Once again, I’m an outsider in America — like liberal Jews always were
For a time, it seemed as if Jews had joined the American mainstream; this election proves that was never the case
Robert Smith performs with The Cure. Photo by Getty Images
Contributing Columnist Jay Michaelson November 7, 2024
These last few weeks, I’ve been listening to The Cure’s excellent new album, Songs of a Lost World. Particularly in the last few days, its typically gloomy lyrics and brooding guitar work has provided an apt soundtrack to the news.
Listening to these now-aged rock stars reminds me of when I was a teenager, decades ago, hearing The Cure in their prime. Back then, they were the voice of all the misfits who didn’t belong in the mainstream society of the Reagan years — and I was definitely one of those. A nerdy, thin, Jewish, pre-gay intellectual, I had nothing in common with seemingly everyone else in my junior high and high schools. I didn’t go to football games, wasn’t trying to “get” girls, and didn’t celebrate Christmas.
Already, I was also aware that my politics, my entire worldview, was at odds with mainstream America. In 1980s Florida, people were patriotic, religious and conservative. Everyone, including me, made fun of gay people — Reagan’s press secretary made jokes about AIDS while his administration did nothing to find a cure for it. But not just gays. We made racist jokes, sexist jokes, jokes about “handicapped” people and, I guess we’d say now, R-word people with intellectual disabilities. In retrospect, it was a cruel time. But it was the only time I knew.
Now, of course, we face the possibility of a return to those years — which the once and future president has called the “great” America to which he would have us return.
True, most of the voters who put Trump over the top electorally were focused on the economy, not immigration or religion. As one analyst put it, Democrats warned of fascism, but most voters were concerned about paying the rent.
Still, these voters were, at the very least, willing to overlook Trump’s nativism in order to get a break from the perceived failures of the Biden-Harris administration. And many more have bought into it hook, line and sinker. They love that he gives the finger to coastal elite intellectuals. They love how he channels their rage, alienation and sense of loss. They love that he’s a bully.
As a teenager, I was bullied a little, but not a lot. There was an antisemite on my school bus who called me “Jay the Jew” and I was teased in gym class for being a loser. But I was usually physically safe, and anyway, wasn’t this part and parcel of being Jewish? After all, there weren’t many Jews who seemed to be part of the dominant society’s cultural and athletic elites. Mark Spitz, everyone said, Sandy Koufax. But their achievements were ancient history to me. And certainly in my schools, there were hardly any Jews in the popular crowd. (There weren’t any Black people in that crowd either, or Latinos, even though my school had sizable populations of each.) So, at the time, I equated my Jewishness with my outsider-ness.
This consciousness grew as I came to embrace my Jewish identity more, in college and beyond. I learned about Jewish activists in the Civil Rights Movement, Jewish intellectuals in postwar America, Jewish musicians like Bob Dylan (Leonard Cohen would come later) and poets like Allen Ginsberg. All this was true to type: We Jews were the outsiders within, gifted with the outsider’s ability to see society in a way that insiders could not. Formal antisemitism may have been a thing of the past (so we thought), but still, everyone knew we weren’t part of the privileged class. Which suited me just fine, because the mainstream of America sucked.
Gradually, that outsider-consciousness changed. I worked for Congressman Jerry Nadler during President Bill Clinton’s first term. After 9/11, Muslims, not Jews, became America’s most hated religious minority. Attitudes toward gay people began to shift. And there were more and more cool Jews, powerful Jews, even a Jewish vice-presidential candidate. I began to feel, in the words of Andrew Sullivan, virtually normal.
And when President Obama was elected — twice! — it felt like the racists and bigots of my youth had either gotten over it, or had been shunted aside by progress.
Ha.
The first Trump presidency, of course, disabused me of some of these illusions. Those kids I went to high school with hadn’t “gotten over it” — they had just gotten older, and some of them joined the Tea Party and then the MAGA movement. Maybe they didn’t tell racist jokes anymore, but they resented not being able to; they railed against political correctness and cancel culture. And weirdly, there were now some Jews among them, like Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration czar, and many of Trump’s wealthy donors like the Adelsons. What was going on? Were Jews now part of the same Real America that I thought we were apart from? They even accused me of “hating my religion,” in Trump’s words.
By the end of the Trump administration, though, the haze seemed to be fading. There was COVID, and Jan. 6, and America seemed to snap out of Trump’s spell. The far right seemed increasingly nuts, with its antisemitic QAnon conspiracy theory and anti-vaccination nonsense. Republicans seemed eager to move beyond MAGA, which had a habit of losing elections. In 2021, things seemed to be getting back to normal.
Ha ha.
The fact is, this election is normal because, as Childish Gambino put it, this is America. We have always been this way, from the vulgarities and anti-elitism of “Jacksonian democracy” to the “anti-intellectualism in American life” that Richard Hofstadter wrote about in the 1950s. White people carry our original sins of genocide and slavery mostly by denying them, or saying that they, too, are a thing of the past that has no impact anymore.
And Jews, as ever, are precariously perched on the fence of American normality. On the one hand, the far right hates us, the far left hates us, and our places of worship are being attacked (mostly by the right). On the other hand, Trump is an anomaly: a populist with a lot of Jewish friends (and relatives). This is not unprecedented — Trump’s mentor, Roy Cohn, was once the sidekick to Joe McCarthy. But it has lulled some Jews into thinking that we are part of the privileged crowd at the country club now, and we can bully the outsiders like they bullied us two generations ago. “America for Americans only!” shouted Miller at the New York City rally last week, perhaps unaware that this was once a rallying cry of the KKK.
I am not one of those Jews. The America I’m proud of isn’t the one with real and fake Americans — it’s the one that embraces, rather than fears, multiculturalism, and doesn’t scapegoat outsiders for our problems. It’s the country where immigrants dream of making new lives for themselves — not the country that puts them in concentration camps to await deportation.
And so I’m listening to The Cure again, and remembering that, even with my nice suburban home and perch as a media commentator and professor, I’m still an outsider to the kind of America that America First people talk about. I know that Steve Bannon was right when he said that our safety in Trump’s America is conditional on whether we “hard weld” ourselves to Christian nationalism, and I don’t think the welding will be strong enough to hold. Or if it’s such a great idea to be an American dhimmi, a tolerated, if second-class, religious minority. Or if it’s a country I would even want to live in.
Happily, despite significant discontent regarding the Democrats and Israel-Palestine, very few non-Orthodox Jews voted for Trump this time around — fewer than 15%. (As they have for decades, Orthodox Jews did mostly vote Republican, now even more than before, and so the overall split was 79% to 21%, according to one exit poll.) So I know I’m not alone in being a liberal American Jew deeply suspicious of a charismatic demagogue who loves to command a mob.
And if that makes me an outsider to Trump’s America, it’s a status I again embrace with pride.
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