America Giveth
The abstract principle that human beings are born with dignity is too difficult for a person to formulate on her own. It had to be formulated by many minds in concert over generations and then enshrined in philosophical texts which shape worldviews and governments. Though the idea of human dignity is at least as old as the Bible, it was not set down in a political philosophy until millennia later. Liberalism is the word we use to refer to the systems of belief and the politics which are buttressed by this principle. It instructs that human dignity endures even when it is abused. And as a political philosophy, liberalism constrains the power of government in service to this inalienable human dignity. Liberalism hectors, and long may it do so, that might does not make right. Might can ignore the truth, but it cannot annul it. In a liberal country — and America is the only country founded explicitly on that philosophy — our leaders serve at our behest. Power does not confer dignity: humanity does. We are blessed to be born late, after this tradition had been developed, and after the government formed upon it has grown fat and sophisticated.
Fat and sophisticated, but alas not always wise. In our country every four years the electorate grants power to a single executive, on the condition that that power be checked and bent to the citizens’ will and rights and good. But it is possible for a liberal system to democratically grant power to an illiberal leader, a leader who has contempt for individual rights and who does not have faith in the liberal system. Insofar as they are only a poll, elections are value-neutral and can reward illiberal leaders and parties without being undemocratic. Such a leader, once elected, can corrupt the power of the presidency by governing as if power itself is constrained by nothing but other power, and that rights are a myth which the citizenry cannot insist upon. Such a leader, like a medieval king, mistakes rights for privileges, which he believes are his to give and his to take away.
There have been power-hungry American presidents before, but the power that they were hungry for derived from the mechanisms laid down in the Constitution. American identity has been perverted, misinterpreted, swollen, shrunk, and turned in on itself — but before Trump the many varieties of abuse dealt to the country by its elected leaders were all products of a particular president’s perverted interpretation of what America was supposed to mean. Trump is different. For Trump, American power is in service to nothing but the personal interests of the man at its helm. Even more than he detests those who “poison the blood of our country,” as he once put it, he adores himself. He is a misogynist but misogyny is not his worldview, and a racist but racism is not his worldview. Self -preservation and self-aggrandizement are his operating principles. Power for power’s sake — fascism, in a word. Trump’s prejudices are all handmaidens of his avarice.
Donald Trump’s stranglehold on our power is premised on wringing out the liberalism which is the lifeblood of this country. He is a bloodhound, and he follows the scent of his own interests with a sub-intellectual zeal. The liberal system was designed to constrain precisely his variety of brute greed, and so he is hellbent on destroying the liberal system — our system, the system of government upon which American identity depends. The system that has made this country the most powerful source and defense of freedom in human history, and the philosophy which informs that system, is the price of his perpetual ascent.
On January 6, 2021, our current president goaded thousands of violent supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol because, he insisted, the election held that year had been stolen from him. He instructed the mobs to fetch for him what was rightfully his. This was a lie which he told in order to protect himself. That day was traumatic for the country because on it a former president sowed distrust in the democratic process throughout the population of a great democracy. But for Trump something else happened that day: for the first time, and irrevocably, he associated his interests with the obliteration of our democracy. When he returned to power — through the very system he now permanently associates with his own defenestration — he returned to destroy it.
It is often pointed out that, while Trump allies himself with various far-right groups (the Christian right, for example) he is not strictly speaking an adherent of any far-right ideology — of any belief system at all. This line of argument is sometimes trotted out to make the point that Trump is not as bad as the company he keeps. This is true: he is worse. His many allies have various discrete concerns, various uses for Trumpian contempt for the liberal system, but Trump’s concern, his aggressive obsession, is with the system itself. And so every beneficiary of American liberalism — and American beneficiaries in particular — is duty-bound to consider Trump and his allies the gravest threat to our wellbeing and our future.
Powerful leaders of one minority group in particular, the American Jewish community, are already shirking that duty. I write as a member of that group, in the first-person plural, because I believe we have a duty to denounce the cowardice committed in our name.
On January 20, 2025 — the first day of Donald Trump’s second and final term as president of the United States, the president issued about one thousand five hundred pardons and commuted the sentences of fourteen of the supporters of his who had, at his instruction, mounted that violent insurrection against the Capitol four years prior. Among those pardoned were members of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, two violent white-supremacist groups. On that same day Rabbi Ari Berman, the current president of Yeshiva University, gave the benediction at Trump’s inauguration.
Berman is not the only Jewish leader — in both America and Israel — to be displayed by this administration as proof that there are Jews, even important Jews, who give Trump their blessings, despite his flirtation with white supremacy and even Nazism. But it was a poetically significant moment — the Jew blessing the king on the same day that the king had pardoned and defended a man in a Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt. Berman’s treachery is representative of a strategy that deserves analysis and condemnation. Black, Latino, and women leaders have also been called upon to sell their blessings in service to our Bigot-in-Chief, but this dishonor has peculiar relevance for the Jew.
Berman’s pandering is a betrayal of his people because it gives support to the undermining of the liberal system by which Jews — for the first time in our history, including before both exiles and after the advent of the Jewish state — were acknowledged to have rights that are axiomatic, not an expression of a monarch’s whim or economic need. Those rights, and the full citizenship that followed on them, were based on nothing other than our humanity. America was the first political power to insist that Jews have dignity because all human beings do. George Washington himself said as much in his sterling letter, written in 1790, to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island:
The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy — a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.
It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
For once, the Jews’ sameness brings them security and even secures the legitimacy of their own institutions of power. America is special because, finally, Jews are not, because Jews here do not have to be. Separateness, cohesion, defenses against assimilation — all of these are choices Jews can decide to make or not. But America owes us the same rights as our fellow citizens, and for the same reason.
The Jewish American is a type of significance to both traditions. No minority which benefits from the largesse of American liberalism has spent more time than the Jew languishing in illiberal alien states. None has exerted more effort in developing mechanisms for securing privileges in societies which grant minorities no rights, of growing dependent on those privileges before, as inevitably happens, they are taken away and the process of dependence and gratitude and nervousness had to begin again somewhere else.
In the millennia that Jews have spent in the Diaspora, no country other than America has based its own right to exist on its duty to honor its citizens by making itself blind to those citizens’ personal identities and group memberships. American liberalism was not an act of charity but of self-preservation. It is the only prudent way to guarantee social peace in a heterogeneous society. Equality is not a favor our elected leader does for us — it is his obligation, and the obstruction of our equality is a betrayal of the office with which he has been entrusted. Liberalism was the philosophical mechanism which granted America authority to separate from Great Britain and govern itself. No country is more indebted to and dependent on the liberal system — and more allergic to monarchy, or any kind of absolute and unquestioned authority, which was what liberalism sought to dissolve — than ours. And so Jewish success in America is a testament to the success of the American project, as is true of all minority groups. Insofar as the Jews are distinct from other vulnerable Americans, we are distinct because we have more empirical evidence, more lived experience, that no other system is as reliable and as ethical as the liberal system is. The alleviation of our vulnerability is proof of America’s promise. America absorbed us — however incompletely, but then America does not demand complete absorption — and we are both, America and its Jewish inhabitants, stronger for it.
The Trumpian flirtation with monarchism titillates his followers. It winks at a bloody dispensation in which monarchs enjoyed absolute power — executive orders galore. Memory is strong, long, and alive in our bones: people respond automatically to Trump’s invocation of monarchism by reverting to pre-modern genuflections. The tech bros trooping in and out of Mar-A-Lago, and then in and out of the White House, to kiss the ring distinguish themselves in this regard, but they are not alone in their atavistic behavior. Jews have also had to appease all-powerful leaders who had no respect for their rights or wellbeing. By the time liberal society had been invented, Jews had spent many centuries developing tools for securing protections. Trumpian illiberalism seems to have awakened in much of the American Jewish population a slumbering but deeply held faith, a kind of buried collective memory, that in an illiberal system a different relationship to power must hold. And so American Jewish leaders such as Rabbi Ari Berman of Yeshiva University morphed like clockwork into their medieval ancestors.
It is enlightening to situate Jewish hospitality to Trump in the political history of the Jews in the exile. Throughout the exile Jews used to develop formal alliances — and, where possible, informal relations — with the ruler of the country. These alliances with the supreme central power were preferred to the other option for establishing a measure of security for themselves — an alliance with the population among which they lived, or with local secular and ecclesiastical authorities whose antipathy to and fear of Jews was reliably more powerful than whatever benefit Jews could offer them. The sovereign, by contrast, could be tempted into a mutually beneficial relationship in which privileges — as opposed to “rights” — were granted in exchange for certain goods. The Jewish historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi called this strategy — by which Jews circumvented local communities and leaders and went straight to the highest authority in the land — “vertical alliances,” and the rejected option of dependence on their neighbors “horizontal alliances.”
Beginning with the Babylonian exile following the destruction of the first temple in 586 BCE, the Jews in exile replicated the governing structure held when they had sovereignty in the Holy Land. It was a sophisticated society. Jews were among the first nations in history to hold common property (the land of Israel belonged to the people, not to the king of Israel — a startling fact), to provide social safety nets, and to criminalize exacting interest from fellow Jews. This meticulously structured and tightly run society ensured that Jews were mutually dependent — that they could find political and economic security by depending on each other. The Jewish community in exile functioned, if not exactly like a state within a state, which became one of the classical canards of modern European anti-Semitism, then certainly as a corporate entity, with a greater degree of organizational independence and self-government than would ever be permitted in a modern European nation-state.
Under Persian, Macedonian, Ptolemaic, and Seleucid rulers, Jews were granted a great deal of autonomy by gentile leaders. The basic structure of the internal Jewish community, and its relationship to its rulers, was essentially fixed from the start of exile through the time of the French Revolution and the advent of the modern era. And throughout that time this independence was secured, often, by paying for it. Jews paid special taxes in exchange for the freedom to govern themselves, and this also spared the monarch responsibility for coercing compliance with the legal and the tax system. This system held the longest, and was the most comprehensive and mutually beneficial, in the exile in Spain. Even after Ferdinand and Isabella forced the Jews into exile in 1492, the Spanish Jewish exile Solomon ibn Verga wrote with pride and nostalgia about the halcyon days of his destroyed community, and of the vertical alliance system throughout Spain and France: “in general, the kings of Spain and France, the nobles, the men of knowledge, and all the distinguished men of the land used to love the Jews, and hatred obtained only among the masses who were jealous of the Jews.”
During the Middle Ages, the relationships between Jewish communities and their political leaders were formalized in charters negotiated by prominent Jews on behalf of their communities and made directly with the highest authority in the land. The earliest extant examples of the medieval charters are Carolingian, issued by Louis the Pious (778–840 CE), and likely modeled on similar charters issued by Charlemagne himself. All of these charters share the same structure and differ only slightly in details and application (from individuals to communities and ultimately, in the thirteenth century, to the Jews of an entire country — Emperor Frederick II issued a charter for all German Jews in 1236). All have in common the basic commitment to protect the Jewish communities and to honor their right to practice their law, in exchange for a direct feudal relationship sworn on the part of the Jewish representative to the King. Jews were called Juifs du Roi, the king’s Jews, or servus regie camerie, serfs of the royal chamber. Frederick Barbarossa wrote that the Jews “belong to our treasury,” and the Jews appreciated this. It was the highest form of protection.
Similar dealings were conducted with the Papal authority, whose contempt for Jewish apostasy was tempered by Christianity’s canonical dependence on the Jewish tradition. Popes could be by turns vicious and solicitous about their Jews. Thus Pope Innocent III — who presided over the Fourth Lateran Council, which in 1215 was the first to compel Jews (and Muslims) to wear badges — also issued the Edict in Favor of the Jews, which begins, “Although the Jewish perfidy is in every way worthy of condemnation, nevertheless, because through them the truth of our faith is proved, they are not to be severely oppressed by the faithful” and warns Christians to refrain from, among other indignities, desecrating Jewish cemeteries; killing, robbing, or wounding Jews; forcing Jews to convert; and disrupting Jewish holidays. At the same time the Crusades were viciously violating these papal prohibitions. Similarly, Gregory IX, the first Pope to order that the Talmud be burned, a cultural disaster that occurred in Paris in 1242, also urged Louis IX of France to stop the crusaders and their mobs from massacring Jewish communities. Jews learned to forge alliances with actors whom they knew harbored ill-will against them. They had no choice. Their neighbors and local leaders reviled them, too. Jews preferred an imperfectly reliable but powerful ally bound by utility to perfectly unreliable and weak allies sour with jealousy and fear (though there were quiet times and places in medieval Europe in which Jews and Christians lived in coexistence with each other).
Until the modern period, Jewish separateness was necessary for securing safety. Separateness — contained autonomy — is what the charters protected. Assimilation was both impossible and undesirable. Cohesion and insulation were protective mechanisms. Mixing with gentiles and weakening the bonds that delineated the Jews from gentiles would have confused the ruler from whom security had been so carefully extracted. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Jewish bankers and businessmen who handled the finances of and lent money to the nobility, and who represented the Jewish communities in their dealings with the monarchy, became known as “Court Jews.” These Jews enjoyed privileges withheld not only from their Jewish coreligionists, but often also from the gentiles. This political arrangement, the system of the Court Jews, was also premised on traditional Jewish separateness. The promise of equality, remember, was never on the horizon.
Until the eighteenth century. The French Revolution brusquely thrust France into the modern period, and the French Jews were the first to be fed the strange fruit of emancipation. Liberalism not only guaranteed rights to everyone, it also made demands of everyone. The possibility of full citizenship came at the cost of an unmixed loyalty to France and a significant degree of self-erasure. Insofar as the organized Jewish community was a quasi-political structure, it had to be dissolved, along with the special access enjoyed by the unelected wealthy Jewish leadership. As Mirabeau, one of the leaders of the revolution, put it, “son pays deviendra sa patrie” — his country must become his homeland. No dualities were allowed.
The old protectionist system of Jewish security vanished with the monarchy. Suddenly the French Jewish community was called to trust a new system which seemed discomfitingly dependent on the goodwill of their political and social leaders as well as the enlightenment of their neighbors — something Jews, like all minorities of liberal countries, recognized was too often honored in the breach. (Yerushalmi described “the royal alliance” as a “myth.”) And so Jews for the first time had to ask ourselves the same question vulnerable minorities of liberal countries have been asking ever since: how big is the breach? How far from the ideal of itself was the reality of the liberal state?
In France, granting rights to Jewish citizens certainly marked something of a departure from the nativist identity of the state. But anti-Semitism burbled in the cauldron of French prejudice as a reminder that liberalism exists always in tension with the uglier impulses of every population which aspires towards it. The burble boiled over first with the Dreyfus Affair at the end of the nineteenth century, and then with the establishment of the Vichy government in the middle of the twentieth.
America was always different. For the American Jew, the distance between liberal promise and liberal fulfillment has always been smaller than anywhere else. Even before total enfranchisement, Jewish Americans recognized that when we were deprived of our rights we were deprived of something that belonged to us, something that the country owed us. We could fight the abuse of our rights with the country’s own principles.
Isaac Leeser was a Prussian Jew who joined his uncle in Richmond, Virginia, in 1824 at the age of seventeen, and became one of the most important leaders of early American Jewry. He published the first English language translation of the Jewish Bible in America (the twenty-two books arranged according to Jewish custom, as opposed to the thirty-nine books which make up the Christian Old Testament), and he was the founder and publisher of the Occident, the first general Jewish newspaper in the United States. In the pages of that paper Leeser published, in 1845, an article about the Maryland Bill, known as the “Jew Bill,” which had been passed in the Maryland legislature nineteen years earlier, and which gave the Jews of that state the right to hold public office. Leeser pointed out that
the few highly respectable Israelites who then lived in Maryland took a noble stand in defense of the good cause; they made no concession; they did not explain away the features of their faith, which might appear harsh and unpalatable to the Christians; but asked for their rights, and obtained them, as becomes freemen, unconditionally and without any trammels whatever. And at the present day, the Jews in Maryland are free, like all the other citizens. At the time when this act of justice was awarded, there was not even a Synagogue in all the state; hence it must be considered as the abstract triumph of liberality over bigotry and prejudice; and we therefore rejoiced the more at the passage of the bill in question, since it proved that Americans will be just whenever they are properly enlightened . . .
Leeser was contrasting the Jewish American strength with the self-conscious weakness of British Jewry’s contemporary Reform movement, which, Leeser insisted, was a systematic attempt to alter Jewish practice in order to make the religion more palatable to British gentiles.
As Leeser makes plain, American citizenship granted the Jews something they had never had before and could never have anywhere else: a rights-based relationship that was not a deviation from the essential character of the country in which they lived, but was a full expression of the state’s promise. In America, the possibility of Jewish success was and is proof of the health of American identity, because it is proof that a weak minority can prosper if treated as full and equal members of a pluralistic democratic society. There was anti-Semitism in America, of course, but it lacked political legitimacy: it was a contradiction of the country’s founding values. In this way, America offered an epochal deviation, as a matter of principle and practice, from what Salo Wittmayer Baron famously called the “lachrymose pattern of Jewish history.” And it accomplishes this in a way that not even the Jewish state does.
The Jewish state was founded as a democracy, but its democratic character has always been in tension with its Jewishness. This tension was inevitable, but the task of moderating between these two elements is a balancing act made nearly impossible by various elements. First, Israel has no constitution and no Bill of Rights — powerful tools with which Americans are immeasurably helped in safeguarding our democratic character. Israel does have a Declaration of Independence but, unlike America, Israel, which is similarly a multiethnic society, did not derive its right to exist from the equality of all its citizens, even though it guaranteed all its citizens the same rights. America grants Jews rights on the basis of equality. In practice, in 2025, Israel grants Jews rights on the basis of an increasingly popular theory of Jewish supremacy, which flies in the face of its Declaration of Independence. It did not have to be this way, but this is the way it is.
There are tragic reasons for this undemocratic devolution. Unlike America, Israel is straddled and partially populated by sworn enemies who have no state, no sovereignty, and no means of either distinguishing their own authority from Israel in a manner that Israel considers legitimate or assimilating as full members into the Jewish state. The Jewishness of Israel’s majority is a bludgeon against the Palestinian members of Israeli society. In Israel, Jewish citizens enjoy full rights and Palestinian citizens do not. The Palestinian citizens of Israel account for twenty-one percent of the Israeli population, and they should enjoy the full rights which citizens of a democracy are owed; and this is true also, and more desperately, of the Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza, where the Israeli police, military, and other Israeli officials openly consider Palestinians their enemies.
Israel, under Netanyahu’s leadership, makes the grotesque case on the global stage that non-Jews are not equal to Jews, and that Jews are entitled to rights in Israel because Israel is a Jewish State. This means by implication that in every other state — including America — Jews are not entitled to full rights. Israeli illiberalism undermines American Jewish equality, and it undermines the liberal project in general. This is more the case today than it ever has been since Israel’s establishment.
Israel’s example, Israel’s brutality, compliments Donald Trump’s, which is why Netanyahu settles so naturally into Trump’s menagerie. No Jew, in America or anywhere else, has dishonored his Jewishness by using it as a fig leaf for fascist and even neo-Nazi sympathies as visibly as Benjamin Netanyahu. Something unprecedented in Jewish history has happened: A Jewish state has determined that it is in its own interests to benefit from and accelerate the erosion of American democracy, thereby jeopardizing America’s Jewish citizens in the name of its own tribal interests. Netanyahu’s illiberalism, Netanyahu’s nativism, gives Jews like Ari Berman and Stephen Miller a calling card for membership in Trump’s thuggish troop.
It seems likely that the anti-Semitism that this administration tolerates and inflames will not be directly caused by the government, but the government will encourage, downplay, and forgive it. The bizarre prominence of Elon Musk and his raised right arm is evidence enough. Black, Latino, Native, and trans people were the first to bear the brunt of Trump’s earliest executive orders, which were only the beginning. But Jews will pay a price for Trump’s fascism, too.
And even if we don’t, the policies Trump is already enforcing should be interpreted as a direct attack on the legitimacy of our membership in this country, since not too long ago it was our ancestors who were clambering at the gates to be let in. It was our grandparents — rather than Mexican or Arab migrants — who were slandered as burdens, job-stealers, spies, and thieves. Between 1820 and 1880, the American Jewish population ballooned from three thousand to three hundred thousand. In the half-century that followed, more than two and a half million Jews joined the slim community already here. This increase was despite the passage of the Johnson–Reed Act in 1924, which was intended to “protect” the country’s “racial stock” by staunching the immigration of “undesirable” immigrants — Jews among them. The United States had no immigration policy, and the quotas set on Jews by the Johnson–Reed Act were not adjusted at all, between 1933 and 1941.
But perhaps more disturbing even than the quota system is the fact that immigration officials perceived that they would be rewarded for letting fewer people in and so they routinely failed to fill the quotas. The Johnson–Reed Act had capped the number of Germans permitted to enter the United States at 25,957, but in 1933 the State Department issued only 1,241 visas to German citizens, while 82,787 German citizens languished on the waiting list for visas that they could not afford. Through 1943, “Hebrew” was a racial category in American immigration law. Between 1939 and 1940, over half of all immigrants to America identified themselves as Jewish, and that number is likely incorrect, since many of the people fleeing the Nazis did not consider themselves Jewish even if the Nuremberg Laws did.
Two weeks after Kristallnacht, on November 24–25, 1938, a Gallup poll asked American citizens, “Should we allow a large number of Jewish exiles from Germany to come to the United States to live?” Seventy-two percent of the respondents said no. The following January, while Congress was considering the passage of the Wagner–Rogers Bill, which would allow special entry for twenty thousand refugee children, Gallup sent out another poll. This time the question read: “It has been proposed that the government permit ten thousand refugee children be brought into this country and taken into American homes. Do you approve of this plan?” And sixty-seven percent said no. Over the next few years, as war spread across Europe, Americans began to suspect that Germany and the Soviet Union were secreting spies into America in the hordes of Jewish immigrants. Perhaps they thought the children were spies, too. This heartlessness was a failure of the American people to live up to the American promise. A hundred years ago, it was our ancestors who suffered for the American inability to rise to its own ideals.
One Jew’s contribution to the Trump administration represents a betrayal of American Jewish history more than any other. Consider the case of Stephen Miller, the man responsible for shaping Trump’s draconian immigration policies. Miller’s radicalism began when he was in high school, a century after his mother’s family arrived in America. Wolf Lieb Glosser and his wife Bessie were the first of Miller’s ancestors to arrive in this country. The couple had fled vicious pogroms in Antopol, Belarus, and set sail on the German ship S.S. Motke, which docked in New York on January 7, 1903, twenty-one years before the Johnson-Reed Act instituted its quotas. Glosser spoke Yiddish, Russian, and Polish but not a word of English. As Miller’s uncle, David Glosser, wrote in Politico in 2018,
I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, an educated man who is well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundations of our family’s life in this country. I shudder at the thought of what would have become of the Glossers had the same policies Stephen so coolly espouses — the travel ban, the radical decreases in refugees, the separation of children from their parents, and even talk of limiting citizenships for legal immigrants — had been in effect when Wolf Liev made his desperate bid for freedom. The Glossers came to the U.S. just a few years before the fear and prejudice of the “America First” nativists of the day closed U.S. borders to Jewish refugees. Had Wolf Lieb waited, his family likely would have been murdered by the Nazis along with all but seven of the 2,000 Jews who remained in Antopol. I would encourage Stephen to ask himself if the chanting, torch-bearing Nazis of Charlottesville, whose support his boss seems to court so cavalierly, do not envision a similar fate for him.
American Jews should take it personally when our president describes immigrants as criminals and poisons. It should scare and enrage us that the first bill which Trump signed into law in his second term was the Laken Riley Act, which will result in the deportation of migrants who are merely accused of a crime, and that at the ceremony for that occasion Trump remarked that “today’s signing is bringing us one step closer to eradicating the scourge of migrant crime in our communities once and for all.” Make no mistake, he was raising the specter of our grandparents, no matter the color of the people who will be turned away from our borders this time.
The ancestors of ours who made it here were not merely lucky. Luck was part of it but not all of it: America granted us what is by right our due as human beings. And as American citizens we have a right and a duty to insist upon that same dispensation for us and for others, which is why American Jews have also contributed significantly to the establishment of institutions in this country which work within the law to protect the vulnerable. It is true, we Jews have a tradition which teaches us to pacify brutes like Trump and to create and fetishize thugs like Netanyahu, but we have other traditions, too. Like every great nation we contain contradictions. We are not fated to emulate our ugliest examples. In Exodus, God told us, “You shall not wrong or oppress a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” It is not moral and it is not wise to align ourselves with the merciless bigots who drew the blood that stains our history.
The first chapter of the Book of Job ends: “And Job said ‘Naked did I leave the belly of my mother, and naked shall I return there, God gives and God takes away, may the name of God be blessed.” Job’s faith is freighted with lyrical resignation. He makes no demands. God’s power is a force which acts over and through him. We have no right to repeat his concessions, not here, not in our country. America is ruled by no God and Donald Trump is no one’s Lord, despite all his invocations of Jesus. America is an artifact, man-made, a product of human will and wisdom. It is not for us to bow and accept the caprice of its leaders. They work for us. America giveth because we designed her to give. When its goods are revoked out of turn it is because we have been poor stewards of our own inheritance. We must fight — not least in the name of our ancestors, the huddled masses yearning for the breath of freedom which is the only air that our spoiled lungs exchange — we must fight for what belongs to us.
