Presidential Politics 2016: Philosemitism vs. Anti-Semitism

To badly paraphrase Charles Dickens, this is the best of times and the not-so-best of times for Jews in American politics.

Like most observers, I don’t think Bernie Sanders will be nominated unless the FBI recommends an indictment of Hillary. Yet he is the first serious Jewish presidential candidate in history, with a real chance unlike Pennsylvania Governor Milton Schapp in 1976 and Joe Lieberman in 2004.

Polls show that 91 percent of American voters say they are willing to vote for a Jew, compared to 46 percent in 1937. In the sixties, when the percentage  was around 80 percent, declared opposition to voting for a Jew was a bit stronger than voting for a Catholic, a women, or even an African American.

One of the national parties is headed by a Jew, Debbie Wasserman-Schulz. Many people think that the GOP national chairman, Reince Priebus, is also Jewish, but he describes himself as “a German and a Greek.”

This is the philosemitic side of things. But there is another side:

• Donald Trump’s son-in-law is Jewish (so is Hillary Clinton’s), yet Trump’s invocations at the Republican-Jewish Coalition of traditional stereotypes of Jews as wealthy, wheeler-dealer businessmen understandably raised eyebrows.

• Debbie Wasserman-Schulz has stepped on many toes, but some of her critics have expressed anger through thinly-veiled anti-Semitic references to her character, looks, and style.

• At a recent Marco Rubio event, an audience member shouted down the Senator by erupting in a diatribe about Rubio as a Jewish tool. This might seem an isolated instance, except that MSNBC's Chris Matthews describes every hardline foreign policy speech given by Senator Rubio as “a love letter to Sheldon Adelson.” Matthews has a history of anti-Jewish innuendo.

• The left’s rallying around Bernie Sanders may be a noble reflex, but his supporters are not necessarily entirely noble. Sander’s Jeremiads against billionaires who unjustly own 90 percent of everything for preying on the working class comes across differently when filtered through the anti-Semitic lenses of some of those on the Internet. They prefer to describe Sanders as “an atheist” rather than a Jew, love him for his critical comments on Israel, and even reinterpret his ideology as opposition to “Jewish billionaires preying on the white working class.” On the right, the National Review criticized Sanders' trade protectionism by equating it with “national socialism.”

Many are heartened by polls showing Sanders defeating all potential GOP rivals in a general election race by decisive margins—more than Hillary Clinton’s. Yet my historical and political instincts are that Trump might very well run against him as “Vermont's Socialist Senator from the Lower East Side,” and that the results might set back Jewish political progress by a generation.