opinions & letters
Does Trump Hate Jews,
or Just ‘Bad Jews’?
they are not. That’s the Trump heard in a recent
video clip, asking if the fi lmmaker was “a good
Jewish character.” Good Jew or bad Jew?
Tamkin calls her book an attempt to “wrestle
with what I believe to be the one truth of American
Jewish identity: it can never be pinned down.”
Still, a lot of people have tried — sometimes out
of the best of intentions, and sometimes to push
people out of the fold. When we presume to tell
ourselves who is and isn’t a “good Jew,” however,
we shouldn’t be shocked when others — espe-
cially a politician who has made racial tribalism his
brand — do the same. JE
BY ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL
Photo by Gage Skidmore / The Star News Network /cc-by-sa-2.0
I n her new book “Bad Jews,” Emily Tamkin frames
recent American Jewish communal politics as a
series of clashes between antagonists who insist
there are right ways and wrong ways to be Jewish
— that is, “good Jews” and “bad Jews.” It’s a useful
and revealing way to look at how Jews fi ght among
themselves. It’s also incredibly timely (or timeless). Donald
Trump had his own version of “bad Jews” in mind
when he tweeted this month that American Jews
were insuffi ciently grateful to him for his support
of Israel, and warned that “U.S. Jews have to get
their act together and appreciate what they have
in Israel — before it is too late!”
Some Jewish groups heard that as an antise-
mitic threat. Even giving him the benefi t of the
doubt — I thought he meant that Israel itself
would be in danger if Jews didn’t vote for a
pro-Israel president like him the next time — it
does fi t into a pattern in which Trump treats “the
Jews” as a monolith, and distinguishes between
the good Jews who vote for him and the bad Jews
who don’t recognize their own self-interest. That
sort of ethnic pigeonholing never ends well. And
as I have written before, I don’t know if Trump is
antisemitic, but he has certainly been good for
antisemitism. Trump was also echoing the kinds of internal
Jewish conversations that Tamkin describes. It
may be presumptuous for a gentile politician
to explain how “good Jews” vote, but Jewish
individuals and organizations have been doing
it for years. Liberal Jews use the “good Jew/bad
Jew” framing, on everything from immigration to
LGBTQ rights. But it has over the years become a
conservative specialty, especially when it comes
to Israel:
In 2002, New York Times columnist William
Safi re urged Jewish Democrats to put their
domestic agenda aside to vote for Republicans
he felt had a better record on Israel.

In 2008, neoconservative icon Norman
Podhoretz lamented that liberalism had “super-
seded Judaism and become a religion in its own
right.” In 2011, Jewish conservative fi rebrand Ben
Shapiro tweeted, “The Jewish people has always
been plagued by Bad Jews, who undermine it
from within. In America, those Bad Jews largely
vote Democrat.”
In 2018, Jonathan Neumann turned that idea
into a book-length attack on Jews involved in
Andrew Silow-Carroll is editor-in-chief of the New
York Jewish Week and senior editor of the Jewish
Telegraphic Agency.

Former President Donald Trump in 2021
social justice movements, subtitled, “How the
Jewish Left Corrupts and Endangers Israel.”
In each case, the writers implied that good Jews
put the fate of Israel ahead of other values —
which, to the degree that they are liberal, seem to
the writers barely Jewish in the fi rst place.

Some of those objecting to Trump’s tweet said
it fed the “dual loyalty” accusation — that is, Jews
pledge their true allegiance to Israel. But again,
Trump is turning an internal Jewish discourse
back on itself. Let’s be honest: Caring about the
well-being of Israel — political, social, military — is
a normative value in the vast majority of American
Jewish settings: synagogues, schools, summer
camps, community councils. That’s not dual loy-
alty, but solidarity with millions of co-religionists
and extended family members. Such solidarity
is the right of any ethnic group, and Jews have
rightly owned it, even as polls show that is the
minority of Jews who make Israel their number
one issue at the polls. Trump’s tweet is a funhouse
version of that tendency — demanding Jews
stand in solidarity with Israel but on his terms, and
exclusive of other priorities.

Trump’s tweet is of a piece with what Maggie
Haberman, in her new book about Trump,
describes as the “racial tribalism” the real estate
mogul absorbed in the New York City of the
1960s, ’70s and ’80s. In that Archie Bunkerish
New York, individuals were pegged and defi ned,
for good and ill, by their ethnicity. In Trump’s view,
Jews are good business people, savvy negotia-
tors and of one mind when it comes to Israel —
and are confounding and even ungrateful when
letters Compounding an Error
The president recently said that “there will be
consequences” in his latest kerfuffl e with the
leader of our once-close ally, Saudi Arabia. This
may be one of the few times in his tenure that he
may be right/half right, since we will suff er the
eff ects of those consequences.

As the Exponent implies (“From Fist Bump to
Poke in the Eye,” Oct. 20), Biden’s statement
during his campaign to make the kingdom an
“international pariah” was a sound moral state-
ment while at the same time being a very poor
foreign policy one. The reason is simple: While
the Saudis’ morality leaves much to be desired, its
economic and political power remains vital to the
Middle East’s ability to contain Iran’s hegemony
in the area.

It’s long been obvious that both America and
Israel need the kingdom to be part of a coali-
tion to act as a buff er against Iranian expansion.

Threatening the Saudis along with some of his
other poorly conceived policies was an unforced
error, and compounding it by indulging in retali-
ations would send the kingdom directly into the
Soviet and Chinese coalition. JE
Steve Heitner, Middle Island, New York
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