It is shocking that Donald Trump issues a statement on the international day of remembrance and fails to include the word Jew. But let’s not forget this tactic really comes from the progressive playbook. Appropriation of the Holocaust and decoupling it from the Jewish experience and psyche did not start with Trump.

Israel is anything but perfect but to my fellow American progressives who both deny Israel’s right to exist and it’s importance to the American Jewish minority, I say take a good look at our own country. Do you deny we have a right to exist because of Trump’s obscene policy? Do you deny our right to exist because of hundreds of years of racism against Blacks and other racial minorities and our treatment of Native Americans?

Just as all American progressives and all good people of conscience must unite to ensure that America lives up to its aspirational goals rather than returning to its racist past, so to must we help Israel achieve its liberal Zionist dream–which necessitates the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state– rather than question its right to exist or support the Global BDS movement that neither recognizes the right of Jewish people to self determination nor supports the two-state solution as the viable way of also acknowledging that the Palestinian people have an equal–but not greater–right to self determination.

I intend to fight like hell to save America,my country, but it’s so important that there is one nation where Jews can always go when anti-semitism rears its ugly head as it is doing in nations like France today and as happened in The USSR and much of the Arab world during Israel’s earlier years. Today nearly 40% of Jews live in Israel our ancestral home and another 40% live in the US. It is amazing to think that at the start of the Holocaust the overwhelming majority of Jews lived in Europe. Today the president of the nation where 40% of world Jewry lives will not even acknowledge the Holocaust targeted Jews on this sacred day of remembrance.