Max Rose is My Hero

Rep. Max Rose, a freshman Democrat from New York (and one of the real "out of nowhere" wins in the 2018 cycle), was one of the first members of the Democratic caucus to criticize Ilhan Omar's "Benjamisn" remark.

Then, when Omar apologized, Rose accepted the apology, observing that the best way to work with Omar is to work with Omar (Omar, in turn, thanked Rose for calling on her to do better).

And then he had a little thing to say to the gathered media hordes.

I do want to point out to all of you that when Kevin McCarthy said that it was Bloomberg and that it was Soros and it was Steyer pulling the strings behind the scenes, none of you camped out. And their caucus stayed united and had his back, and none of you called him out on that. So I just want you all to acknowledge that there is some hypocrisy going on there too, okay? That caucus can't be chickenshit in the face of antisemitism either. In the face of antisemitism we don't acknowledge party, in the face of any hate, any vitriol, we don't acknowledge party. So seriously -- you're not agents of the Republican Party.

You can feel free to inject that paragraph directly into my veins, because it's a point I've harped on for years. Rose's broadside, if only a little bit, has seemed to have moved the needle. He may well have finally prompted a little reflection on the double-standard that meets Republican versus Democratic antisemitism.

And if we're being honest, we in the Jewish community share a bit of the blame here. I stress "a bit", because one of the great fictions about American Jewish life is that discourse about American Jews is primarily a function of what American Jews want it to be. The patterns that characterize how people talk about Jews are not established by Jews, and they're strikingly resistant to disruption from Jews. In many ways, I'm dubious that the Jewish community could generate equal outrage about mainstream right-wing antisemitism even if were committed to it (a fact evidenced by the reality that many of us have been committed to it, with little success to show for it).

But still, there's no question that our communal institutions have played their part in propagating this double-standard. We do not hold mainstream conservatives to the same standards we hold mainstream liberals to. Too often, it seems like mainstream Jewish groups are good at three things:

1. Paying very close attention to explicit far-right and neo-Nazi hate organizations;
2. Paying very close attention to adjunct professors of media studies at Northwest Idaho State University who've endorsed BDS; and
3. Paying very close attention to every word that comes out of the mouths of Linda Sarsour, Tamika Mallory, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib.

That's not tenable. It's chickenshit. It illustrates the

sharp disjuncture in how the Jewish community reacts to problematic left versus right behavior. The left is met “with the full sound and fury for every toe out of line,” while the right “must engage in the most flamboyant provocation to elicit even a murmur of discontent.” The left is “policed to the letter,” while the right is “treated with kid gloves.” 

Remember what happened when the ADL did try to hold Mike Huckabee accountable for cavalier Holocaust comparisons? Did Huckabee apologize and try to make amends? Oh no -- he demanded the ADL apologize to him for their chutzpah, while darkly warning that "Israel and Jewish people need to make friends, not insult the ones they have."

Can you imagine if Ilhan Omar had taken that approach? If she had replied to her Jewish critics by demanding they apologize to her and then suggesting "Jewish people need to make friends, not insult the ones they have"? We'd have a collective rage aneurysm. But Huckabee, of course, gets away with it. Because we don't treat antisemitism on the mainstream right the same way as we do antisemitism on the mainstream left.

So let's be clear: there is antisemitism in America -- far more than many of us would like to admit. But the key difference between Democrats and Republicans isn't that one has an antisemitism problem and the other doesn't.

They key difference between Democrats and Republicans is that Democrats are actually apologize when Jews express concerns about antisemitism in their ranks. Republicans almost never do.