist.

These words have consequences. The perpetrator of the most deadly act of antisemitism in American history, the 2018 Tree of Life massacre, may have raged against Trump for not being sufficiently antisemitic. But he also echoed Trump’s conspiracy theories suggesting that Soros was helping an existentially threatening flood of immigrants get into the country.

So it’s disappointing, to say the least, that the Jews in the Las Vegas ballroom lapped up this speech, which took language that has already harmed Jews to a new extreme. As a minority within a minority, Jewish Trump voters must know many Jews who plan to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris — maybe as their friends, colleagues, children and partners. Are these loved ones really the evil lunatics, bent on the destruction of the U.S. and Israeli alike, that Trump makes them out to be? 

It must feel good to be in a whipped-up crowd of like-minded believers, but isn’t there a part of them that is wary of, if not ashamed by, Trump’s rhetoric against their fellow Jews? What I witnessed on the FoxNation live stream is a right-wing mirror to a phenomenon I’ve seen on some college campuses, in which Jews in the anti-Israel movement have sometimes appeared to think they are safe from the antisemitism directed at Jews who are Zionists. 

Those Jews who applaud Trump as he calls all Jewish Democrats traitors are falling into the same rhetorical death-spiral as a group they dearly love to hate: The Jews who join with those who characterize all Zionists as Nazis. In both cases, the protection you may temporarily feel by not being one of “those” Jews is likely fleeting. 

And if it boggles Trump’s mind that half of American Jewish voters will cast their ballots for the Democratic candidate, wait until November, when by all indications the number will be closer to what it was in 2020 — 68%. (Trump received 28% of the Jewish vote.)

There are deep and substantive divisions among Jews on which we need to engage in debate, compromise, or agree to disagree. At the same time we need to be wary when leaders or movements use rhetoric that deepens those divisions. There’s a word for hatred directed at Jews you disagree with. The word is: antisemitism.

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