Bibi’s war crimes have fueled an explosion in global Antisemitism on the Left, while Donald Trump stokes it from the right. Most of the world, including many Jews; don’t distinguish between Zionism as a mutated political philosophy from Judaism, the religion. Now the American material and financial support of the Israeli war machine is deeply hurting President Joe Biden’s re-election bid. The US has enabled Israel since it supplanted Great Britain and France as Israel’s protectors after the failed 1956 Suez invasion. The unwillingness of the US to divorce itself from Israel, and many Jews to divorce Judaism from Zionism, is strengthening Antisemitism. It is also inadvertently helping Trump’s bid to re-take the presidency.

Antisemitism has been a social disease for about 2,024 years, if not longer. In the wake of Trump’s presidency and metastasizing political movement, it is globally stronger and more visible than any time since WWII. His leadership has empowered not only Fascists in the US, but authoritarian dictators and movement globally. Most destructive is how Trump and Bibi have cross-promoted one another’s quest for fascist dictatorships.

At the same time, Jewish Americans have been subjected to the “Great Replacement” Conspiracy Theory. Some on the MAGA far right have adopted it. At Charlottesville, pro-Trump Neo-Nazis chanted “Jews will not Replace us.”

As Juan Cole wrote recently, “In 2021, [Rep. Elise] Stefanik began taking up the talking points of the Great Replacement Theory. It holds that wealthy Jewish businessmen are bringing in immigrants from the Global South to replace white workers, since the immigrants will work more cheaply. Stefanik perhaps did not utter the phrase, but she appealed to all the dog whistles of this odious theory. Marianna Sotomayor noted last year at the Washington Post that Stefanik put out campaign ads saying, “Radical Democrats are planning their most aggressive move yet: a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION . . . Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.” Guess who the “radical Democrats” might be, to which she refers? Could they possibly be people such as, oh, I don’t know, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and other Jewish American legislators who have worked for immigration reform?”

Antisemitism has also become a 3^rd Rail in American politics, with many elected officials intimidated from weighing in either way. That’s the case in the City of Oakland, where I live. The Mayor’s Office, City Administrator, HR Division and City Council members have all ignored a week’s worth of inquiries, requesting to discuss the visible rise of Antisemitism in City government and the Oakland Unified School District. Dozens of Jewish families have withdrawn their children in response to hostility. Some people on the fringe left, including public employees in Oakland are arguing that, “the October 7 attack was a ‘false flag’ staged by Israel – likely with help from the Americans — to justify genocide in Gaza.” This is a gross characterization born out of willful ignorance.

The new Antisemitism from the left may actually be more dangerous than the traditional, garden-variety brand, embraced by the far-far right. October 7 denial is more dangerous than Holocaust denial, which has fueled Antisemitism on the extreme right for decades. Cyber-Well, a non-profit devoted to countering Antisemitism online cautioned, “Whereas Holocaust denial at its height was limited to fringe academic circles and extremist hate groups who gained a limited following through traditional media, conferences, and papers, today social media platforms provide an algorithmically enhanced stage to disseminate the Antisemitic narrative of October 7 denial directly into the mainstream from a select few influential accounts.” The denialist POV is ignorant about some very important things: 1.) Hamas is NOT Islam and indeed committed atrocious war crimes that violate Islam’s Shari’a code. 2.) Zionism is NOT Judaism, but a mutant ideology that strayed far from its secular, agrarian ideals under a series of corrupt politicians. The Gaza War crimes are afoul of Halacha (Jewish law), as Hamas is of Shari’a.

Democracy Now! “New Film Examines American Jews’ Growing Rejection of Israel’s Occupation”

Counterintuitively, the compulsion for unquestioned American support for Israel is now driven more by US Evangelicals than Jews, as more Jews turn away from Zionism. To many Jews, the Temple Sunday School myth that Israel MUST be a central focus of Judaism is invalid. Since October 7, more Jews than ever have stopped supporting Israel. Anti-zionism, as the concept has evolved, does not mean dismantling the State of Israel, but demanding a Palestinian State alongside it. Zionism began as a non-nationalist, secular agrarian movement, without any rhetoric about Jewish Nationalism or fulfilling Biblical prophecy.

October 7 denialism is not so different from January 6 denialism. One promotes and advocates violence against the US government, and the other violently marginalizes a vital sector of the American population – Jews in this case. The ugliness of this false narrative resulted in an atmosphere of unfettered anti-Jewish sentiments, clothed in objections to Israel.

I’ve openly taken Israel to task for its gross war crimes since the late 1970’s, and I have formally dissociated myself from Zionism. So I am making this critique from a progressive POV.

Reasonable objectors were shouted down and verbally abused at a recent City Council meeting.

The “false flag” promoted by leftists denies some very obvious war crimes, which have been well-documented in Hamas and Israeli videos, plus independent media outlets. As for validating the horrors inflicted on Israeli women, it’s been well documented, but is somehow ignored even by groups devoted to protecting women. Oakland and all municipalities in the Bay Area make it a priority to protect women, promote women’s safety and services. We can expect city employees to show the same concern for Jewish lives. Decrying the atrocities of the Gaza campaign and standing for Palestinian rights are worthy causes that are cheapened by denying the basic facts of the horrific terrorist attack launched by Hamas militants on October 7.

“Today’s McCarthyist tactic of manufacturing an antisemitism scare… turns the very real issue of Jewish safety into a pawn in a cynical political game to cover for Israel’s deeply unpopular policies with regard to Palestine.”

Jessica Corbett

( Commondreams.org) – “For the safety of Jews and Palestinians, stop weaponizing antisemitism.”

That’s the headline of a Friday op-ed from Bernie Steinberg, who was the executive director of Harvard Hillel from 1993 to 2010.

Harvard University is among many U.S. higher education institutions—including Brandeis University, Columbia University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of Florida, and University of Pennsylvania (Penn)—embroiled in a battle over antisemitism amid what a growing number of world leaders and legal scholars call Israel’s “genocidal” war on the Gaza Strip.

Even before the Hamas-led attack on Israel 12 weeks ago sparked a U.S.-backed retaliatory war in which Israeli forces have killed more than 21,670 people in Gaza, including over 8,200 children, members and supporters of the Israeli government have used bad-faith claims of discrimination, hostility, or prejudice against Jews to defend policies and practices that have oppressed Palestinians for decades.

Since October 7, reports of antisemitism and Islamaphobia have soared. There have also been heightened efforts to conflate antisemitism and legitimate criticism of Israel, with U.S. critics facing shuttered campus groups, lost jobs, congressional resolutions, and other consequences for daring to condemn the mass killing of Palestinian civilians.

Image by cplesley from Pixabay

Recalling his own experiences enduring antisemitism, including violent attacks, Steinberg wrote for a new Harvard Crimson opinion series:

As a leader in the Jewish community, I am particularly alarmed by today’s McCarthyist tactic of manufacturing an antisemitism scare, which, in effect, turns the very real issue of Jewish safety into a pawn in a cynical political game to cover for Israel’s deeply unpopular policies with regard to Palestine. (A recent poll found that 66% of all U.S. voters and 80% of Democratic voters desire an end to Israel’s current war, for instance.)

What makes this trend particularly disturbing is the power differential: Billionaire donors and the politically connected, non-Jews and Jews alike on one side, targeting disproportionately people of vulnerable populations on the other, including students, untenured faculty, persons of color, Muslims, and, especially, Palestinian activists.

“In most cases, it takes the form of bullying pro-Palestine organizers. In others, these campaigns persecute anyone who simply doesn’t show due deference to the bullies,” Steinberg wrote of current trends on campuses. He noted the effort to smear Harvard’s new president and warned that “the toppling of the president of the University of Pennsylvania is a sobering example of what can happen when we empower these unscrupulous forces to dictate our path as university leaders.”

Founded a century ago, Hillel International calls itself “the world’s largest and most inclusive Jewish campus organization,” operating at 850 campuses in 16 countries. The ex-Hillel leader wrote to Jews at Harvard that “I know that it’s alienating and hurtful to so many of you when campus Jewish organizations, like Hillel and Chabad, take positions that exclude your voices. To those students, I say: The Jewish tradition is much deeper than any organization. No one has a monopoly on Judaism.”

Steinberg, who lived in Jerusalem for 13 years, urged Harvard’s Jewish students to “continue to learn Torah, Jewish history, and our ethical traditions,” and to “be boldly critical of Israel—not despite being Jewish, but because you are.”

“I know what antisemitism looks like and I do not take the issue of violence against Jews lightly. I have monitored, with vigilance, the kinds of speech that Israel-aligned parties are calling ‘antisemitic,’ and it simply does not pass the sniff test,” he argued. “Let me speak plainly: It is not antisemitic to demand justice for all Palestinians living in their ancestral lands.”

“The activists who employ this language, and the politics of liberation, are sincere people; their cause is a legitimate and important movement dissenting against the brutal treatment of Palestinians that has been ongoing for 75 years,” he stressed. “One can disagree with any part of what these activists say, but they must be allowed to speak safely and afforded the respect their morally serious position deserves.”

Steinberg added that “it is very telling that some of Israel’s own supporters instead go to extraordinary lengths to utterly silence the other side. Smearing one’s opponents is rarely a tactic employed by those confident that justice is on their side.”

“Antisemitism in the U.S. is a real and dangerous phenomenon, most pressingly from the alt-right white supremacist politics that have become alarmingly mainstream since 2016,” he asserted. “To contend against these and other antisemitic forces with clarity and purpose, we must put aside all fabricated and weaponized charges of ‘antisemitism’ that serve to silence criticism of Israeli policy and its sponsors in the U.S.”

Steinberg’s op-ed was praised on social media as a “powerful,” “deeply considered,” “cogent,” “must-read piece.”

Rebecca Vilkomerson, a former Jewish Voice for Peace executive director now at Funding Freedom, said Saturday that “as someone who has felt disappointed and betrayed by mainstream Jewish institutions, including Hillel, for well over a decade (and yet plunged into an even deeper depression and rage by their response to genocide in Gaza), I felt deeply moved by this piece.”

Jessica Corbett

Israel’s total war on Gaza, following Hamas’s horrific terrorist attack on Oct. 7, has roiled higher education in the United States. The atrocities committed by Hamas in southern Israel two months ago have reverberated on many U.S. campuses, deeply traumatizing many Jewish students. But so too has Israel’s massive military response in Gaza, which has been equally shocking to Palestinian-American, Arab American and Muslim American students, among many others.

In the heated atmosphere prevailing since then, questions have arisen about the limits to free speech in the classroom, among student and faculty organizations, and on the social media accounts of university members, from professors to administrators. Often, these charged debates reflect the advent of significant numbers of minority students on university campuses, some from the post-1965 immigration wave, who view the Israel-Palestine conflict very differently than the white majority on many campuses, as a recent Gallup poll demonstrates. These controversies also reflect the efforts of special interest groups and outside organizations, such as the Anti-Defamation League, to discipline campus speech and brand some of it as support for terrorism.

Some of these campaigns have attempted to silence Palestinian-Americans and their perspectives outright. In October, Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis ordered all public universities in the state to derecognize Students for Justice in Palestine chapters on their campus. The move came after the organization issued a “toolkit” for understanding the context of the Oct. 7 attacks, in which they characterized Hamas as a resistance organization. The SJP insisted that its student members are part of the resistance, not merely in solidarity with it. DeSantis’s order immediately provoked threats of civil lawsuits that would personally name university officials participating in the shutdown. Emma Camp at Reason magazine reported that as a result, the Chancellor of the University of Florida system, Ray Rodrigues, announced that he was backing off any action against SJP, though he did hold out the possibility that the university would require the group to pledge nonviolence and disassociate itself from Hamas. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a civil liberties group, immediately pointed out that that requirement would also be unconstitutional.

Photo by Merch HÜSEY on Unsplash

But that did not stop the Anti-Defamation League and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law from taking up DeSantis’s program, writing a letter to university presidents pressuring them to close down SJP chapters on the grounds that the group gave material assistance to terrorism (a charge the letter does not substantiate). Under U.S. law, “material assistance” involves training, expert advice or assistance, service and personnel. Given that the SJP is not hosting training camps for Hamas fighters or actively advising the organization on tactics, the letter is nonsensical and, in a just world, would be found libelous.

            Seeing videos of hundreds of innocent, peaceful Israelis brutally murdered, kidnapped and worse at a music festival was horrifying. Knowing that Hamas committed similar crimes against humanity at 21 other sites that day is beyond infuriating and heartbreaking. It makes anybody want to fight back hard. But political capital can be gained by some measure of restraint, and Bibi knows no such thing. It’s no less maddening and infuriating to see Bibi’s government retaliate with ten times the force, committing mass murders from 20,000 feet of ten times the number of women, children and noncombatant men killed by armed thugs on October 7. Seeing hundreds of thousands of destitute people trudging through the streets of Gaza with no place to go makes me weep. Knowing that their suffering is caused by a gross and sanctimonious perversion of Jewish ideals makes it all the more maddening.

            It’s also maddening to realize the gross hubris and arrogance of the Israeli intelligence and Army, which dispensed with sentry border guards in favor of an electronic system, which was so easily destroyed by Hamas while they were sleeping. I was shocked to learn there were no actual eyes, ears and guns at those entry points, after my experiences traveling throughout a heavily militarized Middle East and Israel many years ago. Though I’m an American Jew, I had to establish my bona fides not only before entering Israel at the notorious Rafah gate, but also before entering some places I expected a more cordial welcome. My two days at a conference in 1980 (right after Camp David) in Nazareth elicited noticeable security monitoring to make me feel watched. The security officials seem to have monitored tourists more efficiently forty years ago than the Netanyahu government monitored Gaza’s main gates last October. It appears that it had sent some forces to help squatters on the West Bank, over-confident that Hamas in Gaza was content to play Israel’s policeman on the Strip.

Embed from Getty Images
WASHINGTON, DC – NOVEMBER 13: U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) speaks at a news conference calling for a ceasefire in Gaza outside the U.S. Capitol building on November 13, 2023 in Washington, DC. House Democrats held the news conference alongside rabbis with the activist group Jewish Voices for Peace. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images).

The UN and much of the global public square have not always been a friendly place for Israel, but not because most of the world hates Jews. After all, we earned a lot of global affection and support for surviving the Holocaust. Critics of this rain of death from the skies don’t hate Jews. They hate what Israel has been doing to innocent Palestinian civilians since 1948, and more recently the juggernaut of bombardments in Gaza. Is there a more profane definition of “overkill” than ensuring that ten or twenty Palestinians die for every Israel Jew who is killed?

Zionism is not Judaism and any assertion to the contrary by Israeli propagandists only tars Jews with the brush of the Likud-led government’s war crimes. Most American Jews of the younger generation are uncomfortable with what Zionism has become. Whatever the original virtues of Zionism as a way for persecuted Jews of the Pale to assert their self-worth, it has now mutated into a quest to humiliate and dominate another people. Zionism became increasingly cruel under the Likud Prime Minister Menachem Begin, more so under Ariel Sharon, and more even destructively radical under Benjamin Netanyahu (Bibi). Yes, Zionism was always exclusionary to encourage Jewish immigration (aliyah), but extremists have transformed it into a sick, cruel ideology that impelled the arrogant, imperial atrocities committed by Israeli governments led by those three. It’s as though Bibi and Donald Trump both fulfill their parties’ ultimate fantasies for a cruel, dystopian, Fascist agenda. The devolution quickly escalated under Bibi, just as the Republican Party has quickly devolved under Trump.

They hate the predations of the far-far right wing Israeli settlers who embrace Biblical myth as a valid historical record, as if it carries the weight of modern diplomacy and valid treaties. Modern Middle Eastern diplomacy began after WWI at the 1920 Sam Remo Conference in Italy, and the law of occupation is enshrined in the Geneva Conventions, not in ancient texts. That’s how most of the world sees it. Recent Israeli governments have empowered the illegal squatters to commit even more atrocities against Palestinian people, property, schools, farms, and water and food supplies.

I consider myself to be a good, UN-Orthodox Jew, and see no need to change. I accept my lifelong unpopularity with Republican Jews where I’ve lived, who tend to dominate the synagogues and social agencies of many American cities. They were the class seduced by Reaganomics, and they see no need to change either. (Familiarity breeds contempt at times.)  Still, a great majority of Jewish Americans are fiercely progressive, forcefully calling out the sins of the Israeli military and Republican Party. We oppose the self-annihilating tendencies of Jewish Republicans who abandoned the progressive agenda and moved increasingly to the far-far right under the Bush boys,  and Donald Trump, who realizes all the dystopian elements of the Republican fantasy model after the Bush’s and Reagan just weren’t mean enough.

PIX 11 News from 2 weeks ago: “Jewish peace activists hold sit-in protest at Grand Central to demand ceasefire in Israel-Hamas conf”

            No one cannibalizes their own like Republicans and especially Jewish Republicans. Before and during the founding of Israel, many deeply observant Orthodox Jews fiercely opposed the creation of Israel, and some still do. They view the creation of a political entity in the Biblical homeland as a disruption to the arrival of the Messiah. They too are anti-Zionist, but out of different motivation. We are not a monolith.

            Despite what I am about to say, I don’t argue for abandoning the medical and humanitarian needs of people living in Israel in a time of war. The majority of them hate their government, as most Americans hate Trump. These atrocities are not in their name either. I argue for a more thoughtful Israeli government, invested in a solution that will solve Palestinian statelessness and thereby provide security for Jews. That outcome is unlikely to be achieved by the lawless and authoritarian Netanyahu government, which is wedded to destroying the courts to remain in power.

Through more than 40 years of my commitment to academic study of Israel and Palestine, I avoided calling myself an “anti-Zionist.” Given the discrimination, pogroms and ultimately the Holocaust that Jews faced at the hands of European white nationalism of the Fascist era, it was hard not to thrill at the realization of a long-held dream of Jews to return to the “Promised Land.” This began as a formal political movement with the 1^st Zionist Congress in Basle in 1896. It became a quadrennial conference, and Jewish immigration to Palestine began in increasingly larger waves. Many Jews like me styled themselves Zionists, who nevertheless objected to the notorious Israeli “military excesses.” (A euphemism for cold-blooded, systemic murder and piracy.) But as a Jew, I’ve never been more opposed to what Zionism has become. The massive overkill and atrocities in Gaza led by Bibi since October 7 and the relentless attacks on Palestinian people and properties in Occupied Palestine of the West Bank by right-wing settlers have driven me firmly to the anti-Zionist camp.

One of the problems is that “Muslims” had not been considered an ethnic group, and the main law enforcement tool against hate crimes is Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It says, “No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

This language is problematic not only for Muslims but also Jewish Americans. Where you have a white American of Jewish faith, does that person fall under Title VI? It doesn’t say anything about religious groups.

So it is huge, enormous news that the Biden administration has issued an interpretation of Title VI that underlines its applicability not only to Jews but also to Muslim Americans and Sikh Americans. Jewish Americans are the most frequent victims of hate crimes among religious groups in the US, and antisemitic tropes such as that George Soros controls the country are routinely repeated by American politicians. But Muslims and Sikhs also feel the lash of such bigotry.

Eight key federal government departments joined this initiative, including the Department of the Interior. Interior issued a statement saying that “Today, the U.S. Department of the Interior joined seven other agencies across the federal government to clarify for the first time in writing that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits certain forms of antisemitism, Islamophobia and related discrimination. Today’s announcement is the latest step of the implementation of the Biden-Harris administration’s historic U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, released in May 2023.”

Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, herself a member of the Pueblo of Laguna, remarked of this historic initiative, “Every person in this country should have access to the resources that the federal government provides. Today, the Biden-Harris administration is leading by example and making it crystal clear that antisemitism, Islamophobia and related forms of discrimination have no place in America. Interior is committed to living up to our values as a country and enforcing these important civil rights protections.”

The change is a vindication of thinkers such as Sahar Aziz, who argued in her The Racial Muslim that Muslim Americans have been discriminated against because they were treated not as members of a religion with first amendment rights but as an unprotected ethnic group that could be surveilled and discriminated against with impunity.

Muslim Americans had not been involved in the September 11, 2001, attacks — they were carried out by a small cult of fanatics based in Afghanistan. The some 4 million Americans are famously law-abiding and most often are the pillars of their communities, being physicians, professors, scientists, attorneys, and business people. Trump’s head of Operation Warp Speed, a public-private collaboration that produced the Moderna vaccine against COVID-19, was a Moroccan-American Muslim, Monçef Slaoui.

Muslim Americans have been treated as pariahs by many local, state and federal authorities and have widely had their constitutional rights infringed. Their mosques have been subject to arson attacks, veiled women have been attacked, and some white nationalist groups have subjected them to hate speech.

We had the campaign against a New York Muslim community center to be built several blocks away from the World Trade Center, which opponents called the “ground zero mosque.” We had a political campaign against a mosque expansion in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in which white Christian city council members openly speculated that their Muslim fellow residents might use it as an opportunity to plot out murders.

We had an NYPD surveillance program targeting Muslim Americans. It was only one such surveillance project– Muslim Americans widely had their fourth amendment rights infringed on by security and law enforcement agencies.

Even then Rep. Peter King of New York, who is an open supporter of the Irish Republican Army who defended its violence as “legitimate,” dared come out and hold hearings on the terrorism danger allegedly emanating from Muslim Americans.

We had a rash of unconstitutional “shariah bans,” mainly in Republican-ruled states, which tried to forbid law-making on the basis of Muslim law. There is no reason to think that the 35,000 Muslims and Arabs of Oklahoma want to have the state legislature adopt shariah, which is analogous to the Jewish halakha, the religious law by which believers regulate their lives. Nor is there any reason to think that they could succeed even if they did want this, which they do not.

Moreover, the measures were nonsense. Since US law is in the British common law tradition, actually precedents can be cited from anywhere and a Muslim or Jewish or Catholic law that became customary in an American community would certainly lend itself to citation in court cases. Muslim Americans who make contracts, including marriage contracts, on the basis of Muslim law or shariah, can have US courts enforce them.

Wherever the shariah bans were challenged in court, as in Oklahoma, they were struck down as unconstitutional, and surely the legislators who passed them knew that they would be. They were just grandstanding, and trying for Evangelical votes. Ironically, Evangelical Christians themselves often wish to erode the wall between church and state in the US, but only in favor of Christian law. The Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade was the imposition of Catholic and Evangelical Christian shariah on Americans, which is apparently all right.

President Biden has put the enormous power and influence of the federal government behind a new push to ensure that Muslim Americans have their full constitutional rights. After all, if they are going to be de facto racialized and treated as a “dangerous” ethnic group by many whites, then they should have Title VI protections against discrimination on grounds of heritage.

In Nazi Germany, Hertha Reis, a 36-year-old Jewish woman, performed forced labor for a private company in Berlin during World War II. In 1941, she was evicted by a judge from the two sublet rooms where she lived with her son and mother – she was unprotected as a tenant because of an anti-Jewish law.

In plain daylight, in front of the courthouse in the heart of the Nazi capital, she protested in front of passersby.

“We lost everything. Because of this cursed government, we finally lost our home, too. This thug Hitler, this damned government, these damned people,” she said. “Just because we are Jews, we are discriminated against.”

Historians knew of clandestine acts of resistance, of course, and of armed group resistance, such as the Warsaw ghetto uprising. But in the dominant understanding of the Nazi period until now, the act of speaking out publicly as an individual against the persecution of Jews seemed unimaginable, especially for the Jews.

But in July 2008, I stumbled on the first trace of such public acts of resistance in the logbook of a Berlin police precinct, one of the few chronicles of its kind that had survived in the Berlin State Archive.

The entry, bearing the label “political incident,” was written by a police officer who had arrested a Jewish man protesting against the Nazi anti-Jewish policies. At the time of the discovery, I had studied the persecution of German Jews intensively for almost 20 years, but I had never heard of anything like this.

Intrigued, I started investigating. Subsequently, finding more and more similar stories of resistance in court records and survivor testimonies began to shatter my established scholarly beliefs.

A display box for the ‘Der Stürmer’ newspaper that has been defaced to read, ‘The Jews are our fortune’ instead of ‘The Jews are our misfortune.’ United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Miriamne Fields

Challenging traditional views of Jewish resistance

Historians, including myself, had long painted a picture of passivity of the persecuted. When discrimination in Nazi Germany gradually increased, the Jews slowly adapted, so went the argument. More generally, an assumption still exists today that defiance, especially individual protest, is rare in authoritarian regimes.

The astonishing evidence from the Berlin police files resonated deeply with me on a personal level. I grew up behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany. The communist regime persecuted even mild expressions of individual opposition as threats. This personal experience of living in a dictatorship until the age of 28 provided me with a distinct sensitivity that enabled me to recognize day-to-day forms of resistance.

Knowing from history that the treatment of the political opposition in Nazi Germany was so much more brutal, how much more serious must the Hitler regime have perceived any signs of resistance coming from their No. 1 racial enemy, the Jews?

Still, today the public and many scholars understand Jewish resistance during the Holocaust mostly in terms of rare armed group activities in the Nazi occupied East, for example ghetto uprisings or partisan attacks.

By including individual acts and, thus, broadening the traditional definition of Jewish resistance, over a dozen years of systematic research I was able to unearth many new sources – from police and court records of various German cities to video testimonies of survivors – that documented a much greater volume and variety of resistance acts than could ever have been imagined.

The astonishing results change the view of Jewish resistance during World War II dramatically. The story of Hertha Reis and many other potent tales of individual defiance and courage contradict the common misconception that Jews were led like sheep to slaughter during the Holocaust.

A 17-year-old challenges the Nazi regime

Searching the Hesse Main State archive in Wiesbaden, I found the story of Hans Oppenheimer. He left his four-story apartment house every night for weeks in 1940, breaking the curfew for Jews. Not a single light illuminated the street in front of him. The city of Frankfurt had ordered a brownout to protect it from Allied air raids.

A few blocks away from his home, Hans hid in a doorway. With the entire city, Hans waited anxiously for the bombs to fall.

Persecuted because he was Jewish, as a 17-year-old, Hans had already toiled as a forced laborer for a year and a half, most recently unloading stones and cement bags from river barges for 10 hours every day. He earned only pennies and felt constantly harassed.

Hans had never been to a movie or a play, because those were prohibited for Jews in Frankfurt. As a Jewish adolescent, he saw no future in Nazi Germany. Because the war prevented him from leaving, he had decided to do something.

Every night, he waited in the dark, anxious and excited. When the sirens started to blare, announcing that the Allied bombers were closing in, Hans set off fire alarms to divert the German firefighters from the actual bombing sites. In December 1940, after he had set off dozens of false alarms, the police finally manage to catch Hans red-handed.

The Frankfurt prosecutor indicted Hans Oppenheimer and put him on trial. Since the court could not prove treason, the now 18-year-old received only three years in prison for sabotaging the war effort.

Incarcerated and isolated, Hans suffered from severe depression and physical debilitation. When the prison officials did not respond to his repeated complaints, the young man attempted to take his own life twice. At the end of 1942, the Gestapo deported all Jewish prison inmates from Germany to Auschwitz. Hans Oppenheimer did not survive there for long, because of his weakened state. He died on Jan. 30, 1943, just days after he had turned 20 years old.

A new history of Jewish resistance

Forgotten until now, between 1933 and 1945 hundreds and hundreds of Jewish women and men performed individual acts of resistance in Nazi Germany proper. I present many of their stories in my new book, “Resisters. How Ordinary Jews Fought Persecution in Hitler’s Germany.”

They destroyed Nazi symbols, protested in public against the persecution, disobeyed Nazi laws and local restrictions and defended themselves from verbal insults as well as physical attacks.

Amazingly, Jews of all ages, educational backgrounds and professions resisted in many ways. Some did it repeatedly, others just once. The fact that so many Germans and Austrians individually resisted the Nazis and their policies obliterates the common misconception of the passivity of the persecuted Jews.

Instead, such widespread individual acts of resistance during World War II provide a new view of history: that Jews showed agency in fighting their persecution by the Nazis. And this, in turn, demonstrates that individual resistance is possible under even the worst genocidal circumstances.

Wolf Gruner, Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor of History; Founding Director, USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Featured Image: Lizi Rosenfeld, a Jewish woman, sits on a park bench bearing a sign that reads, ‘Only for Aryans,’ in August 1938 in Vienna.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum /Provenance: Leo Spitzer, CC BY-SA

A survey commissioned in 2019 revealed the shocking result that over half of Britons did not know that at least six millions Jews had been murdered during the Holocaust.

This result was all the more surprising given the fact that the Holocaust, as a topic, has been part of the national curriculum in England and Wales since its creation in 1991. The 2014 iteration of the national curriculum has the Holocaust as a firm part of key stage 3 history – compulsory for all 11 to 14-year-olds in state schools. Additionally, many secondary school pupils may encounter the Holocaust as a topic in English or religious education lessons.

However, research into what school pupils in England know about the Holocaust shows that they lack knowledge about its context. They may know bare facts – ghettos, deportations, concentration camps – but are less clear on the ideology that led to the rise of the Nazis and the Holocaust in the first place. Pupils may not be clear what exactly it is they need to take away from those lessons and how they can be relevant to their contemporary lives.

For instance, it is important to understand how politicians sought to gain popular support by blaming minorities such as Jewish people for all the ills Germany experienced after the first world war. Relentless anti-Jewish propaganda was used to indoctrinate the general population.

It is for this reason that literature can be a meaningful additional teaching tool, not only in schools but also for everybody interested in the events leading up to the Holocaust. Literature can broaden horizons and deepen knowledge. It can offer different perspectives, often in the same narrative; it teaches us empathy but it can also help us to acquire facts and additional knowledge.

However, the sheer number of books on the Holocaust – survivor accounts, biographies, novels, factual books – can be overwhelming.

Sometimes, bestselling books on the Holocaust, such as John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006) or Heather Morris’ The Tattooist of Auschwitz (2018), lack the factually correct underpinning that is necessary to make them a good way to learn about the history. It is consequently vital to find books that meaningfully introduce their readers to the topic and that provide carefully researched historical context.

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit

One example is Judith Kerr’s When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (1971) which is based on Kerr’s own childhood experience. It is the story of 9-year-old Jewish girl Anna who has a happy childhood in Germany until the day her father, wanted by the Nazis, has to leave the country.

Anna’s subsequent narrative outlines the repressions affecting Jewish life on a daily basis. She encounters public events such as the staged book burnings and the daily propaganda that perpetuated falsehoods about Jews. As such, it is an excellent – though hard-hitting – way to introduce a younger readership to the prejudices and reprisals Jews were increasingly subjected to in Nazi Germany.

The Diary of a Young Girl

Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl (1947) is probably the one Holocaust book most people have heard of. It charts the two years Anne and her family spent in hiding in Amsterdam.

The book is often praised for its positive and hopeful message. It is, however, vital that even young readers are made aware of the fact that the Franks were eventually discovered by the Nazis, deported to Auschwitz and from there to Bergen-Belsen, where Anne tragically died in early 1945.

Night

Survivor accounts are generally the best way to learn about the Holocaust. Older teenagers could read Elie Wiesel’s outstanding Night (1958). It describes, in a dispassionate voice, Wiesel’s experiences of being deported from his home town of Sighet in what is now Romania, first to Auschwitz and from there to Buchenwald.

Wiesel lost his father, mother and youngest sister in the Holocaust and dedicated his life to Holocaust education. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1986. If anybody plans to read just one book on the Holocaust, it should probably be this one.

Maus

Some young readers might be reluctant to read such hard-hitting accounts by witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust. They might be persuaded to engage with the topic, though, through Art Spiegelman’s seminal graphic novel Maus.

Spiegelman’s book recounts the story of his father Vladek and mother Anja, who both survived Nazi concentration camps. He uses the imagery of an animal fable by depicting his Jewish characters as mice who are chased by the Nazi cats. While this is potentially a distancing device to soften the impact of his illustrations, it also helps Spiegelman to pass critical comments on the Nazis’ notorious attempts to classify people into strictly segregated groups.

Maus made it back into the bestseller lists in January 2022 when a County School Board in Tennessee controversially banned it from its classrooms and libraries. Censorship is not yet a thing of the past – and it is, maybe, especially the people making decisions about education who ought to read these texts.

Using literature as a tool to augment Holocaust teaching in secondary schools might be a good way to further pupils’ learning and understanding not just of the Holocaust, but of the ideologies, populism and propaganda that lay behind it – and how to identify similar narratives that are, worryingly, on the rise again in the world around them.

Christine Berberich, Reader in Literature, University of Portsmouth

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

(The Conversation) – In the era of social media, antisemitism and Holocaust denial are no longer hidden in the margins, spewed by fringe hate groups. From Ye – formerly known as Kanye West – and NBA player Kyrie Irving to members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, well-recognized personalities have echoed antisemitic ideas, often online.

Technology is increasingly important in Holocaust education – seen here in ‘The Journey Back’ within The Richard and Jill Chaifetz Family Virtual Reality Gallery at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center. Courtesy of the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center, CC BY-NC-ND

Beyond high-profile figures, there are clear signs that antisemitism is becoming more mainstream. In 2021, using the most recent data available, the Anti-Defamation League reported that antisemitic incidents in the U.S. reached an all-time high. Eighty-five percent of Americans believe at least one anti-Jewish trope, according to another ADL survey, and about 20% believe six or more tropes – a sharp increase from just four years before. In addition, Jewish college students increasingly report feeling unsafe, ostracized or harassed on campus.

All of this is layered on top of a widespread lack of knowledge about the Holocaust. As International Holocaust Remembrance Day approaches – Jan. 27, the day Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated – it is important to rethink how educators like me design lessons on antisemitism and the Holocaust.

Rather than teaching the Holocaust as an isolated event, educators must grapple with how it connects to antisemitism past and present. That means adapting to how people learn and live today: online.

Toxic information landscape

The online ecosystem where today’s antisemitism flourishes is a Wild West of information and misinformation that is largely unmonitored, distributed in an instant, and posted by anyone. Social media posts and news feeds are frequently filtered by algorithms that narrow the content users receive, reinforcing already held beliefs.

Mainstream platforms like TikTok, with soaring growth among young people, can be used to promote antisemitism, as can less well-known apps such as Telegram.

According to a 2022 report by the United Nations, 17% of public TikTok content related to the Holocaust either denied or distorted it. The same was true of almost 1 in 5 Holocaust-related Twitter posts and 49% of Holocaust content on Telegram.

An emerging danger is artificial intelligence technology. New AI resources offer potential teaching tools – but also the menace of easily spread and unmonitored misinformation. For example, character AI and Historical Figures Chat allow you to “chat” with a historical figure, including those associated with the Holocaust: from victims like Holocaust diarist Anne Frank to perpetrators such as Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s minister of propaganda.

These sites come with warnings that characters’ responses could be made up and that users should check for historical accuracy, but it is easy to be misled by inaccurate answers.

Another potential AI hazard is deepfake videos. Media experts are warning about the potential for destabilizing “truth decay,” the inability to know what is real and what is fake, as the amount of synthetic content multiplies. Holocaust scholars are preparing to combat how historical sources and educational materials may be manipulated by deepfakes. There is particular concern that deepfakes will be used to manipulate or undercut survivors’ testimony.

Media literacy

Much of my scholarship tackles contemporary approaches to teaching the Holocaust – for example, the need to rethink education as the number of Holocaust survivors who are still able to tell their stories rapidly declines. Addressing today’s toxic information landscape presents another fundamental challenge that requires innovative solutions.

As a first step, educators can promote media literacy, the knowledge and skills needed to navigate and critique online information, and teach learners to approach sources with both healthy criticism and an open mind. Key strategies for K-12 students include training them to consider who is behind particular information and what evidence is provided and to investigate the creators of an unknown online source by seeing what trusted websites say about its information or authors.

Media literacy also entails identifying a source’s author, genre, purpose and point of view, as well as reflecting on one’s own point of view. Finally, it is important to trace claims, quotes and media back to the original source or context.

Applying these skills to a Holocaust unit might focus on recognizing the implicit stereotypes and misinformation online sources often rely on and paying attention to who these sources are and what their purpose is. Lessons can also analyze how social media enables Holocaust denial and investigate common formats for online antisemitism, such as deepfake videos, memes and troll attacks.

Learning in the digital age

Holocaust educators can also embrace new technologies, rather than just lament their pitfalls. For example, long after survivors die, people will be able to “converse” with them in museums and classrooms using specially recorded testimonies and natural language technology. Such programs can match a visitor’s questions with relevant parts of prerecorded interviews, responding almost as though they were talking to the visitor in person.

Holocaust Memorial. Pixabay.

There are also immersive virtual reality programs that combine recorded survivor testimonies with VR visits to concentration camps, survivors’ hometowns and other historical sites. One such exhibition is “The Journey Back” at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center. Not only can VR experiences transport viewers to such sites in a more realistic way than traditional lessons, but they also allow learners to partially decide how to interact with the virtual environment. In interviews for my current research, viewers report Holocaust VR experiences make them feel emotionally engaged with a survivor.

Society’s ‘family tree’

People often learn about themselves by exploring their family trees, examining heirlooms passed down from ancestors and telling stories around the dinner table – helping people make sense of who they are.

The same principle applies to understanding society. Studying the past provides a road map of how people and prior events shaped today’s conditions, including antisemitism. It is important for young people to understand that antisemitism’s horrific history did not originate with the Holocaust. Lessons that lead students to reflect on how indifference and collaboration fueled hate – or how everyday people helped stop it – can inspire them to speak up and act in response to rising antisemitism.

Holocaust education is not a neutral endeavor. As survivor and scholar Elie Wiesel said when accepting his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.”

Alan Marcus, Professor of Curriculum & Instruction, University of Connecticut

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.