After the Pittsburgh shooting the divide in America’s Jewish community is in ever sharper focus. At the heart of that divide is President Trump

Picture the scene: Michael Peinovich, an American neo-Nazi, stands beneath the Lincoln Memorial in Washington during summer 2017 warning of a “white genocide”. “Who controls the media?” he bellows, call-and-response. “Who controls Hollywood? Who controls Wall Street?” The Jews, the Jews, the Jews. Beside him stands a man with a placard reading: “Jews for Trump”.

Next up is white nationalist Richard Spencer: “Remember everyone, see you in Charlottesville.” A month later, many of the same people marched by torchlight, chanting “Jews will not replace us”. After the violence that ensued, the president whose name was on that placard in Washington infamously blamed “both sides”.

Just 15 months later, a sympathiser with this invigorated Neo-nazi movement murdered 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. President Trump duly arrived to denounce antisemitism, but faced down 13,000 local demonstrators to do so. Those demonstrating were outraged at Trump’s visit, charging that his rhetoric had helped foment violence. One sign read “Words matter”.

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Not within living memory has America been so divided but neither has its Jewish community. As an op-ed in America’s oldest Jewish magazine, the Forward – which celebrated its 120th anniversary last year – said in the aftermath of Pittsburgh and the midterm elections: “the American Jewish community is asking itself for the first time in half a century: What does it mean to be a Jew in America?”

The divide in America’s Jewish community is in ever-sharper focus. Trump is hailed by some in America’s Jewish community for his support of Israel, moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and his tearing up of the Iran deal brokered by Barack Obama. But he is repudiated by more people within that same community for his rhetorical violence and the succour he is seen to give to the far right and white nationalists. That divide has only grown since the shooting in Pittsburgh.

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The Anti-Defamation League, founded over a century ago to monitor antisemitism, has followed the surge in antisemitism during and since the election of Donald Trump. It traced 2.6m antisemitic messages on Twitter between August 2015 and July 2016, aimed at journalists – 10 people receiving 83% of them; “I was number five,” says Jonathan Weisman, a New York Times journalist and author of a recent book on the American Jewish community.

Oren Segal, director of the ADL’s Centre on Extremism, observes: “Most of these conspiracies are not new to us … But now, you don’t know where the mainstream starts and the fringe begins.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hundreds of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and members of the ‘alt-right’ march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

In a Vice film about Charlottesville, neo-Nazi Christopher Cantwell says the plan is to “screw around with the Overton window”, or as reporter Elle Reeve summarises: “What was once forbidden becomes fringe, and what was once fringe becomes mainstream.”

Nowhere is this phenomenon more starkly illustrated than in the vilification of the Jewish liberal philanthropist George Soros, for years a target for virulent attacks in the American (and British) fascist netherworld.

Then Trump accused Soros of orchestrating protests against him, and the caravan – the “invasion” – of Central Americans.

Then came what Trump called “this bomb stuff”: pipe bombs to Soros, also CNN, Hillary Clinton and other targets of the president’s – and the neo-Nazis’ – ire.

“What really shocks me about this revival of antisemitism”, says Weisman in conversation, “is that it uses the internet, in a kind of tech-hip way, yet has repackaged the stereotypes of classic Nazism, so that Soros becomes the new Rothschild – the perfect target: secluded, invisible, funding liberal causes – the intelligent Ashkenazi Jewish puppet-master orchestrating the ‘white genocide’. It’s packaging the exact same hate as that of the National Socialists in Germany … and what is so shocking is that Trump had picked up on this with Soros.”

Weisman knows well about the use of the internet as a way of spreading anti-semitism. His book (which opens with the scene beneath the Lincoln Memorial) is intriguingly entitled (((Semitism))) Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump.

There’s a story behind those brackets.

Weisman, deputy Washington editor of the New York Times, thought little of retweeting a column by conservative historian and commentator Robert Kagan in the Washington Post. But he had “an intuition” when a strange response from someone called ‘CyberTrump’ arrived: “Hello (((Weisman)))”.

“Care to explain?” Weisman replied.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The billionaire George Soros has become a prime target of antisemitic attacks from the right. Photograph: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images

“It’s dog whistle, fool,” the anonymous person answered.

Weisman had “unwittingly exposed what was known in the alt-right as ‘echoes’, those three parentheses … wrapped around Jewish-sounding names on social media in order to track down targets like heat-seeking missiles, then swarm”.

Among the thousands of messages that followed were images of “a path of dollar bills leading into an oven”.

Weisman’s book reaches a now tragically ironic moment, when he writes: “The threat of violence against Jews has not materialized into actual violence aimed specifically against us.” It went to press several months before – but predicts – the Pittsburgh massacre.

“I think it was inevitable,” says Weisman, “in a convergence between this hatred on the internet and a violent culture. The guys who might go into a bar and kill people find a cause – the mass shooter has an ideology.”

The 2017 edition of an annual poll by the American Jewish Committee showed that 77% of Jews had an unfavourable view of Trump, while 21% had a favourable view.

Though Jews have traditionally voted Democrat, Trump’s antisemitic support cuts like a rip-tide beneath those figures now. In the magazine Jewish Exponent, Ron Klein, chairman of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, and Daniel Berger, wrote:

“Amazingly, today in 2018, Nazis, neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, white supremacists and those who align with them are running for Congress – all under the Republican banner … Trump’s refusal to condemn those who espouse hatred and march under the Republican banner is itself encouragement and abetting of such behavior. Sadly, Trump’s followers in the Republican Party are not doing much better.”

Days later, the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) retorted that “Nazi ideology and its supporters, including white supremacists, have no place in the Republican party”.

On election day last week, Weisman retweeted a Washington Post story about Republican campaign literature in six states showing images of rival Democrat Jewish candidates brandishing money. “RJC?” he challenged.

The most thorough investigation into what Trump actually thinks about Jews was published on the eve of the 2016 election by the Jerusalem Post, after “resourcing court documents, media archives and original interviews with campaign aides, close personal confidantes, past lawyers, business partners and employees”.

It concluded that “both supporters and detractors of the Republican nominee agreed on one critical revelation: Trump seems to have something of an affirmative prejudice toward Jews. They believe he considers Jews a group of rich, smart, successful and generally powerful deal makers – all traits which Trump himself aspires to … while simultaneously touching on tropes described by historians of the topic as classically anti-Semitic.”

The rift within Jewry cuts not only along party lines; the other great divide – not entirely in parallel – is over Israel, the current politics of Israel, and what is happening in the Middle East.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Palestinians paint an X over the face of a picture of Donald Trump which was painted on the Israeli separation wall in Bethlehem, West Bank, on 7 December 2017 in protest at his decision to move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Photograph: Abed Al Hashlamoun/EPA

Weisman dates the present schism to President Barack Obama’s signing of a nuclear non-proliferation deal with Iran. As Weisman says, “the searing debate in the Jewish community over the Iran deal had nothing to do with antisemitism … It was about Israel, and more specifically Israel’s conservative prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.” “Jewish identity,” he writes, “thousands of years in the making, seemed to increasingly boil down to one characteristic: affinity to the Jewish state.” He adds: “At what cost? The American Jewish obsession with Israel has taken our eyes off not only the politics of our own country … and the rising tide of nationalism but also our own grounding in faith.”

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While antisemitism in Europe tends to overtly oppose Israel’s politics and even its existence, Weisman recalls the strange theology founded on the American evangelist Jerry Falwell’s dictum that “To stand against Israel is to stand against God.”

“On the right,” writes Weisman, “anti-Semitism and militant Zionism can co-exist quite comfortably.” Spencer calls his movement a “sort of white Zionism”. In a New York Times podcast, Weisman even posits that recent racial policies by the Netanyahu government have made Israel a “model” for the alt-right on how to construct an “ethno-state”.

As a result of these and other deliberations, Weisman received a flurry of communications from fellow Jews that “called me an antisemite for suggesting that far-right antisemitism might have had anything to do with the atmosphere created by this president”. One caller left a message for him: “It’s your despicable Democrat party that’s antisemitic, hate Jews like me … You hate Jews, you hate Israel, Jonathan Weisman, you love the Iran deal by Obama to destroy Israel; you want a second Holocaust. Thank God for Trump.”

The events of the last two weeks – both the Pittsburgh massacre and the midterms – have created a reappraisal among parts of America’s Jewish community. The arrival of congressional newcomers critical of Israel was welcomed on the pages of the Forward.

Jane Eisner, editor, says that “what happened in Pittsburgh was an inflection point – maybe not a turning point – which brought forth a deep well of social justice action by American Jews that had been there all along. What’s happened over the last two years is that although President Trump had done things that please the Jewish establishment – pulling out of the Iran deal, moving the embassy – this election showed 79-80% of Jews voting Democrat against him, more than Obama, far more than Clinton.”

This is “a decisive and divisive moment in American Jewish history, of divisions that reflect the divisions in America”, she says. “We’ve had a lot of progressive Jews elected, two Democrat Jewish governors, and I think we’re going to see a blossoming social justice action by Jewish Americans in response to what’s happening.”

In his book, Weisman says: “the identity of American Jews is at a crossroads. The identification with Israel as the democracy in the Middle East comes under question with the current government, as does Trump’s support for it.”

Weisman ends with a grounding of Jewish identity in faith, and in particular the vision of a mentor, Rabbi Daniel Zemel of Washington DC, who says that “the American Jewish community has been abandoned by its leaders”; but who then insists that: “this is a moment that’s ripe for a Jewish voice in the public square … I don’t go looking for fights, but a central Jewish lesson is to oppose evil in all forms.”

“This really isn’t a choice”, says Weisman. “The Jew is obligated to counter injustice … And now we have an existential threat to propel us into the square.”

• This article was amended on 23 November 2018 to correct Jerry Falwell’s last name, from Fulwell as an earlier version said.