Trump’s antisemitism exposed

Former President Donald Trump unmasked himself as a crude antisemite in one of his latest Truth Social screeds by referring to Governor Josh Shapiro as “the highly overrated Jewish governor” of Pennsylvania.

Perhaps this is a welcome sign that he is becoming increasingly unhinged as he becomes increasingly desperate, but his generic attacks on the vast majority of American Jews who do not support him have become an ugly motif of his campaign. With tedious regularity, he says that Jews who plan to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris, or for any Democrat for that matter, “should have their heads examined.”

Somehow, he does not say the same about Christians who are not rallying to his side. His often snide but never subtle vitriol is reserved for Jews, migrants (“not people”) who are “poisoning the blood of our country,” Muslims (“I think Islam hates us”), and other minorities he holds in contempt.

Highlighting someone’s Jewish identity in order to denigrate them is a time-honored manifestation of antisemitism. Period. Paragraph.

Albert Einstein was regularly called “der Jude Einstein” (the Jew Einstein) in Nazi propaganda and US Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr. was similarly disparaged as “der Jude Morgenthau.” Decades earlier, in France, Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer falsely convicted of treason, was pilloried by the Jew-haters of his day as “le juif Dreyfus” (the Jew Dreyfus).

Some things never change.

It’s irrelevant that Trump’s daughter, son in law, and three of his grandchildren are Jewish, or that there are Jews such as his former senior advisor Stephen Miller and Ambassador David Friedman feature prominently in his far-right entourage. “Some of my best friends are Jewish,” or a variation of that trope, has long been a favored line used by antisemites to try to refute or at least cover up their antisemitism.

What is far more problematic, however, is that Republicans and others who support and finance Trump do not have the moral courage to risk his ire by calling him out on his antisemitic slurs. The Republican Jewish Coalition, once the Jewish arm of the Republican Party and now an apologist for the MAGA movement, has not uttered a single criticism of Trump for his offensive reference to Shapiro as the “Jewish governor.”

Once upon a time, during the 2008 presidential campaign, Senator John McCain corrected a town hall participant who referred to Barack Obama as an Arab. “No ma’am, he’s a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what this campaign is all about,” McCain said. But, to paraphrase Christopher Marlowe’s character Barabas in the 16th century play, “The Jew of Malta,” that was in another political era altogether, and, sadly, McCain is long dead.

Not a chance, therefore, that Matthew Brooks, the Republican Jewish Coalition’s CEO, might do anything remotely similar in 2024. Neither Brooks nor any of the Jewish MAGA mega-donors has the guts or the integrity to tell Trump, as then Senator Joe Biden famously did in one of their 2020 debates: “Will you shut up, man.”

—

Menachem Rosensaft is adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School and lecturer-in-law at Columbia Law School. He is the author of the forthcoming Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz (Ben Yehuda Press, 2025).