Sadly, the topic of antisemitism in US politics today is such a many-tentacled beast that to tackle it seriously would take many thousands or tens of thousands of words. The impetus for this post is a speech given by political philosopher Yoram Hazony on the topic of antisemitism in the Republican Party. Rather than try to write a massive post touching upon all these issues, I’m going to try to take the claims it raises in bite-sized pieces, before looking at the bigger picture.

Hazony’s speech is dedicated to antisemitism in the Republican Party, and he gets the other party out of the way with a comment near the beginning:

Since October 2023, Democrats have largely made their peace with the anti-Jewish hatred of the neo-Marxists and Muslim Brotherhood supporters in their party. In fact, the influence of anti-Semites on the American left has become so blatant and so ubiquitous that most of my American Jewish friends have concluded Jews have no future in the Democratic party of Zohran Mamdani and Ilhan Omar. And if the Republicans were to go down this same road, it’s not clear what would be left of Jewish life in America.

Since 2019, I’ve seen how the idea that the Democratic Party is antisemitic to the core has taken root and become, in many circles, a presumption, something that we’ve all learned long ago and don’t really need to substantiate anymore. There are two strands of this claim that come up pretty much any time you dig deeper. The first is to quote Democrats criticizing policies by the Israeli government. The second is two or three comments by Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. This post will be about the latter.

In this post, I will make a very simple argument.

If Ilhan Omar is an antisemite, then so is Donald Trump, based on their respective comments.

This argument-by-analogy isn’t an attempt at “whataboutism.” It’s simply that determining what is prejudiced and what isn’t depends on where you set the bar. Some people will come out and blame the problems of the world on “organized Jewry,” but barring that, there isn’t an objective answer to the question of whether a particular statement is prejudiced.

What you can say, however, is to say that if you posit a standard such that statement A is bigoted, then statement B falls by the same standard. So if A is bigoted, B is also bigoted.

And that’s what we have in this case.

Here are the two main statements[1] by Ilhan Omar that immediately made her one of the bywords for antisemitism in American politics for the last half decade:

Translation: In response to GOP leader Kevin McCarthy threatening Omar with punishment for statements she made about Israel, she accused him of being influenced by campaign money (“Benjamins“) from AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Let’s take a moment to parse why these comments were and are perceived by many to be antisemitic. There are a couple of steps that you need to take to get from point A to point B here, but the core assumption is that associating a predominantly Jewish organization, AIPAC, with using money to influence politicians, is antisemitic because it evokes the antisemitic trope of Jews controlling governments with money.

This is something of a stretch, because of course AIPAC’s purpose is to influence American politics, in part by funding and supporting candidates seen as “pro-Israel” and leading to the defeat of “candidates who would have undermined the US-Israel relationship,” as the homepage of the AIPAC PAC advertises [2]:

So to claim that Omar’s tweets were antisemitic, you have to have a very low bar for that term– which is legitimate, but needs to be acknowledged. It indicates such a sensitivity to the antisemitic trope of Jews controlling governments with money (which obviously exists) that any suggestion that a predominantly Jewish organization (like AIPAC) is influencing politics through money is inherently antisemitic, even when that is essentially the raison d’être of the organization.

Ok.

Now let me take you back to December 3, 2015. Then presidential candidate Donald Trump is speaking to the Republican Jewish Coalition, who advertise themselves as “the unique bridge between the Jewish community and Republican decision-makers.”

Put aside that the repeatedly referred to the audience of wealthy Jewish donors as “negotiators.” Here is the relevant segment (at 00:17:12 here)

I know why you’re not going to support me and you know you’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money. Isn’t it crazy? […] [Jeb Bush] raised $125 million, which means he’s controlled totally, totally controlled by the people that gave him the money. That’s why you don’t want to give me money, okay? But that’s okay. You want to control your own politician. That’s fine.”

There is simply no way to consider Omar’s tweets antisemitic and not to see these comments as much more blatantly antisemitic. Trump explicitly tells the people in front of him that they want to control politicians via campaign contributions, and that they won’t support him if they can’t do that. This is the Republican Jewish Coalition– not a predominantly Jewish organization whose mission is to strengthen America’s ties with Israel, but a group solely dedicated to Jewish causes and with “Jewish” right there in the name.

That was in 2016. Since then, it’s as if Trump has made an effort to repeat every allegedly antisemitic trope that Democrats have been accused of. In an interview in 2021 he said Israel used to have “absolute power over Congress” (a claim he repeated last September, attributing it to “the strongest lobby I’ve ever seen”), and for good measure he mentioned the “Jewish people that run the New York Times.” In 2019 he claimed Jewish Americans have been “very disloyal to Israel,” presupposing the dual-loyalty trope that Omar was (incorrectly) accused of invoking.

There’s a lot to say about how these incidents reflect on their respective parties. Omar’s statements drew immediate and powerful rebuke from leaders in her own party, and she apologized, whereas much more egregious statements by Trump and his fellow Republicans were ignored or even defended. But I’ll leave that to another post.

My personal preference is to have a very high bar for accusations of bigotry, whether anti-Black or anti-Jewish. So while some of Trump’s comments have a hint of antisemitism (“negotiators” and all that), I think it is a mild and petty sort of flavor of antisemitism, not one that I think is especially concerning. His politics absolutely empower antisemites, which is a separate topic, but not because he shares the views of the people he’s empowering.

But if you want to place a very low bar for antisemitism, such that Omar is clearly an antisemite, then so is Trump, by any measure.

***

[1] There are two additional statements that are sometimes cited, the 2012 tweet about how Israel “hypnotized the world” and the comment in 2019 about people pushing “for allegiance to a foreign country.” The latter is an obvious misrepresentation– it is clear from her comments that she was saying that people were pushing her toward allegiance with Israel, so the accusation that this represented a stereotype of Jewish “dual loyalty” is nonsense. The “hypnosis” tweet is more borderline– she’s obviously (and explicitly) anti-Israel, but linking it to “the myth of Jewish hypnosis” a la Bari Weiss’ op-ed in the New York Times was a bit of a stretch. In any case I think it’s clear that Trump’s comments on Israel controlling Congress, which he uttered as a sitting president and with no apology or backtracking, is more significant by orders of magnitude.

[2] Technically the AIPAC PAC started in 2021, so it did not exist when Omar tweeted her tweets, but I think it’s clear to all that this was a change in methods rather than a fundamental change in the nature of the organization.