The eager welcoming of a fascism that does not target Jews just being Jewish

There is one reliable difference between what we can expect under the new Republican government and what happened in Europe under fascism: While foreigners and the left are targeted (Trump has made this clear), Jews as such will not be.

If that is the main thing you are worried about, you are mistaken. The first reason is that this is mistaken morally, because self-interest is not the main reason to oppose social oppression. The main reason to oppose injustice is that it is unjust. That it oppresses anyone is what makes it offensive and wrong; that it does or may oppress me may supply motivation but is not what justifies resistance and opposition to it.

But this secondary concern for self-interest is of course what must be most addressed, since this is the ground of the debates.

Religion is safe in America, preferably if it affirms "traditional" values and obedience (remember "work, family, fatherland," the slogan of the collaborationist government of Maréchal Petain?), and identity-political nationalism is safe as long as it is consistent with American foreign policy and doesn't seem to threaten business. (Thus, feminism and black nationalism are popular for that reason; Zionism fits this, even though, as everyone knows, it now lacks the left-liberal pretensions). The right loves war, and the Jewish right likes the idea of power. Which is a problem not because Jews "have too much power" and should not, but because the Jewish right wants power too much, and justice too little. It also wants freedom too little; it has helped elect a government that intends to reserve it for the rich. For those on the excludable social. margins, like the Palestinians, the question may be shifted from liberty and democracy to survival, since theirs is expendable while that of Jews, as the self-assertions constantly remind us, is presently not. There are those who out of desperation would attack it, but everyone knows they will not succeed at that. For the world's excludable marginalized and poor, the political question now is whether or not they have the "right" to breath. Increasingly, those subject to the power of authoritarian governance have such rights only on paper, while in fact a generalized state of emergency puts them at the mercy of the will of the sovereign, who is constrained by no legal or moral norms. We now have a president-elect who represents a permanent state of exception. Everything he has said publicly reinforces the fact that his person is, as it were, the name of that exceptionality. This is exciting and popular. I can think of few things that are more blatantly opposed to the spirit of Judaism. Though of course Israel now is operating under such a state of emergency and that condition has been made manifest now to the horror of much of the world. A state of exception in war means killing is authorized without limit. In this, a certain kind of Jewish modernity reaches what may be its horrible apotheosis: the assertion of collective identity, which makes possible a scorched-earth ethnic cleansing and a Blitzkreig conquest of a neighboring territory and its people, means that Jewishness is affirmed identity, and one can wonder what of Judaism then remains besides a Joshua-inspired conquest. The rule of law is replaced by the will to power and assertion of identity. "Self-assertion" was the keyword of a certain German philosopher's infamous sole declaration of support for the Nazi party in 1934. What is wrong with self-assertion? Nothing perhaps unless it is unlimited and particularly by any norm involving recognition of the Other. One can read the Torah and Prophets selectively to pull out passages authorizing this conquest; the problem then is only that what remains of the underlying ethical and moral principles is really a referent that is represented by the military state. Keep quiet and trust the authorities, we represent you. We represent what you care about. And what is that about? Such questions can be deferred until a time of leisure after we have won the war.