Weekend Update: Ridiculing Trump’s Approach to Antisemitism

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.