In the meantime, Peter Dreier at Alternet covers Rump's history as a serial anti- Semite, including:
Trump's comment about Clinton's ties to an international banking conspiracy was not an offhand remark. He has a history of making anti-Semitic remarks, including this comment in a speech during this campaign to the Republican Jewish Coalition (a tiny group): "I know why you're not going to support me. You're not going to support me because I don't want your money ... Look, I'm a negotiator like you folks, we're negotiators."
In an interview where he was asked if he'd read any of Hitler's speeches, Trump said: "If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them... My friend Marty Davis from Paramount gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and he's a Jew." (Davis is not Jewish.)
Trump's frequent references at his rallies and during the debates to Sidney Blumenthal, George Soros and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz—Jewish supporters of Hillary Clinton—is no accident. This is not random name-dropping; these are dog whistles aimed at his racist and anti-Semitic supporters.To say the least, Orthodox Jews voting for Rump have some strange bedfellows:
She had seen her face superimposed on the body of a concentration camp inmate. She had been called “a slimy Jewess.” She had been told she “deserved the oven.” One anonymous individual had electronically harassed her for 19 hours straight.
Things got so bad that Bethany Mandel, a 30-year-old freelance writer in Highland Park, N.J., decided one afternoon last spring to drive to a nearby gun shop. A mother of two small children, she now keeps a .22 in her home.
What had she done to provoke so much vitriol? She posted some messages on Twitter drawing attention to the fact that Donald J. Trump seemed to have a lot of anti-Semitic supporters. [snip]
Anti-Semitism has been resurgent in Europe for years. But it has taken on a new dimension in the United States with the emergence of the Trump campaign, whose battle against political correctness has provided a kind of on-ramp for bigotry to enter the political mainstream.That's just the tip of the iceberg, unfortunately. Any canvassing of Twitter or other social media will turn up many vicious anti- Semitic slurs and threats against anyone (Jew or perceived Jew) opposing Rump. Back to Peter Dreier:
In response to Trump's repeated claim about the election being rigged, the popular right-wing site Daily Stormer wrote that "People aren't going to quietly go home if the Jews steal this election from us." Other sites supporting Trump have posted similar slurs.
Anti-Semitic comments on social media have skyrocketed, because Trump is bringing these ugly stereotypes, once relegated to the lunatic fringe of the internet, into the mainstream. A new Anti-Defamation League uncovered more than 2.6 million tweets with anti-Semitic comments and images between August 2015 and July 2016, a huge upsurge from the previous year. Many of them identified themselves as Trump supporters or Clinton haters, and many (including death threats) were directed at Jewish journalists who had been critical of Trump.Beyond an argument for self- preservation and self-interest, one also has to ask about the moral dimension of a vote for this unfit, white nationalist demagogue. It's the same question we would ask of "Christian" evangelicals who not only put party above country, but party above their purported religious tenets. For there can be no doubt that Rump is an evil, dark element in our politics who is enabling hatred and bigotry to come into the light and flourish. It's disheartening that this subset of American Jewry is deaf and blind to the danger posed by its new bedfellows.
