Before the current war, I had always resisted analogies between today's flavor of antisemitism to the 1930s. But now when I browse old newspapers, I cannot help but feel that the events today are echoes of what happened then.
Each of those three stories has its own "rhymes" today in the supposedly enlightened West.
The first story, "Fight on Jews Will Continue, says Streicher" starts off with
Julius Stretcher, spearhead of Germany's anti-Semitic drive, bitterly assailed Jews tonight and announced the Nazi fight against them will “continue until all humanity understands the problem"
The same crazed hate that Nazis have for Jews is the hate we are seeing throughout the world for "Zionists." As in 1935, anti-Zionists feel an almost mystical obligation to convert the world to their noxious viewpoints.
Just as the campus encampments physically blocked Zionist Jews from approaching, and blacklists are now being created of writers and celebrities celebrities who are not sufficiently anti-Zionist, Streicher railed against German women who slept with Jews and supported publicly shaming and "canceling" them to discourage any interaction with Jews.
His widely heralded speech was a rambling one. It was wildly applauded by 23,000 listeners in the huge Berlin Sportspalast while Jews remained in seclusion.Stretcher said “If we lead a woman who has forgotten her racial obligations through the city, the wife of the American ambassador gets exalted about it." His reference was to an incident In Nurnberg when a woman was led through the streets with a placard announcing she was a “racial traitor"“Present at the time this incident occurred,” Streicher said, “was I believe the wife of the American ambassador who was shocked. The American press said that in Nurnberg Jews and girls were led through the streets dth placards ‘racial traitor' on their breasts. "“God created different races so they would not mix," Streicher shouted ,“else he would have created one mixed race In the beginning." Legal steps, he warned, will be taken to end mixed marriages, branding any German girl who “gives herself to a Jew” as "lost to the German race.The Jewish question, he asserted, is so serious it is a millennial question. "If humanity can't solve it humanity will decay."
I cannot find any difference in the level of hate and vitriol between Streicher's hate of Jews and today's "progressive" opinion of Zionists. Both go way, way beyond criticism, but both frame themselves as logical and reasonable protection against a global danger.
The second story is even more similar to today. It was written by Henry Haskell about how the Nazi party destroyed German universities by imposing its own racial theories on all scholarly fields.
Before the war Germany was supreme In the realm of scholarly research. It was the ambition of every energetic young American looking forward to an academic career to get his PhD from a German university. Naturally the effects of the pressure of the Nazi regime on scholarship are of concern to the world.Briefly, free scholarly research in important fields of German universities is dead.The faculties have been purged of many distinguished scholars wpo were objectionable personally to the regime. A few Jewish professors are left, but most of them have followed Einstein into exile. Known liberals, especially those affiliated with the liberal or radical parties, have been displaced....At last year's session of the great German conference of psychologists the papers read discussed such subjects as “National Socialist Ideology" and “The Structure of the Aryan Folk State.”
Haskell asked a German expert on about what was happening, and how all fields are affected.
"...Naturally there la little room for the sort of free scholarly research we have had In the past... Medical research, anatomy and physiology, must be concerned with the science of breeding a pure race and with investigating the effects of race mixtures The field of comparative religion must be investigated from the new viewpoint. Leadership as you know it a fundamental party principle and so in theology ws have lectures on ‘The Leadership Principle In the New Testament,’ The Leadership Idea in Early Christianity,' ‘Christianity and Race ‘Leadership Figures in Church History’“Philosophy and psychology musi reconsider all their fundamental principles and you yourself have mentioned the Aryan and non-Aryan conflict in mathematics The relation of literature to the Aryan idea is obvious."
We are seeing this being played out today. No subject is too far afield for an anti-Zionist perspective to be included, and this is done deliberately. And not only in academia, but in places like children's books, recipe books, poetry, plays - the list is endless.
The third article discusses a pro-Nazi conference that was to be held in New York City but was moved when the hotel refused to display the Nazi flag.
The organizers ridiculed the idea that they are antisemitic, because, they said, they had "plenty of Jews" as members.
Just as today's antisemites can point to "Jewish Voice for Peace" to pretend that they don't hate Jews, so did the German Americans who were proud of the Nazi government.
No analogy is perfect, but the feeling one gets when reading these articles is that we are in danger of this happening all over again.
