Above: in the wake of Trump’s win, the German magazine Der Spiegel published a cover that depicted him as a flaming asteroid heading toward earth. The title read: “the end of the world as we know it” (image via Twitter).

The day after Donald Trump was elected as the next president of the United States, my friend Eric Asimov, wine critic for the New York Times tweeted the following:

As a white male I’m ashamed.
As a Jew I’m afraid.
As an American, 2018 can’t come soon enough.
As an earthling, I grieve for my planet.
(see tweet)

I have a lot of admiration for Eric, as a writer and a wine expert and taster. And I also know him to be a wise and adept arbiter of the zeitgeist. His sentiment resonated with me deeply and I retweeted him.

Here are just a few of the tweets that he received in response

Jews aren’t white, future lampshade. Stop pretending to be white, nobody is falling for it anymore.
(see tweet)

How can you be both White and Jew? Son of a Jew = Jew. Jew = NOT White.
(see tweet in thread)

This morning, my family and I awoke early to discover that Donald Trump has appointed his campaign manager Stephen Bannon, the executive editor of Breitbart News, as a top advisor.

Bannon is a self-avowed anti-semite and a champion of the extreme right movement in our country, the alt-right, whose members regularly espouse anti-semitic, misogynist, and racist rhetoric. There is no question where Bannon stands: between his own personal affirmations and the hate-fueled ideology that very publicly drives his media outlet, his anti-semitic views are well known among political and cultural observers.

He is not only one of the architects of our new president’s campaign but he is now going to be one of his top advisors in the White House.

Donald Trump claims not to be an anti-semite but he clearly holds the values and ideologies of anti-semites in high esteem. He has such great admiration for Bannon that he is going to work very closely with him in shaping American policy.

I am a Jew and I cannot stand for my president to allow such hatred to become part of my country’s policies.

His supporters claim that Jews are not “white.” That’s okay with me. I don’t need to be white. But does that mean that my children are not white? Gauging from Bannon’s supporters’ tone, they don’t consider my children to be white since they are part Jew. That’s okay with me, too.

But these attitudes are terrifying to me in the parallels that we can draw between them and the early policies of Nazi Germany. The historic similarities are uncanny.

Clearly, Bannon doesn’t subscribe to Judeo-Christian values. But does he subscribe to Christian values? Is anti-semitism okay with Christians? I’ll have to ask some of my “white” friends.

This is my president, people. I didn’t vote for him but he is my president. He is your president. He is our president. We cannot stand for this… The Parzen family will not stand for this. No ends justify these means.