Jews are tired of being used as a political football
American Jews are exhausted. Graphic by Jake Wasserman
Deputy Opinion Editor Nora Berman August 8, 2024
The last 10 months have been, to put it mildly, a rough time to be a Jew in the U.S.
Some of us lost family members or friends on Oct. 7. Many of us are horrified by Israel’s continuing atrocities in Gaza. The war has alienated us from family and friends, and divided our synagogues and former safe spaces.
Even dating apps are fraught, with warring profiles filled with watermelon emojis, Israeli flags and statements of “NO ZIONISTS.”
But none of these miseries is the most tiresome aspect of being Jewish in 2024. No, that honor goes to the way our Jewish identity — and the real antisemitic threats we face — have become go-to political tools, on both the right and the left.
The callousness of this theme in the contentious current election cycle reached new heights this week, as former President Donald Trump’s vice presidential running mate, Sen. JD Vance, implied to a crowd of supporters that Vice President Kamala Harris had been persuaded to not select Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate because he is Jewish.
“The guy had to run away from his Jewish heritage,” Vance said — despite the fact that Shapiro, that same night, proclaimed “I am proud of my faith” to cheers at a Philadelphia rally for Harris.
But it isn’t just the right that has tried to turn deeply personal questions of how Jews navigate potential conflicts between their personal and public identities into a referendum on their opponents’ political viability.
On the left, progressives boasted that they singlehandedly were responsible for Kamala Harris’ selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz over Shapiro. The Democratic Socialists of America crowed on the social platform X, “Harris choosing Walz as a running mate has shown the world that DSA and our allies on the left are a force that cannot be ignored.” The left’s pressure campaign, they added, successfully made Harris stand down from choosing “a potential VP with direct ties to the IDF and who would have ferociously supported the ongoing genocide in Palestine.”
(For the record, Shapiro’s “direct ties to the IDF” are, uh, his record of completing a high school service project in Israel — which he was required to do — that included non-military volunteer work on an Israeli army base, along with work on a kibbutz and at a fishery. He also supports a ceasefire and two-state solution. But go off, DSA.)
Being a political pawn has always been part of the Jewish experience. For much of our modern history, in many different contexts, we have been used by parties across the political spectrum to represent the ills or successes that they find useful in the moment.
But this time is different — not just because of the extraordinary traumas of Oct. 7 and Israel’s subsequent war against Hamas, but also, crucially, because of the dominance of social media. The humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, the campus protests where students have gotten violently arrested, the antisemitic vitriol targeting American Jews — all of it is playing out on our phones 24/7, often lacking essential context and driven by purposefully inflammatory rhetoric. It’s unavoidable. This year’s political story involving Jews is simply bigger and more complex than any in recent memory, and each tiny intricacy is exploited and amplified on social media.
Instead of simply being 2.4% of the U.S. population — a small minority whose vote is being courted, just like that of any other small minority — Jews have been turned into an idea that is used as a political cudgel. Because almost everyone has become an armchair Middle East expert in the last 10 months, with opinions on Israel and Palestine that are often more emphatic than they are well-supported, they also have increasingly strong opinions on Jews, whether consciously or not.
As we begin a new chapter in the presidential race, fewer than 90 days away from casting our ballots, is it possible to simply let Jews be people?
Since Oct. 7, the American right and left have been duking it out over who is the biggest protector of the Jews and who is the biggest perpetrator of antisemitism. The accusations have flung back and forth at a dizzying pace, so much so that to make this incomplete list I needed to enlist the help of a colleague due to antisemitism-accusation-fatigue.
Trump has said repeatedly — including in a press conference today — that Jews who vote for Democrats are “disloyal to Israel,” and ought to have their “heads examined.” When Biden temporarily paused a shipment of bombs to Israel, Republicans accused him of “caving to the anti-Israel base and campus Communists who decided to wrap themselves in the flags of Hamas and Hezbollah.” At a Holocaust Remembrance Ceremony this year, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said that U.S. universities are “hostile” to Jews, with the implication, of course, that it’s Democrats’ fault.
After Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — whose criticism of Israel has not made her especially popular with American Jews — hosted a livestream conversation about antisemitism and anti-Zionism with two Jewish experts, the DSA pulled their endorsement of her, calling her sponsorship of the panel “a deep betrayal.”
In perhaps the most potent example of this out-of-control weaponization of Jewish identity, Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik’s viral questioning of university presidents on antisemitism in December 2023 managed to simultaneously treat Jews as victims, conniving anti-DEI masterminds who would cry “antisemitism” in order to get a Black woman fired, and the blunt political instrument of an ambitious politician. In her quest to elevate her own political profile — and pursue the longstanding GOP quest to degrade trust in educational institutions — by playing the role of valiant defender of Jewish students, Stefanik ensured that the reality of what Jews actually feel about this complex issue was lost in the uproar.
Those, like Stefanik, who try to play protector have a point: Antisemitism is real, and rising in the U.S. What they miss is that Jews are exhausted not only because of antisemitism, but because we so frequently have to contend with allegations of antisemitism being trotted out for reasons that feel like they have very little to do with actual Jewish safety.
The accusation of being antisemitic risks becoming hollow; the more it is used as an insult used to score points by the right and left, without much care of what Jews actually want or feel, the more any allegation of it will come to read as bad-faith, which will endanger Jews more — not less.
How can we as a community grieve and grapple with this deeply painful war when our Jewishness keeps being politicized for a seemingly infinite number of causes? How can the political issues we’re concerned about — including not just Israel and antisemitism, but also reproductive rights and climate justice — be adequately addressed when our identity is not seen as part of our humanity, but a political talking point?
At this point, whenever I see someone speaking on behalf of the Jews, or a newspaper headline articulating something about what Jews think, like The New York Times recently did (“Walz Instead of Shapiro Excites Left, but May Alienate Jewish Voters”), I want to close my laptop, turn off my phone and take a nap.
Which Jews are they referring to? I don’t know, and more importantly, I’m getting too tired to care — the most dangerous outcome of all.
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