In a Time of Trump, Millennial Jews Awaken to Anti-Semitism
Like many Jewish families in America, the Reizes household has been deliberating in recent months what Donald Trump really thinks of them.
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As they celebrate the Jewish New Year this weekend in their suburban Cleveland home, the topic of discussion will once again be anti-Semitism, and whether it’s surging in the United States thanks to the Trump campaign. Like others representing America’s aging Jewish Gen-X’ers and boomers, Joelle Reizes, 48, remembers experiencing some anti-Semitism as a girl—occasional sideways glances and untoward comments. But millennial Jews and their juniors are another matter. Joelle’s children—ages 19, 14, and 12—have grown up during an unprecedented era of prosperity and assimilation for Jews in America, one in which the struggles endured by an earlier generation is understood as something closer to historical lore than present fact.
“They’ve been protected,” says the Reizes’ mother, “to help them to not feel like being Jewish isn’t different.”
For younger Jews in the United States, that era has suddenly passed. The early months of 2016 brought in a strange tide of online hate speech aimed largely at Jewish journalists who had published articles critical of Trump or his campaign, with all the old ugly epithets on display. Then in July Trump’s Twitter account posted an image of a six-pointed star next to a picture of Hillary Clinton, with a pile of money in the background. Though he deleted the tweet, afterward Trump walked up to a brightly lit podium and defended the image, bellowing that the Jewish star was not a Jewish star. A dim reality descended on American Jews. Yes: Trump had broadcast the message of a neo-Nazi without apology.
Then: Weeks of quiet, lasting into August. But the issue roared back into view in September, when the ex-wife of Trump’s campaign manager, Steve Bannon, said that Bannon had kept his daughters out of a school because he there were too many “whiny” Jewish brats there; the candidate’s son, Donald Trump, Jr., retweeted someone described as the neo-Nazis’ “favorite academic”; and a Trump advisor was accused of discriminating against Jewish employees (and denying the Holocaust). Then Don Trump, Jr., with unblinking casualness, stumbled on an odious analogy. “The media has been [Clinton’s] number one surrogate,” Donald, Jr. complained, not unlike a whiny brat, during a radio interview in Philadelphia. “If Republicans were doing that, they’d be warming up the gas chamber.”
More at Politico: In a Time of Trump, Millennial Jews Awaken to Anti-Semitism