"Dual Loyalty" Used to Be a Slur. Now It's a Demand.
"Dual Loyalty" Used to Be a Slur. Now It's a Demand.
The dangerous idea that Jews and Israel are inseparable.
Donald Trump has long been convinced that any moment now, Jews are going to abandon the Democratic Party and become Republicans. His strategy to bring this change about is to periodically berate Jews and traffic in antisemitic stereotypes, even as he proclaims himself the Jews’ greatest friend. That was always repugnant, but today it has become even more dangerous
In a radio interview earlier this week with his odious former aide Sebastian Gorka (it’s amazing how many of Trump’s two-bit grifters are still hanging around), Trump responded to a speech Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer gave in which he criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and called on Israel to hold new elections by saying, “Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion. They hate everything about Israel, and they should be ashamed of themselves because Israel will be destroyed.”
Trump’s statement was rightly criticized for being hateful, but it raises some important questions about the increasingly fraught relationship between American Jews and Israel. In what he no doubt thought was a persuasive argument to rally Jews to him and his party, Trump was in effect aligning himself with antisemites of all kinds. Unfortunately, the idea he was articulating, in his characteristically crude way, has become all too common.
The “dual loyalty” inversion
For decades, Jews fought against the charge of dual loyalty, that they might not be trustworthy because their loyalties were split between America and Israel. While others have faced a similar accusation — when John F. Kennedy ran for president, many of his right-wing opponents charged that as a Catholic he’d be taking orders from the Pope — it always had a particular force for Jews because as a minority religion their Americanness was never fully accepted.
But in recent years we’ve seen a deeply disturbing inversion of the dual loyalty idea. The idea is often brought up in incoherent ways without acknowledging how its meaning has been reversed — for instance, here’s a news report on Trump’s remarks saying he “invoked a dual loyalty trope,” implying that that was what was antisemitic in his statement. But that’s not what’s at work here. Trump was attacking Jews for not having dual loyalty. This has become extremely common; the more pro-Israel the American right has become, the more it has demanded that Jews show their loyalty to the Israeli government.
The context of recent history has to be understood here. In the wake of the demise of the Soviet Union, conservatives were adrift without a foreign enemy to hate, a vacuum that was filled after September 11 by Muslims, both foreign and domestic. As part of that new orientation, Republicans embraced Israel with an enthusiasm that grew by the year, helped along by Israel’s own steady march to the right. As they became more fervent advocates for Israel, conservatives began insisting that to be really American you had to be supportive of the (right wing) Israeli government, whatever your religion.
Many states passed laws meant to punish support for the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement, often by excluding companies or individuals who support BDS from government contracts (and to be clear, a disappointing number of Democrats have supported these laws). In one case, a speech pathologist in Texas who refused to sign what was in effect a loyalty oath to Israel, promising never to personally participate in a boycott of one foreign country, lost her job as a contractor in a public school (she later won in court). When he signed the law in question, Gov. Greg Abbott said, “Anti-Israel policies are anti-Texas policies.” Sounds a lot like…dual loyalty. Which is now good.
Jews ≠ Israel
The simplistic way to look at the conservative commitment to Israel — and the way many conservatives would like Jews to understand it — is that it’s great for the Jews. They have so many allies now in both parties, to the point where support for Israel is written into policy and law.
But this is not true, and outbursts like Trump’s prove it. Trump wants everyone to believe that Jews=Israel, but this is an extraordinarily dangerous idea. It’s not an accident that it’s exactly what today is being used to justify antisemitism directed against Jews. We’ve seen this in the startling upsurge in left-wing antisemitism since October 7, with incidents reported around the country in which people believe that the appropriate way to protest Israel’s war on Gaza is to harass, intimidate, and even direct violence against whichever Jews seem to be close at hand.
So this is where we are: Conservatives want Jews to proclaim their dual loyalty, as a way to suppress dissent over the Israeli government’s policies and drive a wedge into the Democratic coalition. Trump himself seems to believe that if he says this often enough, eventually Jews will start moving toward the GOP. If there’s any good news, it’s that at a moment when American Jewish opposition toward the current Israeli government has probably never been higher, the effort to turn Jews into Republicans is particularly likely to fail.
It isn’t any mystery why. First, most American Jews are liberals, not because they’ve been deceived about who their real friends are, but because their people have a historical experience of oppression and value justice. Second, Jews despise Donald Trump — according to a recent Pew Research Center poll, 79 percent have an unfavorable view of him — regardless of his support for Israel, because he’s exactly the kind of dangerous authoritarian bigot they’ve been running from for centuries.1
The dual loyalty demand is just as bad as the dual loyalty accusation
There are some Jews who believe the way to keep Jews safe is to reinforce the Jews=Israel idea by defining criticism of Israel as inherently antisemitic, which only makes things worse by lumping people of good will all over the world who have legitimate criticisms of Israeli government policy together with actual antisemites. This is something I worry about especially with regard to younger generations of Jews who have only known right-wing Israeli governments. If you tell them over and over that being Jewish requires them to support the brutalization of Palestinians and whatever nightmarish future Bibi Netanyahu and his far-right allies envision for Israel, the response of many of them is not going to be “OK, I’ll stop criticizing Israel.” It’s going to be “Well then maybe I’m not Jewish after all.”
Bonus audio content!
Before you go, here are the last couple episodes of Boundary Issues, the podcast I host with my sister Ayelet, for anyone who hasn’t had a chance to check it out. It’s of course available wherever you get your podcasts, but I thought I’d put these two here so you could take a listen. This is our latest episode, in which we were joined by Sarah Lipton-Lubet, the president of Take Back the Court, for a discussion of why the Supreme Court sucks so much:
And here’s an episode we did with Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, about performative masculinity and politics:
Subscribe, like, share, the whole bit.
There’s another factor that doesn’t get mentioned much in this story of partisan loyalties, but which I think is meaningful: Republican politicians and their conservative media allies are constantly telling the rural and small-town voters who sit at the heart of their coalition that they should despise cosmopolitan urbanites, and that “real” Americans are those who live in the “heartland.” While there are some heartland and rural Jews, most Jews live in cities and suburbs, and for a great many if not most American Jews no matter where they live, their lineage includes an extended stay in Brooklyn. Even today, a quarter of all American Jews live in the New York metropolitan area, and the urban immigrant experience is absolutely central to American Jewish identity.
So the way conservatives practice the politics of place — both lauding rural areas for their supposedly superior “values” and denigrating cities as crime-ridden hellholes — sends a strong if implicit signal to American Jews who carry an urban sensibility with them wherever they may live. That signal says We don’t like your kind, and Jews hear it loud and clear.