Disagreement among Jews about how to understand antisemitism and how to classify Jews under law served as a touchstone for broad societal debates. Despite the small size of the Jewish population in the United States (approximately 2.5%), questions about Jews’ rights and status tended to raise larger political, legal, and social questions. Trump’s 2019 executive order on antisemitism drew attention from the media because it was emblematic of several political turns that included changing the terms of antidiscrimination law to protect white people and targeting universities as bastions of leftism or “wokeism.” Saturday Night Live’s short segment on the order expressed incredulity that Jews fit within the parameters of Title VI and echoed suspicion from other quarters that Jews were being used as a wedge to fight liberal ideas and policies.
What earlier debates offer relevant context for Colin Jost’s comment that the order will “reclassify Judaism as both a nationality and a race”? Why do you think he says Judaism, not Jews?
Jost overlooks Ivanka Trump’s conversion to Judaism in his quip about her interracial marriage. The complex configurations of Jewish identity may undercut the joke, but how do they also challenge the legal classification of Jews?
Is the law a good tool to fight antisemitism? What does the history of Jews’ place in Title VI reveal about the risks and opportunities of defining Jews into antidiscrimination law?
