Of all the Trump-era falseisms– global warming is a hoax, non-citizens vote in America, tariffs are paid by foreign countries– one of the most toxic is that Judaism equals Israel.  The equation is not articulated just like that; rather, it is embedded in Trump’s definition of antisemitism . I’m sure by now you got the memo: Antisemitism consists of criticizing anything that Netanyahu’s government does or standing up for the rights of people Israel attacks. If you do either of those things you’re an antisemite; no exceptions, even if you’re a Jew. If you don’t, you’re morally clean. This from the people who once put out a Holocaust Remembrance Day statement that did not include the words Jew, Jewry, Judaism or antisemitism. The logic would seem to be that since the Israeli state never does anything that is in any way objectionable to a fair-minded observer, any criticism of Israel is a confession of Jew-hating. Now, whether or not Israel’s behavior in the world ever warranted this conclusion, at this point it’s absurd. We can argue about whether the operation in Gaza is genocide or ethnic cleansing (or domicide, a previously obscure term meaning the intentional destruction of thousands of human habitations), but telling people that they are not morally permitted to have a problem with it is crazy.   It has been a startling revision, especially to those of us with Jewish heritage. The state of Israel has existed for less than a century, and people have hated the Jews literally for millennia. Defining antisemitism as opposition to today’s Israel is a little  like citing the Beatles as an influence on Mozart. In a world full of hatreds, this is a kind of dynastic champion. Across the centuries, across continents and empires, people have expressed their hatred of the Jews in laws, in violence, in “humor,” and in casual remarks. To those who are afflicted by this spiritual virus, it needs no explanation. We hate Jews because they’re so, y’know, they’re so Jewish! The rest of us explain the phenomenon to ourselves and each other however we can, or just shake our heads. What we do know is that the virus needs no help in spreading and thriving. That’s why the new calculation is so frightening. The Trumper thesis is that the way you feel about Israel is the way you feel about Jews; if you criticize the one, clearly you hate the other. Okay then, I guess the way we feel about Jews should be the way we feel about Israel. Right? Let’s say you’re among the billions who were not raised to be kindly disposed towards Jewry in the first place, and then Israeli bombs kill your family in Lebanon. If you’re in Lebanon, you are motivated to join Hezbollah. If you’re in Michigan, there’s no Hezbollah to join and no Israel to attack– but there are Jews. There’s a synagogue. And the new deal is that Jews everywhere are the moral equivalent of the Israeli military. So, attack the local synagogue. This– exactly this– happened on Thursday March 12 of this year. It has happened before and it will happen again. One of the unanswerables of our era is whether Trump is as demented as he often seems, or really has a plan. No doubt there’s some of both, but if his plan is to stoke real antisemitism nationwide and beyond, insisting that Jews everywhere are the moral equivalent of Netanyahu’s government is a masterstroke. Eric Kuhn lives in Middletown.    ...read more read less