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Next Comes What
How Antisemitism Warps — History's Most Flexible Weapon
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Hate cultivated over time becomes a tool to destroy everything, and it's happening in America today. Read the post that inspired this episode: Subscribe to Andrea Pitzer’s Degenerate Art newsletter to support Next Comes What:...
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Andrea Pitzer
You're listening to Next comes what from Degenerate Art. This is Andrea Pitzer. Each week we'll look at one aspect of authoritarianism to figure out how we got where we are and how to fight back. There's been so much news since the last episode. We're bringing religion back in America. We're bringing a lot of things back, but religion is coming back to America. The Supreme Court issued a middle of the night emergency order to stop the Trump administration from flying Venezuelans out of the us. We're going to honor Jesus Christ very powerfully. The Pope died. It's one of our favorite days. It's one of our favorite periods of time. Every morning we wake up to some new cruel experiment and there's almost too much to keep up with day to day. So sometimes it's worth taking a step back and looking at some more panoramic aspect of what's happening around us. Enjoy your lives. It's partly so that you don't miss the four for the trees, but it's also because sometimes the pace of what's happening is, or at least feels a little less frantic when you understand our situation is more predictable than you might have realized. Our role in history is tremendous. I mean our human role. Absurdity, yes, plays a major role. In fact, it's the greatest challenge to existence, not only to religion. The greatest challenge to all activities, to political activity, to economic activity, to all idea of progress is the encounter with absurdity. In that spirit today I want to talk about an issue that has come to the forefront in the last year and a half, not to mention the last several decades, not to mention the last centuries. So I want to talk about antisemitism. I'll address a little bit about where it came from, how it made Auschwitz possible, and why. For so many people, particularly those in the United States, understanding how this particular form of bigotry works is more important than ever. In a free society. Some are guilty, all are responsible. If you've ever happened to write a history of concentration camps, the idea that you have to reckon with in some serious way is how to frame Auschwitz. The Nazis opened concentration camps, including Dachau, within weeks of taking over Germany in 1933. But it wasn't until almost a decade later that they would commit to building another enterprise on top of those camps. A death camp system aimed specifically at the mass murder of European Jews. This is the place where on the 20th of January 1942, 15 high ranking Nazi officials met to discuss the final solution of the Jewish question. In Europe. 11 million Jews of Europe are supposed to be murdered. They're talking here very clearly about mass murder. Auschwitz was the pinnacle, which is to say the abyss at the heart of the death camps, leading to the immolation of nearly a million Jews just by itself. They built factories of deaths. Never before in history have there ever been built factories of death. Death as an industrial process reached its most lethal forms in those camps. We saw these columns of women, mothers and children going into the door there, talking to us, and they're told they're walking into a bathhouse. You know, they're asking questions, where are you from? And a half hour later, the chimney is belching fire. And that went on day after day and night after night. So it was critical for me to show in the book I wrote the singularity of the Holocaust, and not to minimize it. At the same time, I wanted to show how humanity got there. And how it got there was a very long process indeed. Hitler viewed world history as a racial struggle for survival of the fittest. He saw Jews as the source of all evil, disease, social injustice, cultural decline, capitalism, and all forms of Marxism, especially communism. In addition to the Jews that were murdered, millions more were killed by Nazis in those camps. Among them Polish resistance fighters, Soviet prisoners of war, queer people, disabled people, and Roma and sinti populations who, like European 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 true hatred that they manipulated to help bring them to power, was anti Semitism. After the Nazi takeover, anti Jewish measures were put into effect one after another. Jewish businesses were boyish, then seized. Jews were defined separated from non Jews. Jews were excluded from professions and studies. Jewish children were barred from schools. Jews were subjected to public humiliation. The changes, whether gradual or sudden, were incomprehensible. Few could imagine what would happen, even Jews. Anti Semitism was one of the most important tools they deployed and one to which they never lost their commitment to even when to pursue their murderous policies would disadvantage them in the war that they had started. What made the Nazi use of antisemitism successful 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. In the words of Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, it happens. Therefore, it can happen again. Antisemitism is ancient with roots going back thousands of years, which is an important part of how it grew so powerful in Europe. Christianity had begun as an offshoot of Judaism and sought to define itself against the source from which it sprang. Some church leaders intensified the charge, condemning Jews as agents of the devil and murderers of God. The accusation was not renounced until the 1960s, when the Second Vatican Council officially repudiated the ancient charge that Jews had murdered Christ even after it became the dominant religion in Europe. Laws were passed to restrict the power and presence of Jewish residents and even to force them to wear badges so that they would be constantly represented as different or foreign. For centuries, state and church laws restricted Jews, preventing them from owning land and holding public office. Church murals connected Jews in obscene ways with pigs. Whole works of literature characterized Jewish people as cursed to wander, with the reality being that Jewish populations were often forcibly exiled, restricted in where they could live and what kind of work they were allowed to do. Guilds excluded Jews from most occupations, forcing them into pursuits like money, lending, trade, commerce. Excluded from Christian society, Jews maintained their religious and social customs. The Christian Bible and many of its translations haven't helped. But perhaps the most disingenuous and influential document in the history of antisemitism is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It has a murky origin story. It appears to have been developed using some pre existing materials from the 19th century, while binding them together as the account of a secret group of Jews plotting world domination. The forgery appears to have been assembled in early 20th century Tsarist Russia, which was a deeply antisemitic place. To divert popular discontent at appalling living conditions and autocratic control, Russian authorities encouraged antisemitic violence. It relied on that heavy borrowing, but with new twists, from essays to novels. By the early 1930s, the protocols had made their way into so many translations all around the world and were well on the way to nursing fervent antisemitism worldwide, including and especially in Germany and the United States. Henry Ford's newspaper in Michigan took the Protocols and ran with them. Every Ford dealer would distribute Henry Ford's newspaper, known as the Dearborn Independent. For 91 straight issues. The Dearborn Independent targeted Jews, the world's foremost problem, as he said. Then Henry Ford repackaged those articles into a series of volumes entitled the International Jew. These books were sent free to every library in America. So never before in America had we seen antisemitism at a mass level. There had been earlier anti Jewish pamphlets, but they were considered fringe elements. It might seem strange to connect the most ancient aspects of this bigotry so closely to the modern terrors that the Nazis inflicted. Leading Nazi figures incorporated it in their ideology as early as the 1920s as can clearly be seen in Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. Between their rise to power in 1933 and the beginning of the Second World War, the Nazis published at least 23 editions of the Protocols, which were widely distributed. But the first made the second possible. The Nazis took an existing prejudice that had been used strategically by political and religious authorities over time and supercharged it in the modern era to benefit themselves. A study that looked at pogroms in German towns from earlier in history was correlated with higher rates of violence under the Nazis. The past remains with us. Despite popular understanding of the Nazis, profound antisemitism, and the realization that mass deportations had taken place in Europe for years, it took much longer before the scope of Hitler's methodical and pervasive genocide was made clear. There's a poll in late 1944, and the question is asked, do you believe that Germans are murdering Jews in concentration camps? 76% of Americans by that time believe that it's happening. But then they're asked the numbers, how many Jews do you think have been killed? And Americans cannot grasp the scale and the scope of the crime. It's only one in five Americans believe that it's more than a million Jews who have been murdered, and by that point it's more than 5 million. There had always been out groups and violence against those out groups in Europe. But antisemitism's longevity had allowed a critical shift to happen. After its defeat in the First World War, Germany was in a dire state of economic and political instability. The Nazi embrace of antisemitism in its most extreme form was in part a way to limit political competition. They managed to brand Marxism as a fundamentally Jewish threat in order to reduce its appeal to working classes. But it also allowed a humiliated country to feel superior to a group that it was already willing to see as outsiders, and then to further exclude them. In July 1938, the Evian Conference, an international summit in which 32 nations participated, took place in France. Its express purpose was to find a solution that would ease the emigration of German and Austrian Jews. Ultimately, none of the countries participating in the conference agreed, in practice to open their gates to Jewish immigration or to increase immigration quotas for Jewish refugees. As a human endeavor, the Holocaust was almost impossible to understand. But in 1946, just after the end of the war, linguist Max Weinrich wrote one thing about it that I think about often. He wrote that 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. This prejudice had endured so long and had been used in so many ways that it had become infinitely flexible, infinitely elastic. It had become totally dissociated from anything unique to Jews and instead had become untethered grievance that could be aimed at will. Decades ago sociologist Sigmund Baumann wrote that antisemitism fits so well with so many local obsessions because Jewishness itself isn't actually connected with any of the things that antisemitism accuses it of. A small group of philosophers who had escaped Hitler's murderous regime, returned to Germany and performed a kind of moral autopsy on the third right. The most famous of the so called Frankfurt school of philosophers was a man named Jurgen Habermas, best known I would say. But it was Habermas mentor Theodore Adorno who wrote that the first step in that nation's descent into hell was and I quote, the conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power. He described how the Nazis, and I quote again attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false. So if you're writing a concentration camp history then Auschwitz becomes the pinnacle of this kind of weaponization of a folk prejudice that was ceded and maintained by people who benefited directly from it. It's not just somehow ignorance and hatred that's essential to humanity. It's human vulnerability to someone swooping in and exploiting prejudice for their own ends. It's important not to minimize what happened at Auschwitz because it hasn't been repeated and we must work so that it can't repeat. But the road there was laid with so much violence and harm and manipulation. We have to pay attention to what came before it as well. Because Auschwitz may be singular but 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. Because you know we have thousands of people that are ready to go out and you can't have a trial for all of these people. Why does this matter today? I'm glad you asked power hungry globalists. You know what a globalist is, right? Anti Semitism's free floating and fact free nature can be demonstrated here in the US by looking at university protests against Israeli actions in Gaza. Mohsen Madawi was set to graduate Colombia this spring. But he's now being held in a prison in northwest Vermont after he was detained by Homeland Security agents when he went to an immigration Immigration services center to take a civics test. That's the final step in the process of becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen. Student protesters are a traditional opponent of university administrators. Mr. McAdawi has been accused of no crime. Okay, this is critically important for people to understand. He's been accused of no crime, went in for his final citizenship interview. This is not the America I think many of us thought we lived in. And he was not afforded the ability to speak to his attorney right away. He was not afforded due process, the court of law. He's being attacked because of free speech. This should terrify every single person living in this country, regardless of your citizenship status. They are coming for people because of their beliefs and what they may have said. And, you know, I just. I'm so enraged by this. Also because of who Mr. Mahdawi is. He has said in the past that the fight for freedom of Palestine and the fight against antisemitism go hand in hand because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. But in this case, many Jewish students wound up accused of of being anti Semitic because they disagreed with Israeli military operations. In the student encampments, there were many Jewish students who felt they were not there despite being Jewish. They were there because they are Jewish. The United States hasn't existed long enough as a country or even as an idea to have ancient prejudices stretching back millennia in its own past. But it does have long standing traditions of assigning less than human status to whole groups of people who are already Americans. These traditions have centered around the denial of the privileges of citizenship. Indigenous people whose land was taken away as they were made into denizens saw full citizenship withheld. For more than a century. The chattel enslavement of black Americans led to de facto denial of rights of citizenship even after emancipation and constitutional amendment. Japanese Americans during World War II, who in theory were citizens, who were citizens, saw those rights vanish when they were put into concentration camps. Millions of immigrants have lived in the US Some of them for decades, as a functional and constructive part of the country. Even the undocumented ones are already Americans, but they are not citizens. A judge can't say no, you have to have a trial. The trial is going to take two years and no, the current administration is trying to remove every particle of anything that could be considered a privilege of citizenship from these US Residents. Remember that Hitler's first goal with regard to Jews was to make them illegal aliens in Germany and force them to leave. Okay. This is critically important for people to understand the current White House obsession with punishment and exile for aliens in the country without documentation, whom they portray as secretly destroying the country. We're going to have a very. We're going to have a very dangerous country if we're not allowed to do what we're entitled to do is nothing more than the homegrown varietal of the antisemitism that plagued Europe. You also had people that were very fine people on both sides. This is related to why the same anti alien sentiment was such a powerful motivator toward Brexit in the uk. Xenophobia and antisemitism both feed white supremacy because outside groups can be blamed for anything that's seen as a problem. They're called globalists. They like the globe. I like the globe too. I like the globe too. But we have to take care of our people. We have to. Globalists. While the targeted groups are not the cause of the problems attributed to them, these are infinitely elastic prejudices. So you Fast forward to 2018 and you have the QAnon in a conspiracy theory. Just tell them. Yeah. So it's a. It's a conspiracy theory developed by the MAGA movement during the first Trump presidency that says that a secretive cabal of blood drinking elites is feasting on children. And this cabal is focused in the government, in the media, among Democrats and liberal elites. And this conspiracy theory helped mobilize folks to storm the Capitol on January 6th. It serves as a connective glue, a narrative kind of glue of the. Of the MAGA movement. Another current effort that the Trump administration is making is to eradicate the presence of black Americans in some ways similar to what we saw done in Germany with Jews. Anti woke and anti diversity efforts are the modern face of Aryanization. Just look at how DEI efforts were blamed for every problem in government. And it was promised that removing them would restore inherent greatness to the nation. But what does that look like in practice? We got Pete Hegseth, who replaced Lloyd Austin as Secretary of defense, and a litany of nonstop scandals have arrived in just the first three months. This is why we're fighting the fake news media. This is why we're fighting slash and burn Democrats. This is why we're fighting hoaxters. Hoaxers. This group. No, no, this group right here. Full of hoaxters that peddle anonymous sources from leakers with axes to grind. And then you put it all together as if it's some news story. One terrible thing about these various forms of deep historical bigotries is that they tend to not to knock each other out or to be in competition with one another, but to be additive instead. Kind of a 180 out of the Pentagon putting this page of Jackie Robinson. We'll show it to you here, back up on its website after it was taken down, apparently as part of the Trump administration's push to clear out DEI and the federal government. Before Robinson became the first black player in Major League baseball history, he served in the army, training as an officer, and then with a tank regimen. During World War II, he was court martialed for refusing to sit in the back of the bus while at Fort Hood. This is partly how we get to antisemites in the current administration claiming to be protecting Jews even as they attack Jewish American students. Whom are they protecting American Jews against? All too often, the answer appears to be nobody. I did not see it coming. Classic. All you have to do is look at who is involved in fighting anti Semitism in the Trump administration. This effort's entirely literally led by Christian nationalists. They could barely find any Jewish groups to endorse it. Right. But they're trying to equate criticism of Israel and Zionism with anti Semitism. It's like a litany of people that you would pick to not do this work. Let's look towards the future. And this is a pretty interesting idea that President Elect Trump announced yesterday. He said he just named Mel Gibson as special ambassadors to Hollywood. It is a litany of the kind of people that if you were trying to address anti Semitism in America, you would point to these people as the problem. We will reject anti Semitism in our schools, reject it in our foreign policy. We will reject it in our immigration system. It's a comedy of horrors. But a tradition of antisemitism still exists in the US and if the flames of hatred have not been fanned as extensively here as they were in Europe, the US does have a long history of working directly or indirectly to bar immigration by Jewish refugees. After Kristallnacht, Britain had allowed 10,000 children, but not their parents, to escape Nazism. In what was called the Kindertransport. Democratic Senator Robert Wagner of New York and Republican Congresswoman Edith Norris Rogers of Massachusetts introduced a new bill. The bill says, let's let in 10,000 kids between the age of 5 and 14 per year, 1939 and 1940. The first lady backed the bill. Her husband privately offered advice on how it might be passed, but said nothing in public. But the American Legion, the Daughters of the American Revolution and the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies were all opposed. Our country, likewise, has long refused to let Jewish Americans into certain public places or roles. Breaking down those barriers successfully took a lot of work and a lot of time. But racing to undo protections for vulnerable groups, the Trump administration has managed to make inroads into strengthening and deepening every kind of prejudice in America. His name is Darren Beatty, and his name may be familiar because back in 2018, he was fired from the first Trump administration after CNN revealed he spoke at a conference attended by white nationalists. Beatty has also made a series of racially charged comments, writing in one tweet last year, quote, competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Darren Beatty. Now he's been appointed to serve as the acting undersecretary for Public diplomacy and Public affairs. 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 kinds of political actors pick up for use as a tool isn't usually dependent on their own deep beliefs so much as convenience or what might work. The Trump administration is insisting on trying to create their own preferred version of reality. They say Ukraine attacked Russia instead of the other way around, and expect us to believe it at home. They attack heroes who have defended our nation in war and against cyber attacks as traitors. This dangerous kind of demonization will not stop until we not only refuse to take part in their machinations, it won't stop until we shore up our institutions so that everyone is understood to be fully human. This week, I'll skip my usual list of practical, small actions you can take. If you're short on ideas today, go look at the ends of prior episodes where I list them every week, or check back next week instead. For this week, I'm going to close with a different suggestion. Whenever you hear someone categorize a group, any group of people, as innately dangerous or defective in some way, just on the basis of who they are. If they're not trolling you, if they seem to believe what they're saying, I would encourage you to ask them what they mean. Sometimes just having to clarify that can help awaken some people to what they're really saying. And 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 religion or what pronouns they use. Say that you know this kind of targeting is wrong, and even more that it can get out of control regardless of the intentions of the people doing it, and that people often end up dead. You can point out that any group that is bigger than a few thousand people is going to contain examples of whatever crimes you want to attribute to it. These kinds of conversations can be difficult, but occasionally can be useful if you approach them more in sorrow than in anger. They're not the ones 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 people you love, or people in your family or community, they can be a way of letting people know where you stand gently, without taking direct aim at them. And it does so in a way that sometimes plants a seed and opens eyes to what's happening. If you come, as I do, from a community that's less vulnerable to targeting than most groups, 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 at risk to have to explain to other people why they deserve to live like anybody else. But as with every week, take what's useful and leave behind what's not. I'm here to give you more ideas, not to make rules. And that's it. Thanks for listening to Next comes what? Please share this with anyone who's looking for ways to help each other survive this mess. To support this podcast, Please subscribe@Andreapitzer.com and consider giving Next Comes what? A five star review you where you get your podcasts.