Summary: A Jewish Pulitzer Prize winning writer, Michael Chabon, calls for all Jews, everywhere, to oppose Donald Trump. Weekly publication Jewish Journal responds with opposition.
Link to full pieces follow, but below are excerpts. I will say however, that both pieces are really worth the read.
Michael Chabon:
We know that, up to now, some of you have made an effort to reserve judgment on the question of whether or not President Donald Trump is an anti-Semite, and to give him the benefit of the doubt. Some of you voted for him last November. Some of you have found employment in his service, or have involved yourself with him in private business deals, or in diplomatic ties.
You have counted carefully as each appointment to his administration of a white supremacist, anti-Semite, neo-Nazi or crypto-fascist appeared to be counterbalanced by the appointment of a fellow Jew, and reassured yourself that the most troubling of those hires would be cumulatively outweighed by the presence, in his own family and circle of closest advisors, of a Jewish son-in-law and daughter.
***
Any Jew, anywhere, who does not act to oppose President Donald Trump and his administration acts in favor of anti-Semitism; any Jew who does not condemn the President, directly and by name, for his racism, white supremacism, intolerance and Jew hatred, condones all of those things.
To our fellow Jews, in North America, in Israel, and around the world: What side are you on?
Jewish Journal response:
The problem I have with such denunciations this. Even if the Chabons are 100 percent correct about Trump, their piece represents the opposite vice of Trumpian moral relativism about Charlottesville: I mean moral absolutism. No shades of gray, no nuance, no tolerance or benefit of the doubt for the other guy’s motives or predicament.
Moral absolutism comes too close to a form of totalitarianism: I am not comparing it to the Hitler-Stalin variety, of course. Rather the danger here is something akin to that of the all-virtuous Robespierre during French Revolution. He guillotined his fellow Jacobin revolutionaries over any deviations from his political opinions. It all did not end well for Maximilien Robespierre (himself guillotined in 1794) and the French—unless you are a big fan of Napoleon Bonaparte’s imperial dictatorship.
The French Jacobins devoured their own back then. We American Jews should not do the same today.
First piece (Chabon):
https://extranewsfeed.com/to-our-fel...d-ff421a1d325d
Jewish Journal reply:
http://jewishjournal.com/opinion/223...r-fellow-jews/
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