Steve Bannon, the Jews who praise him and the hatred that breeds depraved indifference

The deadly consequences of sinat hinam

The Burnt House in Jerusalem is a museum and also a document: a snapshot of the collapse of Jewish sovereignty buried deep in the heart of Jerusalem’s Old City.

Archaeologists in the 1970s uncovered soot coating the inside of the house, in place since the Roman sacking and burning in September of 70 CE of the city’s upper portion. The area is where the wealthier and more established Jews lived, including members of the priestly caste. The Romans had burned down the lower, more impoverished part of the city – and the Temple – a month previous.

The relics are stunning, including a weight stone bearing the name of the proprietors, the Kathros family, who are mentioned in the Talmud.

The most poignant relic is preserved only in a photo: the skeletal arm of a young woman, believed to have been reaching for a step as the house was burned. The arm was buried according to Jewish ritual, not long after the site’s excavation in the 1970s.

The exile of Jews from their homeland stretches over centuries, but 70 CE is what we’ve come to accept as year zero: the year Titus burned Jerusalem and the Second Temple to the ground.

The revolt had started four years earlier, in 66 CE, but Vespasian, who was tasked with crushing it, was called away by the infighting among the Roman leadership before he could fully rout the Jews from Jerusalem. Vespasian emerged from the Roman civil wars as emperor in 69 CE and assigned the remnants of Jewish resistance to his son, Titus.

Titus’ job was made easier by the bloody civil war among three factions of Jews in Jerusalem. Amazingly, the factions besieged and slaughtered one another during Titus’ siege. He emerged triumphant, literally: his troops bearing the Temple’s seven branched menorah, are immortalized in a triumphal arch in Rome.

The Talmud bestowed the term “sinat hinam” שִׂנְאַת חִנָּם to describe the fratricidal impulses that beset the Jews prior to the Roman sacking. The term is most commonly translated as “baseless hatred,” but that has always struck me as inadequate, and I’m not the only one. Rabbi David Fohrman has struggled with the term. My 1996 edition Alcalay Hebrew dictionary uses eight words to try to approximate “hinam” in its entry: “hatred without cause, unfounded (blind, groundless, unreasoning, senseless.)”

The term “hinam” in modern Hebrew has a positive meaning: free, as in no cost. It occurred to me last week that an additional modern term could be added to the mix, one familiar to those of us who are addicted to police procedurals: hatred with depraved indifference. An indifference to others that lulls us into thinking the hatred has no cost.

The occasion was Steve Bannon’s rant about the nefariousness of non-MAGA American Jews at CPAC, the conservative movement conference.

I’ll get back to Bannon, but the depraved indifference I noticed was among the Jews on social media who blasted out the video with comment like “I’m a Jew and a Zionist, but I think Steve Bannon is right here,” and “He ain’t wrong,” and “There’s something to what he says.”

Bannon called non-MAGA Jews the “number one enemy” to Israel. The folks approving of demonizing a vast class of Jews – around 70% of the voting population – are routinely outraged (and with reason!) when much smaller segments of the community suffer generalizations. Think how classifying, say, Orthodox Jews as anyone’s “number one enemy” would land with this crowd.

And it’s true, the depraved indifference runs in multiple directions: The Jews on the anti-Zionist left who describe the whole of Israeli society as “vile,” and who would – again with reason – decry the same classification attached to Palestinians as dangerously dehumanizing. (I’m not linking to or naming the folks who engage in these malign generalizations, but Dahlia Scheindlin’s take on this mutual blindness in Haaretz is worth a read.)

Much has been written about whether Bannon or Elon Musk have simulated Nazi salutes. I find this weirdly beside the point: Instead of falling into their did-he-or-didn’t-he trolls, listen to what they’re actually saying – it’s bad enough.

Musk wants to wipe out Holocaust memory. And Bannon is peddling a theory of Jewish control that culminates in bloodshed. Here’s how Bannon put it at CPAC:

“The number one enemy to the people in Israel are American Jews that do not support Israel and do not support MAGA. MAGA and the evangelical Christians and the traditional Catholics in this country have Israel's back. They have the Jews’ back. The biggest single enemy to the Jewish people are not the Islamic supremacists. The biggest enemy you have is inside the wire, progressive Jewish billionaires that are funding all this stuff. They are the number one enemy. And the people in Israel have to set that right because MAGA has your back. Traditional Catholics have your back and evangelical Christians have you back, we will always have the back of Israel. You have an enemy inside the wire.”

There’s a lot to unpack here, none of it pretty: A non-Jew prescribing to Jews which Jews are good or bad (a reflex that also thrives among anti-Zionists); the attempt to isolate Jews from one another and to turn them one on the other (“people in Israel have to set this right”); the prescription of a non-Jewish ideology (in this case extremist nationalism) as the only legitimate means of Jewish expression. It’s not a coincidence that Bannon couples “do not support MAGA and do not support Israel” – he wants it understood the two are inseparable.

Most insidious is the claim that “progressive Jewish billionaires … are funding all this stuff.” The idea that Jewish wealth is smashing civilization is ancient, but a modern American version fueled deadly attacks in Pittsburgh in 2018, in 2019 in El Paso, in 2022 in Buffalo. It is a libel soaked in the blood of innocents. The other time I saw a photo of a ruined Jewish body cut down reaching for a stair was at the trial of the Pittsburgh mass murderer.

Perhaps the Jews under siege in Jerusalem saw a Roman empire they thought to be in disarray and believed it afforded them the luxury of slaughtering one another. Perhaps the wealthier, Romanized Jews of the upper city believed their assimilation would spare them.

Whatever the case, their mutual hatreds instilled in them a depraved indifference to the horrors lurking outside the city walls.