Donald Trump Is a Clear and Present Danger to American Jews | Opinion
I am the grandson and son of Holocaust survivors who fled across Europe with the sound of German guns in the distance. While they were able to flee Belgium on the back of a pickup truck, my mother an infant, most of our extended family was not that lucky. Family in Tarnow and Rava Ruska, Poland, ended up either shot to death, killed by gas, or worked to death. Some of the stories we know but most are lost, just as the Nazis hoped they would be.
After growing up on stories about the war, and many conversations with other survivors beyond my family, I decided to write a book set in the Holocaust. I spent months doing research into horror.
After, I decided to dedicate my life to helping the world understand whatever meaning can be gleaned from senseless murder and boundless cruelty. I joined the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to tell these stories to the world through the web.
After I left, I married a Holocaust historian.
I feel I can say with some limited authority that I don't fear another Holocaust of the Jews under a returned President Donald Trump.
The Holocaust was a distinct and unique event.
But that doesn't mean antisemitism has disappeared or that people have stopped wielding its allure for power.
My grandfather on the other side was born in the United States to a family that had fled what is now Belarus because of the hatred they faced as Jews in the czar's Russia. The pogroms—incidents of blood, rape, and murder that took the lives of tens and tens of thousands of Jews over centuries in Europe's east—drove them west and to America.
My grandfather grew up drowning in antisemitism, changing the family name to the byline you see on this article, from Finkelstein to Fields. Like so many others, my grandfather never finished his formal education, but he grew up to be successful, setting up his family for success for generations to come.
My grandfather was a bit of a big deal in Queens, New York, in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and for a while after. He played in the tennis tournament we now call the U.S. Open, making it to the quarter finals. He was president of the county's bar association and a prominent Democrat. They tried to make him an elector for a presidential race, but he declined. We have photographs of Harold C. Fields with Eleanor Roosevelt and other prominent politicians. He floated among others who had worked their way up, the cream of Queens society.
My grandfather knew Paul Simon's family and, on a less musical note, he knew Fred Trump, Donald's dad. He had two words to describe him. Slumlord was one.
Antisemite was the other.
I will not call Fred's son an antisemite. The man is an opportunist, grabbing any lever of power to keep himself from drowning. One of the levers he pulls most often is labeled hate. And his followers thrill to it.
At last weekend's rally in Madison Square Garden, the hatred brimmed to where even the straight media couldn't ignore it. Trump's campaign disavows the hate while standing there pumping the bellows for a furnace of fear of the "other."
Most of that heat is directed at migrants who, whatever else you can say about them, are poorer and more desperate than all but the least fortunate in our nation of great wealth for the few.
But don't worry, the Jews are not left out of the Donald Trump traveling medicine show of racism.
Remember, if he loses this time around, Jews will carry at least part of the blame. The man said so himself—more than once. Jews are disloyal to America if they vote for Democrats. Trump and the United States are one and the same.
Trump has had dinner with Nick Fuentes and other champions of the Great Replacement theory. (Anyone remember the chant "Jews will not replace us!" No? Charlottesville too far in your rearview mirror? Don't worry, stick around. They do it all the time.)
People have forgotten the immense rise in antisemitic acts under Trump's administration, the great emboldening of American antisemitism that began long before the student protests on quads across America. The desecration of gravestones around the country. The deaths of Jews trying to celebrate God in Pittsburgh on Oct. 27, 2018. If you're looking for a fuller list of Trump's antisemitic tropes, I recommend reading here.
The counter is always that Trump moved the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, symbolically picking a side in the endless war for the Holy City that I love.
Well, if you like crumbs thrown to keep the Adelson money flowing, that's cool.
But America is America. Israel is Israel. They are two nations with interests that often align, but not always. They are TWO nations. For one country to blindly follow the interests of another is foolish at best and malfeasance at worst. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have been the best of allies to Israel. Providing cover at the United Nations, an institution that has never been known to take the Jewish side, in war or peace. Providing cash. Providing technology. Providing weapons enough to fight a war on three fronts, as is happening today.
But this U.S. administration is not blind and owes nothing to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally, even if it is committed to Israel as a nation. The people of the U.S. have not elected Netanyahu and are under no obligation to follow him into war—or peace.
Even the best of friends question each other. The people of Israel themselves are so deeply divided over everything that when I visited over the summer there was talk of a civil war.
In other words, Kamala Harris gets to keep her Israel cred, even if she thinks a ceasefire might be a good idea (and I'm honestly not sure of the best course, myself). The vast majority of Jews I have spoken to who feel otherwise seem to me to be angry and hurt, many aching from the slaughter of Oct. 7, 2023. Others are permanently angry and live in a place not so different from the extreme right one can find as much in Israel and the U.S. as you can in today's Alternative for Deutschland Germany.
On Nov. 5, we are electing an American president, with a responsibility to the people who elected her (did I say her? Oops). Among those people will likely be the majority of Jews who want to live in a place of safety, of sanctuary. A place that I fear Israel may no longer be.
Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff(whose synagogue I attend sporadically), will keep us safe in a place that has offered Jews so much opportunity and acceptance. She will keep Israel safe and on the map, too.
Donald Trump may support Benjamin Netanyahu, but when the support of the worst of his supporters is on the line, he won't be there for you.
Jason Fields is a deputy opinion editor at Newsweek.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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