Mairav Zonszein writes:

On August 20, after President Donald Trump told a reporter that any American Jew who casts a “vote for a Democrat… shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty,” outraged reactions flooded social media, attributing to his statement the anti-Semitic trope of “dual loyalty.” This is the idea, rampant in so much nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought, that Jews cannot be trusted because their allegiances are inherently divided between their Jewish and their national identities. Captain Alfred Dreyfus would never have been tried in France without the perception that Jews were disloyal.

The insecurity Jews felt in the face of the accusation of disloyalty was something that Zionism, born in the nineteenth century, aimed to resolve by establishing a Jewish homeland in a modern nation-state. By Zionism’s account, assimilation or minority status in the Diaspora could never assure the same safety; Jewish identity had to be its own nationality. As the Israeli author A.B. Yehoshua said to a room full of American Jews in 2006, “I cannot keep my identity outside Israel. [Being] Israeli is my skin, not my jacket.”

Just as troubling in Trump’s statement as any echo of the old charge of dual loyalty, though, was its implication that any Jew who doesn’t subscribe to his politics—to both the policies of his Republican Party and of the current Israeli government—is a disloyal Jew, an inauthentic Jew, a self-hating Jew. Trump was equating Judaism with a messianic vision associated with Israel’s settler right, putting forth a souped-up loyalty test based on his alignment with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In his years in office, Trump has made himself a staunch ally of Netanyahu—withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, and ending USAID to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. If you are Jewish and vote Democratic, then you are triply disloyal—to Trump, Israel, and America. [Continue reading…]