Opinion: The GOP’s hypocrisy on antisemitism

Editor’s Note: Rabbi Jay Michaelson, PhD is a frequent guest on CNN Tonight and a columnist for Rolling Stone. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.

Consider, in isolation, two recent statements about Jews and Israel.

In one, a politician makes a strident comment about Israel being a racist state, due to its unequal treatment of Jewish and non-Jewish citizens.

In another, a presidential candidate makes a wholly baseless claim that the Covid-19 virus might have been engineered by a shadowy conspiracy to spare Ashkenazi Jewish (and Chinese) people and attack Caucasians and Black people.

On the face of it, the second comment is far more problematic than the first. It echoes 1,000 years of antisemitic conspiracy theories that Jews are responsible for, yet somehow immune to, plagues and disease – beliefs that led to actual Jews being murdered by angry mobs. It is wildly inaccurate – in fact, both Jewish and Chinese populations were heavily affected by Covid. And it is profoundly dangerous, stoking the flames of antisemitic and anti-Asian hate.

But of course, the comments weren’t made in isolation. And while the first, made by US Rep. Pramila Jayapal, inspired Republicans to pass a resolution on Tuesday to repudiate them, those same Republicans are bringing the second commenter, fringe presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to offer expert testimony Thursday at a House hearing on government interference in social media. (Both RFK and Rep. Jayapal have walked back their comments and said they were taken out of context.)

Have we fallen down the rabbit hole into Wonderland? Are we in the Upside-Down?

No, of course, we’re in Washington, DC, where politics dictates how antisemitism is, or isn’t, tolerated by those with something to gain from it.

Rep. Jayapal’s comments, of course, are good for Republicans.  Many Democrats on the hard-left side of the party are, indeed, heavily critical of Israel, and that represents a massive political liability for the party as a whole. And while Jayapal quickly apologized, and cited “the trauma of pogroms and persecution, the Holocaust, and continuing antisemitism and hate violence,” the damage was done. Democrats are anti-Israel, goes the messaging. Here’s the proof.

Whereas, Kennedy Jr. is the epitome of the ‘useful idiot.’ Heavily funded by right-wing donors, he is proving to be an early headache for President Joe Biden, who is now forced into a no-win decision between debating him and allowing his dangerous nonsense to go unchecked.

So what if RFK Jr. said the quiet part out loud? Republicans think the more his profile can be elevated, the worse for Democrats.  So, apology accepted.

The disparate treatment of Kennedy and Jayapal is even more galling given the very different levels of damage that their words might cause.

In the case of Jayapal, I would argue – though many would disagree – that her comments are not even antisemitic.  I think they oversimplify and mischaracterize the specific dynamics of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, and that they can contribute to the kind of anti-Israel sentiment that does, indeed, sometimes slide into antisemitism.  But that’s a far more attenuated relationship to bigotry than Kennedy’s overly antisemitic discourse.

And let’s get real.  Over the last few months, millions of Israeli and American Jews have been out protesting the draconian and theocratic nationalism of Israel’s current government. Some of that government’s policies would indeed enshrine different levels of rights and citizenship for Jews and non-Jews. Is that “racist”? I don’t know for sure (and saying a particular government’s policies are racist is different from saying that the state itself is racist) but it sure comes close.

Whereas Kennedy’s lies are the kinds of lies that kill. This week, the trial of a man who murdered 11 Jews at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in October 2018 entered its final, penalty phase, as the jury considers imposing the death penalty. He was motivated, we now know, by an odious web of conspiracy theories involving shadowy elites who have infiltrated our government and who are bringing migrants to America to displace white people. RFK’s specific subject matter is different – the shadowy elites control the Center for Disease Control and the National Institute of Health rather than Homeland Security, the FBI, and the CIA – but the basic structure is the same: shadowy elites control politics, and media, to the detriment of ‘real’ Americans.

Sometimes those elites are explicitly Judaized, as in the Tree of Life murderer’s rants or the Right’s endless blaming of George Soros for all manner of social unrest. Other times, they are merely ‘cosmopolitan’ elites who manipulate media, politics, and finance. But eventually, these rootless, alien cosmopolitans end up being Jews.  Really, it was only a matter of time before RFK Jr. stumbled into overt antisemitism.  If you play the conspiracy-theory poker game long enough, eventually you’re going to draw a Jewish card.

And that is the crisis that, as a rabbi, keeps me up at night. MAGA Republicans have met with overt antisemites like Nick Fuentes, elevated antisemitic conspiracy theories (let’s not forget now Georgia GOP US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s 2018 statement that California wildfires were started by space lasers run by the [non-existent] Rothschild investment bank), railed against ‘elites’ in Hollywood, New York, and Washington DC, and even, recently, equaled the white supremacist label to the N-word.  All of this would’ve been unthinkable a generation ago.

Without exaggeration, many of my Jewish friends have remarked that this mainstreaming of antisemitism reminds them of 1930s Germany. There, too, Jews had been comfortable and prosperous for generations. Adolf Hitler was seen as a fringe nationalist, a bit of a joke. And yet, bit by bit, the unthinkable became acceptable and, eventually, all too real.

There is no equivalence between a strident anti-Israel remark and the resurrection of age-old antisemitic conspiracy theories. The former is an unfortunate misstep. The latter is a step toward darkness.