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| Marjorie Taylor Greene announcing her resignation from Congress |
While America’s early history included some soft Christian
antisemitism, attitudes changed dramatically after the Holocaust and Vatican
II. Which came about because of Pope John XXIII’s recognition of the Church’s
complicity in a centuries long antisemitism - that culminated in the Holocaust.
He wrote:
“We are conscious today that many centuries of blindness have cloaked our eyes so that we can no longer either see the beauty of Thy Chosen People nor recognize in their faces the features of our privileged brethren. We realize that the mark of Cain stands upon our foreheads. Across the centuries, our brother Abel has lain in the blood which we drew or shed the tears we caused by forgetting Thy Love. Forgive us for the curse we falsely attached to their name as Jews. Forgive us for crucifying Thee a second time in their flesh. For we knew not what we did.”
Today the term ‘Judeo-Christian’ is commonly used by
conservatives to describe the values upon which this country is based. Some
cynics, however, claim that merely a politically correct term used by
conservative Christians who really mean Christian values.
This is nonsense. Mainstream conservatives mean it when they say it.
But some Christian conservatives inhabit the world of Christian Nationalism. They do not use the term. They totally reject any Jewish component to their values. At
the core they are antisemites of the first order! (A prominent example of this attitude
is congresswomen Marjorie Taylor Greene.) These individuals promote Jewish conspiracy theories. They are the spiritual heirs of Henry Ford whose publication
of Protocols of the Elders of Zion accused a Cabal of Jews of plotting to control the country and manipulating Christians to do their bidding.
This kind of thinking once belonged only to the fringes of American society. But
figures like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, the aforementioned Taylor Greene,
and open antisemites like Nick Fuentes have been spewing this garbage a lot lately and they all have large followings. This has
amplified their wacky conspiratorial ideas.
Even so, this remains far from mainstream conservatism. Most
conservative leaders still use the term Judeo-Christian and fully embrace the idea that the United States moral
foundations are based on a shared bible.
Progressive antisemitism is of a very different sort. It is largely anti-Israel rather than conspiratorial. Many progressives do not hate Jews; they oppose the existence of Israel and, by extension, those who support it. New York’s mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, for example, has long been vehemently hostile to Israel but insists he will protect Jewish New Yorkers from hate crimes. While his virulent anti Israel attitude is extremely troubling for those of us that support the Jewish state, his problem is political, not theological.
There has been much hand-wringing about whether the United States is ‘reliving 1930s. Germany’. Which seems to be getting more evident now than ever.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Pre-Holocaust Germany was saturated with antisemitism rooted in centuries of
religious hostility - far different from today’s America, where antisemitism is
widely condemned across the political spectrum. While Israel’s reputation has
suffered over the last two years and fringe ideas have grown louder, there has
been no erosion of the broad American consensus that antisemitism is immoral
and unacceptable.
My advice to those who fear a return to the 1930s is simple:
listen to the soft sensible voices of the mainstream, not the extremists and their wacky ideas. The fringe voices are loud, but
they are not close to becoming dominant. I truly believe that America’s moral
compass with respect to the Jewish people is still intact.
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