Jeff Jacoby: The politics of an Auschwitz survivor’s son
Equally menacing is an obsession with race and racial distinctions. Hitler’s Germany deemed “Aryans” the highest race and Jews the lowest. In their fanaticism on the subject, the Nazis demonized Jews, denied them legal rights, deprived them of their livelihoods, drove them from their homes, and finally destroyed them by the millions. As the son of a Holocaust survivor, I consider all racial categories fundamentally illegitimate. I abhor the labeling and sorting of Americans by race. “Classifications and distinctions based on race or color,” argued the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in a 1947 brief, “have no moral or legal validity in our society.” That has always been my position. It makes me heartsick that 50 years after the civil rights movement, America’s leading institutions have become more race-obsessed than ever.After converting to Judaism, I was surrounded by neo-Nazis - Opinion
I’m sure that some of the stands I take in public-policy debates have been influenced by my experience growing up with a father who survived the death camps and being raised in a community that was home to other survivors. I fervently opposed the Bush administration’s reliance on torture to extract information from Al Qaeda detainees, for example. I have always condemned the scapegoating of immigrants, whether it came from the left or from the right. I have no patience with foreign-policy “realists” who downplay human rights in dealing with other governments.
Above and beyond politics, however, my lifelong awareness of the Holocaust has made it impossible for me not to know that human goodness is fragile. It doesn’t come naturally but must be honed and practiced, etched into our nature one good deed at a time. Civility and civilization are only veneers, stretched like a bandage over an ugly wound. More easily than we like to think, that bandage can be pulled off, exposing the putrescence beneath. It was pulled off in Europe in the middle of the 20th century, and the consequences were diabolical — for the world, for the Jews, for my father and his family. Those consequences are never far from my mind. They shape my thinking to this day.
When we talked about it over scoops of ice cream later that night, he told me it was surprising to have experienced neo-Nazis in Iceland, a country famous for its equality and peaceful society, but he didn’t reveal having felt anything beyond the surprise.The uncomfortable truth about BLM, Malcolm X and anti-Semitism
I took this experience home with me though, and it helped me understand the gravity of my conversion. It was the first time that fear made me reconsider my conversion and the choices I was making in my public Jewish life. It was the first time I truly looked inward and asked myself the hard question required of converts: Was I ready to accept the realities of anti-Semitism?
I also asked myself the question so many of my friends had asked already: As a gay man, why would I want to add an additional target on my back?
I used to find the imagery of a target on someone’s back too grotesque and melodramatic for the context of a religious conversion, but since my encounter with presumed neo-Nazis in the hot tub that day, the question has become even more reasonable. On top of all-too-common news of anti-Semitic threats and vandalism, there have been synagogue shootings and Jewish-oriented hate crimes around the world.
At the time of this writing, we are dealing with the aftermath of domestic terrorists storming and overtaking the U.S. Capitol building. Some rioters waved Confederate flags, others held signs referencing the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory QAnon. Others wore sweatshirts that read things like “Camp Auschwitz,” an obvious glorification of the Holocaust. During the pro-Trump “Save America” rally leading up to the storming of the Capitol building, a Republican congresswoman, Mary Miller, even quoted Hitler.
While I wait for my city’s mikvah to reopen after being closed due to COVID-19 in order to finalize my conversion, I find myself revisiting the same question I asked myself back in Reykjavík: Is my conversion a smart choice?
In the two years that have passed since soaking in a hot tub with neo-Nazis, I have to admit that my certainty in my desire to convert has taken a few blows. But what keeps me pushing toward the mikvah, however, is that when I’m asked if I’m Jewish, I always say yes.
Fifty-five years ago, Martin Luther King delivered a speech to 50,000 Americans in which he demanded justice for persecuted Jews behind the Iron Curtain.
‘The absence of opportunity to associate as Jews in the enjoyment of Jewish culture and religious experience becomes a severe limitation upon the individual,’ he said. ‘Negros can well understand and sympathise with this problem.’
He then stated, in typically uncompromising style, that Jewish history and culture were ‘part of everyone’s heritage, whether he be Jewish, Christian or Moslem.’ He concluded:
‘We cannot sit complacently by the wayside while our Jewish brothers in the Soviet Union face the possible extinction of their cultural and spiritual life. Those that sit at rest, while others take pains, are tender turtles, and buy their quiet with disgrace.’
This speech – released last week by the National Coalition Supporting Eurasian Jewry (NCEJ) to mark Martin Luther King Day, and coming just days before we remember the Holocaust – feels particularly poignant in the newly radicalised atmosphere of 2021. Today's activists in the Black Lives Matter movement would be wise to remember King's words.
During the Los Angeles riots over the killing of George Floyd, Jewish shops were destroyed, synagogues were sprayed with ‘free Palestine’ graffiti, and a statue of a Swedish diplomat who had saved Hungarian Jews from the Nazis was defaced with anti-Semitic slogans.
In France, a Black Lives Matter rally descended into cries of ‘dirty Jews’, echoing the anti-Semitic chants that filled the same streets during the Dreyfus affair a century ago. Shortly afterwards, the #Jewishprivilege Twitter hashtag sought to lump Jews together with the forces of oppression – until it was subverted by Jews posting accounts of the persecution suffered by their families. Jewish privilege indeed.