#jexodus

BY TALIA LAVIN - March 14, 2019

Over the past month, the Democratic and Republican parties have battled over the subject of anti-Semitism, in a protracted, exhausting, and phenomenally unproductive war of words, with a bunch of tired Jews in the middle. Freshman Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s tossed-off tweets about AIPAC and Israel provoked a furious backlash dripping with Islamophobia and misogynoir. From these unpromising ashes, a slick, gaudy phoenix has raised its thirsty beak—the fledgling political movement known as “Jexodus.”

The first thing to know about Jexodus, an initiative to draw Jewish votes away from the Democratic party, is that the J is superfluous. There was already a Jewish exodus, and it was called Exodus—you know, the one where the Jewish people fled slavery in Egypt. There’s a book of the Bible named after it. (To be fair, I suppose “Jexodus” rolls more neatly off the tongue than “Jgenesis,” or “Jdeuteronomy.”)

The second thing to know about Jexodus is that it’s a nakedly grasping, cynical, and hypocritical gambit by the contemporary GOP. Like many such gambits—“Blexit,” attempting to woo black votes from the Democrats, comes to mind—it’s an operation entirely engineered by conservative flacks, doing its best to masquerade as an authentic grassroots movement.

On Tuesday morning, “Fox & Friends” did a segment on this newest faux-movement, which in turn led the President of the United States, a huge fan of that TV show’s chipper racism, to tweet about it at length. Jexodus was embodied by the doe-eyed Elizabeth Pipko, a 23-year-old former Trump campaign staffer, Jexodus’s “national spokesperson.” She has excellent eyebrows and two self-published books of poetry (“Just the thought of failure brings me to tears/And the thought of someone witnessing it, brings out my biggest fears,” reads one poem from her first collection, “Sweet Sixteen”).

The president tweeting about Jews raised my stomach acid level by approximately 300%, causing me to need to pop an alka-seltzer like an emasculated father in a Philip Roth novel. Then I got angry, not just seized with Ashkenazi agita. The president lumbering wetly into this discussion—this particular president, with his long history of cozying up to anti-Semites; his public, infamous embrace of neo-Nazis; his adoration of conspiracy theories, which so frequently feature shadowy Rothschilds…the very thought brought my bile up. It was like picking your way through dog shit, only to be crapped on, stealthily, by a pigeon: very white, and thoroughly unwelcome.