Unpacking Trump's executive order on antisemitism
December 17, 2019
The other day here on the blog, in a secondary item, I mentioned that President Donald Trump had signed an executive order somehow designed to fight against antisemitism on college campuses (as seen in the photo here today).
One reason, I noted, to doubt Trump's sincerity on this complicated issue, is that one of the people he invited to speak at the event has a history of declaring that Jews who don't convert to Christianity are going to hell.
So there's that.
But the issue of how to define both antisemitism and how to define what it means to be Jewish complicates this whole matter in sometimes-frustrating ways.
As David Schraub, a lecturer at Berkeley Law School and senior research fellow at the California Constitution Center, writes in this Atlantic article, there is much to unwind here if antisemitism is to be fought against.
"At root," he concludes, "the problem is that the Trump administration cannot be trusted to judge what is anti-Semitic and what is not. But the fight against anti-Semitism requires judgment — there is no way to avoid it. Jews can be mistrustful of what the Trump administration has in store for us, or suspect that Trump does not have our best interests at heart when he purports to fight anti-Semitism for us. But we must nonetheless preserve a real and serious corpus of law protecting Jews from anti-Semitic discrimination, even if the Trump administration tries to use these tools for its own illiberal agenda."
The ancient question of what does it mean to be Jewish, he writes, is fraught with issues but must be addressed nonetheless if anti-discrimination legislation is to mean anything. So, he says, "as a legal question, it matters a great deal."
Does even coming up with a legal definition of what it means to be Jewish or black or Mexican-American mean that it gives prejudicial people another tool to use to promote their hatred? Well, maybe.
As Schraub writes, Trump's executive order "set off a firestorm of criticism in the Jewish community, most of which focused on attacking the idea that Jews could be included as a 'nationality' (thus receiving national-origin-based protections). These critics perceived the order as implicitly denying the Americanness of American Jews: What would it mean for the federal government — led by Donald Trump, no less — to separate Jews into their own nation?"
Humanity is infected with ancient hatreds that get passed from one generation to the next and that transform into new forms of previously unknown hatreds. Trying to legislate against all that is well meaning but extraordinarily difficult -- and sometimes it can backfire. What we must be careful about, as Schraub makes clear, is that in our efforts to prevent illegal public expressions of such hatreds we don't make it easier for those hatreds to exist and be spread.
(The photo here today came from this New Yorker site, which will give you another take on Trump's executive order.)
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WHO ARE THE BLACK HEBREW ISRAELITES?
After the murders at a kosher market in Jersey City, N.J., last week, law enforcement authorities said that one of the suspected shooters (both dead now) had ties to the Black Hebrew Israelite movement. Just what is that? This helpful RNS piece gives us some help understanding this complex and varied group, which is really a collection of groups.
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