Yesterday, I opened my Twitter timeline to find friends, allies, and colleagues pitting racism and anti-semitism against each other. The battle lines had been drawn, and I was, as I often am as a mixed race Jew, caught in the middle.
Sunday afternoon, Rep. Ilhan Omar tweeted a response to Glenn Greenwald, who was musing about GOP leader Kevin McCarthy’s motivations for threatening punishment for herself and Rep. Rashida Tlaib. “It’s all about the Benjamins,” Omar wrote, quoting a famous Puff Daddy song. “The Benjamins”, of course, are $100 bills — with Benjamin Franklin’s image on them.
Forward opinions editor, Batya Ungar-Sargon, threw Omar a lifeline, asking her to clarify who she was talking about, spelling out quite clearly that Omar had used an anti-semitic trope. Rather than backing off, though, Omar leaned in, quoting Ungar-Sargon to answer her question with one word: AIPAC.
