Alexander Nazaryan: How antisemitism became an American crisis

(Alexander Nazaryan is Yahoo's senior White House correspondent.) Jews have always been fleeing, but America was the country from which Jews would never have to flee. They fled from Eastern Europe, Germany and the Soviet Union (as my family did in the 1980s). They settled on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and in West Philadelphia. They opened delis in Denver and Indianapolis. They went to Ivy League colleges and played in the NFL. And now, suddenly, after all this time, after so many waves of assimilation and acceptance, after “Seinfeld” and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, many American Jews have come to feel like strangers in their own home. “America was our promised land but we might not be safe here anymore,” the artist Deborah Kass recently wrote, expressing a sentiment that is increasingly voiced at synagogues, where armed guards are now commonplace, and at Shabbat tables, where younger American Jews are suddenly facing anxieties that had supposedly been expunged several generations ago.

For many Jews, it adds up to the all-too-familiar feeling of being caught, in this case, between a progressive left with a growing antipathy to Israel and a hardening conservative movement whose xenophobic tendencies spell obvious trouble. During a recent High Holidays sermon, a rabbi confronted congregants at his Washington, D.C., synagogue with a forthright question: “How many people in the last few years have been at a dining room conversation where the conversation has turned to where might we move? How many of us?” Since then, the question has taken on even more urgency. Last week, having just announced his third run for president, former President Donald Trump hosted a Thanksgiving dinner at his South Florida estate with two of the most prominent antisemites in the United States: white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and rapper-entrepreneur Kanye West. Trump denied knowing Fuentes’s lurid background, though the 24-year-old would-be fascist is a verified user on Trump’s own Truth Social network and has long traveled in the same far-right circles from which the former president draws some of his support. As for West, there is no doubt that Trump knows of the rapper’s antisemitic tirades, which led to the severing of most of his professional relationships.