Recently, Debbie Wasserman Schultz penned a heart-tugging letter about her Jewish daughters heading off to college titled, “Have We Forgotten Never Forget?” In it, she wrote:
This past weekend, my twins were accepted to their top choice for college. Like all of the Jewish mothers before me, I kvelled with pride. We celebrated the good news all weekend, yet slowly but surely my nachas soon turned to tsoris. My worry wasn’t about making sure they eat well-balanced meals in the college cafeteria, or that they come home for the Jewish holidays. Rather, as the mother of twins heading off to college in the year 2017, I am deeply worried about the anti-Semitism they may encounter.
First of all, much of the so-called hate crime scares recently reported are hoaxes, designed to make it appear that colleges are under siege by supporters of President Donald Trump. (Most hilariously, a student at Bowling Green University reported that the KKK was alive and well at her college, after mistaking lab equipment for a hooded Klansman.)
Second, however, Wasserman Schultz might find anti-Jewish sentiment closer to home than she thinks.
Wasserman Schultz, as you recall, is the former head of the Democratic National Convention, who had to step down when WikiLeaks dumped 20,000 Democratic emails into the public domain that showed just how protective she was over one Jew in particular.
Bernie Sanders was the first Jewish person to win a Presidential primary when he triumphed over Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire’s primary.
Wasserman Schultz didn't use the occasion to celebrate America's embrace of diversity. Rather, she used the faith of Sanders to try to drive a wedge between him and Southern voters. In one of the emails, she had floated the idea of telling evangelical voters in Kentucky and West Virginia that Bernie was an atheist in order to scare them into the waiting arms of Hillary Clinton. (In this, she artfully managed to offend both Jews and Christians in one fell swoop.) In other emails, it became apparent that the entire DNC was undermining the campaign of Sanders by painting him as out of touch and even devising narratives to explain his downfall.
Even more troubling, the entire Democratic party has become more anti-Israel under Wasserman Schultz’s leadership. For example, President Obama moved away from a 16-year tradition of unwavering support of Israel, and statistics show that increasingly Democrats are beginning to identify more with Palestine.
“Republicans have chosen the dangerous strategy of politicizing Israel’s security as their strategy to win over Jewish voters,” Wasserman Schultz once said, as if people worried about actual terror attacks were less important than the micro-aggressions her kids might (or more probably might not) experience in a classroom.
It seems that the trendy worry these days is an irrational fear of neo-Nazis hiding in the shadows of American life. (Sarah Silverman’s embarrassing mistake is the most prominent, recent example.) Instead of looking in the shadows, perhaps Wasserman Schultz could find the most egregious example of Anti-Semitism right there in the mirror.