Dangling Jews: Move Over Participles

“Identified as a Jew, the train made no distinctions.” The train didn’t identify as Jewish. You did.

The above is a much-needed example of a dangling participle — a grammar error where the subject falls out of the sentence and what’s left just hangs there, unattached. An afterthought. A secondary consideration.

Please excuse the train reference, but I’m furious.

Waking up to Trump gloating about some half-assed, cockamamie deal he’s made with the IRGC — the evilest of galactic empires — was a horrible way to start the week.

I have many friends who are Persian here in Los Angeles, good people, people who love Iran and mourn what it’s been turned into, and they are horrified by this news. After all the bluster, lives lost, resources squandered, and general hullabaloo, let’s face it — not much has changed. The vile Iranian Revolutionary Guard continues to play the world like a game of Risk. As long as the mullahs are in power, the people of Iran are going to be miserable, and they, like Americans, deserve freedom.

Instead, Trump is headed to the G7 Summit parading around like he’s wearing a full-length chinchilla fur coat, waving around his half-cocked “signed” agreement like it’s a trophy. Let’s be clear: this is a one-sided deal with a country that has been lying for 47 years and is now promising to stop lying. Iran saying it won’t pursue nuclear arms is like a drug addict telling their mother they didn’t take the Percocet from her medicine cabinet.

The worst part is the disrespect Trump is showing Israel and Jews in the diaspora. Look, Bibi is not my favorite person. Far from it. But Israel’s commitment to keeping its people safe is real, and as long as Israel exists as a regional power, Jews have somewhere to exist on the land they originated from thousands of years ago.

Israel matters.

Every antisemite who has ever lived would love to see Israel gone from the map. So the fact that Trump has pulled the rug from under Israel — for the sake of a photo op at the G7 with the hopes of not losing the House or Senate come November — is a pathetic attempt to hold power and collect accolades. He won’t get them because they all can’t stand him at that summit of self flagellating nonsense. Nor will too many Americans be happy. In fact, the only ones quietly thrilled that Trump has pulled the wool over the eyes of Jews are our haters — the Democratic Socialists of America.

And may a pox fall upon all their homes.

Now. Back to that train.

Jews are being dangled in this messy global political landscape. We’re invoked — enthusiastically, constantly — but we are not the subject of anyone’s sentence. The optics are whatever plays at the summit. We’re the ones left hanging. Technically, a participle modifies a verb, and you can’t use “Jew” as a verb — to do so would be the equivalent of the N-word, and we all know what a no-no that is. So we’re not even a proper participle. We’re just the part that looks like it belongs but doesn’t connect to anything at the moment.

Trump isn’t unique in this. Every politician dangles us to some degree. We are useful as a constituency, useful as a talking point, useful as proof of someone’s virtue or someone else’s villainy.

And while we’re on the subject of useful — let’s not forget who’s being played as the useful idiot here. Have I got a plane for you!

And here’s what history has taught us about dangling: it’s dangerous. The Jews who believed they had successfully assimilated, who were German first or French first, ended up on those trains.

“Identified as a Jew, the train made no distinctions.”

I don’t like being dangled. I am not interested in being an afterthought in someone else’s geopolitical performance — or lack thereof. I am not here to be waved at and moved on from, to be proof of a friendship that evaporates the moment the deal is signed and the cameras turn off. As it is I have lost all my long-time friends because I am the kind of mad this post displays.

I am no participle for some schmuck politician who needs to use my peoplehood for their own self-serving power dynamic and fundraising scam.

Dangle someone else. Like every last antisemite out there hiding behind their shit-eating grins.

If you haven’t read my memoir, please do. Click here.