In 1988, the Saturday Night Live crew performed a skit about a game show hosted by Tom Hanks called “Jew, Not a Jew.” Contestants would look at a photo of a celebrity with an anglicized name and guess whether that person was a “Jew or not a Jew.” It was great comedy, written by the Jewish comedian and future senator Al Franken. Now we have this same question voiced by Donald Trump, and it’s deadly serious. Trump has long maintained that there are good Jews and bad Jews. The good Jews fund his campaign and worship him for being, in his words, the Jews’ “big protector.” In contrast, any bad Jew, one who opposes him, “should have your head examined.” Last year, he said menacingly, “If we were to lose in 2024, Jews would be to blame.”
A week ago, Trump threw more kindling on the fire, saying that Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, an enthusiast of the Israeli occupation, was not only “not Jewish”; he was “a Palestinian.” I asked Rabbi Alissa Wise, the founder of Rabbis for Ceasefire, about the implicit threat in this cocktail of bigotry. “Trump in one fell swoop used Palestinian as a derogatory slur and—as a non-Jew—elevated himself to arbiter of who is the right and wrong kind of Jew,” Rabbi Wise said. “This has gotten Jews murdered by authoritarian leaders like himself. Woe to the Jewish institutions, like the Anti-Defamation League, that continue to kiss his ring, playing Russian roulette with both Jewish and Palestinian lives.” ….more
