I don’t know what is worse about Talia Lavin‘s article calling me a Trump Jew: is it her blatant McCarthyism or her insistence that Jews behave like “guests” in an alien country?
Let’s begin with her mendacious McCarthyism: I am not a Trump Jew. I voted, campaigned and contributed against Trump and for Hillary Clinton. I have criticized many of Trump’s policies and statements. I am not his lawyer. I have never provided him with “legal advice.”
I am doing what the ACLU is failing to do: defending the constitutional rights of all Americans, including this president’s. I would be doing the same thing had Hillary Clinton been elected President and Republicans were trying to “lock her up.”
When, as a student at Brooklyn College, I defended the right of Communists to speak, McCarthyists called me a “Communist Jew.” When I defended the right of Nazis to march in Skokie, McCarthyists called me a “Nazi Jew.” When I defended unpopular criminal defendants, McCarthyists said I was a Jew who was complicit in murder. Associating an advocate of civil liberties with those whose liberties he advocates is the worst kind of McCarthyism.
What is even more disturbing is her shanda fur di goyim mentality based on her father’s belief that “you’re just a guest in America.”
In my book “Chutzpah,” written over 25 years ago, I lament the fact that many American Jews still regard themselves “as second-class citizens – as guests in another people’s land. [They] obsess about what the “real” Americans will think of [them]”… and “don’t accept that we are entitled to first-class status in this diverse and heterogeneous democracy.” Lavin seems to believe that Jews in America do not have first class citizenship. In her America, Jews are not allowed to be supportive of a President or the Party of which she (and I) disapprove. Lavin even goes so far to suggest their “herem – expulsion from the fold.”
I will not allow Lavin to define what it means to be an American or a Jew. Although I have been a lifelong Democrat, I would never want to live in a country where Jews cannot be supportive of any political candidate or party they choose.