Barbara Adde’s Reviews > (((Semitism))): Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump > Status Update

“To stand up to creeping totalitarianism, we needn’t throw ourselves under the tank treads. We just need to not play the game.”

“Had ordinary Germans and Poles and Ukrainians and Austrians and French people not played along, had consumers continued to shop in Jewish establishments and gotten their checkups with Jewish doctors, maybe, just maybe, history would have been altered even a little bit, and the Final Solution would not have been quite so final.”

“We are in a golden age of going through the motions, but we have made no real progress in grounding the People of Israel in a moral purpose. Our return to religiosity is tactical, borne of a desire to connect a wandering Jewish people to the synagogue and to identity. But while it has given many Jews an aura of authenticity, it has not enriched our theology.”

“The hatred of government that spawned the militia movement in the 1990s sparked the vigilante Minutemen a few years later and then the Tea Party, the Freedom Caucus, and the alt-right. And now there is Donald Trump.”

This should be required reading for everyone, not just Jews.

“George Lincoln Rockwell, an infamous segregationist and anti-Semite, captured the dilemma. ‘That’s one great trouble with our movement,’ he confessed. ‘90% of the people in the movement are lunatics.’”

“American Jewry should be at least as focused on maintaining political support for Judaism in the United States as it is on sustaining Israel’s security.”

“American Jewry was split between the tribalists and the internationalists: those who saw the Jew’s role primarily as falling in behind the lesser of the tribe and those who saw Israel in the larger context of international relations and global security.”

“‘I’d say, ‘Are you Russian, grandma?’ ‘No, she’d say, ‘I’m Jewish.’ …. I’d press her on it. Finally, she’d say, ‘Jonah, my father dug a hole underneath the floorboards so I could be hidden from the Cossacks coming to rape me. I saw the rabbi in my village tied by his beard to a cart and dragged from town. I am not Russian.’”

“I would make my way through the season of Jewish guilt every fall, then assume my defensive crouch as the season is the Christmas tree, pine wreaths, nutcrackers, faux holly, plastic berries, and garish-but-temporary objets d’holiday approached, bearing the next wave of guilt - the sins of Jewish omission giving way to the sins of intermarriage commission.”