Pundits spent the past week trying to explain Trump’s hesitation. Peter Beinart blamed narcissism, using the theory that when Trump hears “anti-Semitism,” he can’t help but take it as a personal attack that he must fend off. I wondered if it was simple belligerence — that the more you ask this president for something, the more he is likely to say “you can’t make me.”<\/p>\n
Or maybe he was just annoyed at the ADL, the group most identified with combating anti-Semitism, for repeatedly calling him and his campaign out for\u00a0either ignoring or encouraging intolerance. Maybe Trump saw CEO Jonathan Greenblatt’s Feb. 17 column <\/a>in The Washington Post recalling how “the Trump campaign repeatedly tweeted and shared anti-Semitic imagery<\/a> and language<\/a>,” thus “allowing this poison to move from the margins into the mainstream of the public conversation.”<\/p>\n The most ominous explanation, offered by Bradley Burston from the left-wing Haaretz newspaper and a surprisingly outspoken Chuck Todd of NBC News, was that Trump was throwing a bone to — or at least trying not to alienate — the “alt-right” trolls who formed a small but vocal part of his winning coalition.<\/p>\n “Mr. President, we believe you and many other Jews believe you, so please make it clear that not only are you not an anti-Semite but that you reject people who are even if they did vote for you,\u201d Todd said last week.<\/p>\n If Trump had been struggling with a political calculation, it was reminiscent of one that played out in the 2008 campaign, when then-candidate Barack Obama was being pressed to disavow an endorsement from Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. When he was asked about Farrakhan during a debate with fellow Democratic contender Hillary Clinton, you could almost see the thought bubble over Obama’s head as he weighed rejecting Farrakhan without alienating supporters who considered him a hero.<\/p>\n Obama answered by reiterating his “denunciation” of Farrakhan\u2019s anti-Semitism, leading to a semantic debate with Clinton over the distinction between “denouncing and rejecting.\u201d Eventually the ADL’s then national director, Abe Foxman, declared that Obama had cleared the Farrakhan hurdle.<\/p>\n If Trump’s allergy to\u00a0the “A” word is a political calculation, what would it be? He knows that three out of every four Jews didn’t vote for him, and perhaps someone is whispering to him, a la James Baker, that he gains no advantage by caving to a special interest as liberal as the Jews.<\/p>\n Trump’s critics pin the issue on his chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, who came to the Trump campaign after steering Breitbart News, which he himself called a “platform” for the alt-right, among other right-wing movements. In turn, Bannon’s defenders note that Breitbart is enthusiastically pro-Israel and often keeps tabs on anti-Semitism.<\/p>\n But search “anti-Semitism” at Breitbart and a pattern emerges\u00a0— one that could explain the week that was. The site seems most exercised about Jew hatred when it is committed by Muslims<\/a>, members of the left wing<\/a> in Europe, <\/a>and far left and anti-Israel activists on\u00a0American college campuses<\/a>. When it does report on hate crimes in\u00a0the United States, its coverage is almost always skeptical,\u00a0highlighting<\/a>\u00a0hate-crime “hoaxes” or quoting those who deny that there has been a surge in hate crimes here or in Britain since the U.S. elections or Brexit.<\/p>\n This week, when much of the press corps was focusing on how and whether Trump would denounce anti-Semitism, Joel Pollak, a\u00a0senior editor-at-large at Breitbart, was accusing the media<\/a> of hyping fears of anti-Semitism. Pollak blames an “ongoing\u00a0pattern<\/a>\u00a0of\u00a0false ‘hate crimes’\u201d and the media’s reluctance to report on left-wing anti-Semitism. But mostly he blames general “anti-Trump hysteria.”<\/p>\n “Trump\u2019s critics seem to\u00a0want<\/em> to believe false accusations of\u00a0antisemitism, which justify\u00a0their hatred of him\u00a0and maintain\u00a0a sense of outrage and unity among activists,” writes Pollak.<\/p>\n For Pollak and other Breitbart contributors, the reporting and denunciation of anti-Semitism is a partisan weapon wielded by the left to discredit the right. (Just as Trump asserted that it’s a charge wielded by a dishonest media to discredit him.) Of course, Breitbart also politicizes anti-Semitism, using it as a scarlet “A” to be worn, almost exclusively, by Muslims, campus radicals, self-hating Jews<\/a> and European leftists. In fact, it\u00a0has become an increasingly familiar trope both on the left and the right that the other is more anti-Semitic.<\/p>\n At least both sides agree that anti-Semitism is bad, even if they hesitate to take responsibility for the version that metastasizes among their ideological allies. They want to target the Jew haters but are wary about friendly fire.<\/p>\n Maybe the mistake of Jewish groups in seeking a strong response from Trump is that they are living in a simpler past, when both sides could agree that anti-Semitism was an evil, no matter the perpetrators or their politics.<\/p>\n (Andrew Silow-Carroll is the editor-in-chief of JTA, the Jewish news service.)<\/em><\/p>\n![\"Share](\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/buttons\/share-medium.png\")