Is it a prediction to say that the situation for Jews in the US will continue to deteriorate or is it merely an observation about the nature of Jewish history?

Is it speculation to ask whether, if say a black Muslim massacred a white Evangelical church, the initial response would be “maybe they should have had better security”?

Is it any huge surprise that in the wake of this shooting, Mike Pence appeared at a prayer event with a messianic rabbi — that is, someone who sees Jews as imperfect and needing to be “completed” by conversion to Christianity — who proceeded to pray for Jesus to intercede on behalf of Republican candidates?

If Trump is America with the mask off, then Trump and his administration’s response to the massacre in Pittsburgh reveals a harsh truth.

We were never truly American and we are truly expendable if need be. The official response to us in our time of pain and grief is either muted, or involves misdirection (“an attack on religious expression” as a thing in general and not on Jews as a people), or revolves around adding insult to injury by illuminating the strings attached to our place in the social order. And now, that thing that always happens to us — the scapegoating, the portrayal of us as a destructive (or simply “imperfect”) element in society, the violence that undergirds and springs from these ideas, the indifferent or victim-blaming responses— it’s all happening again.

Our Americanness and our expendability are really two sides of the same coin. Our Americanness was provisional and based on things like

Being a model minority

Being successful financially

Deference to whiteness as a feature of society and a mode of social mobility

Overarching economic stability

The economic stability of the late 20th century (that is, the prime years of Jewish integration into American life and society) is collapsing, revealing that no, we aren’t “real” Americans but rather in a more precarious position.

Integrating into American society meant in large part integrating into and upholding the framework of white supremacy; for those who could pass, we got to enjoy the benefits of whiteness even though deep down, white supremacists never saw us as “white,” whatever that even means. We largely didn’t care about this faustian bargain because whiteness conveyed privileges that allowed us to have more comfortable lives than if we were nonwhite. Members of my own family have expressed solidarity with white supremacy and engaged in certain of its rites — voting exclusively for white candidates, denigrating nonwhites, seeing immigrants as an invading horde, etc. Little did they know that the white supremacists whose whiteness isn’t provisional saw us all along as part and parcel of that horde.

Because, if you’re Jewish, you aren’t and weren’t ever really fully American. Your provisional Americanness — and, for those with the right skin tone, whiteness — rested on an assumption of generally good economic conditions and a world not in the throes of impending climate catastrophe. In the 50s, 60s, and 70s we magically became American and even white, and in the Trump era we were relegated to status uncertain pending further review. Marginalization, followed by de-marginalization, followed by re-marginalization. It isn’t remotely the first time this dynamic has played out in our history. The solution is not to seek to be de-marginalized all over again by cleaving as closely as we can to Americanness and whiteness, but to reject such ideas altogether and build solidarity with other marginalized groups as fascism rises and the planet starts to melt.

The truth is this: the radical right has been actively fomenting radicalization by spreading propaganda that sometimes makes it to the president’s lips and tweets. (Nobody quite knows what circuitous route the propaganda took to get there, but we all have our guesses.) This is a country saturated with guns, alienation, and right wing misinformation of various stripes, including the overtly antisemitic. Why?

If you’re a liberal — which, in this instance would be someone who isn’t on the right but doesn’t see fascism as a byproduct of capitalism in disarray and whose analysis doesn’t factor in how a ruling class might insulate itself from criticism — much of what’s happening might seem like a confusing, cruel joke: this wasn’t supposed to happen here! And yet, if Jewish history is any indication this was always on the verge of happening: for the powerful, Jews have been a reliable scapegoat and this country has some incredibly powerful people at the helm of a capitalist system in disarray. Fox News, for example, airs antisemitic “Soros” dogwhistles ad nauseum but can still hide behind cutesy denials — here the emperor has no clothes. For the powerful, Soros is merely the latest in a long line of Jewish boogeymen. Rupert Murdoch would rather you focus on the boogeyman and his shadowy cabal of conspiracies than focus on the system as a whole and the misery it imposes on the world by force.