In November, an email arrived with the subject line: “Cancel my subscription immediately.”
That piqued my interest, and I read on:
“For 35 years I’ve put up with your leftist agenda because I thought it was important to support a Jewish publication.”
Actually, in June 2025, I will mark 30 years at the Jewish World. Perhaps, my correspondent has been reading my writing for other publications.
The disgruntled subscriber objected to the headline on the cover story of the AJW’s Nov. 2024 issue: “Is Trump a fascist?” The JTA story by Philissa Cramer looked at a Trump campaign ad that featured a Holocaust survivor and pushed back on Vice President Kamala Harris’ assessment that the president-elect is a “fascist.”
Apparently, the former subscriber (I canceled his subscription, as per his request) did not bother to read the article, which noted that a “growing number of experts on fascism, as well as officials who served under him during his four years as president, have said the label befits Trump, who openly admires dictators and has discussed using the power of the presidency to retaliate against his opponents. The discourse accelerated last week after The Atlantic reported that Trump had reportedly expressed admiration for Hitler’s generals.
“Harris applied the label to Trump herself for the first time during a CNN town hall meeting on Oct. 23. Asked whether she believed Trump was a fascist, she answered, ‘Yes, I do.’ She also said Americans believe in democracy and ‘not having a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist.’”
The email message from the local physician (who will not be providing medical care to me, ever) called the headline “disgusting” and went on to state that his extended family died in the Holocaust. “To compare Trump to Hitler is the most vile slur I could ever imagine. Basically, to equate Trump to Hitler, so trivializes the Holocaust, that it renders you a Holocaust denier. Congratulations — you’re now a Holocaust denier.”
This guy jumped immediately from Trump to Hitler. The JTA story mentioned that the Shoah survivor in Trump’s campaign commercial did roll up his sleeve to reveal a concentration camp tattoo. And the article states that the campaign ad “reflects the particular resonance of fascism for Jewish voters given fascism’s strong historical association with Hitler and the Nazis, and the degree to which Jewish ideas and concerns are playing a central role in the presidential race in its final days. Both campaigns are fighting for Jewish voters who make up significant constituencies in multiple swing states.”
Anyway, I don’t recall anyone ever branding me as a “Holocaust denier” — a type of person that is “vile scum,” as a prominent historian of the Holocaust put it some years ago.
So, I responded to the email correspondent, pointing out that I found his slur offensive and that “over nearly 30 years at the newspaper, I have written many remembrances of our local Shoah survivors who have passed away. And I’ve written numerous articles about Holocaust education and remembrance. Over recent years, I have traveled to the Czech Republic, Hungary, Berlin and Poland, and explicated the history of the destruction of European Jewry during the Shoah in those places.”
I’ve noticed that the Trumpites, both Jews and gentiles, generally are not satisfied with debating an issue; they also have to inject some ad hominem attack.
On the theme of fascism, Timothy Snyder, an author and professor of history at Yale University, wrote an essay for The New Yorker’s Nov. 18, 2024, issue, which featured a series of reflections on the 2024 election results by prominent writers.
Snyder began his piece by saying that it “was wrong to treat Donald Trump as a series of absences. The standard critique has always been that he lacks something that we imagine to be a prerequisite for high office: breeding, or grammar, or diplomacy, or business acumen, or love of country. And he does lack all those things, as well as pretty much any conventional bourgeois virtue you can name.
“Trump’s skills and talents go unrecognized when we see him as a conventional candidate—a person who seeks to explain policies that might improve lives, or who works to create the appearance of empathy. Yet this is our shortcoming more than his. Trump has always been a presence, not an absence: the presence of fascism. What does this mean?”
Snyder then pivoted to Putin, the Russian dictator, who knows his way around a defamatory label:
When the Soviets called their enemies “fascists,” they turned the word into a meaningless insult. Putinist Russia has preserved the habit: a “fascist” is anyone who opposes the wishes of a Russian dictator. So Ukrainians defending their country from Russian invaders are “fascists.” This is a trick that Trump has copied. He, like Vladimir Putin, refers to his enemies as “fascists,” with no ideological significance at all. It is simply a term of opprobrium.
Putin and Trump are both, in fact, fascists. And their use of the word, though meant to confuse, reminds us of one of fascism’s essential characteristics. A fascist is unconcerned with the connection between words and meanings. He does not serve the language; the language serves him. When a fascist calls a liberal a “fascist,” the term begins to work in a different way, as the servant of a particular person, rather than as a bearer of meaning.
Many of our readers are apprehensive about what the coming Trump 2.0 administration will bring. In this issue of the Jewish World, Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California’s Berkeley School of Law, considers some of the baggage Trump brings to the White House this time: multiple felony convictions and pending criminal cases. He’s out on bail. And unlike the former generals and rational individuals Trump gathered for his first presidential administration, Chemerinsky notes that this time around “Trump will surround himself with staunch loyalists — the kinds of people who will enable, rather than restrain, him.”
It’s a collection of right-wing extremists and miscreants. Trump’s initial pick for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, has already bowed out and resigned his House seat. The recently released House Ethics Committee report on Gaetz found “substantial evidence” that he “violated House Rules, state and federal laws, and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, acceptance of impermissible gifts, the provision of special favors and privileges, and obstruction of Congress.”
My hope is that all of us stay vigilant in support of democracy. The plan to deport millions of undocumented U.S. residents could be a flashpoint for chaos in the coming months. I expect leaders of the organized Jewish community to resist the Trump administration’s scheme to construct concentration camps and separate families, again. Such policies are un-Jewish.
Mordecai Specktor / editor [at] ajwnews [dot] com
(American Jewish World, January 2025)
