Upon being told that the mayor of Dublin, Bobby Briscoe, was Jewish, Yogi Berra famously said, “Only in America.”
You know what else could happen only in America?
A president changes policy for the purpose of helping American Jews who find themselves under assault on college campuses — and gets called an anti-Semite as a result.
This could only happen in America, because President Trump could only have happened in America. And it could only happen in America, because, save for rare and sometimes horrific exceptions, American Jews have so little personal experience with actual anti-Semitism that they imagine their ideological differences with Trump, and their honest distress at his divisive rhetoric, are enough to mark him as an anti-Semite.
The latest example comes with a new executive order from Team Trump that extends to Jews some language from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 denying federal funding to any institution that discriminates on the basis of race, color or national origin.
The original reporting on the executive order suggested it would do this by placing Jews in the “national origin” category — which, it was said, would define Jews as a separate “nation.”
This inaccurate account of the executive order caused what can only be called a freakout all over social media. Liberal Jews likened the idea to Nazi ideology, said Trump was denying us our Americanness and that this would be the beginning of a separate status for American Jews.
The reaction was psychotic — in two ways.
