For Trump, Jews Are Proving to Be a Very Useful Tool

Of note:

…As the categories of majority and minority now shift and blur, Americans find themselves returning, almost obsessively, to Jews: a group that doesn’t fit easily into racial binaries, that troubles the boundaries between religion and ethnicity, whose members are not people of color but whose claim to whiteness was always suspect in the eyes of white supremacists, and who have diasporic ties to a polarizing nation-state.

This ambiguity has also created ideological blind spots. Centrist liberals were late to recognize the seriousness of antisemitism in American life. They likewise missed its potency as a political weapon for the populist right and the combustibility of the Palestine question in American politics. Progressives have failed to grapple with antisemitism among their own ranks. And now a conservative administration intent on undoing civil rights law has turned that ambiguity to its own advantage.

The civil rights revolution was never finished. Now its contradictions have returned, sharper than ever. They won’t end with antisemitism, because debates about Jews are never just about Jews. They are the seismographs of a society’s deeper tremors: its fears of difference, its contested visions of nationhood.

As Americans, we can build a legal framework that is more than a cynical tool with which to punish one’s enemies and also better than what preceded it — something capacious enough to protect all minorities, principled enough to command legitimacy and resilient enough to resist political manipulation. We can do it if we stop treating civil rights as a cudgel and start treating them once again as a covenant. Covenants are not merely inherited; they are renewed. This one must be renewed not for the America that was, but for the America that we are becoming.

Prof. Loeffler is the author of “Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight Over Free Speech in Modern America.”

Source: For Trump, Jews Are Proving to Be a Very Useful Tool