Yair Rosenberg

Yair Rosenberg is an American journalist and a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers politics, culture, and religion, and writes the "Deep Shtetl" newsletter. Formerly a senior writer at Tablet magazine, he is a regular speaker and commentator on antisemitism in the modern era and on strategies to combat abuse on online platforms.

Yair Rosenberg

Quotes

• [I]s Trump a philo-Semite or an anti-Semite? The answer is both. The principle that explains his seemingly contradictory outlook toward Jews is simple: Trump believes all the anti-Semitic stereotypes about Jews. But he sees those traits as admirable.
  To Trump, the belief that Jews are foreign interlopers who use their wealth to serve their own clannish interests is not a negative — as it is for traditional anti-Semites — but rather a positive. He wants Jews to be his attorneys and manage his money, so that he, too, can be rich. He wants them in his political corner, so that he, too, can be powerful. He wants to buy politicians, just like he thinks they do. As a man who has always stood solely for his own naked self-interest, Trump does not see the anti-Semitic conception of the self-interested Jew as a complaint, but rather a compliment. He prioritizes his needs ahead of the national interest, and so he sees the idea that Jews might do the same with themselves or with Israel as entirely natural.
  • "Trump keeps pushing anti-Semitic stereotypes. But he thinks he’s praising Jews", The Washington Post (August 21, 2019)

• In July 2016, Trump tweeted a meme declaring that Hillary Clinton was "the most corrupt candidate ever"—with those words emblazoned over a six-pointed Jewish star superimposed on a pile of money. The meme had previously been popularized on a neo-Nazi website. Shortly before the election, Donald Trump Jr. retweeted Kevin MacDonald, America’s premier white-supremacist academic, who has argued that Jews are genetically driven to destroy Western countries, pumping the marginal malcontent into the political mainstream.
  • "This Is Who Trump Always Was", The Atlantic (December 1, 2022)
  • Originally a "Deep Shtetl" newsletter. The article followed criticism of Donald Trump having dinner with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago in late November 2022.

• Out of 8 billion people on the planet, there are only 16 million Jews—but far, far more anti-Semites.
  • "How to Be Anti-Semitic and Get Away With It", The Atlantic (December 8, 2023)