The window dressing on Hate 2.0

The pace of news seems to keep accelerating. Last weekend, the Supreme Court issued a middle-of-the-night emergency order to stop the Trump administration from flying Venezuelans out of the U.S. Then Pope Francis died. Every morning we wake up to the administration’s next cruel decision, big or small. There’s almost too much to keep up with day to day.

Sometimes it’s worth taking a break from the news. Or barring that, to step back and ponder a more panoramic approach to what’s going on. Thinking about the bigger picture can help you not miss the forest for the trees. And sometimes the pace of what’s happening feels less frantic when you understand our situation is more predictable than you might have realized.

In that spirit, today I’ll write about an issue that’s come to the forefront in the last year and a half—not to mention the last several decades or even centuries. I want to discuss antisemitism. It’s not the kind of topic that can be covered in any comprehensive way in one newsletter post. But here, I’ll address some broad outlines of where it came from, how it made Auschwitz possible, and why, for those of us living in the United States, understanding how this particular form of bigotry works is more important than ever.

The death-camp conundrum

While writing my history of concentration camps, figuring out how to frame Auschwitz sat at the heart of the project. The Nazis began opening camps, including Dachau, within weeks of coming to power in Germany in 1933. Almost a decade later, they committed to building another enterprise on top of the existing camp system: extermination camps aimed specifically at the eradication of European Jews.

Auschwitz was the pinnacle—which is to say the abyss—at the heart of those death camps, a camp where nearly a million Jews were killed. For these and other reasons, I felt that it was critical to show the singularity of the Holocaust and not to minimize it in any way.

I also wanted to show how humanity got there. Concentration camps had been around for decades by then, but another element had been around much longer.

Origins of antisemitism

Of course, it was not only the Jews of Europe who were murdered in Nazi concentration camps. Millions of other people died in camps during World War II—among them, Polish resistance fighters, Soviet prisoners of war, queer people, disabled people, and Roma and Sinti populations, who, like Jews, were targeted with genocidal intent to remove them as peoples from the face of the Earth.

But the animating hatred of the Nazis—the through-hatred they manipulated consistently to gain and stay in power—was antisemitism. It was one of the most important tools they deployed, and one to which they never lost their commitment, even when pursuing their murderous policies eventually disadvantaged them in the war of conquest they’d launched. What made the Nazi use of antisemitism so effective was leaders willing to embrace evil to get and hold power, a tremendous amount of propaganda, and a population willing, in the end, to be persuaded.

Antisemitism’s roots go back thousands of years. Christianity had begun as an offshoot of Judaism, and sought to define itself against the source from which it sprang. Even after Christianity became the dominant religion in Europe, it treated Judaism as a threat and Jews as an “other.” Edicts were issued to restrict the power and presence of Jewish residents in various regions, and even to force them to wear specific clothing, so that they would be constantly represented as alien. Mercenary leaders triggered pogroms, using antisemitism as a distraction or for political advantage.

Church murals connected Jews in grotesque ways with pigs. Whole works of literature characterized Jewish people as cursed to wander for their sins, with the reality being that Jewish populations were often forcibly exiled, restricted in where they could live and limited as to what occupations they could pursue. Parts of the Christian Bible and many of its translations haven’t helped. The sheer longevity of this bigotry is such that, if you look into the history of nearly any conspiracy theory in Europe and the Americas, you will find its roots in antisemitism.

Perhaps the most disingenuous and influential document in the history of antisemitism— the writing that supercharged existing antisemitism—was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. With a murky origin story, the Protocols are an entirely imaginary documentary account of a secret cabal of Jews plotting world domination.

This forgery is believed to have been been assembled in early twentieth-century Tsarist Russia, a deeply antisemitic place. It borrowed heavily from antisemitic nineteenth-century writings, including essays and novels. But by the early 1930s, the Protocols had made their way around the globe to nurse fervent antisemitism worldwide, including and especially in Germany and the United States.

It might seem strange to connect ancient bigotry so closely to the very modern terrors that the Nazis inflicted, to link the mass-murders of the 1940s to pogroms from centuries before. But these horrors do not ever rise out of a vacuum. Earlier events made the later ones possible. The Nazis took an existing prejudice that had been used strategically by political and religious authorities over time and super-charged it through modern propaganda to benefit themselves. A look at pogroms in German towns from earlier in history showed that they were correlated with higher rates of violence under the Nazis. The past remains with us.

Post-World War II

Despite global awareness of the Nazis’ profound antisemitism, and the realization that extensive mass deportations had taken place, years passed after the end of World War II before the scope of their methodical and pervasive genocide grew clear.

And even after the events of the Holocaust could be intellectually outlined and documented, it remains impossible to understand. But in 1946, just after the end of the war, linguist Max Weinrich said one thing about it that comes to mind often:

“The Jew could be represented as the embodiment of everything to be resented, feared, or despised. He was a carrier of Bolshevism, but curiously enough, he simultaneously stood for the liberal spirit of rotten Western democracy. Economically, he was both capitalist and socialist. He was blamed as the indolent pacifist but, by strange coincidence, he was also the instigator to wars.”

Antisemitism had endured so long and had been used in so many ways that it had become infinitely flexible. It had become totally dissociated from anything unique to Jews and instead had become untethered grievance that could be aimed at will. Decades ago, talking about that passage, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman wrote that antisemitism fits so well with so many local obsessions because Jewishness itself isn’t actually connected with the things that antisemitism accuses it of.

Back to Auschwitz

Auschwitz becomes the pinnacle of this kind of weaponization of a folk prejudice that was seeded and maintained by people who used it for their own purposes. This kind of hatred doesn’t grow directly from ignorance and hatred that all humans are born with. Rather, humanity is vulnerable to those with power making sustained efforts to swoop in and exploit prejudice for evil ends.

It’s important not to minimize what happened at Auschwitz. It’s never been repeated—and we must work so that it never does. But the road to it was laid using so much earlier violence, harm, and manipulation that we have to pay attention to what came before as well. Auschwitz remains singular, but all those precursors to it have already repeated and are repeating even now. And I think we have to consider how other prejudices might be manipulated to the same ends.

United States of exclusion

Why does this matter today? Antisemitism’s elastic nature can be demonstrated here in the U.S. by looking at the university protests against Israeli actions in Gaza. Student protesters are traditional opponents of university administrators, but in this case, many Jewish students wound up accused of being antisemitic themselves because they disagreed in public with Israeli military operations. With antisemitism devoted to the kind of free-floating hatred against Jews that requires no exploration of facts, perhaps it’s not surprising that antisemitism is flexible enough for Jewish activists to be accused of it, too.

The United States isn’t old enough as a country or even an idea to have its own ancient prejudices stretching back millennia. But it does have long-standing traditions of assigning less-than-human status to whole groups who are already Americans. These traditions have centered around the denial of the privileges of citizenship of people who have lived in the country, often for a very long time.

Indigenous people whose land was taken as they were made into denizens saw full citizenship withheld for more than a century. Chattel slavery led to de facto denial of rights of citizenship for Black Americans even after Emancipation and constitutional amendment had addressed the legal issues. Japanese Americans—including tens of thousands who were U.S. citizens—saw their rights vanish when they were put into concentration camps during World War II.

Millions of immigrants have lived in the U.S., some of them for decades, as a functional and constructive part of the country. Even the undocumented ones are already Americans, because they are residents even if they’re not citizens. The current administration is trying to remove every particle of anything that could be considered a privilege of American-ness from these U.S. residents. And they’re embracing the kind of hatred that attempts to strip these rights even from those who have papers. Recent months have seen the U.S. government arresting green-card holders and U.S. citizens alike, targeting them for deportation.

Remember that Hitler’s first goal with regard to Germany’s Jews was to turn them into illegal aliens and force them to leave. The current White House obsession with punishment and exile for aliens in the country—people they pretend are destroying it—is nothing more than the homegrown variety of the antisemitism that plagued Europe, just at a slightly earlier stage. It is our own, American form of a parallel cultural ailment.

And it’s related to why the same anti-alien sentiment was such a powerful motivator toward Brexit in the U.K. Xenophobia and antisemitism both feed white supremacy because outside groups can be blamed for anything that’s seen as a problem, while the targeted groups are not the cause of the problems attributed to them. They are infinitely elastic prejudices.

Being Black in public

Another current effort that the Trump administration is undertaking is the eradication of public power and public roles for Black Americans, as we saw done in Germany nearly a century ago.

Anti-woke and anti-diversity efforts are the current face of Aryanization. Just look at how DEI efforts have been blamed for every problem in government, and how it was promised that removing people of color from public office would restore inherent greatness to the nation. But what does that look like in practice? We wound up with Pete Hegseth, who replaced Lloyd Austin as Secretary of Defense, and a litany of nonstop scandal in just the first 90 days.

One terrible thing about these various forms of deep historical bigotry is that they tend not to knock each other out, but to be additive. This is how we get to racists who are also open antisemites in the current administration at the same time the White House claims to be protecting Jews. Who do American Jews need protection from? If the administration were seriously looking at a rise in antisemitic threats or violence, we might have the answer. Instead, the administration seems to have decided that the real threat to the Jewish people is… other Jews. It’s a comedy of horrors.

But a tradition of antisemitism exists worldwide. And if the flames of hatred have not been fanned as extensively as they were in Europe, the U.S. has a long history of working directly or indirectly to bar emigration by Jewish refugees. Our country likewise long refused to let Jewish Americans into certain public places or roles. Breaking down these barriers took work.

By racing to undo protections for vulnerable groups, the Trump administration has managed to strengthen and deepen every kind of prejudice in America. And we know exactly how far it can all go when we let these deepest fears and ignorance be bridled by hate to drive violence.

The particular prejudice these power-hungry, small-souled people pick up for use as a tool isn’t often dependent on their deep beliefs so much as convenience or what they expect will work. This dangerous kind of demonization won’t stop until we not only refuse to take part in their machinations, but also shore up our institutions so that everyone is understood to be fully human, in ways that can’t be undone.

To-do List

For today, I’ll skip my usual list of small, practical actions you can take. If you’re short on ideas for now, go look at the end of prior Tuesday posts, where I list them each week, or check back next week. Instead, for this week, I’ll close with something different.

Whenever you hear someone categorize a group of people as innately dangerous or defective in some way, if they’re not just trolling you—if they seem to believe what they’re saying—I would encourage you to ask them what they mean. And continue asking, gently, until they can be specific.

I’d also encourage you to practice being able to express in your own words that you don’t support people in power harming or threatening any group on the basis of who they are—whether it’s the country they’re from or their race or religion, or what pronouns they use. Say that you know that this kind of targeting is wrong; that regardless of the intentions of anyone doing it, it can get out of control; and that people often wind up dead.

These kinds of conversations can be difficult but occasionally are surprisingly useful, if you’re able to approach them more in sorrow than in anger. To be clear, they’re not work that should happen in place of actually doing things to prevent the kind of harm I’m talking about today. And they don’t always lead to change.

But with those whom you love or who live in your family or community, they can be a way of letting people know where you stand without giving them the sense of being attacked. Sometimes a conversation happens in a way that plants a seed and opens others’ eyes to what’s going on.

If you come, as I do, from a community that’s less likely to be targeted than many others, these conversations can be a way of in-group education, an attempt to bring you and yours to accountability and not leave it to those in danger to have to explain to other people why, like anybody else, they deserve not to live in terror.

But as is true every week, take what’s useful, and leave behind what’s not. I’m here to give you ideas, not rules.

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