Marty Levine
March 30, 2025
Driving home yesterday, my wife saw a similar billboard along a Chicago street. This morning, I listened to NPR’s Morning Edition refer to recent comments from Texas Lt. Governor Patrick, a hero of the MAGA movement, describing the government he serves in as “ the most Christ-centered legislature in the country.”
I wonder if you find these messages as scary as I do.
I see them as symptoms of the powerful political current reshaping America. It is threatening the nation’s democratic fiber. It is rebuilding our nation as a white, Christian project. It is seducing many in the American Jewish community with a belief that if they align with it, they are supporting Israel, and they will be spared from the hurt of the conservative Christian political leaders.
In the 2024 election, we saw a Republican Party able to control the two elected branches of our national government and continue to have total control of many state governments. Underpinning the energy of MAGA Republicanism, as Pew Research found in 2022, is this: “The vast majority of White evangelical Protestants (81%) say the U.S. should be a Christian nation…”
And since January 20th when President Trump reassumed the presidency, this government has moved rapidly to make this a fact. Using a carefully crafted blueprint, Project 2025, it has moved quickly to build a government that erases any recognition of our nation’s diversity (purging even the use of that word) as well as the historical legacy of our racist beginnings. They have been able to reframe DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) as evil and as un-American. In eliminating these efforts, they are reversing the modest but difficult to achieve gains in mitigating the impact of historic bias against women, people of color, indigenous people, LGBTQ+ people, and immigrants.
Milestones of our national progress are being wiped away in service of rebuilding an image of America as a white, Christian, male society. As cited by Yahoo.com
Earlier this month, Civil War historian Kevin M. Levin reported that Arlington National Cemetery had begun to wipe its website of the histories of Black, Hispanic and women war veterans. .. “the Pentagon…said it saluted the individuals, but refused to see “them through the prism of immutable characteristics….(DEI) is a form of Woke cultural Marxism that Divides …Erodes…and…Interferes…”
And in that spirit, websites and cemeteries are being purged.
Among the more than 26,000 items marked to be removed were references to the Enola Gay, the US aircraft that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945 — apparently because the plane’s name triggered a digital search for word associated with LGBT inclusion.
Other content removed by the Pentagon included stories on the Tuskegee Airmen, who were the first African American military aviators, and baseball legend and veteran Jackie Robinson.
Descendants of the Native Americans who played a vital role for US forces in World War II said they had been shocked to discover their ancestors’ heroic contributions had been effectively deleted from the public record.
“I definitely see it as an attempt to erase the history of people of color in general,” said Zonnie Gorman, daughter of military veteran Carl Gorman.
And the impact goes well beyond the halls of government. Government pressure has been successfully pushed corporate America, NGO’s and schools at all levels to follow suit.
[The Trump] administration has announced investigations into 52 universities for their diversity, equity and inclusion programs. And it has suspended approximately $175 million in federal funding for the University of Pennsylvania over a transgender swimmer who last competed for the school in 2022. (Associated Press)
A growing number of prominent companies have scaled back or set aside the diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives that much of corporate America endorsed following the protests that accompanied the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, a Black man, in 2020. The changes have come in response to a campaign by conservative activists to target workplace programs in the courts and social media, and more recently, President Donald Trump’s executive orders aimed at upending DEI policies in both the federal government and private sector. . (Associated Press)
If you have any doubt that these are reflections of a white, Christian vision of America, consider how Robert P. Jones, writing for Time, described candidate Trump’s vision of our nation:
The beating heart of the speech was the projection of a white Christian nationalist vision. Trump told the enthusiastic crowd—many of whom sported red hats emblazoned with the words “Make America Pray Again”—that he knew they were “under siege.” He declared that one of his first acts of his second term would be to set up a task force to root out “anti-Christian bias” and pledged to protect “pro-God context and content.” He received spontaneous applause for vows to promote school vouchers for private Christian schools and seal the United States’ southern border against “an illegal alien invasion by the world’s most sadistic criminals and savage gangs.”
Trump’s deployment of the term “our religion”—one he regularly rolls out when addressing predominantly white evangelical audiences—is transparently an affirmation of an America of, by, and for white conservative Christians. This worldview, most frequently referred to as white Christian nationalism today, is an old one, predating the founding of our nation. It flows directly from the 500-year-old Christian Doctrine of Discovery—the idea that America was designated by God to be a promised land for European Christians—which justified the settler colonial project and lies at the ancient headwaters of our nation’s history.
MAGA has also seen that its ability to enact these drastic changes, as I commented recently, is enhanced if it can divide those who are going to oppose their work. At the top of that strategy is driving wedges into a very progressive American Jewish electorate. And how better to do that than by making support of Israel a core plank in their platform and driving opposition to Israeli policies and to the state of Israil itself into the column of antisemitism.
This is where that billboard speaks volumes. It represents that a significant portion of American Jewry has seen that conflation as being in their self-interest. They are going along with a MAGA government even if it means aligning with a government that threatens many of the values American Jews have supported in years past. They have been willing to make this alliance even if what they value is being torn down by Trump. Those values have allowed American Judaism to flourish socially, culturally, and religiously in a manner unprecedented in the long period of its Diaspora.
That bargain with the Devil is very dangerous. It leads to giving up control of one’s own identity. The same Christian nationalist structure of that gave us Project 2025 also put forth Project Esther. This self-described National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism was authored by set or primarily non-Jewish authors aligned with a group of primarily non-Jewish organizations. Its being external to Jewish life is perhaps best illustrated in its introductory sentence, where it tells us why it chose the name and what that says about its credentials. It begins with “The Torah, in the Book of Esther (Megillat Esther).” Within Jewish life, the Torah is usually understood to encompass five texts (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy) which comprise for the Christian world the “Old Testament.” These are the texts that are regularly read as part of weekly religious services. The Book of Esther is seen as a minor volume that is read only to celebrate a minor holiday (Purim). Most Jewish sources would be clear about this, but it is not surprising that the authors of Project Esther were not.
But more critical than their lack of familiarity with Jewish life is their use of a Jewish Text as a central point in putting forward a strategy to combat antisemitism that ignores the real danger of Christian nationalism and rightwing antisemitism to the Jewish community. The goal is to separate Jews from other progressive elements and weaken opposition to their destruction of our democracy. Project Esther tells us:
Antisemitism in the United States of America is alive and spreading.
Antisemitism in the United States of America is alive and spreading. This antisemitism had been rekindled for decades before October 7, 2023, by the promotion of a view that reduces all human interaction to a heroic struggle between the oppressed and their oppressors. The victim status of the oppressed, in this view, grants them license to pursue any course of action. Jews, Israelis, and all proud Americans in this case have been cast in the role of the implacable oppressors and the Palestinians, Arab or Muslim, in the role of their victims. While this understanding of history comes straight from the pages of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, it can also be traced to Soviet agitprop and found in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and other Nazi propaganda, which portrayed the Jew as the conniving exploiter of the pure and innocent German. The anti-Israel and anti-Zionist Jew-haters attempting to lay siege to our education system, political processes, and government have not simply been influenced by this way of thinking—they have enthusiastically adopted it. This makes them a threat not just to American Jewry, but to all Americans. Their ideology and actions directly challenge and attempt to undermine the American values that are fundamental to our way of life, our nation’s success, and our future.
Prior to the beginning of this version of the Trump Presidency, it might have been understandable that leading American Jewish Organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and American Jewish Committee (AJC) were expousing a similar line. For them, year by year their support of Israel was so important that they cam close to the line of accusing all Israel critics as antisemites. But with Trump’s victory that line has been crossed and the damage he is doing has become so severe that it will take years to repair once he is out of power, if it can be repaired at all.
What I think too many in the Jewish community are ignoring is that in buying into this kind of support from a racist government, in becoming seen as part of a white, Christian power structure, we are not buying security. We are trading a short-term gain in Israel support for a long-term weakening of a retrograde America. And when the time becomes right for them, Jews will return to being just another minority to be punished, limited, and possibly expelled.
When Jewish organizations allow this MAGA world to define who is a Jew, they are telling MAGA that it is okay to divide the Jewish community just as they are dividing progressives. We need to remember two lessons. The first was taught to us by Founding Father Benjamin Franklin: “We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.” The second was taught to us by Father Martin Niemöller in his poem First They Came as the horror of the Holocaust was beginning. If we do not recognize the threat that is right before us now it may be too late when we wake up.
