Since 2016, there has been a sudden outbreak of faux Holocaust historians, whose “facts” are divorced from their context and wielded for political gain. This weekend, after comedian Sarah Silverman received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, she quipped how “lucky [she was] to be given a star and not have to sew it on [her] clothes.” It hurts my heart to imagine what those who were stripped of their humanity and forced to wear that Star of David would think about Silverman’s offensive attempt at humor.
In an interview with Bill Maher, Silverman insinuated that the 57 percent increase in anti-Semitic crime in America is the fault of President Trump. The truth is murkier than what Silverman seems to think. The increase in attacks has not occurred solely at the hands of Trump supporters. From the spate of threats against over 100 American Jewish institutions in early 2017, an untold majority were the work of an Israeli Jewish teen. A Democratic volunteer with President Barack Obama’s first campaign is responsible for seven arsons at Williamsburg shuls and yeshivas and anti-Semitic graffiti left on a Brooklyn temple.
Rather than simply cherry picking from the attacks in America, I want to look outside our country. Canada saw a 26 percent increase in anti-Semitic attacks from 2015 to 2016, with the number of attacks slightly increasing in 2017. In Europe, anti-Semitism is likewise on the rise. Though the number of anti-Semitic attacks in Europe has declined, Jews there are targets of anti-Semitism from both right- and left-wing groups, and “an increasing number of Jews were no longer wearing identifying items in public or attending synagogues on Jewish holidays.” In the last three years, more than 10 percent of France’s Jewish population has emigrated. More than two-thirds of German Jews say that do not feel “part of German society.”
My personal interest in redressing the inhumanity of the Holocaust was sparked when I read my first book about the period as a grade schooler. Most Holocaust books for young adults only follow the initial trajectory of Hitler’s rise to power. They cover the segregation of Jews from public life and stripping of their civil liberties, the horror of Kristallnacht, mothers painstakingly sewing homemade yellow Stars of David to the family’s clothing, harassment of Jews on the streets by power-drunk brown shirts, family members being permanently removed in the middle of the night, and, finally, relocation to a ghetto or labor camp. Often, the horrid fates of beloved characters are only addressed in an author’s note.
As an adult, I took “Never Forget” to heart. I read everything I could, and etched all of that grizzly detail into my soul so that, if there ever came a time when it was necessary, I could testify to the Holocaust’s horrors. I could tell of the starvation, typhus outbreaks, physical harassment, and dehumanizing treatment of people in labor and death camps, the medical experimentation to which children and adults were subjected, the deadly blue Zyklon B crystals delivered under the guise of sanitation showers, the stench of burning flesh that hung over places of evil like Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the mass atrocities Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen committed as they crossed Eastern Europe.
Eventually, my accumulated knowledge of those horrors, and my German language skills, were put to use when I interned with the Justice Department to help the government prove that an aging U.S. citizen had committed genocide during World War II. I spent many of my days holed up in the National Archives at College Park, scrolling through reels of captured German documents detailing war crimes, and sitting in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum paging through chilling photographs, searching for the pieces that would make the government’s case airtight.
During that internship in 2009, I was disabused of any notion that I was studying the Holocaust for the last time when James Wenneker von Brunn entered the lobby of the USHMM (which I so often entered myself) with the express purpose of killing people who worked to keep alive what he believed to be a false history.
The source of the recent virulent increase of anti-Semitism is varied, and insidious. If we have any chance of stamping out this growing hatred, unprejudiced human beings must band together as allies of a historically persecuted people. That means the placement of undue blame and accusations must end. Holocaust tidbits, watered down and pulled inaccurately from their historical context, must no longer be used to make political gains.
Hatred and intolerance spawned the deaths of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust. Turning hatred and intolerance on one another will not help us avert another genocide. To keep that diseased thinking from rearing its awful head, humans around the world must stand against anti-Semitism, and show respect for one another, regardless of race or ethnicity.
