For years, presidential conference calls were a nonpartisan holiday tradition with hundreds of rabbis in advance of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, in what participants described as a meeting of minds, free of raw politics. - nytimes.com
But on Wednesday four Jewish groups — the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Rabbinical Assembly, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association and the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism — said they could not participate in interactions with Mr. Trump around the fall holidays.
“We have concluded that President Trump’s statements during and after the tragic events in Charlottesville are so lacking in moral leadership and empathy for the victims of racial and religious hatred that we cannot organize such a call this year,” the statement said.
Rabbi Jonah Pesner, director of the Religious Action Center, said in an interview that events in Charlottesville had sent a deep shudder through the rabbinical community. He said Jews were appalled by the experience of rabbis in Charlottesville, who feared that they would become the targets of neo-Nazi violence, and by Mr. Trump’s equivocal response.
Rabbi Pesner, who said he joined conference calls for the High Holy Days during the previous administrations, said he and his colleagues had fully intended to speak with Mr. Trump before his handling of the Charlottesville aftermath. He said there was “a lot of sadness” at scrapping the call.
It was not immediately clear whether a presidential conference call would go forward without the rabbi groups, or whether the White House had other outreach plans around the holidays. A White House official said the Trump administration would announce plans for the Jewish holidays in the coming weeks.
Past presidents, including George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, have made a practice of conferring with Jewish leaders around the holidays, though the presidential conference call is most identified with Mr. Obama.
Other Jewish organizations that have joined the annual phone calls in the past, including the Rabbinical Council of America, an influential group of Orthodox rabbis, did not say on Wednesday whether they intended to participate in holiday events with Mr. Trump. But the Orthodox group previously issued a statement condemning any effort to draw “moral equivalency between the White Supremacists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville and those who stood up to their repugnant messages and actions.”
Mr. Trump’s approach has alarmed leaders from minority groups and experts on political extremism, who have tracked a rise in hate incidents this year. In April, the Anti-Defamation League’s annual audit showed that anti-Semitic incidents increased by more than one-third in 2016 and jumped 86 percent in the first quarter of 2017 compared with the same period last year.
That rise was most likely “driven by a relatively small but emboldened cadre of neo-Nazis and white supremacists,” said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. He said that Mr. Trump’s rhetoric risked aggravating those groups.
“For a segment of his supporters, the scapegoated institutional elite quickly devolves into a code word for Jews, especially when condemnation of anti-Semitism is absent or diluted,” Mr. Levin said. |
