New York Times deputy Washington editor Jonathan Weisman made the Sunday Review with the dramatically titled “American Jews and Israeli Jews Break Up.”
Weisman is author of the book (((Semitism))) Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump, which blames Trump and the alt-right for a rise in U.S. anti-Semitism. But he was unwilling to acknowledge anti-Semitism on the left, as Ben Shapiro found in his evisceration of Weisman’s book.
That held true in his latest for the Sunday Review, where he made Trump the villain (click “expand”):
The events of the past year brought American and Israeli Jews ever closer to a breaking point. President Trump, beloved in Israel and decidedly unloved by a majority of American Jews, moved the United States Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in May, with the fiery evangelical pastors John Hagee and Robert Jeffress consecrating the ceremony.
In October, after the murder of 11 Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, President Trump went to that city to pay his respects. Members of the Jewish community there, in near silent mourning, came out to protest Mr. Trump’s arrival, declaring that he was not welcome until he gave a national address to renounce the rise of white nationalism and its attendant bigotry.
....
At a Hanukkah celebration at the White House last month, the president raised eyebrows and age-old insinuations of dual loyalties when he told American Jews at the gathering that his vice president had great affection for “your country,” Israel.
After casually accusing Trump of “basically doing whatever the government of Benjamin Netanyahu asks,” to the approval of Jews in Israel, he tarred Trump as the enemy of American Jews:
American Jews, in contrast, see President Trump as their existential threat, a leader who they believe has stoked nationalist bigotry, stirred anti-Semitism and, time and time again, failed to renounce the violent hatred swirling around his political movement. The F.B.I. reports that hate crimes in the United States jumped 17 percent in 2017, with a 37 percent spike in crimes against Jews and Jewish institutions.
But are those assaults committed by Trump supporters? Weisman may want to read his colleague Ginia Bellafante’s October 31 column, which featured the fact that in New York City, “During the past 22 months, not one person caught or identified as the aggressor in an anti-Semitic hate crime has been associated with a far right-wing group....”
Blamed conservative Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the schism as well:
Part of the distance between Jews in the United States and Israeli Jews may come from the stance that Israel’s leader is taking on the world stage. Mr. Netanyahu has embraced the increasingly authoritarian Hungarian leader Victor Orban, who ran a blatantly anti-Semitic re-election campaign....
Also a problem? Not caving into Palestinian demands for a state, despite basic survival concerns for Jews:
The two-state solution is increasingly feeling like a cruel joke. American Jews’ rabbis and lay leaders counsel them to be vigilant against any other solution, such as granting Palestinians full rights in a greater Israel, because those solutions would dilute or destroy Israel’s identity as a Jewish state. Be patient, American Jews are told. Peace talks are coming. The Palestinians will have their state.
Weisman seriously softened the anti-Israel (at very best) ferocity of two new House Democrats and the anti-Jewish “BDS” movement:
In the meantime, the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel grows stronger on American campuses, and new voices are emerging in the Democratic Party, such as Representatives Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, who are willing to speak openly about Palestinian rights and autonomy where other lawmakers have declined to do so.
The campus “BDS” movement (boycotts, divestments, and sanctions) supports a one-state solution that would eliminate the Jewish state. Tlaib endorses the movement’s one-state solution, while Omar has issued creepy tweets claiming Israel had “hypnotized the world” to ignore its “evil doings.”
For a self-proclaimed fighter on behalf of Jews, Weisman is quick to insult them, suggesting a people who were the target of genocide 75 years ago have become a “bully”:
....Older American Jews, more viscerally aware of the Holocaust and connected to the living history of the Jewish state, are generally willing to look past Israeli government actions that challenge their values. Or they embrace those actions. Younger American Jews do not typically remember Israel as the David against regional Goliaths. They see a bully, armed and indifferent, 45 years past the Yom Kippur War, the last conflict that threatened Israel’s existence.
Weisman was also responsible for an offensive chart that accompanied a Times article on Jews in the U.S. Congress in 2015, labeling Democratic lawmakers against the Obama administration's controversial nuclear deal with Iran as "Jewish?" or not (the "Jewish?" part was removed from the online version after outcry).
