America has a serious problem with evangelical Christians pretending to be Jews

Yesterday on Twitter, a Christian author wished happy Rosh Hashanah to all Jewish and Christian people celebrating the holiday. She then informed her followers that the Jewish New Year would begin when the first sliver of the new moon appeared in Israel.

A lot of Jewish people (myself included) told her, more or less politely, that that was ridiculous. Rosh Hashanah, like most Jewish holidays, begins at sundown wherever you happen to be; Jewish rituals and practices have been formed by literally millennia in diaspora. She was unconvinced, however, and doubled down, eventually insisting she was being bullied and blocking her Jewish interlocutors.

Social media is social media, and you can find people saying all sorts of silly things without too much trouble. But this isn’t a one-off. Christians — especially evangelical Christians in the US — have become more and more aggressive about appropriating Jewish traditions, and about insisting that they are the arbiters of Jewish identity. In doing so, they marginalize Jewish people within their own communities and seek to absolve themselves of guilt for antisemitic policies and prejudices past and present.

Examples of Christians draping themselves in Jewish identity abound. Right-wing Christians have taken to blowing shofars — rams’ horns sounded on the Jewish High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur — at rallies. The Christian horns are generally large and often draped in red, white and blue. They’ve taken a Jewish ritual symbol linked to atonement and turned it into a militant battle cry for a Christian America.

Some Christians also believe that Rosh Hashanah will be the date of the Rapture. That’s the day when Christian believers are taken bodily into heaven, and the start of the end times when Jews either have to convert or go to hell.

As a secular Jewish atheist, like my fathers and grandfathers before me, I’m not personally offended at the blasphemy. But Christian appropriation of Jewish holidays is part of a larger trend of appropriating Jewish identity for very dubious political purposes.

In January of this year, Republicans and one conservative Democrat — none of whom are Jewish — formed the Caucus for the Advancement of Torah Values. It claimed to be devoted to fighting antisemitism and advancing the interests of Israel. But a bunch of gentiles claiming to speak for Jewish values borders on antisemitism in itself. There are many Jewish members of Congress; if you can’t convince any of them to participate in your pseudo-Jewish caucus, maybe show a little humility.

Former President Trump also liked to position himself as the self-appointed ruler of the Jews. In 2019, he claimed that Jewish people who vote for Democrats demonstrate “either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.”

Trump based this claim on the fact that he was an enthusiastic supporter of Israel, and especially of Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of Israel’s right-wing government. But American Jewish people in the United States are not Israeli citizens; they’re American. And while some 80 percent of them are sympathetic to Israel, 70 percent are Democrats and they were close to evenly split on support for Netanyahu when he was in power.

In any case, it’s not up to an American Christian president to smear Jews with the antisemitic trope of disloyalty if they don’t recognize him and his party as the embodiment of Jewish identity. Nor do Christians have the standing to tell me I’m not Jewish because I support Palestinian rights and think Israeli government policy is cruel and inhumane.

Evangelical right-wing Christians enlist Jewish identity to validate their foreign policy in the Middle East. They also enlist Jewish identity to validate Christian theocracy at home. Right-wing Christians love to talk about “Judeo-Christian values” as the values underpinning western civilization. Supposedly these values are not narrowly sectarian, since they encompass both Christians and Jews.

But in fact, the policies pushed by these far-right, white, evangelical Judeo-Christian value-holders often marginalize and target Jewish people. Forcing pregnant people to give birth is often touted as central to Judeo-Christian values on the right. But abortion bans in most cases are inconsistent with most Jewish traditions. “Judeo-Christian” values therefore are being used to subject Jewish women to Christian supremacist theocratic laws enforced by the state. Jewish identity is therefore weaponized by Christians against Jewish people.

Christians have a long, brutal history of persecuting, torturing, and murdering Jewish people in shockingly large numbers. That persecution and violence is less now in the US than in some times and places, but it isn’t over. And Jewish people are generally the ones who are most aware of violence against Jewish people. Listening to Jewish voices about antisemitism and marginalization is important if you want to contain and fight against antisemitism. That’s true even though, of course, different Jewish people may have different views on what constitutes antisemitism and may disagree on individual cases.

But what happens when Christians abrogate to themselves the right to define and speak for Jewish people? I’m sure, for example, that some Christians will read this essay and say, “Well, the author is an atheist, and that means he doesn’t count as Jewish — I’m a Christian who celebrates Rosh Hashanah, and I’m more Jewish than him.” But if non-Jews are in a position to decide which Jewish voices count, or who is and is not a real Jew, they are also in a position to decide when antisemitism “counts.” They’re even in a position to decide that certain “fake Jews” deserve to be the target of discrimination and violence for not being Jewish enough.

Identity is complicated, and Jewish identity — which is linked to religion, ethnicity, heritage, history, persecution, and more — is as complicated as any. But that doesn’t mean that Christian communities get to take it for themselves.

If Christians want to atone during the Jewish High Holy days, they could start by reflecting on the fact that they are, historically, not the Jews themselves, but the Jews’ persecutors. In that context, when Christians blow that giant ram’s horn, many Jewish people aren’t going to hear it as a show of solidarity. They’re going to hear it as a threat.