There’s a fascinating detail in a Semafor scoop on President Trump’s legal battles. Trump has declared the influential law firm of Paul Weiss persona non grata, in retaliation for the participation of some of the firm’s lawyers in Jan. 6 prosecutions and the president’s own case in New York. In order to smooth things out with the president, Ben Smith reports, Brad Karp, the firm’s chairman proposed “helping the White House respond to alleged instances of antisemitism that came out of the wave of campus protests last year.”
I’m not sure we in the Jewish community have fully processed the extent to which the battle against domestic anti-Semitism has come to dominate our political and cultural discourse. There have certainly been periods during which anti-Semitism itself was as prominently featured in the public square as it is today, and there have been periods when the battle against anti-Semitism globally was consistently a front-page story. But in the United States, there has never been a moment quite like this one, in which how to fight American anti-Semitism is a thread connecting numerous otherwise-disparate debates over national policy.
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