In the week and a half since Donald Trump was elected president, there’s been a backlash from the people who didn’t – and still don’t – support him. There have been protests all across the country, including in Portland, Oregon, where an anti-Trump protestor was shot in the leg. There has been a marked rise in reported hate crimes. On the internet and out in the world, there’s been an outpouring of support for marginalized groups that the Trump administration has targeted, and that’s good. It’s just that, in all those solidarity posts, one group is being continually left out.
In the United States, most people think that Jewish people (unless you’re Jewish, please don’t refer to Jewish people as ‘Jews’) are far from oppressed. If you ask your average person on the street, they can probably tell you that Jewish people are liberal, live on the East Coast, don’t eat pork, and somehow manage to control the “main stream media,” Wall Street, and international affairs -- all this despite making up a fraction of the U.S. population and an even smaller fraction of the world population.
By this point, we all can agree that the extreme right wing played a major role in putting the president-elect in power. Most of us associate the extreme right wing, or ‘alt-right,’ as they call themselves, with conservative Christianity, racism, and Islamophobia. All of these are fair associations, but it’s important to also note the anti-Semitism that runs deep within the American right wing. Neo-Nazis and white supremacists rejoiced when Trump was elected. In the right wing of American politics, racism and anti-Semitism go hand-in-hand. But that’s nothing new.
Jewish people have always existed at the intersection of racism and religious hatred. Contrary to popular belief, Jewish people were not targeted because of our religion in the Holocaust – we were massacred in the millions because Hitler and the Nazi Party believed that Jewish people constituted an inferior race. That’s right: Race. These sentiments haven’t died out. Whether they’re exemplified by a supervisor at one of my previous jobs telling me upon learning that I’m Jewish that “you look like you have some Jew in you,” or by Donald Trump appointing a blatant anti-Semite as one of his senior advisors, it’s clear to Jewish people in the United States and worldwide that we are no longer safe.
Now is a time for solidarity against the right-wing forces that elected Donald Trump to the highest office in the land. It’s time to come together, to protect each other, to make our voices heard and make it clear that if the alt-right wants to enact their racist, xenophobic agenda, they’ll have to fight us every step of the way. It’s not the time to fight amongst ourselves, to blame each other for what has happened, or to argue about which minority group will suffer the most under a Trump administration. Please don’t leave Jewish people out of your anti-Trump activism. We’re scared, too.
