Antisemitism's March Into the Mainstream

[Nevilledog]

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/28/opinion/antisemitism-trump-nick-fuentes.html

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https://archive.ph/gxonw

Tom Stoppard’s wrenching drama “Leopoldstadt,” which I recently saw on Broadway, begins in 1899 at a Christmas party in the Vienna apartment of Hermann Merz, a prosperous and assimilated Jewish businessman, who is married to a Catholic and nominally converted. Hermann is convinced that the antisemitism that plagued his forefathers is fading into the past.

There’s still plenty of anti-Jewish prejudice around, he acknowledges, but nothing comparable to what prior generations endured. His family socializes with aristocrats, patronizes the arts, worships high culture. “This is the promised land, and not because it’s some place on a map where my ancestors came from,” he says to his anxious and pessimistic brother-in-law. “We’re Austrians now.”

The rest of the play, which ends in 1955, chronicles how misplaced this confidence was. Seen in 2022 in New York — my own promised land — it felt like both an elegy and a warning. Jews are thriving in America, and even with the violent resurgence of antisemitism in the Trump era, I’ve rarely felt personally threatened, perhaps a function of my privilege. Over the last week, though, I’m reminded that well-off Jews in other times and places have also imagined that they’d moved beyond existential danger, and been wrong.

At this point, there is no excuse for being shocked by anything that Donald Trump does, yet I confess to being astonished that the former president dined last week with one of the country’s most influential white supremacists, a smirking little fascist named Nick Fuentes. There’s nothing new about antisemites in Trump’s circle, but they usually try to maintain some plausible deniability, ranting about globalists and George Soros rather than the Jews. Fuentes, by contrast, is overt. “Jews have too much power in our society,” he recently wrote on his Telegram channel. “Christians should have all the power, everyone else very little.”

*snip*

[Behind the Aegis]

1. KICK!

It has always been there, usually ignored, downplayed, or excused. Now, well, not much has changed.