“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the Jews.” I misquote Shakespeare; in Henry VI, part ii, Jack Cade, leading a populist rebellion, wants to kill all the lawyers. Given a joke current in New England decades ago—every Jewish family has one lawyer, except those which have two or three—, kill the one, kill the other, it almost comes to the same thing.
Dana Milbank’s recent editorial “American Jews start to think the unthinkable” (The Washington Post, 28 October) reports that some Jews are beginning to think of leaving America and going into exile. Some people hope that they do—or else. As Trump warns American Jews in obvious mobster lingo, they had better cozy up to him “before it is too late.” “Too late” for what? What would this dictator-would-be do if it were “too late”?
Nothing in the recent surge in antisemitism elsewhere—none yet reported in New Mexico—surprises me. By the time I was 10, I had taught myself that America could turn antisemitic in a fascist revival. I had read about Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent’s 1920s diatribes on Jewish plans to control the world and about Father Coughlin’s 1930s antisemitic and pro-fascist radio broadcasts. I had read newspaper stories of the 1945 discoveries of the death camps--the starvation, overwork, beatings, tortures, medical experiments, murders, incinerations—designed for Jews. I had heard about anti-Jewish residential restrictions in my hometown, Shaker Heights. The legacy of my early self-education is forbearance in the face of antisemitism, now accelerating and increasing the chances of a pogrom in America.
But most Americans know little about Holocaustic antisemitism in fascist Germany for three reasons. One, Auschwitz, the icon of antisemitism in Europe, teaches nothing about it. Two, the atrocities are so horrific, so enormous, and so long ago and far away that they make perpetuation by a state or acceptance by its people incomprehensible or unimaginable. Fact: Germany, a modern state, became genocidally antisemitic, and its cultivated, educated people accepted genocide for Jews. Three, atrocities resulting from antisemitic polices start small, then worsen exponentially. Fact: antisemitic leaders slowly harden those with moral or religious principles to the coarseness required to accept ever more brutal behavior toward Jews. With antisemitism rife in their history, always latent, sometimes overt, Germans quickly adjusted to barbarities against Jews.
Note: My subject is antisemitism, but the same principles and practices applied to other groups, whether social (Roma, Sinti), religious (Jehovah’s Witnesses), racial (Blacks especially but not exclusively), political (socialists, communists), national (Poles, etc.), gender (LGBTQ), or medical (the disabled). They apply to a society’s outliers and others stigmatized. We have outliers right here is America. Among those stigmatized here: Jews, Blacks, Hispanics and Asian-Americans, and LGBTQs. Trump’s mocking a reporter with a disability or RNC chair Ronna McDaniel’s mocking Pennsylvania’s Democratic Senatorial candidate with a stroke-induced speech impediment is no aberration. The party is built on a diverse array of forms of abuse, as their anti-people policies imply.
So what about America and Americans? Has the country and its people become used to antisemitism? Is the concept of America as a “Christian nation” justifying the growth of antisemitism? The increasing number of antisemitic episodes and the lack of prompt and unqualified repudiation by elected Republican leaders and officials mean that they know two things: the country and its citizens already tolerate antisemitism, and they can exploit antisemitism for their political purposes with impunity. (Progressives do not use antisemitism in their campaigns for office.) Republicans have succeeded in anesthetizing the righteous, and arousing and emboldening the rest. Trump’s appeal to his base, most members of the Republican Party, and other voters under his sway have already forsaken America’s first foundational value, the equality of all people. Any departure from that value is necessarily a step prompted by and taken toward bigotry.
Antisemitism is one such step. As I have blogged, institutional racism is the result of its essential pre-condition, individual racism. Likewise, other kinds of bigotry, including antisemitism. Antisemitism begins, not with death camps and furnaces, but with slurs and violence. It spreads when people ignore or deny such evidence of antisemitism in their community, neighborhood, circle of friends, and family—unless they themselves utter or act them. Then this popular toleration enables antisemitic miscarriages of justice by the legal community—police, prosecutors, judges.
I recently asked a lawyer in the Governor’s administration about the circumstances prompting the Governor’s executive order about antisemitism. The lawyer did not know. I said that it did not apply to government personnel acting antisemitically in the exercise of their duties. I gave the example of five false code violations alleged by a police officer who saw a Jewish star on my house but tolerated by city officials to resist the obvious inference about the officer’s motive. The lawyer’s prompt response: antisemitism.
The 3-year-and-counting refusal of the Las Cruces mayor, all councilors, two police chiefs, and, notably, the city attorney to admit the facts and rectify the wrongs identifies each as an antisemite. The mayor and councilors excluded them from police review; the LCPD closed my complaint without mentioning them; the city attorney defied them by asserting counter-factually that the violations were valid. Worse, when the city manager admitted the facts and agreed to apologize for the false charges, the city attorney intervened to stop him from doing so. Rule of thumb: antisemites never apologize for words or deeds offensive to Jews. Their acts of omission or commission identify these officials as tenacious antisemites.
Is there a link between the antisemitism of Las Cruces officials and a pogrom? Not if citizen disapprove of and protest antisemitic speech and acts. But if they become more numerous and widespread, these antisemitic public officials will act in support of trends which play to their propensities. They will do more of what comes naturally to them. The exception to the rule of law in my case will likely become the rule in other false but more serious allegations against Jews, with jailing, penalties, and worse to follow. In Las Cruces, with citizens indifferent to or tolerant of the abuse of law by their antisemitic officials, a pogrom is quite possible. Will there be one? Maybe. If so, I may live to see it.
The lesson: Auschwitz ends what the antisemitic begin and the morally tainted or weak abide.
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