Is Hillary Clinton The Jewish Scapegoat Of Our Time?

[Bonobo]

http://forward.com/opinion/387023/is-hillary-clinton-the-jewish-scapegoat-of-our-time/?attribution=author-article-listing-1-headline

Like the overwhelming majority of Jewish women, I voted for Hillary Clinton. Her experience and competence as a Senator and Secretary of State, and then as a career politician who nonetheless seemed to believe in public service and democratic values earned my support. I was drawn to her lifelong insistence that women’s rights are human rights, and that it takes a village to rear the next generation.

I was also appalled that both the right and the left trash-talked her with such impunity. Especially concerning was the eerie echo between Sanders’ charge that Clinton was “dependent upon big-money interests” and Trump’s tweet that featured Clinton adjacent to a Star of David with the words “most corrupt candidate ever” amid wads of cash. Voters on the right and the left also seemed joined in their desire to jail a legitimate candidate.

Social theorist Zygmant Bauman, who had to flee Poland twice — first from the Nazis, then the Polish Communist Party — has written about the importance of understanding “the Jew as a concept” in Western thought. Conceptual “Jews” are not identical with real or “empirical Jews,” which is why anti-Semitic memes can attach themselves to anyone, even non-Jews.

Throughout the election and into this year, Clinton has been figured as a treasonous commie like the Rosenbergs, while simultaneously alienating labor with her capitalist conspiracies. And she is cast as the old money-changing Democrat who refuses to be replaced by the new. Sounds like an anti-Semitic rendering of the Jew to me, and a potent reminder that when anti-Semitic ideology pollutes the public square, the nation, non-Jews, and real Jews are all imperiled.