Officials of Auschwitz II-Birkenau in Poland announced that a security guard at the former Nazi concentration camp discovered on October 5 widespread antisemitic graffiti sprayed on nine wooden barracks. Some of the scrawls included Holocaust denials seen as a cruel affront to the approximately 1.1 innocent souls, 90% of who were Jews, who lost their lives to the horrors of Nazi cruelty and inhumanity.
This terrorist vandalism is an example of the rising tide of antisemitism in Europe. A recent research report released by Europe’s Agency for Fundamental Rights found that 81% of young Jewish Europeans responded that antisemitism is an issue in their countries. Fully 44% reported that they were the target of antisemitic harassment or attack in the previous 12 months.
Now we are hearing a top leader in Southlake, Texas in the Carroll school district that teachers who discuss the Holocaust must “balance” Holocaust books with “opposing” views. What “opposing” views? Does this school “leader” want teachers to validate claims deniers argue that the Holocaust is fiction and that it never happened? Or does the “leader” want teachers to ratify the Christian white supremacist position that Jews, homosexuals, Roma, people with disabilities, Jehovah’s Witnesses, unemployed people, and so-called “vagrants” deserved their death?
This vicious assault by presently unknown vandals at Birkenau and comments in Southlake hit me hard. The Nazi regime decimated large segments of my family in Poland (some at Auschwitz II-Birkenau and Belzec concentration camps) and in Hungary.
According to Ashkenazi (Eastern and Central European Jewish tradition), a newborn infant is given a name in honor of a deceased relative. Either the entire name is taken or a new name is formed by taking the initial letter of the name of the ancestor being honored. I had the good fortune of being named after my maternal great-grandfather, Wolf Mahler. As it has turned out over the years, Wolf not only gave me my name, but he and great-grandmother Bascha also gave me a sense of history and a sense of my identity.
My grandfather, Shimon Mahler, and three of his sisters left Krosno in 1912 bound for New York, leaving his parents and nine of his siblings. (Already in this country was one brother, David Mahler.)
He arrived in the United States on New Years’ Eve in a city filled with gleaming lights and frenetic activity, and with his own heart filled with hope for a new life.
Shimon returned to Krosno with my grandmother, Eva, in 1932 to a joyous homecoming — for this was the first time he had seen his mishpucha (family) since he left Poland. He took with him an early home movie camera to record his family and his town on film.
While in Poland he promised that once back in the United States, he would try to earn enough money to send for his remaining family members who wished to leave, but history was to thwart his plans. During that happy reunion, he had no way of knowing that this was to be the last time he would ever see his loved ones he left behind alive. Just seven years later, the Nazis invaded Poland.
Shimon heard the news while sitting in the kitchen of his home in Brooklyn. He was so infuriated, so frightened, so incensed that he took the large radio from the table, lifted it above his head, and violently hurled it against a wall. He knew what this invasion meant. He knew it signaled the end of the Jewish population in Eastern Europe as he had known it. He knew it meant certain death for people he had grown up with, people he had loved, people who had loved him.
Shimon’s fears soon became real. He eventually learned from a brother who had eventually escaped into the woods with his wife and young son that his father Wolf, and several of his siblings were killed by Nazi troops either on the streets of Krosno or up a small hill about 20 kilometers away in a mass grave.
His mother, Bascha, had died earlier in 1934 of a heart attack. Other friends and relatives we learned were eventually loaded onto cattle cars and transported to Auschwitz and Belzec concentration camps.
Shimon never fully recovered from those days in 1939. Though he kept the faces and voices from that distant land within him throughout his life, the Nazis also invaded my grandfather’s heart, killing a part of him forever. My mother told me that Shimon became increasingly introspective, less spontaneous, less optimistic of what the future would hold.
In this country, my own father suffered the effects of anti-Jewish prejudice. One of only a handful of Jews in his school in Los Angeles in the 1920s and ‘30s, many afternoons he returned home injured from a fight. To get a decent job, his father, Abraham, was forced to anglicize the family name, changing it unofficially from “Blumenfeld” to “Fields.”
My parents did what they could to protect my sister and myself from the effects of anti-Jewish prejudice, but still, I grew up with a constant and gnawing feeling that I somehow did not belong. The time was the early 1950s, the so-called “McCarthy Era”—a conservative time, a time when difference of any sort was held suspect.
On the floor of the U.S. Senate, a brash young Senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, sternly warned that “Communists [often thought of as Jews in public perceptions] corrupt the minds of good upstanding Americans,” and he proceeded to have them officially banned from government service as alleged “Communists.”
In a 2020 research survey, 88% of Jewish respondents said that antisemitism is a problem in the United States with only 11% saying that it is not, with 82% stating that the problem has increased over the past five years.
Pervasive hatred and oppression against the Jewish people have their bases in persistent representations of Jews as “race” polluters, and as manipulators, controllers, and destroyers of the glorious Western civilization. These perennial conspiracy theories have resulted in blatant antisemitic macroaggressions, and day-to-day microaggressions of Christian privilege facilitated and maintained by consistent Christian hegemony within these “Western” nations.
Anti-Jewish hatred, while a mainstay of political, religious, and social discourse in the United States, appears nevertheless to be on the rise.
So why do people all along the political spectrum, from far left to far right, from self-described “white supremacists” to many who are otherwise well-intentioned target Jews, many who appear “white”?
The answer, stemming from a long and complex history, is quite simple: Though Jewish people are members of every so-called “race,” even Jews of European heritage (Ashkenazim) have been and still continue to be “racially” othered by some dominant Christian European-heritage communities. In addition, dominant groups have historically scapegoated Jews for causing the major problems faced by nations.
For these reasons, members of white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups engage in religious, ethnic, and racial bigotry against all groups they consider non-white, including Jews. In other words, anti-Jewish prejudice and discrimination (a.k.a. antisemitism) is a form of racism.
In addition to the supposed “racialized” other, Jews have been represented as invaders, dominators, controllers of national and international banking and economic systems, the media, politicians, and other centers of power, and destroyers of societies. Antisemitism is presented as conspiracy theories, sometimes as warnings relayed in coded and not-so-coded language.
Jews will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!
The estimated 1500 neo-Nazi white supremacists blared out this disgusting chant as they marched with their Tiki Torches in hand through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, August 11-12, 2017, in their “Unite the Right” protest rally over the scheduled removal of a statue commemorating Civil War General Robert E. Lee. This march was reminiscent of similar events held throughout Germany, and particularly in Nuremberg during the Nazi era.
Many Jews within our communities carry a collective “enemy memory”: from the long history of antisemitism, an intense awareness that anti-Jewish oppression can surface again at any time, regardless of how “good” conditions for Jews appear at any given historical moment.
To the haters, the conspiracy theorists, the vandals, the harassers, and the murderers, I tell you that we will write our own stories. We will write our history. We will never again be your victims. We will embrace one of the foundational tenets of liberation by defining ourselves.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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