Max Paul Friedman is Professor of History at American University in Washington, D.C., and this year he was a visiting fellow at the United States Studies Centre, the University of Sydney. He is author of Nazis and Good Neighbors and Rethinking Anti-Americanism.

Overlooked in the outrage over the neo-Nazi demonstrations and racist violence at the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, is the spectre of anti-Semitism.

The oversight is entirely understandable and appropriate. Jews are not now the principal targets of white supremacists in the United States, who focus their hatred and criminal actions on African Americans, Muslims and Latino immigrants.

The demonstration, after all, was a celebration of the secessionist Confederacy, a defence of a statue honouring General Robert E. Lee.

Lee was the American traitor who led an army waging war against the United States and quite literally against liberty itself. Those who claim Lee opposed slavery or secession ignore his writings calling slavery God's will, as well as his actions. He inherited most of his slaves from his father-in-law's estate. The old man had promised to free his slaves upon his death, wrote that into his will, and told them in advance to expect their freedom. Lee reversed that decision when he became the boss of his wife's plantation - where he ordered that runaways be recaptured and whipped before being returned to the fields.

Lee's defenders, touting their support for President Trump's agenda and claiming his endorsement, insist they want only to preserve equality for whites and to honour Southern heritage, but they are as ignorant of Lee's life as they are of the Confederacy itself.

What caused secession? They could look to Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America: he said it was because Lincoln instituted "a persistent and organized system of hostile measures against the rights of the owners of slaves in the Southern States," where "the labor of African slaves was and is indispensable." His vice-president," Alexander Stephens, wrote of the new country they founded:

"Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."

To make that idea law, the Confederate founders wrote this into Article I of their Constitution: No "law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed." The Confederacy had one surpassing purpose, and that was to enslave one group of people forever.

Trump's position is clear when, in response to the bloodshed in Charlottesville, he blamed "many sides" and then called on Americans to "cherish our history," code words for celebrating the breakaway slave system whose founding documents he has undoubtedly never read.

This was the major issue at stake in Charlottesville: would white supremacists defending a heritage of slavery be permitted to intimidate and assault those they believe stand in the way of a revival of unapologetic white dominance? People of colour are the principle targets of this movement and have been among the most organized and courageous in resisting its rise.

When white men wearing an assortment of Naziesque uniforms marched with torches aflame onto the campus of the University of Virginia shouting "You shall not replace us!" they meant that immigrants of colour should not replace them in the U.S. population, that African Americans should not benefit from affirmative action to take "their" places in colleges or job sites (or again take the presidency), and that Muslims should not replace Christianity as the leading religion in American culture.

Those chants were interspersed with a variant naming another target: "Jews shall not replace us!" If that seemed to have little to do with Robert E. Lee or the current political and policy disputes over race and immigration, it does speak to a peculiar and enduring aspect of the white supremacist movement in the United States that styles itself as Trump's shock troops: many subscribe to a classically anti-Semitic worldview blaming Jews for the evils they see befalling the nation.

I became more aware of this undercurrent after publishing an opinion piece critical of Donald Trump in the New York Daily News during Trump's presidential campaign. As a writer who happens to be Jewish, I got off easy. Trump's self-appointed defenders on Twitter provided me with anatomically detailed, alas unprintable suggestions for what I should do next. They wrote to my university to try to get me fired. They wrote to the University of California at Berkeley to demand my PhD be rescinded. And my name appeared on the internet's oldest major hate site, Stormfront.org ("the voice of the new embattled white minority") with a comment decrying this latest anti-Trump author's recognizably Jewish last name: "Every damn time!"

This was weak tea compared to the vitriol that has sluiced through the antisocial media, flooding the inbox and Twitter feed of any journalist identified as Jewish who is critical of the President of the United States. A vocal segment of Trump supporters fear that the Jews are out to get him, and they are rising to his defence so that he will help save their white nation from the Jews.

When synagogues and Jewish community centres across America received bomb threats and Jewish graves were desecrated by the hundreds earlier this year, it took Trump days of receiving pressure from across the political spectrum and media for him to condemn anti-Semitic acts.

After an apparent neo-Nazi drove his car into a crowd of counter-demonstrators in Charlottesville, killing one and injuring 19, it took two days for Trump to criticize the white supremacist hate groups - enough of a delay for them to celebrate his initial "on many sides" comments as tacit endorsement. It is high time for Trump to confront this fraction of his cheering squad directly, before they make good on their threats.

Fascism, American-Style

Analysts have debated whether Trump is a fascist. On the one hand, there is the authoritarian personality reflected in his constant touting his own strength and disdaining all others as weak, his fondness for dictators like Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad, his insistence that Mikhail Gorbachev should have cracked down on demonstrators in 1989, his defence of the tanks that crushed the Tiananmen Square protests, his belligerent nationalism and scapegoating of foreigners, his attacks on judges and journalists ("enemies of the people"), and his taste for the "Big Lie": Barack Obama was born abroad; blacks kill most white murder victims; thousands of Muslims in New Jersey celebrated on 9/11; millions of undocumented aliens voted for Hillary Clinton; and so on.

His "America First" foreign policy slogan reveals either obliviousness or, worse, full knowledge that he is adopting the name of the pro-Nazi American isolationists led by Charles Lindbergh until 1941. Rather than America's democratic institutions, what he celebrates is himself, claiming that only he through the sheer force of his own will can save the nation in its time of crisis. During the election campaign, he promised to commit war crimes, torture suspects and jail his political opponent.

On the other hand, Trump lacks the ideological conviction to be a fascist or the belief that the state should run all aspects of society, and he has no fascist organization, no blackshirts or brownshirts at his side. But among his fans there are volunteers, some of whom announce they are ready to enlist in the "Trump Deportation Force" or the "RWDS" (right-wing death squad), hundreds of whom marched in Charlottesville shouting his name, carrying enough military-grade semi-automatic rifles to lead Virginia's governor to exclaim that they looked like "an army."

Even if Trump is not a fascist in the classic mould, he did not object when some of his followers indulged in attacks with quite deliberate echoes of the 1930s, especially when harassing Jewish journalists. Trumpistas who disliked Julia Ioffe's profile of Trump's wife Melania in GQ Magazine called Ioffe's phone to play her recordings of Hitler's speeches, sent her an image of herself in an Auschwitz uniform, and told her that her face would look good on a lampshade. "A million Jews are not worth one Melania fingernail," wrote "Wilhelm Von Judengas," who illustrates his Twitter account with a canister of Zyklon B.

Jonathan Chait of New York magazine was served a screenshot of himself being interviewed on television with a yellow star marked "Jude" affixed to his lapel. David Rothkopf of Foreign Policy magazine received a photo of the crematoria at Auschwitz with the caption, "These ovens need cleaning" (presumably for reuse). Isaac Chotiner, contributing writer at Slate, reposted a message telling him "You would've had a great time at Auschwitz, but, sadly, you're too young." Award-winning foreign correspondent Jonathan M. Katz, who has written for the Associated Press and the New York Times, responded that these kinds of messages are now "epidemic" and have "reached a new level for everyone."

Jonathan Weisman, a New York Times editor, retweeted an editorial by Robert Kagan warning that Trump could bring fascism to America. In response, Weisman received a picture of "a smiling Mr. Trump in Nazi uniform flicking the switch on a gas chamber containing my Photoshopped face," an assortment of hook-nosed caricatures, and "an image of the gates of Auschwitz, the famous words 'Arbeit Macht Frei' replaced without irony with 'Machen Amerika Great'." A similarly creative correspondent sent Weisman a photograph of a trail of dollar bills leading across a kitchen floor into an oven. "Do it kike; after the Muslims and Mexicans you filth are next," promised a Twitterer named Pantsukampfwagen.

The Daily Stormer, an American neo-Nazi and white supremacist website dedicated to solving "the Jewish problem" while singing encomiums to Trump, regularly publishes attacks on Jews in public life. After Weisman's article appeared, the site's founder Andrew Anglin published a list of questions, including, "Why have Jews been kicked out of so many countries if they never did anything wrong?" and "Why are Jews flooding White nations with immigrants?" He then urged his readers to forward the list to Weisman on Twitter, adding, "You need to answer these questions, Weisman, or just shut your filthy Jew mouth."

Conservatives are not exempt. Ben Shapiro, dubbed "Ben Jewpiro the rat faced kike" by a Twitterer named "Diejewdie," was treated to an image of himself in a concentration camp uniform labelled, "Ben Shapiro at Camp Trump." Shapiro wrote in the National Review of:

"experiencing more pure, unadulterated anti-Semitism since coming out against Trump's candidacy than at any other time in my political career. Trump supporters have threatened me and other Jews who hold my viewpoint. They've blown up my e-mail inbox with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. They greeted the birth of my second child by calling for me, my wife, and two children to be thrown into a gas chamber."

Wesley Lowery, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Washington Post who is black, said he received some harassment from Trump supporters, but nothing compared to the attacks directed at his Jewish colleagues.

Being (((Jewish))) in an Age of Antisocial Media

Sending Holocaust taunts to Jews who criticize Trump is made easier by their identification. Stormfront's introductory page claims that "it can be fun trying to 'spot the Jew'." The Daily Stormer provides a helpful database of common Jewish names.

In the age of the antisocial media, this process has become much more efficient. White supremacists identify Jews on Twitter by simply placing their surnames inside three parentheses like this: (((Friedman))), the internet equivalent of pinning a yellow star on a Jew's coat. That shorthand can also serve to denote Jewish control of institutions, often with a fourth parenthesis to denote a collective noun, as in complaints that ((((Wall St.)))) is responsible for the financial crisis and the ((((media)))) and ((((Hollywood)))) poison our children's minds with liberal ideas about tolerance and multiculturalism. They call "neocons," the hawkish neoconservative intellectuals like Kagan, Eliot Cohen and Max Boot, or the New York Times columnist Bret Stephens (((neocohens))), angered because these men have also criticized Trump for his deficits in foreign policy knowledge.

The symbol is called an (((echo))), begun to invoke the echo sound-effect the anti-Semitic podcast The Daily Shoah - a send-up of Jon Stewart's The Daily Show - used to announce Jewish names. It also looks to some observers like a shooting target. Trump does not follow this practice on Twitter, his favoured medium for political communication, but he did make sure that his millions of readers would know that the Jon Stewart's given name was "Jonathan Leibowitz."

There is a healthy resistance. A senior writer for Tablet Magazine and editor of Israel Archives symbolically re-appropriated the virtual yellow star, as it were, by labelling himself (((Yair Rosenberg))) and urging others to do the same: "Want to raise awareness about anti-Semitism, show solidarity with harassed Jews & mess with the Twitter Nazis? Put ((( ))) around your name." This practice spread rapidly. Those who followed his example included Aboud Dandachi, a Syrian exile in Istanbul who has written of his gratitude to Israeli doctors for treating injured Syrian refugees.

Jewish Conspiracies ... Everywhere

To date, Trump has clung tightly to his most controversial current advisor, Steve Bannon, former editor of the far-right website Breitbart News. Bannon's wife claimed in a divorce suit that he had objected to sending their daughters to a school with too many Jewish children. Whether that is true or not, Bannon does favour code words such as attacking the "globalist" media opposed to his and Trump's "nationalism," an updated version of the rootless cosmopolitan charge invoked in the past against Jews.

Bannon was also behind a shocking television advertisement late in Trump's election campaign. The narrator claimed that rival Hillary Clinton was "part of a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class," while images flashed on the screen of investor George Soros, Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen and Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfein, all of them Jewish. The campaign also circulated an image of Hillary Clinton against piles of money and the tagline "most corrupt candidate ever!" inside a Jewish star.

Once in control of the White House, the Trump administration broke with precedent by omitting any mention of Jews in its statement marking Holocaust Memorial Day. As deputy to Bannon, Trump appointed Sebastian Gorka, who once joined members of the anti-Semitic Jobbik Party in Hungary to form a new political party, the New Democratic Coalition. An actual fascist gathering celebrated Trump's election in downtown Washington, D.C., where Richard B. Spencer - who coined the term "alt-right" as a euphemism for white supremacist - addressed a crowd of two hundred to denounce the Luegenpresse (the Nazi term for the "lying press") and shout "Hail Trump!" while audience members gave the Nazi salute.

That white supremacists have embraced Trump as their champion seems to have caused him little public discomfort at first. Even though he has a Jewish son-in-law and a daughter who converted to Judaism, Trump initially rejected a reporter's suggestion that he condemn the fervid anti-Semites among his followers, or even send any message to his fans who engage in anti-Semitic harassment. Melania Trump, for her part, told a reporter that the neo-Nazis' attacks on Julia Ioffe "went too far," but then again, "she provoked them."

Meanwhile, Donald Trump has repeatedly retweeted white supremacists from the United States and the Netherlands, including one who uses the handle "WhiteGenocideTM." White Genocide is the concept popular in extreme right-wing circles that Jews are conspiring to flood white societies with migrants from the Third World in order to destroy their culture.

Asked by a reporter whether he would disavow the endorsement of David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who blamed "Jewish supremacists" for undermining Trump's candidacy, Trump initially refused and pretended he did not know who Duke was, even though he had called Duke "a big racist" in 2000. He later grudgingly disavowed him, not convincingly enough for Duke, who was present in Charlottesville: "We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump," Duke exulted to a reporter. "That's why we voted for Donald Trump, because he said he's going to take our country back and that's what we're going to do."

When Trump spoke to the Republican Jewish Coalition, he mixed awkward, stereotyped backslapping ("Is there anyone in this room who doesn't renegotiate deals ... This room negotiates them - perhaps more than any other room I've ever spoken in") with classic anti-Semitic tropes ("You're not going to support me because I don't want your money ... You want to control your own politician"). His ideas about Jews and money are of long standing. In 1991, according to the president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, Trump objected to employing a black accountant because "laziness is a trait in blacks," and added, "Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day."

After Trump told a Jewish reporter at a news conference to "sit down" and heatedly denied he was anti-Semitic when the reporter questioned not Trump's own views, but what he as president could do against the wave of bomb threats, Trump came under increasing pressure from Jewish organizations to finally condemn anti-Semitism. This he did after the desecration of more than 100 graves at a Jewish cemetery in St. Louis. "The anti-Semitic threats targeting our Jewish community and community centers are horrible and are painful and a very sad reminder of the work that still must be done to root out hate and prejudice and evil," Trump said, without suggesting anything that could be done in practice.

In a speech to a joint session of Congress, he mentioned the vandalism of Jewish cemeteries and threats to Jewish community centres, and stated that "we are a country that stands united in condemning hate and evil in all its forms." Instead of suggesting what he would do about it, he proposed a new government agency to publicize crimes committed by immigrants - even though immigrants engage in crime at lower rates than native-born Americans.

Who Are Trump's Supporters?

By using the power of his office not to protect the vulnerable, but to denigrate them, Trump is appealing to his core supporters, whites without college educations who live in areas with few immigrants and racial minorities, but harbour suspicion and fear of people who are different.

A respected Pew poll found that hostility toward immigrants, racial minorities and Islam correlated more strongly with support for Trump than did concern about economic unfairness or business profits in the United States. Trump supporters were more likely than backers of his Republican rivals to say that African Americans are criminal, violent, and lazy. Asked whether they agreed with the statement, "I prefer to live in a community with people who come from diverse cultures," 36% of Trump supporters agreed, compared to 70% of Clinton supporters. In Ohio voters favoured the protectionist Trump by 51%, but backed Republican Senator Rob Portman by 58%; Portman not only has a long record of supporting free trade agreements, but literally negotiated some of them himself as George W. Bush's United States Trade Representative. Trump also won resoundingly among white Americans who never left their hometowns.

Animus toward minorities and immigrants does not in itself make one a white supremacist, and arguably some of those whites who would like to reverse the demographic trends that will make the United States population majority ethnic minorities by 2040 are the kind of conservatives who would just like to conserve society as it is.

Or, rather, as it never was. The mythification of the Old South is an integral part of the white supremacist claim that white domination has always been benign, even in times of the literal enslavement of African Americans, or during the Jim Crow era (a kind of southern Apartheid that produced legal segregation from the time Northern troops withdrew from occupation duty until the civil rights movement overturned the system in the 1960s). In fact, the ideology of white supremacy is inextricable from the story of America.

And on the radical fringe that today blames immigrants and African Americans for undermining America, and Jews for enabling immigrants to come in and African Americans to get ahead, one can find some of Trump's most ferocious defenders. The Daily Stormer's Anglin told the Los Angeles Times during the election: "Virtually every alt-right Nazi I know is volunteering for the Trump campaign."

It is not hard to understand why white supremacists see Trump as one of their own. They share an otherwise perplexing sympathy for Vladimir Putin, whom the far right see as the strongest Christian leader defending Europe from the Muslim hordes. Jews loom larger in their discourse than in his, and they have to overlook his family ties (some arguing casuistically that since Ivanka Trump is a convert, she and Trump's grandchildren are not the truly nefarious biological Jews). Many are perfectly comfortable with his rhetorical celebration of Israel and his ambassadorial nominee David Friedman's pro-settlement record because they see an expansive Jewish state akin to settler colonialism and would be glad to see Jews leave America for Israel.

"Make America White Again!"

In the end, Trump and his radical supporters share an obsession with the menace posed to a mythical white America, which they want to "take back" and "make great again." Vituperative, threatening messages are doled out in all directions, and actual physical violence so far has struck Trump's favoured targets - Mexicans, African Americans, Muslims and people suspected of being such, like the two Indian tech workers shot in Kansas by a man who thought they were Iranian - rather than his Jewish critics.

American Jews are alarmed by all this, not so much by a sense of personal endangerment as by a deeply rooted cultural and religious tradition of social justice and empathy with persecuted minorities that led to statistical overrepresentation in the civil rights movement and on the American Left - both now fodder for white supremacist conspiracy theories.

To be sure, Trump is not responsible for everything said or done in his name, and plenty of Trump supporters abhor personal violence - even though the single view most consistently found among Trump backers is that foreigners are responsible for America's woes.

When Trump promises to exclude foreigners by race or religion, when he mocks the disabled and urges supporters to beat up protestors at his rallies, when he claims torture works and threatens the largest mass deportations since the end of the Second World War, white supremacists hear a kindred spirit. If they are wrong to see him as their leader, he could do more than utter half-hearted, tardy criticism under intense pressure.

He should restore the full energy of the Justice Department and the FBI to investigate the danger posed by white supremacist terrorism - a greater threat to Americans lives and liberty than the variety he cares about. And he should tell them to stop chanting his name.

Max Paul Friedman is Professor of History at American University in Washington, D.C., and this year he was a visiting fellow at the United States Studies Centre, the University of Sydney. He is author of Nazis and Good Neighbors and Rethinking Anti-Americanism.