As troubling in Trump’s statement as any echo of the old charge of dual loyalty was its implication that any Jew who doesn’t subscribe to his politics—to both the policies of his Republican Party and of the current Israeli government—is traitorous: if you are Jewish and vote Democratic, then you are triply disloyal—to Trump, Israel, and America. Making right-wing pro-Israel sentiment a litmus test of Jewishness, and anti-Israel sentiment the measure of anti-Semitism, misrecognizes the long history of Western anti-Semitism. The most dangerous long-term effect of the false accusations of anti-Semitism is that they will obscure and pervert people’s understanding of what actual anti-Semitism is and undermine the battle to combat it.
