Anti-Jewish bigotry just isn’t what it used to be.

On 6 January 2021, demonstrators incited by then president Donald Trump stormed the United States Capitol in an attempt to overturn the result of a presidential election that Trump had lost. Since the event was a festival of white nationalist prejudice, it was perhaps predictable that some demonstrators would be wearing garments bearing the slogan ‘Camp Auschwitz’, celebrating a death camp in Poland where the Nazis had murdered Jews and others. But the January 2021 event was a little more complicated than it initially appeared. First, one of the participants, apparently a Christian Zionist, proudly waved an Israeli flag. Also, ‘another masked protestor sported a black-and-white Israeli flag sown onto his paramilitary vest, beside a pro-police “Thin Blue Line” flag’. News agencies reported that several Israeli flags were waved in the protest. Second, among the participants were Orthodox Jews, who, reportedly, had voted overwhelmingly for Trump.

To anyone familiar with the history of anti-Jewish racism, the event sent very confusing messages. Why would people who cheer the genocidal murder of six million Jews also support a state whose parliament, in 2018, passed a basic law declaring itself the ‘nation state of the Jewish people’? What were Orthodox Jews doing on the same side of the barricades as those who hanker for Nazi death camps? What, for that matter, were they doing supporting a president given to repeating and endorsing anti-Jewish slanders and who, in 2016, used an image in his campaign literature that included the Jewish Star of David to brand his (non-Jewish) opponent Hillary Clinton as corrupt? Trump had also told American Jews that the Israeli state was ‘your country’, repeating the stock prejudice that Jews are not really loyal to the countries in which they live – much like telling South Africans of Indian descent that their country is India. In one view, this ‘betrayed his understanding of U.S. Jews as not fully American, in keeping with his overall exclusivist notion of citizenship’. Why would a politician who harbours such prejudices enjoy any Jewish support, particularly from some who enthusiastically embrace their Jewish identity?

The answer to these questions is that the world has moved on in some odd and disturbing ways.