Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) is the new Hillary Clinton emails.
In fact, if we're to believe the Republican narrative, the Democratic "Tribe"—admittedly no friends of the Tribe from which I hail—somehow represents all of the party and is the biggest threat to American Jews in the country right now.
This is not to say there isn't a problem on the left when it comes to antisemitism. Comments over the years from Tlaib and Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and even Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's (D-N.Y.) tepid response to the Oct. 7 attacks and her ill-timed reference to Israel's "occupation" without appropriate context have been, to say the least, disappointing and concerning.
Equally concerning is what is going on within college campuses, including at top universities like Emory, Cornell, and Harvard. Much of this bigoted sentiment, I have little doubt, comes from a leftist perspective that presents only one side of the story—call it antisemitic blindness.
Yet should this legitimate problem on the left lead us to believe that the alternative—the Republican Party—is somehow better? A dear friend recently told me that, while she finds former President Donald Trump distasteful, she's voting Republican now, including for president in 2024, because she's a "one-issue voter," and that issue is Israel and antisemitism.
This, to me, is akin to a 1920s Chicagoan declaring that they're tired of city corruption and therefore, to fix everything, they're choosing Al Capone for mayor.
President Joe Biden has never endorsed nor been significantly influenced by Omar or Tlaib, who are essentially party outcasts. He's instead been a steadfast ally of Israel, offering military and moral support. Donald Trump, on the other hand, while claiming he'll stand with Israel, has been highly critical of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel in general. More to the point, Trump has openly courted antisemites, hosting Kanye West and Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago, saying there were "very fine people on both sides" of the Unite the Right rally, where marchers chanted "Jews will not replace us," and frequently engaging in antisemitic tropes, including often implying that American Jews are more loyal to Israel than the United States.
But Trump is not alone in the GOP. For starters, his son, Don Jr., aka racist Patrick Bateman, in addition to the thinking Syrian people are worth the same as Skittles, has tweeted out the white supremacist symbol Pepe the Frog.
Trump lackey Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), has frequently engaged with antisemitic rhetoric, promoting "Rothschild" and "globalist" conspiracies and ideas about replacement theory.
Representative Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) has supported Fuentes and spoken at his rallies. He's had no issue, either, with linking to antisemitic websites.
Just recently, Representative Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), while affirming his support for Israel, engaged in a heated exchange asking if it's possible to criticize George Soros or "globalists" without being antisemitic, either oblivious to the fact that these have become antisemitic euphemisms or pretending to be.
And (nominally "independent") right-aligned billionaire Elon Musk recently went full-on antisemitic, if he wasn't already.
Even Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the short-lived speaker, until recently Trump's man in the House, once tweeted (and later deleted) that Michael Bloomberg, Tom Steyer, and (of course) George Soros were all attempting to "buy" the 2018 election—all three men are Jewish.
Other notable Republican antisemites include Paul Nehlen, who was once endorsed by Trump (before Nehlen went full-fledged white supremacist); Texas GOP chair Matt Rinaldi, who's hosted antisemites and refused to renounce them; and Tucker Carlson, who denies being antisemitic, but certainly sounds like one with all his talk of globalist conspiracies. Also, he's Tucker Carlson—racism and bigotry is pretty much his bag.
And for a party that claims to be so supportive of Jews, why is it that there are a whopping two members of the GOP in all of Congress who are Jewish, while 99 percent describe themselves as Christian? The Democrats, by contrast, have 31 Jewish members.
To be fair, this is partially because most Jewish people have long known the GOP is not the place for them: over three-quarters of them chose Biden over Trump in 2020, which makes sense considering that 74 percent of them saw Trump and MAGA as a threat that year and that 7 in 10 told the American Jewish Committee that antisemitism has been prevalent in the GOP.
We cannot ignore, either, the threat of violence on the right. Robert Bowers, who killed 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, was—no surprise—a supporter of the far right.
Violence and antisemitism can come from the left too: recently a Jewish man, Paul Kessler, was killed during a rally altercation in California.
But Trump is not our Jesus, and the Republicans certainly aren't likely to produce a savior anytime soon. And their general hatred—of Muslims, Black people, poor people, and pretty much anyone who isn't Christian—is, if not a direct road to antisemitism, certainly an avenue that can get people there.
Ross Rosenfeld is a political writer and educator based on Long Island.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
