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[Law & Liberty] Jewer Than Thou
A new book by Emily Tamkin surveys the various malleable identities encompassed by the word “Jew”.
Bad Jews: A History of American Jewish Politics and Identities. By Emily Tamkin. HarperCollins; 307 pages; $29.99.
For a measure of the roil to which, for all of four years, the Trump administration subjected America’s Jewish community of 7,6 million, consider two split-screen, simultaneous stories. On one hand, shortly upon the 2020 election that Trump lost, the NYC branch of the United Against Racism and Fascism campaign (UARF) wallpapered the borough Gavin Mario Wax had just moved to. The New York-based right-wing activist shot to fame defending Trump’s brand of nationalist populism in the state’s GOP circles, and the UARF paper signs set Wax’s politics athwart his Jewishness by labeling him a “white supremacist”. When a left-leaning Jewish activist affixed him the same label on Twitter, Wax offered a familiar reply, posting a picture of him donning tefillin and labelling his accuser a “Jew in name only” (JINO), a term Ben Shapiro popularized in 2015. Stephen Miller, on the other hand, had less of a repertoire to out-Jew his critics. Despite serving in the most pro-Israel administration in history, the family separation policy he oversaw tainted him irreparably, offering him his own reckoning with the outer limits of Jewishness as policed by his liberal coreligionists. That summer, Miller’s neuropsychologist uncle took to the pages of POLITICO to shame him for betraying his roots.
Continue reading the entire book review at Law & Liberty here.
