Jew Code

The first time someone threw a penny at me, I was, oh, 7 or 8. I was a student at Lakeview Elementary School in Mahopac, N.Y. I didn’t understand what the gesture meant, even when someone snickered and referred to me as a “cheap Jew.” Um, huh? What did being Jewish have to do with thriftiness? I was confused.

As the years passed, I’d get comments from time to time. I was cheap. Chanukah sucked. Little things that really didn’t bother me too much. Then, as a high school senior, a classmate wrote the word JEW all over my yearbook. He probably scribbled it 30 times, in tiny blue pen …

JEW

JEW

JEW

JEW

JEW

JEW

I laughed. Because that’s what you do at that age. You laugh. But there was something there, and had long been something there. A good number of people in my little hometown saw Jews differently. We were known to be greedy, money grubbing, shifty, untrustworthy. You never turned your back on a Jew. You never let a Jew hold your wallet. Just as my best friend (an African-American kid from down the street) was one of the “good blacks,” I was probably one of the “good Jews.” But, just as he was still black, I was still Jewish. You felt it. It was there.

I haven’t thought much of that in many moons, but it returned to my cranium earlier today, when I saw the Twitter posting that I’ve pasted above. It was fired off via the Trump campaign, and features Hillary Clinton in front of money, with MOST CORRUPT CANDIDATE EVER! in a Jewish star.

In a Jewish star.

Donald Trump will tell you this was accidental. It wasn’t. I promise you—it wasn’t. There are 1,000,000 shapes in the world. He could have used a circle (actually, under intense backlash he later changed it to a red circle), a square, a rectangle, an octagon. He could have used anything. But the Jewish star says something to his base, and it is this: I am one of you. I feel like you do. I am not them.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. You may hate Hillary Clinton. You may abhor Hillary Clinton. But Donald Trump is not Hillary Clinton.

He’s fascism.