Smithsonian essayist, Dara Horn, backs up and illuminates this stunning opening line thesis of a recent article with several examples to explain why many people who acknowledge, regret, and grieve for the Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust continue to marginalize and oppress Jews on multiple levels.
Horn relates an incident at the world-famous house in Amsterdam where seven people along with young Anne Frank hid in the secret annex until they were reported and discovered by the German military in 1944. Only Otto Frank, Anne’s father, survived the war.
As late as 2017, administrators of the Anne Frank House Museum, and the annex — in Dutch, “Het Achterhuis [The House Behind]”—told a Jewish staff member he could not wear his yarmulke unless he covered it with a baseball cap. The museum director explained this action to the press by stating that a living Jew wearing a yarmulke might “interfere” with the museum’s “independent position.”
How “independent” is a position to force the continued hiding of Jews in arguably the universally most recognizable site in the world where Jews were forced to hide? If officials meant “independent” as “apolitical,” what can possibly be more “political” than the persecution and mass murder of an entire people?
In addition, until recently, in the museum’s audioguide displays, every guide’s language was signified with a national flag, all except the one in Hebrew. Only when visitors called this to the museum’s attention did it include the Israeli flag.
After a full six months of deliberation, officials finally relented to allow Jewish employees to wear yarmulkes.
These public relations mishaps, clumsy though they may have been, were not really mistakes, nor even the fault of the museum alone,” stated Horn. “One the contrary, the runaway success of Anne Frank’s diary depended on playing down her Jewish identity: At least two direct references to Hanukkah were edited out of the diary when it was originally published. Concealment was central to the psychological legacy of Anne Frank’s parents and grandparents….
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Publishers have printed Anne’s diary in over 70 languages selling worldwide over 30 million copies. Well over one million visitors come to her famous hiding place each year. But concealment, states Horn, is,
at the heart of Anne Frank’s endless appeal. After all, Anne Frank had to hide her identity so much that she was forced to spend two years in a closet rather than breathe in public. And that closet, hiding place for a dead Jewish girl, is what millions of visitors want to see.
Would these same visitors have advocated in 1939 for the Wagner-Rogers Act—that Congress rejected—which if passed would have granted emergency refugee status to 20,000 Eastern European Jewish children entry into the U.S.? Would these same visitors have lobbied the Franklin Roosevelt administration to permit the 937 Germans and other citizens fleeing Nazi persecution from Central and Eastern Europe aboard the ocean liner St. Louis entry into the U.S., which Roosevelt failed to do?
Public opinion polls at the time showed that 83% of U.S. residents opposed any increases in immigration.
How many of these same visitors acknowledge, regret, and grieve the murder of nearly two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population, but continue to hold age-old stereotypes of the Jewish people? How many of these visitors express antisemitic epithets and would prefer that Jews not move into their neighborhoods or work alongside them at the office?
Dara Horn’s Smithsonian article could have been written about any marginalized and minoritized group today. In the opening line, the word “Jews” could be substituted with, for example, “blacks,” “Latinx,” “Muslims,” “LGBTQ people,” “people with disabilities,” and many others.
To all the people who acknowledge, regret, and grieve the institution of slavery in the Americas, the denial of formal education to those enslaved, the forced breaking up of families, the definition in the U.S. Constitution as representing them as only three-fifths of a full human being for census purposes…
The continued forced segregation, the hangings, the torchings, the denial of voting rights during the “Jim Crow” era and gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court, the murders of four young girls in an arson attack at a black church, the brutal high-profile murders of Emmett Till, James Byrd Jr., Sherrice Iverson, Trayvon Martin, and countless others…
How many of these same people continue to hold age-old stereotypes of African-heritage people? How many of these people express racist epithets and would prefer that Black people not move into their neighborhoods or work alongside them at the office?
How many people who self-define as “pro-life,” advocate for refugee status for people fleeing oppression anywhere in the world, specifically, allowing entry of Latinx people from our southern border and Muslims from countries such as Syria?
How many people hold a deep sense of empathy for the dead as well as for those alive? How many of us follow the code of “Love thy neighbor [deceased and living] as thyself.”
The price of acceptance in the United States and other countries around the world is a strict adherence to the notion of assimilation into the “melting pot” of dominant group cultural standard by giving up what distinguishes the individual and their group. Upon entering this country, people have little choice other than to relinquish their cultural identity in order to achieve upward mobility in their new homeland.
Until the 1960s, a pattern emerged (what some social scientists termed the “immigrant analogy”) in which white ethnic groups initially migrated to cities, assimilated into the dominant Anglo-Protestant culture, and achieved a certain degree of success. They often relinquished their cultural identities for the promise of social and economic mobility.
Many of these same social scientists assumed that people of color (then called “minorities” or “racial minorities”) would follow this model. However, they did not fully comprehend the profound salience of “race” and racism in the United States, the ethnic consciousness of some groups, and their desire to retain their cultural heritage.
People possibly find it easier to empathize with those from the past than those living today. And yes, George Santayana, many ordinarily good people appear, ironically, not to remember the past, so humanity seems destined to repeat it.
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