Anti-Democratic Bullying is Making it Difficult for Liberal Gay Jews Like Me to Rejoice in This Moment of Middle-East Truce
Anti-Democratic Bullying and Minority Scapegoating are Making it Difficult for Liberal Gay Jews Like Me to Have Trust in Trump’s Showpiece Middle East Truce
Why It Feels Counterintuitive for me to Have Enthusiasm and Hope
There’s a scene in the movie, Schindler’s List, that comes to mind regarding the current situation of liberal gay Jews who are otherwise pro Israel and patriotic Americans. In this scene, Jewish slave laborers are beginning work on the construction of the concentration camp that will house them. One of the workers, a young woman, has an idea for facilitating their efforts and shares it with a Nazi officer. He appears to sincerely thank her for her helpfulness, then takes out his pistol and shoots her. Question. Did the Jewish girl actually believe that, despite the harshness of their conditions, earnest efforts among inmates to cooperate would, as the slogan above Auschwitz (“Arbeit Macht Frei” ) still reads, be in their interests beyond immediate survival? Did she believe that what was good for Germany then could somehow eventually prove to be good for the Jews as well?
Trump MAGA Project 2025 is making it very difficult for liberal gay Jews like me to have trust in the impending truce between Israel and Hamas. While outspokenly critical of Trump MAGA Project 2025, I have been long and likewise outspokenly concerned about Islamic extremism and antisemitism as well as that which can feel in league with it in protests on campus and other demonstrations, alongside far-right antisemitism among white supremacists and Christian nationalists. At their extremes, they all traffic in the rhetoric of genocide, which, certainly as I have always seen it, remains a genuine and gravely persistent threat to Israel and Jews as well as countless other peoples, past, present and everywhere. In the case of Israel, I’m still the only one I know who refers to the Oct 7 conflict between Israel and the Palestinians as “the Hamas-Israel War” rather than the Israel-Hamas War. Yet, even with its provisions and affirmations of both Israel and the Palestinians among regional Islamic peoples, it’s hard to summon the enthusiasm and hope this truce might otherwise inspire.
For LGBTQ+ people, it’s as if we were Jews or gay people in Nazi Germany and expected to be supportive of Hitler and Nazism because some good things were starting to happen in bigger pictures — more jobs, less street crime, less inflation, food on the table — none of which, incidentally, is happening here in America now, but all of which seemed to be happening under Hitler and appeared to bode well for the future of Germany. Could “Heil Hitler” patriotism somehow ever have been expected from everybody, even from those of us who were members of minorities targeted by Hitler and Nazism for scapegoating, Jews most prominently, of course, but also “sexual degenerates.”
If fascism is metastasizing among a broad majority of the public, which is being primed with disinformation and propaganda, and being enforced with bullying, thuggery and goonery, should popularity be the only and overriding consideration to give a mandate to a dictator and his agenda, even at the price of one’s own oppression? In a democracy, if popular opinion favors the reinstatement of witch burnings, slavery and abolishing minority rights, including those for women, which is exactly what the Christian right is perpetrating (the latter, that is, the others not yet), in sync with all other far-right fundamentalists and extremists, does majority “popularity” make it right? That it does is apparently what a majority of conservatives now believe, in lockstep with conservative Supreme Court Justices, beyond their being Trump dupes and stooges.
In view of the reality of their all out war here in America on “wokeness,” on “DEI,” on “gender ideology,” on LGBTQ+ peoples, on people of color, and most notably on trans people, a tiny defenseless cohort whose constituents are the victims of scapegoating, hate crimes and murders in unprecedented numbers, any minority persons, including all Jews everywhere, should be gravely concerned about any consensus efforts by authoritarians to make pacts with the devil, even if they might seem, somehow momentarily and situationally, comparatively hopeful for the long run. Even if it (fascism) looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, can it be believed in as “good for the Jews”? In reality, what’s coming through ever more clearly is that the Jews are being used by Trump to catapult him to becoming the world’s premiere dictator.
Meanwhile, like Thomas Friedman in a New York Times opinion piece, and having said all this, yes, I too would give Trump the Nobel Prize for Peace if this Gaza situation proves to be not limited to being just the window-dressing startup of a new, more secure, equitable and prosperous Middle East, and which can demonstrate a track record of sustaining itself as such over time.
But in contrast to Tom Friedman, I’d need more in the way of security guarantees. I’d want the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Peace to Trump to be further conditional on a comparable commitment of intervention in Russia’s aggressive war against Ukraine, and other democracies and the West more broadly. And, as Friedman likewise argues, the current agenda would have to be tethered as well to a credible major and sustained change in the Trump MAGA juggernaut of creating and weaponizing hate-fueled, police state dictatorship rants and brutal, imperial, personal and arbitrary exertions of force in America centered around “enemies of the people,” vilifying minorities, especially immigrants and LGBTQ+ people, and denying their rights, scapegoating them blatantly, aggressively and relentlessly (every minority, that is, except extremist Jews and extremist Christians) and who don’t seem to actually, genuinely care in the least about the Constitution, due process, civil rights, laws, history, culture, or what Jesus actually preached, except in their fiendish and Orwellian perversions of them.
If there were to be a sea change, however highly unlikely and however untrustworthy in view of the track record of this presidency, on the home front as well as with the Middle East and Russia-Ukraine, I too would vote for Donald Trump to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, notwithstanding his authoritarian past, unpredictability and ever-more alarmingly extremist persona. As it is right now, I cannot rejoice with the enthusiasm and hope which the caesura in this stalemate between Hamas and Israel might otherwise inspire. However I might wish it to be otherwise, my misgivings about Trump MAGA Project 2025 are just too grave and have become too deeply imprinted to feel any real degree of genuine security and hope.
Jews and Gays for police-state dictators and dictatorships? Sorry, there’s no way I can reconcile doing that. I’ll leave that juggling act to my old friend, Phyllis Chesler and too many other LGBTQ+ people to name. I think conservative Jews are profoundly and tragically deluded in believing otherwise. You could force me to attest to MAGA lies-are-truth blather under torture in detainment but not to actually feel it genuinely, even though feeling it “genuinely” is exactly what the totalitarians of George Orwell’s 1984 made their endgame.
Were there Jews in Nazi Germany who originally supported Hitler? Were there efforts to indoctrinate them as such? We know there were Uncle Toms, if you will. There were collaborators, albeit most of them in circumstances of coercion. Meanwhile, there comes a point in the vilification and scapegoating of a minority when to request or witness such support from its victims is beyond stupefying. It’s my understanding that, by and large that’s not what happened with Jews in Germany as Nazism escalated. Fom the beginning of the Nazi onslaught, antisemitism in Germany and its allies was so dire that there were virtually no (none that I know of) conservative, wealthy Republican type Jews of renown known to to be supporters of Hitler and Nazism, even if some were passive collaborators and too many Jews may have been too passive, terrified into submission and silence by very real mortal threats to them and their families, finally becoming more self-aware, more “woke,” only when it was too late.
Alas, although there weren’t Jews for Hitler, there were conservative gays to argue for Hitler and his war against gays (“effeminate” men), Jews and everybody else in the greater interests of it being good for Germany, the Aryan race and family. And there still are many such in dictatorships everywhere today (even in Russia now?). One need only consider the AFD and its lesbian leader, Alice Weidel. Or the many gays in Trump MAGA, some of them, like Peter Thiel and Richard Grinell, in top-shelf positions.
Most famously in Nazi Germany, there was openly gay (even though homosexuality remained illegal in Germany until the early 1970’s) Ernst Roehm, Hitler’s right hand man and their Nazi militia, the Brown Shirts, all of whom were assassinated on Hitler’s orders when that proved expedient in the Night of The Long Knives. Do our current gay Trump Republicans know this history? Apparently not. In Italy, Jews of wealth and power tended to support Mussolini. Virtually all of them ended up dead, as did critics of the fascists like filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1975 in “post-fascist” Italy, mirroring what happened to Federico Garcia Lorca under Franco a decade earlier.
There’s a lot more to say. But for now, for those who want to know why I, a gay Jew who believes in the promise of Israel and the future of its peoples, who has been very critical of Islamic extremism and who has repeatedly called out the left and gay left for failing to credibly indict Islamic extremism and genocidal antisemitism alongside the oppression of women and LGBTQ+ people in Islamic theocracies and kingdoms, let me restate that I can feel no more secure about any Trump victory, including what’s happening now in the Middle East, than I could about any victory by Putin, Orban, Erdogan, Bolsonaro, Maduro, Kim Jong Un, Xi Jinping, Georgia Meloni or any other antidemocratic police state dictator.
Giving Trump even more of a mandate to dominate and exact revenge on the world is not a mistake we can afford to keep making, even if it might seem “good for the Jews” in the short run, and good for the gays in Trump’s orbit. In fairness, it should be pointed out that many Jews are simply reacting the way we always have to threats to our survival with an ethos of survival first, the details and consequences put off for later. And turncoat gays are merely being opportunistic and transactional, the way most human beings are wont to do and be when tempted and if they think they can get away with it.
IS this a deal we can’t refuse? And what’s going to happen when the ambitions of the Arab dictators aligning with Trump now, ostensibly in alliance as well with Israel, start to diverge? Will Israel still be able to count on Trump or his successor (who may not have the direct Kushner family ties of the Trumps)? Or will Israel become increasingly like Ukraine, entirely dependent on ambivalent, unpredictable dictators (Trump et al) to help them fend off the deadly genocidal aggression that never ceases to be in pursuit of Jews?
Finally, another hit at the left. In that last sentence, should I have substituted “Israel” for “Jews,” to emphasize that the good oh-so-democracy-hearted people of the left (“Democracy Now”) always successfully draw clear distinctions between the two (read that again with irony): [We’re not antisemitic, we’re only critical of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians. The two are completely separate, and certainly so with us (many of whom are ourselves Jewish]. Uh, right. As with Trump’s current victory, it’s hard to have that kind of optimism that the greater world — from far left to far right — will always clearly, genuinely and successfully henceforth distinguish between Israeli aggression in self-defense and Jewish life and security everywhere.
That’s why my late life partner, leading gay liberationist Arnie Kantrowitz, and I were persistent in calling ourselves centrists. We did not want to be identified with the “far left” or the “far right,” both of which, so far as we could tell, were already in that nether-regions inferno we would gladly consign them both to, and where they are likely to remain forever. To say we never trusted either extreme would be an understatement.
Larry Mass, New York City
