Last week, Donald Trump went on Fox News and took offense on behalf of the Jews. Asked about Vice President Kamala Harris choosing Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate over Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, the former president declared: “I think it’s insulting to Jewish people.” Trump’s own running mate, J. D. Vance, expressed similar sentiments at a Philadelphia rally, saying that he “felt bad” for Shapiro, and that “whatever disagreements on policy you have about somebody,” the fact “that the vice-presidential race on the Democratic side became so focused on his ethnicity” is “absolutely disgraceful” and “insulting to Americans.”
These claims didn’t come out of nowhere. During the VP selection process, Shapiro faced legitimate criticism over his stances on subjects like school vouchers, but also a campaign by far-left activists to cast the Jewish governor—a sharp critic of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—as “Genocide Josh,” while ignoring the Israel stances of non-Jewish VP contenders such as Walz and Arizona’s Mark Kelly. Shapiro has said that anti-Semitism played no role in his conversations with Harris, and there’s no evidence that it factored into her ultimate decision. Nonetheless, the all-out assault against Shapiro’s prospective candidacy shocked many Jews and outside observers, who saw it as singling out the governor for his Jewish identity and insinuating that Jews secretly serve the Israeli state over America.
But the fact that Shapiro encountered anti-Semitism doesn’t mean that we should take Trump’s sympathy for him at face value—because we also know how Trump treats Jews once they assume leadership in the Democratic Party. “Chuck Schumer has become a Palestinian,” the former president recently told supporters in Pennsylvania, unleashing one of his new favorite slurs against the Senate majority leader and highest-ranking Jewish Democrat in the nation. “Can you believe it? He’s become a proud member of Hamas.”
What was Schumer’s offense? In March, he called for Israeli voters to replace Netanyahu. But months earlier, Shapiro publicly dubbed Netanyahu “one of the worst leaders of all time.” Harris didn’t pick Shapiro, and so Trump today labels her choice as “insulting to Jewish people.” But had she picked Shapiro, Trump would be calling the governor a bad Jew over his strident criticisms of Netanyahu, just as he has derided Schumer. That’s because Trump doesn’t actually care about anti-Semitism; he just invokes it for advantage.
Sadly, this approach is not unique to Trump. It’s emblematic of the cynical politics of anti-Semitism today, where many political partisans attend to anti-Jewish prejudice only if it can be pinned on the other team. Otherwise, they either ignore it or make excuses for it.
This selective sensitivity to anti-Semitism allows Trump to have dinner at his Florida home with bigots such as Kanye “Ye” West and the Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes one day, then assail liberals for anti-Jewish prejudice the next. And it allows some hard-left activists to rightly critique the white nationalism seeping into mainstream Republican politics, yet simultaneously justify anti-Semitism that’s cloaked in the guise of “anti-Zionism”—with some even adopting the terminology of the neo-Nazis they claim to oppose.
In all of these cases, the anti-Jewish agitators have a ready defense: They have Jewish friends and even relatives. Debating Kamala Harris in 2020, then–Vice President Mike Pence dismissed her concern that Trump “doesn’t condemn neo-Nazis” by retorting that “President Trump has Jewish grandchildren. His daughter and son-in-law are Jewish.” Defenders of the “Genocide Josh” campaign against Shapiro offered similar protestations: “Those suggesting the ‘far left’ conducted a mudslinging campaign against Shapiro due to his faith don’t seem to reconcile how this amorphous ‘far left’ happily backed Jewish presidential candidates like Bernie Sanders,” Zeteo’s Prem Thakker argued.
But the measure of anti-Semitism isn’t whether a person likes Jews who say and do what that person wants—it’s how they treat Jews who don’t. Does someone respond to Jews who defy their preferences the same way they would to anyone else they disagree with, or do they respond with bigotry, stereotypes, slanders, and conspiracy theories? Just as plenty of reactionaries—including members of Congress, evangelical Zionists, and Elon Musk—lionize Netanyahu but nonetheless express anti-Semitic views, some progressives valorize Sanders but pursue prejudicial lines of argument against Jews with different politics, such as Shapiro.
This is how Jews often get sorted into “good Jews” (who are seen as deserving protection from discrimination) and “bad Jews” (who aren’t), based on the ideological inclinations of outsiders—something that also happens to other religious and racial groups. The true test of tolerance, therefore, is not how a person treats members of a minority community who are agreeable or subservient, but how they treat those who are not. Judging by the controversy surrounding Shapiro and the self-serving use Trump has made of it, that’s a test many in our politics continue to fail.