The 615th Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Let Trump Define What it is To Be a Jew

Tradition holds that there were 613 Commandments given to the Jews at Sinai.

A more recent tradition, pioneered by Emil Fackenheim, identified a 614th Commandment: "Thou shalt not give Hitler a posthumous victory." There are several interpretations of what this means, but the basic gist is that Hitler tried to eradicate the Jewish people and failed, but we cannot let him win in death by allowing the Jewish people to disappear. Be religious, be secular, be in Israel, be in the diaspora, but don't stop being Jewish or transmitting your membership in the Jewish community forward.

As many have remarked, we seem now to be in the twilight of a Jewish "golden era" that began out of the ashes of World War II. Old hatreds that slumbered now are past stirring and roar awake, and new threats emerge on all sides. And a large part of that threat (though not all of it) emanates from Donald Trump and his MAGA movement.

Of course, the connections between Trump and his lackeys and far-right antisemites of the worst sort are easy to document. But one of the more insidious features of their antisemitism is how they anoint themselves speakers for the Jews. It's more than just the old saw "a philosemite is an antisemite who likes Jews". Trump and his followers arrogate to themselves the right to define what being Jewish is in the public eye. Right now, most people in America only encounter the concept "Jew" in the context of various MAGA policies that pretend to be about fighting "antisemitism" -- the deportations, the funding cuts, the speech cancellations. Whether they support or oppose these initiatives, these events swamp any other context in which they might encounter something that is (or claims it is) Jewish. Through his efforts, many people understand "Jewishness", in its public persona, exclusively through the lens of Trumpism -- Jewishness is free speech crackdowns and mass deportations and destroying the academy and promising to turn Gaza into a beachside resort.

I wrote about a form of this in my "Liberal Jews and Religious Liberty" article under the moniker "the new supersessionism": "the ability of non-Jews to possess, as against actual Jews, a superior entitlement to declare what Jewishness is." Certainly (albeit regrettably) it's true that some Jews support some or all of the above things Trump is seeking to place under the umbrella of Jewishness. But the point is that Jewish endorsement or not is largely irrelevant to this popular perception -- it is a seizure of control of Jewishness from the Jews.

Against this, though, I feel like I'm witnessing an organic and largely inchoate emergence of a potential 615th Commandment: a compulsion to not let Trump define what it is to be a Jew. The various cries, against Trump's attempt to make us into fig leaves for his fascism, "not in my name!" is a version of this -- but I think it goes deeper than that. I'm seeing more and more liberal Jews making a point of being publicly Jewish not (or not just) in a political context, but simply out of desire to reclaim the public meaning of Jewishness. It's not cynical, and it's not opportunism. If anything, it's inspiring in its earnestness -- the category "Jewish" matters to us, and where we see that category being purloined out from under us, the best way to fight back is to claim it louder.

Every time a public-facing Jew talks about eating bread again after Passover, it resists this. Every time a Jew mentions their Bar or Bat Mitzvah, it resists this. Every time a Jew casually drops in the Yiddish slang they grew up with, it resists this. I'm not saying the "political" displays -- talking about what Jews actually think about reproductive freedom, or marching with the families of the hostages enraged that Netanyahu has kept this war going not to redeem the captives but to save his own skin at their peril -- doesn't matter. They matter a lot. But it is very important that it's not just that. It's not as-a-Jew-ing. It's not being indifferent to one's Jewish identity except as an occasional political cudgel. It is people for whom being Jewish matters to deeply, at every level, and who cannot countenance letting a sick antisemitic authoritarian steal that identity away from us and claim it for his own project.

Perhaps placing this in the realm of one of the Commandments is too august. But the instinct, I think, is one I'm not alone in feeling. Being Jewish is meaningful, and beautiful, and historic, and a privilege. It is our obligation, as Jews, not to let this intruder seize our very identity from his and redirect it to his perversions. To borrow a very non-Jewish concept, we have a duty to bear witness to our Jewishness every day, simply by being Jews others see, so that they have something that stands against the torrent of articles and news stories and press releases that relentlessly associate "Jewish" with ... that. In doing so, we resist. In doing so, we assert that it is Jews -- not Donald Trump or his minions, not right-wing media outlets, not conservative Christian "allies", but Jews -- who determine what it means to be a Jew.