Minneapolis Will Prove It’s Better than Trump’s Sick Somali Smear

The caricature of Jews as crooks coexisted for such bigots with the stereotypes of Jews as both rapacious capitalists and violent revolutionaries. The irreconcilables somehow reconciled in just the way that Trump has pilloried Somalis as both cunning con artists and Islamist terrorists. And then as now, the point of instrumentalizing racial or religious hatred was and is to deny political agency to liberals or progressives or Democrats, whether represented in the person of the Minnesota Governor Elmer Benson in the 1930s or his current successor, Tim Walz.

As mayor of Minneapolis in the mid-1940s, a young Hubert Humphrey and his sophisticated and incorruptible police chief, Ed Ryan, decisively severed the supposed link between Jewish crime and Jewish sedition. Ryan cracked down on the downtown gangsters, while Humphrey pushed through a set of antidiscrimination and civil rights laws that put him on the national political radar.

The Minneapolis of today, led by Mayor Frey and police Chief Brian O’Hara, now has its own moment of reckoning on behalf of its own community of the falsely maligned and cynically persecuted. Their vow this week to refuse cooperation with ICE is a vital sign that the spirits of Humphrey and Ryan are girded for battle against the grandiose threats of Trump.