Anti-immigrant and white supremacist, maybe. But is the alt-right anti-Semitic?http://www.jewishjournal.com/election2016/article/anti-immigrant_and_white_supremacist_maybe._but_is_the_alt-right_anti-semitCan you go alt-right without going anti-Semitic?
The movement that has emerged from conservatism -- and in some ways has turned against it -- appears to be nudging its way into the American mainstream as it attaches itself to the success of Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee. Its followers and intellectuals have also been associated with anti-Semitism.
Now experts on extremism are contemplating whether the claim the alt-right has on establishment politics through its ride on Trump’s coattails also means a mainstreaming of anti-Semitism.
“You can have some of the ideas of the alt-right, which is anti-immigration, anti-multiculturalism and anti-globalism, without it being anti-Semitic,” said Marilyn Mayo, who tracks the alt-right at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. “However, a good deal of the people who are talking about the ideology of white identity, white culture, focus on Jews as part of a problem for them.”
The ADL defines the alt-right as "an extremely loose movement made up of different strands of people connected to white supremacy."
Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremists, said that some of the movement’s ideologues explicitly rejected anti-Semitism, seeing Jews as a branch of the “white nationalism” movement they embrace.
Nonetheless, he said, the movement has its share of explicit anti-Semites. More substantively, Potok said, its embrace of “white identity” had roots in movements that have been dangerous to Jews.
“The alt-right, whether nominally anti-Semitic or not, certainly poses dangers to the Jewish community,” he said. “It is fixated on America as a country birthed by Europe and by a core population of Europeans, and for enormous numbers of people that description does not include Jews.”
“I sometimes wonder what Jews who enthusiastically go on about ‘white privilege’ think the endgame is,” Seidel wrote in the Forward.
He acknowledged that the alt-right “is the most aggressively offensive political movement in existence, and it often targets the Jewish community.” (In the essay's comments section, he engaged with multiple self-proclaimed alt-righters who argued – sometimes in threatening terms imagining Seidel’s elimination -- that his Jewishness necessarily excluded him from the movement.)
Alt-righters came to wide attention earlier this year after they targeted Jewish writers and reporters online who criticized Trump, and they have excoriated Jews as being at the forefront of those who would promote diversity. They use images that cross into anti-Semitism; one tweeted by Trump, casting Democratic rival Hillary Clinton as corrupt and accompanied by a six-pointed star spread over a pile of cash, emerged from the alt-right. (Trump’s campaign later removed the tweet, though the candidate said he would not have.)
