American Jews, beware of being used by Trump

Right-wing Jews, and indeed conservatives everywhere, are about to be tested. They have, quite rightly, raged against the illiberalism of woke culture and its denial of freedom of speech.

In what is now jokingly called the “liberal” press, the universities and the publishing industry a series of highly dubious doctrines have been enforced by fear. Say that a man cannot become a woman, or that racism is not confined to whites, and the mob will drive you from your job.

Instead of freedom of conscience on matters of legitimate public debate, they took the knee, literally and metaphorically, to identitarian orthodoxy.

We are weeks away from finding out whether those who denounced attacks on liberal values will abandon their principles when times change.

The incoming Trump administration is planning a woke-ism of the right. And guess who will be at the forefront of its cultural counter-revolution. As always, and of course, it will be Jews. Trump will use real and imaginary antisemitism as an excuse to hammer higher education in the US.

Now, let me be honest, there will be a certain satisfaction in seeing US academics, who dismissed concerns about freedom of speech, learn the hard way why it matters. Some of us tried to warn them that the weapons they used against others could just as easily be turned against them when the reactionary right took power.

But schadenfreude, however justifiable, is not a serious moral position. And cries of “I told you so, you bloody fools” grow tedious with over-repetition. We are moving to a time when the arguments we once threw at the left and far left will be needed in the struggle against the right and far right.

The first argument is the most vital: who gets to decide what is offensive speech? At the high point of the woke movement it was not the courts but the cause’s most extreme advocates who held sway. In 2019, the American politician Ayanna Pressley explained with brutal honesty that “we don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice. We don’t need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice. We don’t need queers that don’t want to be a queer voice.” It was not enough to be Asian, black, Muslin or LGBT. You had to be an ultra-believer in identitarian politics to be accepted as a true “voice”.

The same will apply to Jews under Trump: only the most extreme voices will count as authentic.

If the US right was simply to say it would fight incitement to violence against Jews, or the abuse of Jewish students, or the dissemination of racist propaganda, I wouldn’t object. But the Trump administration will target arguments for punishment that ought to be thrashed out in public debate.

Recent complaints from the activists spurring Trump on include panellists at university debates minimising Hamas atrocities or accusing Israel of genocide. Doubtless these arguments are uncomfortable for Israel’s supporters, but they are not remotely comparable to Islamist or Nazi antisemitic conspiracy theories, death threats, or swastikas carved on the doors of Jewish institutions. To pretend that they are the same as physical attacks on Jews is to follow the reasoning of the left of the 2010s, when it maintained that, for instance, asserting the material reality of biological sex was the equivalent of actual violence against trans people.

These hysterical claims helped silence dissent. But at an awful price. The reaction against woke censorship has been a gift to right-wing movements everywhere. The Republicans won the 2024 US presidential election with an advertising slogan even Democrats conceded was devastating: “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you”.

There’s an old saying that antisemitism is never really about Jews. Everyone from European fascists to today’s Khomeinists, for example, uses anti-Jewish conspiracy theories to justify the denial of human rights to their own citizens. The same applies to the philosemitism of the Trump movement. It wants to use American Jews – most of whom still vote Democrat, I should add – as an excuse to undermine their political opponents in liberal universities and abolish the US Education department.

The ground is already being prepared. The Guardian published a video of the Republican congressional leader Steve Scalise detailing plans to pull billions of dollars of federal funding from universities and to strip them of accreditation as punishment for allowing pro-Palestine protests on their campuses. As Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities said, Trump’s supporters want to “dismantle higher education, not reform it, and to replace what they perceive as woke Marxist ideology with their own conservative ideology”.

Jews in the US, and indeed here, should be wary of being coopted by men who do not believe in freedom or tolerance. Just as there has been a backlash against left-wing authoritarianism, so there will be a backlash against the authoritarianism of the right.

To escape it, you should remember that the old rules still apply. Unless your opponents are advocating violence or virulent hatred, they should be free to argue with you. Meanwhile, those on the left or on the right who deny that freedom are, everywhere and always, the greatest menace of all.