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A century before Trump targeted Somalis, Jews faced the politics of blame
(JTA) — As President Donald Trump ramped up his rhetoric against Somali immigrants in Minnesota and ordered a surge in immigration enforcement because Somalis took part in a social-service fraud scheme, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey pushed back.
“’When a fraud takes place, when a crime takes place, you investigate it, you prosecute it, you charge it. You arrest the person that did the fraud or the crime, you put him in jail as an individual,” Frey told NPR. “You get held accountable as an individual. That’s how this works in America.
“You do not, however, hold an entire community accountable for the crimes of one.”
Frey’s remarks were echoed by other state and national figures. “We do not blame the lawlessness of an individual on a whole community,” said Rep. Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota Democrat, who herself immigrated from Somalia to the United States as a child.
Frey, who is Jewish, didn’t mention his own background in standing up for Somalis, a community of whom Trump has said, “And they contribute nothing. The welfare is like 88%. They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country. I’ll be honest with you.”
But had Frey turned to Jewish history, he may well have cited another instance in which a powerful political figure blamed an immigrant community for the crimes of a few, and an ethnic group was targeted by nativists who pinned the country’s ills on immigrants.
Frey might have reached back to 1908, when New York City Police Commissioner Theodore A. Bingham leveled what at the time was the most explicit, highest profile accusation of Jewish criminality made by a major American official since Gen. Ulysses Grant expelled all Jews from his military district to combat allegations of cotton smuggling and corruption.
That year, in an article in the North American Review, Bingham claimed Jews accounted for half of New York’s crimes, especially picking pockets, fencing stolen goods, arson and operating gambling and vice operations.
“It is not astonishing that with a million Hebrews, mostly Russian, in the city (one quarter of its population), perhaps half of the criminals should be of that race when we consider the ignorance of the language, more particularly among men not physically fit for hard labor,” Bingham wrote with the stilted prose of a bureaucrat and the dubious authority of the then popular pseudoscience of eugenics.
Bingham buttressed his accusation with statistics: “Forty per cent of the boys at the House of Refuge and twenty per cent of those arraigned in the Children’s Court” are Jews, he claimed. “The percentage of Hebrew children in the truant schools is also higher than that of any other.”
Jewish leaders saw Bingham’s accusations as all the more dangerous because they were based on a shred of truth: “They knew, for one thing, that there was a crime problem on the East Side, not so lurid as Bingham had painted, but serious enough,” wrote Irving Howe in his history of the period, “World of Our Fathers.”
Like Somali-Americans in Minnesota, the Jews of the era were on the cusp — with one foot in the poverty of the tenements and the other in the growing prosperity of a rising working and business-owning class. But the Eastern European Jewish newcomers also had an important lever: the German Jews who had arrived earlier and established positions of power in finance and politics.
Jacob Schiff, the powerful banker and philanthropist, became one of the most forceful critics of Bingham’s article, publicly denouncing it as reckless and un-American. Joseph Seligman, founder of the investment bank J. & W. Seligman & Co., similarly condemned Bingham, insisting that crime was a function of poverty and dislocation, not religion or ethnicity, and pointing out the danger of a police commissioner racializing crime. Both men brought their own statistics and experts to show Bingham had exaggerated Jewish involvement.
The grassroots response was just as strong, with letters to the Yiddish and general newspapers, mass protests and heated sermons.
“Mr. Bingham has been indulging in mere generalities and he should be forced to give facts, including the names, residences, in fact the exact figures of any one week or month, to prove his statements, or else he will be asked to make a public retraction and apologize to the race he has injured,” fumed Rabbi Joseph A. Silverman of New York City’s Temple Emanu-El.
Bingham was, and he did. “By mid-September,” Howe writes, “under severe pressure, Bingham retracted his charges ‘frankly and without reservation.’” He subsequently lost the support of Mayor George B. McClellan Jr. and was forced to resign in July 1909.
Bingham wasn’t the only figure to hold the entire Jewish community responsible for the crimes committed by its members. Eleven years earlier, police commissioner Frank Moss argued in his book “The American Metropolis” that “criminal instincts… are so often found naturally in the Russian and Polish Jews.” Between 1907 and 1909, McClure’s Magazine published articles by the muckraking journalist George Kibbe Turner claiming extensive Jewish involvement in the “white slave trade” — what today we would call human trafficking. While courts found little evidence of a wide-spead Jewish conspiracy to traffic women, “McClure’s used the white slavery investigation and grand jury to stoke anti-immigration and anti-Semitic fears throughout the city,” historian Mia Brett wrote in a paper for the Gotham Center at CUNY.
The Jewish elite counted Bingham’s retraction as a victory, but the incident left many with the impression that the Jewish community needed a better mechanism for organizing around the fight against antisemitism. In New York, that meant the formation of the Kehillah, an ambitious experiment to create a unified Jewish communal organization. The Kehillah included educational and political committees, as well as a “Bureau of Social Morals” — a sort of self-policing body meant to help law enforcement root out crime among Jews. When it sank in that the bureau was only reinforcing an impression that the Kehillah had been formed to dispel, the bureau was scrapped.
The Kehillah lasted until 1922, when it disbanded over — spoiler alert — ideological disagreements among its constituent groups. But it created a precedent for centralized communal organizations to come, including UJA-Federation of New York.
In Minnesota too there are signs that the president’s attacks are strengthening the Somali community by sparking solidarity and organizing.“I think it’s giving us a chance for many Americans to learn about the Somali community, and not only that, but also to see the resilience,” Jaylani Hussein, executive director of the Minnesota chapter of CAIR, told CNN. “Also, it’s giving Somali Americans a chance to own their American identity and fight for it.”
When the Bingham incident is remembered, it is often to illustrate how officials trade on xenophobic fears over facts — and why such scapegoating, once unleashed, can do profound damage to both the targeted community and the civic fabric.
“We know that when a few people commit crimes, it does not implicate an entire community and to say so is racist, is xenophobic and just wrong,” Rabbi Adam Stock Spilker of Mount Zion Temple in St Paul told Fox 9 in Minneapolis last month.Meanwhile, the current police chief in Minneapolis, Brian O’Hara, has taken the very un-Bingham-like position that the “real problem” of social service fraud in the state doesn’t justify the “largely political” reaction of the federal government, especially immigration authorities.
“I had not known any Somali Americans until I moved to Minnesota,” O’Hara said Monday on “The Daily” podcast. “The Somali Americans that I have met here, including many of whom are police officers in this city, have been incredibly welcoming of me. From a personal perspective, [the immigration crackdown on Somalis] was just bizarre because I’m also aware that the overwhelming majority of people from that community are American citizens.”
The post A century before Trump targeted Somalis, Jews faced the politics of blame appeared first on The Forward.
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The Netanyahu-Trump alliance reaches its breaking point
For decades, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s greatest political asset was the United States. Even Israelis who distrusted him, opposed him, or blamed him for deepening the country’s divisions often accepted one proposition: Netanyahu understood the U.S. better than any other politician. He knew how to preserve Israel’s position at the center of American politics and power, without which the country would be in danger.
That belief is no more.
As negotiators meet this week to discuss the future of the Middle East, Israel finds itself in an extraordinary position. Central questions under discussion involve Israel’s security, Israel’s freedom of military action, and the future of Iran’s nuclear and regional ambitions.
Yet Israel is not in the room. Iran is.
The result, in Israel, has been something close to wall-to-wall shock and condemnation. And the harshest criticism is aimed not at the agreement but at Netanyahu himself. Switzerland looks like a vindication of the deepest concerns of opponents who have long argued that Netanyahu mortgaged Israel’s bipartisan support in Washington in exchange for a close relationship with President Donald Trump.
“The strategic damage that this government is leaving behind in terms of our relationship with the United States is damage that will take years to repair,” said former Cabinet minister Izhar Shai.
Netanyahu “built Israel’s entire strategic position around President Trump,” Shai added. “But Trump does what is good for himself and for his voters. He does not act on behalf of the state of Israel.”
Someone might want to convey that message to Trump, who has repeatedly suggested that he determines what Israel can and cannot do, and publicly implied that Netanyahu follows his instructions.
Now, as Trump makes promises about Israel’s actions without Israel in the room, he’s solidified the international impression that the hallowed U.S.-Israel relationship has been reduced to that of a superpower dictating terms to an utterly dependent client. No American president from either party has treated an Israeli prime minister this way — at least in public.
An alliance close to fracturing
Many Israelis are confronting the once-unthinkable possibility that their country’s relationship with the U.S. has been materially damaged by the very leader who claimed unique mastery over it. The concern is not merely that Trump disagrees with Netanyahu. It is that influential figures in Washington increasingly appear to believe that Netanyahu helped draw the U.S. into a military confrontation with Iran based on assumptions that were flawed from the outset.
Since Netanyahu spent years narrowing Israel’s political base in the U.S., there’s nowhere for Israel to turn. Netanyahu’s repeated confrontations with Democratic administrations, beginning most dramatically with his 2015 speech objecting to President Barack Obama’s proposed nuclear deal with Iran, steadily weakened bipartisan support. His identification with Trump — whom he openly supported in the 2024 election — meaningfully deepened that trend.
Meanwhile, relations with many European governments deteriorated, especially during the cataclysmic Gaza war. The result is that Israel now finds itself with fewer reserves of international goodwill than at any point in recent memory.
For Israelis, the American relationship has never primarily been about aid. The billions of dollars in annual military assistance are important, but for a half-trillion-dollar economy they are not decisive. The real value of the alliance is strategic.
American backing provides Israel with a level of deterrence that no other country can offer. It shields Israel diplomatically, particularly at the United Nations. It anchors the network of trade, investment, technological cooperation and international legitimacy on which Israeli prosperity depends. Without that support, Israel would face far greater risks of diplomatic isolation, economic pressure and boycotts.
Israelis understand this intuitively, even if their politics do not always reflect it. It is their prosperous economy that finances a sophisticated military. International trade and investment help sustain that prosperity. Strong alliances help make those relationships possible.
Remove enough pieces from that structure, and eventually even Israel’s military power will begin to erode. Remove the U.S., and it could crumble.
A boon for Israel’s military foes
The immediate strategic implications of negotiations are also serious. If Washington agrees to constrain Israeli freedom of action in Lebanon as part of a broader accommodation with Tehran, as appears possible, Israel could find itself pressured by its strongest ally to withdraw from positions it regards as essential to its security. For residents of northern Israel, many of whom only recently returned home after months of displacement, that prospect is deeply unsettling.
And a weakened Israeli deterrent could strengthen Hezbollah politically as well as militarily. The organization is battered. But if Israel is forced to accept restrictions on its freedom of action while Hezbollah remains intact, the Lebanese government — which recently took risks by signaling a willingness to challenge Hezbollah’s dominance — may conclude that confrontation is no longer worth the danger.
In the worst case scenario, Hezbollah could emerge from the crisis with greater influence than before, emboldened to test Israel through provocations, targeted attacks or efforts to intimidate opponents inside Lebanon.
Israel’s military future as regards Iran also looks grim. The Islamic Republic has emerged strategically strengthened from this conflict. It’s all but certain that Tehran has no real plans to abandon its long-term nuclear ambitions, even if it accepts temporary restrictions. Israelis’ expectation now is that Iran will eventually resume enrichment activities — while Israel’s ability to respond militarily has been narrowed by understandings reached over its head.
That is why the current moment feels so dangerous. Israelis are considering, for the first time for real, that by relying on Trump, Netanyahu has wrecked the strategic framework that has underwritten Israel’s security and prosperity for generations. The October election may therefore become more than a referendum on the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack, Gaza or Iran. It may become a referendum on the central promise that sustained Netanyahu’s political career for decades: that whatever his faults, he knew how to manage America.
The post The Netanyahu-Trump alliance reaches its breaking point appeared first on The Forward.
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The White House cabinet is eating like your zayde
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is hawking a new diet: sauerkraut. Yes, lacto-fermented cabbage. And it’s catching on with Trump’s cabinet, according to The Wall Street Journal, which reported that Vice President JD Vance, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick are all heaping their plates with cabbage — apparently “drawn by the promise of slimmer waistlines and glowing skin.”
This claim may sound like it belongs in the marketing material for some sort of beauty product, or a scammy gas station supplement, rather than a jar of preserved vegetables. But RFK Jr. boasted that he lost 20 lbs in 30 days from eating mass amounts of the stuff. One might assume something like a tapeworm is responsible for such extreme weight loss — especially given Kennedy’s previous worm-related medical issues — but he asserts it’s all thanks to cabbage.
The diet, drawn up by one Dr. Sean O’Mara, an MD who advertises himself as an “executive biological consultant to high-performance leaders,” is apparently not just about sauerkraut; it includes other fermented vegetables, urges followers to also eat steak, snack on “old world cheese” and cut out alcohol and sugar.
Admittedly, this sounds like a fairly normal, low-carb diet. But sauerkraut is so core to the meal plan that members of the cabinet have taken to making their own, and carrying it around just to make sure they’re never without. Kennedy’s wife, Cheryl Hines, said on a podcast with Steven Miller’s wife, Katie, that she has had to refuse to stow a container of sauerkraut in her clutch when she and her husband go out for a nice evening. But, she said, he brings it anyway, presumably in his own bag. Or maybe tucked under his arm.
It’s hard to imagine anything more bubbie-coded than whipping out a jar of sauerkraut from a handbag while out at a nice dinner.
It’s not that Jews have some kind of patent on fermented vegetables; they exist in many cultures, like kimchi in Korea and miso in Japan. Sauerkraut specifically is common throughout European countries like Germany, Czechia and Russia.
But in the U.S., there’s a pretty strong association between Jews and pickles, whether they be sauerkraut or cucumbers, thanks to the deli culture imported with Jewish immigrants into the U.S. Jews created a pickle district on the Lower East Side, selling the preserved vegetables from pushcarts and spreading the food through the city. We’ve long been aware of the healthy gut biome effects of a lacto-fermented vegetable.
Ashkenazi food has long been made fun of for being gross — largely thanks to innovations like jarred gefilte fish, its beige-heavy color palette and, as the Wall Street Journal piece hinted at, the diet’s resulting gastrointestinal effects. Much of shtetl food culture was the result of hardship, and the need to preserve food through long winters, not an attempt for glowing skin and slim waistlines. The hardier the vegetable, the longer it lasted. Enter the cabbage. There are few foods less sexy than cabbage. (And I love cabbage.)
Which is why it’s so funny to see some of the most powerful men in the U.S. adopting the diet of a poor shtetl Jew — and doing so for aesthetic reasons.
There are a lot of weird diets and quasi-scientific buzzwords like “seed oils” and “clean protein” floating through the MAHA world that these American leaders often play to. But most of those, at least the ones promoted by men like Vance, have some cross-over focus on manliness and discipline — they’re about building muscle in some sort of primitive way. Think the carnivore diet or Kennedy’s obsession with beef tallow. Seeing these men turn to a diet I associate with my grandmother because they want to lose weight feels absurd, especially in the days of Ozempic for those with the funds to pay for it. Perhaps that does not have the right optics.
Of course, sauerkraut is nothing to be ashamed of. In recent years, Jews have been reclaiming pride in their food cultures; bespoke pickling classes have boomed. So the White House cabinet’s sauerkraut kick is really just them being really late to the shtetl chic trend. But you still should probably be ashamed of smuggling your own food into a nice restaurant, even if it’s sauerkraut.
The post The White House cabinet is eating like your zayde appeared first on The Forward.
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Chair of Britain’s largest arts center to step down amid antisemitism scrutiny
(JTA) — The chair of the United Kingdom’s largest arts institution will step down this fall following months of controversy over allegations of antisemitism and his social media activity related to Israel.
Misan Harriman, 48, the chair of the publicly funded Southbank Centre in central London that hosts millions of visitors per year, publicly stated earlier this week that he would not seek another term.
In a since-deleted social media post, Harriman stated on Monday that his departure had long been planned. “It’s semi-public knowledge that my term is coming to an end anyway,” he said, according to The Guardian. “I had decided way before this madness that I was going to do two terms.” He added, “I came on just after Covid, two terms, then handing the baton to whoever the next chairman will be. We will find out in due course, and of course, I am going to support that.”
The Southbank Centre said that it had been informed earlier in the year of Harriman’s decision.
In May, more than 64 MPs and peers wrote to Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy asking the government to open an investigation into Harriman’s behavior, expressing concern that his public comments “have not been treated with sufficient scrutiny, particularly given their implications for public trust and community confidence,” in a publicly funded institution.
Nandy later confirmed that the Charity Commission and Arts Council England were examining complaints, alongside an internal review by the Southbank Centre.
Harriman, a photographer and self-described social activist, came to prominence in 2020, photographing a Black Lives Matter protest in London. He has overseen the Southbank Centre since 2021, but it’s only in recent months that he has faced increasing scrutiny over his public and social media comments, including referring to Israel as an “occupying power” and accusing the country of genocide.
In April, when two Jewish men were stabbed in the heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Golders Green in London, Harriman posted on social media about an alleged third victim who was Muslim. He wrote, “Wait, so there was a 3rd victim on the SAME DAY who was Muslim?! And our press isn’t reporting it? Even the Met Police didn’t mention the Muslim victim in its X post?! What is going on @metpolice_uk ?”
The Muslim victim did in fact receive coverage, and the focus on the Jewish victims stemmed from the alleged attacker’s anti-Jewish animus.
Then, following Reform UK’s gains in the May 7 local elections, Harriman shared a post that critics said compared the party’s success to the events that led to the Holocaust.
The post prompted Reform MP Robert Jenrick to respond on X, “Comparing the millions who voted Reform on Thursday to the Nazis is disgusting.”
Harriman received support from many prominent activists and artists who signed a petition in May organized by The Good Law Project. The petition accused right-wing media of running a smear campaign against Harriman.
Those who signed included activist Greta Thunberg, actors Aimee Lou Wood, Mark Ruffalo, and Susan Sarandon, director Yorgos Lanthimos and journalist Mehdi Hassan.
Following Harriman’s announcement, the Campaign Against Antisemitism praised the decision, posting on X, “Mr Harriman’s decision to step down – supposedly always his intention – is welcome. This saga has exposed a rot in the arts world. We hope that his successor will be more worthy of the post.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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