Following the Hamas October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel, in which that group murdered approximately 1,200 people and took 251 more hostage, Israel began a military campaign of “total victory” against the group—a terrorist organization it has previously promoted by facilitating Qatari funding for the group in order to weaken the Palestinian Authority and thereby lessen pressure on Israel to allow the creation of a genuine Palestinian state. That campaign has since killed well over 50,000 Gazans, a majority of whom were women or children.

During the course of its attacks, Israel has seen fit to cut off water, electricity, and food supplies to Gaza’s population, destroyed much of its physical infrastructure, and left its residents enduring what the British Red Cross called a “desperate humanitarian crisis.” As if that weren’t enough, in addition to the war on Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces have recently launched multiple attacks in the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran, with the strong possibility of a much larger attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities later this year.

At the same time, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s deeply unpopular, scandal- plagued extremist right-wing government—one that features an avowed racist and homophobe and a longtime supporter of Jewish anti-Arab terrorism—is in the process of attempting to destroy the nation’s democracy from within as it prioritizes military attacks over the lives of its remaining hostages in Gaza.

The war has exacerbated a burgeoning conflict between the country that Israel is becoming and the values of the majority of American Jews. To put it in familiar terms, Israel has grown politically bright red while American Jews, alone among ethnicities that code as “white,” remain proudly deep blue. Two-thirds of Israelis questioned told pollsters they preferred Donald Trump over Kamala Harris; the exact opposite held true among American Jews. (“Trump gets nothing but praise here,” the Tel Aviv–based pollster and political analyst Dahlia Scheindlin told me.)

Legacy Jewish organizations are throwing in with a president and political movement that seek to destroy the democratic pillars and educational institutions that have helped to make Jews secure and successful in the United States and are shot through with neo-Nazis.

Despite this, the leaders of the large “legacy” American Jewish organizations, without exception, have chosen to side with Netanyahu, defending Israel against all critics and demonizing as “antisemitic” anyone—especially other Jews—who they believe threatens it. In doing so, however, they face the problem not only of opposing the views of the vast majority of American Jews, but also of throwing in with a U.S. president and political movement that seek to destroy the democratic pillars and educational institutions that have helped to make Jews secure and successful in the United States and are shot through with neo-Nazis and Jew-haters of all sorts.

The net result is that we are in the early stages of a Jewish civil war unmatched since the early battles over Zionism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In essence, Trump and the forces arrayed behind him—the legacy organizations, a new and well-financed right-wing Jewish media, and the Christian evangelical world that blindly supports Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu—have offered American Jews a kind of devil’s bargain: throw in with us against the antisemitic universities and campus rabble-rousers, but pay no attention as we dismantle the traditions and institutions that Jews value and that have provided the foundation for all they have been able to accomplish as Americans. Who’s in?

Back in September, Donald Trump appeared at an event about antisemitism together with mega-pro-Israel donor Miriam Adelson and promised the crowd: “I will be your defender, your protector, and I will be the best friend Jewish Americans have ever had in the White House.” Shocker: This was a lie. Trump’s antisemitism is no secret to anyone who cares to look. We know from his former chief of staff that he believes “Hitler did a lot of good things.” We know that according to his ex-wife Ivana, he kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bed. No less worrisome is the sympathy he has consistently shown toward contemporary neo-Nazis. This was most obvious when he referred to the Charlottesville protesters who chanted “Jews will not replace us” as “very fine people.” Then came the high-profile dinner he had at Mar-a-Lago with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and the Hitler-loving rapper Ye (formerly Kanye West).

Trump, moreover, exploits antisemitism as a political weapon. In 2016, for instance, he tweeted an image that featured Hillary Clinton backgrounded by hundred-dollar bills together with a Jewish star. His campaign ran an ad that went after disloyal “globalist” billionaires, illustrated, coincidentally, with the faces of three Jews: Janet Yellen, George Soros, and Lloyd Blankfein. He also embraces the antisemitic canard that the primary loyalty of American Jews lies with Israel rather than their own country. “Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion.… They hate everything about Israel, and they should be ashamed of themselves,” he proclaimed.

Equally offensive is Trump’s idiotic claim that Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer is “not Jewish anymore” and has instead become “a Palestinian.” In assuming the right to decide who is and isn’t legitimately Jewish, Trump is emulating both his hero, Vladimir Putin, who says much the same thing about Volodymyr Zelenskiy and other “ethnic Jews,” as well as the virulently antisemitic mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger, who in the late nineteenth century famously asserted, “I decide who is a Jew”; a claim later picked up by Hermann Göring.

Perhaps most worrisome of all, however, is Trump’s eagerness to blame the Jews when things don’t go his way. At the same Adelson event mentioned above, he warned, “If I don’t win this election … the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss.” He was preparing his followers for an old-fashioned, antisemitic “stab-in-the-back” attack on liberal Jews. This is no idle threat, given the fact that Trump leads a movement whose members are not averse to political violence and that includes actual neo-Nazis.

Such threats should be ringing alarm bells among Jews. After all, the vast majority of violent attacks on Jews in the United States since Trump came on the political scene have come from the right. These include synagogue murders in Pittsburgh and Poway, California, and the planting of an explosive device at George Soros’s house. Like the neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville, many Trump supporters expound the racist, antisemitic “great replacement” theory that appears to inspire these attacks.

Finally, there is the administration’s embrace of Europe’s and Latin America’s extreme right wing. Rabbi Rick Jacobs, who heads the Union for Reform Judaism, told me, “To see the vice president at the Munich conference saying that we should give a break to the AfD [the Alternative for Germany party] and not talk about this Nazi past, it’s just incredible that an administration would think such a thing, much less say it.” One AfD leader has been fined twice for repeatedly using a Nazi slogan that’s banned in his country. (JD Vance’s February speech, not coincidentally, came a day after his visit to Dachau.)

The apparent contradiction between fealty to Israel’s government and hostility to diaspora Jews is evidence of a phenomenon that Georgia State University political scientist Jelena Subotić has named “pro-Israel antisemitism.” It can be seen today in the ruling parties in Russia, Hungary, and Poland, and in the ideologies of Germany’s AfD and France’s National Rally. Their parties make up what is often termed the “Illiberal International” and attract support with antisemitic memes and themes thereby laying the groundwork to blame Jews when things go sour. But they support Israel because they appreciate its model of ethno-nationalist statehood and because they despise Muslims even more than they do Jews.

By the way, all of these concerns can be applied to Trump’s BFF, Elon Musk, and then some. When the world’s wealthiest man bought X (formerly Twitter), he purposely opened it up to what a report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate found to be a surge in hate speech, including antisemitic and white supremacist content. Much of its antisemitic content was encouraged by Musk himself. For instance, when someone calling himself “Eric” responded to a PSA about antisemitism by saying, “Jewish communties [sic] have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them,” Musk replied, “You have said the actual truth.”

Back in 2022, when Musk decided to reinstate Trump on the site, the Anti-Defamation League co-led a campaign for an advertising boycott. (ADL chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt was initially a great fan of Musk’s purchase of the site, calling him “an amazing entrepreneur and extraordinary innovator” and “the Henry Ford of our time,” apparently unaware that Ford was one of the most prominent antisemites in American history; he quickly reconsidered after........

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