Minnesota Twins

This past August, an opinion piece appeared on the website of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) regarding a controversy surrounding Minnesota Republican politician Tom Emmer. The congressman had issued a fundraising letter in which he accused “far-left billionaires George Soros, Tom Steyer, and Michael Bloomberg” of having “essentially bought control of Congress for the Democrats.”

The fact that in a letter claiming that Congress had been bought by three wealthy people, two of the three are Jewish (and Steyer’s father is Jewish and he has at times identified as such) led some local Jewish leaders in Minnesota to level a charge of anti-Semitic dog-whistling at Emmer. In response, Rabbi Hershel Lutch wrote a JTA op-ed asserting that as “someone who knows Emmer well… nothing could be further from the truth…. Emmer has shown himself to be a true friend of the Jewish community and of the U.S.-Israel relationship…. While I personally may have preferred a different syntax within the fundraising letter, I find any suggestion that Emmer harbors attitudes of anti-Semitism to be profoundly offensive.”

Rabbi Lutch went on to say that “falsely accusing someone of anti-Semitism is just as dangerous as not calling out anti-Semitism when, in fact, it is present,” because “we lose our credibility to define and identify” actual anti-Semitism. If all conduct critical of any Jew is anti-Semitic, then the term “anti-Semite” loses its teeth and becomes just another meaningless expression.

Another JTA opinion writer, legal scholar David Schraub, took issue with Rabbi Lutch’s defense of Congressman Emmer, arguing that the case for Emmer’s letter “being anti-Semitic does not depend on asserting awful, corrupt motives or hatred of Jews… which I am sure [Emmer does]not hold, nor is it falsified by… having Jewish friends and allies, which I am sure [he does] possess…. [I]t rests not on a ridiculous assertion that all ‘criticism’ of a Jew is anti-Semitic, but rather on… use of the trope of a plutocratic Jewish conspiracy that has the American political establishment ‘bought and paid for,’ stealing our national sovereignty from patriotic ‘Main Street’ Americans and placing it in the hands of wealthy globalist financiers.” Schraub also noted that Emmer had no second thoughts about the letter and that the National Republican Congressional Committee insisted that “there is nothing anti-Semitic about drawing attention to billionaire donors and who they are giving money to.”