shalom y’all Back in my summer camp and youth group days, one of the oh-so-provocative discussion questions was “are you an American Jew or a Jewish American?” Why one feels it necessary to rank the two is perplexing, as they are wholly compatible, so the best response to that I ever heard was “the only reason someone would ask that is if they want to pick a fight.” So don’t take the bait. Another variant of the aforementioned question, of course, is “if the U.S. and Israel went to war, who would you fight for?” My response to that hypothetical trap is that if, God forbid, such a circumstance ever happened, it would mean that something has gone horrifically, catastrophically wrong with one or the other. In this hyper-sensitive era, it does not take much to set off alarm bells in the Jewish community, and as we go to press, the big debate is over President Donald Trump’s supposed decree that we Jews are A Nation. Thanks to a lot of misreporting in the mainstream press (we’ve said that phrase a lot lately, haven’t we?), hyperbole set in. Some who wouldn’t think of wasting an opportunity to make a Trump-Hitler analogy reacted to the executive order by saying we were being written out of America, just as Nazi Germany declared Jews weren’t German but were a separate nation. What Trump actually signed is something that has been pushed by both sides of the aisle, with the backing of mainstream Jewish organizations. Basically, it says that when haters target Jews on the presumption of a Jewish nationality, then the government can use the Title VI protections from the 1960s to go after such antisemitism. Title VI protections are based on race and national origin, but not religion, so antisemitism has fallen through the loophole. The order closed that loophole (though perhaps a better solution would have been to add religious protections). It did not declare that Jews are a nation, and even Trump wouldn’t have the chutzpah to think he could make such a decree. continued on next page
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i n s u r a n c e s December 2019 • Southern Jewish Life
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