Dennis Prager speaking at CPAC in 2016

This week, right-wing radio jock and professional Jew Dennis Prager used a classic anti-Semitic trope to attack Bernie Sanders. The headline at the top of his National Review column says it all: “Bernie Sanders, the Non-Jewish Jew and Non-American American: Cut off from his own roots, he wants others to be alienated, too.”

After Enlightenment Europe let Jews become full citizens of the countries where they lived, the anti-Semites added “deracinated cosmopolitan” to their arsenal. Now there were secular Jews making their own way in the wide world. Now the religious Jews who kept to their own kind were OK.

Here’s T.S. Eliot in 1940, explaining to a correspondent that because Christians retain some connection with their religious past, “[t]he Jew who is separated from his religious past is therefore much more deracinated thereby than the descendant of Christians, and it is this deracination that I think dangerous and tending to irresponsibility.”

Then there’s Charles Coughlin, the radio priest of the 1930s, who along with assailing Jewish bankers for predatory capitalism told “the good Jews of America, be not indulgent with the irreligious, atheistic Jews and gentiles who promote the cause of persecution in the land of the Communists.”

That’s the heritage Dennis Prager draws on in associating Bernie Sanders with Leon Trotsky (“born Lev Bronstein”), who “along with Stalin and three others (two of whom were also non-Jewish Jews) fought to succeed Lenin as leader of the Communist Party.” Sanders may be a “milder” version of Trotsky, but like him (and such deracinated radical and/or capitalist Jews like Noam Chomsky and George Soros, he seeks “to undermine the national and religious identities of others, especially those in their own national and religious group. In the case of Sanders, that means Jewish and American identities.”

Oh, and not only those identities.

That’s why non-Jewish Jews are far more likely to work to weaken Christianity in America than Jewish Jews, especially religious Jews. Religious Jews celebrate religious Christians. The same holds true for Americans non-Jews who have rejected any identification with Christianity: Many seek to weaken Christian influence and identity in America.

Non-Jewish Jews such as Sanders are alienated from Jews who strongly identify as Jews, and from Christians who strongly identify as Christians. And non-American Americans like Sanders and others who identify as “world citizens” more than as American citizens are alienated from Americans who strongly identify as Americans.

The radical non-Jewish Jew and the radical non-American American love humanity, but they hurt real humans, especially Jews and Americans.

This is vile stuff. National Review‘s founder William F. Buckley was always vigilant about keeping anti-Semitism out of his conservative magazine. Prager’s screed is a disgrace to his memory.