>To be clear: More than 200 House Democrats have signed onto an impeachment inquiry and yet the president chose to target only three of them by name, two of whom are Jewish: Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler, chairs of the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees. The third target was — surprise! — a woman of color, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Shamefully, he attacked all of them as “savages.”
>How is such rhetoric not racist?
>On October 2, Trump escalated his brazenly anti-Semitic attack on Schiff. “We don’t call him ‘Shifty Schiff’ for nothing,” the president told reporters in the Oval Office. “He’s a shifty, dishonest guy.”
>The stereotype of Jews as “shifty,” the suggestion that they are sneaky and manipulative, has a long and ignominious history. Trump — who “often plays on well-worn caricatures about cleverness, deviousness, and physical weakness” when discussing Jews, to quote Peter Beinart — knows what he is doing when he gives Schiff this particular nickname; it is no accident or coincidence.
