“This assessment…bespeaks an overly self-absorbed Jewish community and continues the left’s self-defeating tone-deafness when it comes to Trump and his associates”

Author Date

Among American Jewish progressives, the consensus is that Bannon, Donald Trump’s “strategic adviser,” is anti-Semitic. The website he managed, Breitbart.com, called itself “the platform for the alt-right,” and the “alt-right” contains within it some extreme anti-Semites, neo-Nazis and so forth. And besides, according to court documents, Bannon didn’t want his child going to school with “whiny Jews.”

This assessment is incorrect. It misses what Bannon is really about (which is far more dangerous than anti-Semitism), bespeaks an overly self-absorbed Jewish community and continues the left’s self-defeating tone-deafness when it comes to Trump and his associates.

Bannon is a populist.

Jay Michaelson, “Sorry, Jews. Steve Bannon Is Not an Anti-Semite, and This Story Is Not About Us.”, The Forward (10 December 2016) [http://forward.com/opinion/356390/sorry-jews-steve-bannon-is-not-an-anti-semite-and-this-story-is-not-about-u/]

Related posts:

  1. “By engaging in a kind of weird witch-hunt against Bannon, sifting through his garbage to find scraps of anti-Semitism, Jewish pundits are misunderstanding and misrepresenting Trumpism itself”
  2. “Bannon and the Trumpian right have discovered what Jews have known for a century: That Zionism is built, in part, on the rejection of Diaspora Jewish identity”
  3. “…for Bannon, and many on the Trumpian right, the crucial political divide in today’s world is between internationalists (who they call “globalists”) and nationalists”
  4. “The problem with Trump is…that his rhetoric…has created an atmosphere that suggests that behavioral anti-Semitism…may have a new legitimacy”