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American Jews created historic summer camps. Or did summer camps create American Jews?

(JTA) — Among Sandra Fox’s most memorable finds during her years mining American archives for materials about Jewish summer camps was a series of letters about the hours before lights-out.

The letters were by counselors who were documenting an unusual window in the day when they stopped supervising campers, leaving the teens instead to their own devices, which sometimes included romance and sexual exploration.

“It was each division talking about how they dealt with that free time before bed in ‘age-appropriate ways,’” Fox recalled about the letters written by counselors at Camp Ramah in Wisconsin, the original iteration of the Conservative movement’s network of summer camps.

“I’ve spoken to Christian people who work at Christian camps and have researched Christian camps. There is no free time before bed,” Fox told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “That’s not a thing if you don’t want kids to hook up. So it was just amazing to find these documents of Camp Ramah leaders really having the conversation explicitly. Most of the romance and sexuality stuff is implicit in the archives.”

The letters are quoted extensively in Fox’s new book, “The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America.” Fox, who earned a PhD in history from New York University in 2018 and now teaches and directs the Archive of the American Jewish Left there, tells the story of American Judaism’s most immersive laboratory for constructing identity and contesting values.

Next week, Fox is launching the book with an event at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn. (Tickets for the Feb. 23 event are available here.) Attendees will be able to tour adult versions of some of the most durable elements of Jewish summer camps, from Israeli dance to Yiddish and Hebrew instruction to Color Wars to Tisha B’Av, the mournful holiday that always falls over the summer.

“I never considered doing a normal book party,” Fox said. “It was always really obvious to me that a book about experiential Jewish education and role play should be celebrated and launched out into the world through experiential education and role play.”

Sandra Fox’s 2023 book “The Jews of Summer,” looks at the history of American Jewish summer camps. (Courtesy of Fox)

We spoke to Fox about her party plans, how Jewish summer camps have changed over time and how they’ve stayed the same, and the cultural history of that before-bed free time.

This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. We’ll be continuing the conversation in a virtual chat through the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research Feb. 27 at 1 p.m.; register here.

Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Given how much Jews like to talk about camp, were you surprised that this book hadn’t already been written?

Sandra Fox: There’s been a lot of fruitful research on the history of various camps, but it’s usually been focused on one camping movement or one camp type. So there are articles about Zionist camps. There are certainly articles out there about the Ramah camps. A lot of camps have produced books — either their alumni associations or a scholar who went to let’s say, Reform movement camps have created essay collections about those camps. And there are also books about Habonim and other Zionist youth movements.

I don’t really know why this is the first stab at this kind of cross-comparison. It might be that people didn’t think there would be so much to compare. I think the overwhelming feeling I get from readers so far, people who preordered and gotten their books early, is that they’re very surprised to hear how similar these camps are. So perhaps it’s that scholars weren’t thinking about Jewish summer camps that came from such diverse standpoints as having something enough in common to write about them all at once.

Also distance from the time period really helps. You can write a book about — and people do write a book about — the ’60s and ’70s and have been for decades, but there’s a certain amount of distance from the period that has allowed me to do this, I think, and maybe it also helps that I’m generationally removed. A lot of the scholars who’ve worked on camps in the postwar period went to camps in the postwar period. It makes a lot of sense that it would be harder to write this sort of sweeping thing perhaps. The fact that I’m a millennial meant that I could write about the postwar period — and also write kind of an epilogue-style chapter that catches us up to the present.

What’s clear is that there’s something amazing about studying summer camp, a completely immersive 24/7 experience that parents send children away for. There’s no better setting for thinking about how adults project their anxieties and desires about the future onto children. There’s also no place better to think about power dynamics and age and generational tension.

I was definitely struck by the “sameyness” of Jewish camps in your accounting. What do you think we can learn from that, either about camps or about us as Jews?

I do want to say that while there’s a lot of sameyness, whenever you do a comparative study, there’s a risk of kind of collapsing all these things and making them seem too similar. What I’m trying to convey is that the camp leaders from a variety of movements took the basic structure of the summer camp as we know it — its daily schedule, its environment, its activities — and it did look similar from camp to camp, at least on that surface level.

If you look at the daily schedules in comparison, they might have a lot of the same features but they’ll be called slightly different things depending on if the camp leans more heavily towards Hebrew, or Yiddish, or English. But the content within those schedules would be rather different. It’s more that the skeletal structure of camp life has a lot of similarities across the board and then the details within each section of the day or the month had a lot of differences.

But I think what it says is that in the postwar period, the anxieties that Jewish leaders had about the future of Judaism are really, really similar and the solution that they found within the summer camp, they were pretty unanimous about. They just then took the model and inserted within it their particular nationalistic, linguistic or religious perspectives. So I think more so than saying anything about American Jewry, it shows kind of how flexible camping is. And that’s not just the Jewish story. Lots of different Americans have embraced summer camping in different ways.

So many people who have gone to camp have a fixed memory of what camp is like, where it’s caught in time, but you argue that camps have actually undergone lots of change. What are the most striking changes you documented, perhaps ones that might have been hard for even insiders to discern as they happened?

First of all, the Israel-centeredness of American Jewish education as we know it today didn’t happen overnight in 1948, for instance. It was a slower process, beyond the Zionist movements where that was already going on, for decades before 1948. Ramah and the Reform camps for instance took their time towards getting to the heavily Zionist-imbued curricula that we know.

There was considerable confusion and ambivalence at first about what to do with Israel: whether to raise an Israeli flag, not because they were anti-Zionist, but because American Jews had been thinking about proving their loyalty to America for many generations. There were some sources that would talk about — what kind of right do American Jews have to raise the Israeli flag when they’re not Israeli? So that kind of Israel-centeredness that is really a feature of camp life today was a slower process than we might think.

It fit camp life really well because broader American camps used Native American symbols, in some ways that are problematic today, to create what we know of as an iconography of camp life. So for Jews, Israel and its iconography, or Palestine and iconography before ’48, provided an alternative set of options that were read as Jewish, but it still took some time to get to where we are now in terms of the Israel focus.

One of the reasons I place emphasis on the Yiddish summer camps is to show that in the early 20th century and the mid-20th century there was more ideological diversity in the Jewish camping sphere, including various forms of Yiddishist groups and socialist groups and communist groups that operated summer camps. Most of them have closed, and their decline is obviously a change that tells a story of how American Jewry changed over the course of the postwar period. Their legacy is important, too: I have made the argument that these camps in a lot of ways modeled the idea of Yiddish as having a future in America.

What about hookup culture? Contemporary discourse about Jewish camps have focused on sex and sexuality there. What did you observe about this in the archives?

I think people think of the hookup culture of Jewish camps today and certainly in my time in the ’90s and 2000s as a permanent feature, and in some ways I found through my research and oral history interviews that that was the case, but it was really interesting to zoom out a little bit and think about how Jewish summer camps changed in terms of sexual romantic culture, in relationship to how America changed with the sexual revolution and the youth culture.

It’s not it’s not useful to think about Jewish hookup culture in a vacuum. It’s happening within America more broadly. And so of course, it’s changed dramatically over time. And one of the things I learned that was so fascinating is that Jewish summer camps were actually their leaders were less concerned in a lot of ways about sexuality at camp in the ’40s and ’50s, than they were in the late ’60s and ’70s. Because earlier premarital sex was pretty rare, at least in the teenage years, so they were not that concerned about what happened after lights out because they kind of assumed whatever was going on was fairly innocent.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, that’s when camps have to actually think about how to balance allowance and control. They want to allow campers to have these relationships, to have their first sexual experiences, and part of that is related to rising rates of intermarriage and wanting to encourage love between Jews, but they also want to control it because there’s a broader societal moment in which the sexuality of teenagers is problematized and their and their sexual culture is more public.

There’s been a real wave of sustained criticism by former campers about the cultures that they experienced, arguing that the camps created an inappropriately sexualized and unsafe space. There’s been a lot of reaction to that and the broader #MeToo moment. I’m curious about what you can speculate about a future where that space is cleaned up, based on your historical research — what is gained and what, potentially, could be lost?

Without being involved in camping today — and I want to really make that disclaimer because I know a lot of change is happening and lot of organizations are involved to talk about this issue better, to train camps and camp leaders and their counselors to not create a pressured environment for camper — I think what the history shows is that this hookup culture did not come about out of nowhere. It was partly related to the broader changes in America and the sexual revolution.

But it was also partly created because camps really needed to have campers’ buy-in, in order to be “successful.” A huge argument of my book is that we think about the power of camps as if camp directors have campers as, like, puppets on strings, and that what they do is what happens in camp life. But actually, campers have changed the everyday texture of life at camp over the course of the decades in so many different ways by resisting various ideas or just not being interested.

So hookup culture is also part of making campers feel like they have freedom at camp and that’s essential. That’s not a side project — that is essential to their ability to get campers to come back. It’s a financial need, and it’s an ideological need. If you make campers feel like they have freedom, then they will feel like they freely took on the ideologies your camp is promoting in a really natural way.

The last part of it is rising rates of intermarriage. As rates of intermarriage rose in the second half of the 20th century, there’s no doubt in my mind from doing the research that the preexisting culture around sexuality at camp and romance at camp got turbo-boosted [to facilitate relationships that could potentially lead to marriage between two Jews]. At that point, the allowance and control that camp leaders were trying to create for many decades leans maybe more heavily towards allowance.

There are positives to camp environments being a place where campers can explore their sexualities. There’s definitely a lot of conversation about the negative effects and those are all very, very real. I know people who went through horrible things at a camp and I also know people who experienced it as a very sex-positive atmosphere. I know people in my age range who were able to discover that they were gay or lesbian at camp in safety in comparison to home, so it’s not black and white at all. I hope that my chapter on romance and sexuality can maybe add some historical nuance to the conversation and give people a sense of how this actually happened. Because it happened for a whole bunch of reasons.

I think there’s a consensus view that camp is one of the most “successful” things the Jews do. But it’s hard to see where lessons from camp or camp culture are being imported to the rest of Jewish life. I’m curious what you see as kind of the lessons that Jewish institutions or Jewish communities have taken from camp — or have they not done that?

Every single public engagement I do about my work has boiled down to the question of, well, does it work? Does camp work? Is it successful? And that’s been a question that a lot of social scientists have been interested in. I don’t want to oversimplify that research, but a lot of the ways that they’ve measured success have been things that are not necessarily a given to all Jews as obviously the right way to be a Jew. So, for instance, in the ’90s and early 2000s, at the very least, a lot of research was about how, you know, “XYZ” camp and youth movement were successfully curbing intermarriage. A lot of them also asked campers and former campers how they feel about Israel, and it’s always if they are supportive of Israel in very normative ways, right, giving money visiting, supporting Israel or lobbying for its behalf — then camps have been successful.

I’m not interested in whether camps were successful by those metrics. I’m interested in how we got to the idea that camp should be successful in those ways in the first place. How did we get to those kinds of normative assumptions of like, this is a good Jew; a good Jew marries a Jew; a good Jew supports Israel, no matter what. So what I wanted to do is zoom out from that question of success and show how camp actually functions.

And then the question of “does it work” is really up to the reader. To people who believe that curbing intermarriage is the most important thing, then camps have been somewhat successful in the sense that people who go to these heavily educational camps are less likely to marry out of the faith.

But I am more interested in what actually happened at camp. And in terms of their legacies, I wanted to show how they changed various aspects of American Jewish life, and religion and politics. So I was really able to find how camping was essential in making kind of an Israel-centered Jewish education the norm. I was also able to draw a line between these Yiddish camps over the ’60s and ’70s that closed in the ’80s and contemporary Yiddish. The question of success is a real tricky and political one in a way that a lot of people have not talked about.

And is camp also fun? Because you’re creating a camp experience for your book launch next week.

Camp is fun — for a lot of people. Camp was not fun for everyone. And so I do want to play with that ambivalence at the party, and acknowledge that and also acknowledge that some people loved camp when they were younger and have mixed feelings about it now.

The party is not really a celebration of Jewish summer camp. People will be drinking and having fun and dancing — but I want them to be thinking while also about what is going on and why. How is Tisha B’Av [the fast day that commemorates the destruction of the ancient Jewish temple in Jerusalem that falls at the height of summer] commemorated at camp, for example?

Or what songs are we singing and what do they mean? I think a lot of people when they’re little kids, they learn songs in these Jewish summer camps that they can’t understand and later they maybe learn Hebrew and go, whoa, we were singing what?! My example from Zionist summer camp is singing “Ein Li Eretz Acheret,” or “I Have No Other Country.” We were in America and we obviously have another country! I don’t think anyone in my youth movement actually believes the words “Ein Li Eretz Acheret” because we live in America and people tend to kind of like living in America and most of them do not move to Israel.

So at the party we’ll be working through the fun of it, and at the same time the confusion of it and the ambivalence of it. I want it to be fun, and I also want it to be something that causes people to think.

—
The post American Jews created historic summer camps. Or did summer camps create American Jews? appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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AI, Judaism and what to do about ‘Fully-Automated Luxury Communism’

In the mid-2010s, journalist Aaron Bastani coined the phrase “Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” arguing that automation, AI, and synthetic biology would eventually make work and material scarcity essentially obsolete. Eventually this idea became a manifesto envisioning a post-scarcity, post-capitalist world.

The Internet took notice, and by the summer of 2015, Bastani’s earnest manifesto had spawned millions of trollish variations (including my personal favorite, “Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism” — the ‘gay’ and ‘space’ parts pointing to different ways to deal with overpopulation on Earth). As such things usually are, the memes were half-joking, half-serious, pointing both to a utopian vision of the future and to the impossibility of ever achieving it.

Eleven years later, though, the utopia may be at hand — though, as we’ve all heard by now, it could be more of a dystopia.

We’ve all read the takes: AI is taking our jobs, data centers are polluting the heartland, and, oh yeah, there’s a 10% chance that rogue AI agents will wipe out life on Earth.  Of these three very different risks, Mira Fox recently wrote about the third from a Jewish perspective, and many pundits have commented on the second. I want to focus on the first one — on what happens to society when the value and availability of work changes so radically,and on how Jewish traditions may end up being of value.

On, in other words, Fully Automated Luxury Jewish Communism.

Let’s start in the present, when, as AI boosters are fond of saying, LLMs are the least-capable that they will ever be, yet have already radically altered the fields in which my husband and I both work. Jobs are already disappearing and highly qualified “white collar” workers are finding it harder and harder to get new ones. I’d guess that 90% of the work I did as a young lawyer could be done by 2026-level LLMs, with review by a senior attorney. And that’s today.

It is, at best, extremely unclear how our society is supposed to cope with the economic and social-spiritual-psychological consequences of this.

Economically, most AI-boosters say we’ll need some kind of Universal Basic Income (UBI) to support all those laid-off actuaries, coders, call center operators, researchers, and technical writers. Never mind that many of these same AI boosters are libertarians opposed to the state doing anything at all, and that many others are contributing mightily to Republican politicians who are opposed even to raising the minimum wage or expanding healthcare coverage. These are the politicians who will usher in UBI socialism for all?

But the question is deeper than economics. When the work you do is done by a machine, who are you?

After all, work isn’t just about putting food on the table; our identities are often tied to our jobs, and, more generally, to our capacity to provide for ourselves and our families. (For traditionalists, much of this is still gendered — men do the providing — but not for most progressives.)  Even if our material needs are somehow met by UBI and the explosion in productivity that AI is supposed to bring about, what about our non-material needs: our need for purpose, meaning and identity?

Lest this sound vague or ‘soft,’ consider that what philosopher Jon Vervaeke has called the ‘Meaning Crisis’ animates much of our contemporary politics today. MAGA populism is, in large part, a response to the erosion (real or perceived) in American conceptions of communal identity, economic opportunity, gender roles, and religion – i.e., the Meaning Crisis. Yes, much of MAGA’s resentment is driven by economics: by the hollowing out of the American middle class in the wake of globalization and other factors. And a lot of it is driven by racism. But much of it is also about meaning: what it means to be an American, to be a man, to be white, to be Christian. And Donald Trump has brilliantly, intuitively channeled the rage at those societal changes into a hopeless, nihilistic patriotism — the Lost Cause for the 21st century.

The point is, “soft” concerns often drive our politics. Sure, it’s the economy, but also what economic dislocation means to people who experience it. And that meaning is as much spiritual, for lack of a better term, as it is financial.

From my vantage point, as a rabbi/journalist/psychedelics scholar/meditation teacher, it seems obvious that we are headed for a collective crisis even more massive than the ones we have already experienced. In a sense, AI is to white-collar work what globalization, de-unionization, and technology was to blue-collar work. Twenty years ago, it was the factories that were closing. Now, it’s the law offices cutting back on hiring. What is supposed to happen next?

From that same vantage point, it seems equally obvious that, as a society, there will need to be significant reorientation toward non-economic forms of value. Of course, these exist already: people find meaning in family, religion, culture, creativity, sports, hobbies, and a thousand other interests. It’s not like we’re starting from scratch. But consider how many people in your life (present company included) also derive meaning from work, and what will happen when that is taken away.

Religion, in its broadest possible sense, will almost certainly grow in response. Already, we’ve seen some of this in conservative quarters — converts to Catholicism like JD Vance and Peter Thiel, for example, or even the broad religiosity of Joe Rogan. But Capital-R Religion’s price of admission may be too high for many people: belief in God, conservative ideas about gender and sexuality, and all the myths and stories that seem preposterous if taken literally.

But there is also what I’ve called lower-case-r religion: forms of communal, ethical, and spiritual cohesion that are less about God, dogma, and obligation and more about the sacred in everyday life, rituals that bring us together, and practices that help us to grow ethically and spiritually.

In other words, what a lot of liberal Judaism, at its best, is already about.

A majority of non-Orthodox Judaism is already what Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie has called “God-optional” — it may have some general notion of the universe as sacred (I once wrote a book about that), and may maintain traditional God-language in liturgy and text, but it’s not focused on belief in an old man in the sky or obedience to Him for fear of punishment. Rather, as I wrote about in these pages in 2009, it’s focused on what religion does: how it can nourish the soul, teach ethical values, mark the passages of time, and bring people together in communities of meaning.

DZ Kalman, a leading theorist on Judaism and artificial intelligence, told me that “neither Judaism nor any other religion has a ready-to-hand answer for what to do when a chunk of the world’s jobs is suddenly no longer necessary. We have thoughts about the value of work, but those ideas are premised on a world where human labor is necessary to keep society running. We are not yet ready for a ‘time that is wholly Shabbat,’” a metaphor for the messianic age.

Yet, Kalman continued, “Shabbat is fundamental here. Humans can simply be; AI (for the moment) cannot. We as a society are not good at championing the value of presence, which is core to the Shabbat experience.”

But soon, we are going to have to be. Because what is “fully-automated luxury Jewish communism” if not a time that is wholly Shabbat?

What “religion” looks like in its particulars will vary with every person who experiences it. For some, it may mean a recommitment to seemingly non-religious activities: rescuing animals is ‘religious’ in this sense, as is throwing elaborate parties, seeing films, writing poetry, or, of course, raising a family. For others, it may well be the full traditional package, which excels at providing holistic systems of meaning. And for me, it will continue to mean a combination of spiritual practice (meditation, psychedelics, ritual), family life and political activism. Judaism and Jewishness already encompasses all of these things; just peruse the weekly schedule of a mainstream suburban synagogue, and you’ll find most of them already.

Personally, among those various possibilities, I’m interested in whether we’ll see a Jewish ‘archaic revival’ — a term coined by psychedelic theorist Terrence McKenna to describe a resurgence in ‘primitive’, non-rational ways of relating to the great mystery of the human condition. I’m excited by that possibility, which will likely be accelerated by psychedelics in particular (if you haven’t yet, please read the ‘Jewish Journeys’ study which showed how psychedelic experience super-charged people’s interest in spirituality). There are plenty of risks as well: Contrary to hippie myths, spirituality does not make one more politically liberal, and often makes people more particularistic. But I’m intrigued by an embodied Judaism newly revitalized to meet the needs of a post-work future.

Of course, that’s only one Jewish path, and not the most popular one. The broader point is that as work recedes in importance and society faces radical and destabilizing changes, we are going to need more and better ways to understand ourselves, our communities, and our world.

Which, for all its shortcomings, Judaism has been exploring for around 3,000 years.

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Israel-bound flight diverted to Saudi Arabia after terror attack on board

(JTA) — A Flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia after passengers reported that an altercation broke out between two pilots. Israeli officials are describing the incident as a terrorist attack and passengers say they intervened to restrain a man who had attacked one of the pilots.

The flight, carrying more than 100 Israeli passengers, was diverted while flying over Jordanian airspace and eventually landed at Tabuk Airport in northern Saudi Arabia, an Israeli official to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

An Israeli official briefed the media and was quoted by Israel’s Channel 12 as saying that one pilot stabbed the other and attempted to “do a 9/11” — either by hijacking the plane and flying it toward Israel or crashing it. The official said that a “dramatic disaster was prevented.”

According to accounts from passengers posted on social media and reports by Israeli media, the co-pilot attacked the captain and attempted to take control of the aircraft. At least two people were injured in the incident. The entire incident lasted about an hour and a half.

“We are on the flight from Dubai. We took control of the flight. There was an attacker with a knife who stabbed one of the pilots,” passenger Itzhak Liber said in a Facebook video. “A few of us jumped in and pulled him out of the cockpit. Everything is OK now. The terrorist is neutralized. There is a pilot who is seriously injured.”

“It was tough. Everything is covered in blood,” Liber added.

Another passenger, appearing in a video posted to social media with blood visible on his face, said the passengers were in the middle of a hijacking and had restrained the attacker as the plane prepared to land. In another video, several passengers said they were protecting the pilot.

A third passenger told Israel’s Channel 12, “There were moments when we were sure this was the end.”

Saudi authorities said the two pilots were taken to a hospital after sustaining injuries, according to international media reports. Flydubai, which is owned by the United Arab Emirates, has acknowledged that there was an “incident” that led to the diversion of the flight. It stressed that the plane landed safely and that all passengers were safe. UAE officials had not commented on the incident as of publication.

Data from Flightradar24 showed the aircraft descending roughly 14,000 feet in less than 30 seconds during the incident. The plane subsequently diverted from its route and landed in Tabuk.

The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had held consultations and was monitoring developments. “Following concerns over an aviation incident, the prime minister held consultations on the matter and followed developments,” Netanyahu’s office said. “The incident is under control, and all measures are now being taken to return the Israeli passengers safely to Israel.”

Israel and Saudi Arabia do not have formal diplomatic relations, but the two countries maintain ties. This is not the first time a flight carrying Israeli passengers has landed in Saudi Arabia.

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said in a post on X that there had been an attempt to “crash” the aircraft and “murder 180 Israelis.” He called for Israel to hold accountable the “state or terrorist organization” responsible for the incident.

This is a developing story.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

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Far-right Israel critic James Fishback likens abortion to the Holocaust

(JTA) — James Fishback, a fierce critic of Israel and a far-right politician, offered scathing remarks about the Jewish state and likened abortion to the Holocaust during an address at the University of Mississippi on Tuesday evening.

Fishback, a former GOP gubernatorial candidate in Florida, recalled that earlier this summer the Combat Antisemitism Movement flagged as antisemitic one of his X posts describing abortion as a holocaust.

“Abortion is a holocaust, and by every single historical metric available, it was worse than the other one,” Fishback said, claiming that “61 million children have been killed in the womb since Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided in 1973.”

He also had harsh words for the state of Israel. “It is time for President Trump to call [Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu and cut him off. We must decouple from Israel to save America,” he added.

Fishback was speaking at a Turn Up the Mic forum arranged by members of the University of Mississippi chapter of Turning Point USA, the organization founded by the late Charlie Kirk.

Slamming immigration policies on both sides of the aisle — Republicans for too few mass deportations and Democrats for an influx of foreign workers — Fishback declared, “It’s time to stand up and tell both parties that no, American jobs are for Americans only.”

He noted, however, that making such demands could result in a person being labeled a racist or misogynist, and that “if you’re really bad they’ll call you an antisemite.” Stressing that he condemns “all forms of religious hatred,” he maintained that “the most virulent” type is the hostility “against Christians in this country.”

Fishback blamed Israel and the inability of the U.S. to “tell them no” for drawing the country into the war with Iran. That war, he argued, has pushed gas prices and Treasury yields higher.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

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