Trust Fall

Children Of Israel Are Never Alone

Hey, beloved tribe.

I hope you’re having a decent week.

I’ve been grappling with the fallout from last week’s intercommunity argument about Holocaust appropriation in the context of ICE’s violence.

To my great surprise, the majority opinion was with me both here and on Facebook. But there was a significant minority who were bitterly affronted by it and several reproachful messages have accumulated in my inbox over many days, including today.

One woman in particular, whom I’ve always liked quite a lot, was especially and startlingly angry.

She accused me of (and these are all lifted from her screeds verbatim): “bitter coldness”, self-indulgence, selfishness, spite, arrogance, obfuscation, appropriation, gaslighting, petulance, fragility, betrayal and plenty more. She said I was selling out the memory and legacy of the 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust. “It’s astonishing,” she wrote. “It’s vulgar. It’s contemptible.” She said I was cavalier. That I was becoming a virtue-signaling egomaniac. That I’m yet “another social media person succumbing to their need for affirmations and likes.”

(I am admittedly quite greedy for affirmation and often print your notes of appreciation out and put them on my office wall to fortify me in my many low moments, but the irony here is that I actually feared losing half my readership by writing those opinions.)

After a tsunami of vitriol from her accumulated in my inbox, I blocked her.

This morning I unblocked her.

I want to reiterate that I welcome dissent and argument. Arguing is what we do, it’s who we are, and we owe so much of the richness of our tradition to famously argumentative hevrutah pairs like Hillel and Shammai, Rabbi Yochanan and Resh Lakish, Rav Pappa and Abaye, Rabbi Meir and Berurya.

In this column, I’m going to address the most recurrent objections to my argument and I’m going to make the rare move of opening the comment section to everyone, whereas I usually restrict it to paying subscribers to keep trolls from hijacking the space.

Passionate pushback is fine. Personal attacks are and will always be prohibited from and toward everyone. I put this in my community guidelines (see #9) on the day I launched this newsletter and I will never waver from it. All of social media and the entire internet and every aspect of our national discourse is a cesspool of hatred and abuse.

This space will never be that.

If we can’t have these conversations with each other, then who can we have them with?

Okay, so here were the most frequently-raised objections to my ICESTAPO posts:

1. What’s happening in America is absolutely terrible but it is nothing like the Holocaust and it cheapens the latter to invoke it in this context.

Okay, well first, I never said that what’s happening in America today is exactly the same as the Holocaust. Of course it isn’t.

But it is true that the atmosphere in the U.S. has undeniable parallels with early 1930s Europe.

Dachau was the first concentration camp, and initially it was not a death camp.

In fact, the first death camp wasn’t built until nearly a decade later.

And Germany’s government in the early 1930s was taking a hard and heedless turn into explicit white nationalism.

Much like the U.S. today.

Many beautiful and innocent children have already died in ICE custody. ICE has already brutalized many brown U.S. citizens and executed other dissident U.S. citizens in the street.

In my opinion, we shouldn’t have to wait until mass executions are happening to recognize these patterns, draw the parallels, and respond accordingly.

2. ICE is horrific, but not comparable to the Nazis.

To this I say: the same label can be accurately be applied to two entities that are not exactly the same — and for that matter, they can even be applied to two entities that are not even remotely the same.

Joseph Stalin was a Socialist, and so is Bernie Sanders. (You might hate Bernie, but Joseph Stalin he is not.)

The guy with a Jewish mom who’s sitting by his Christmas tree with his non-Jewish wife, eating a bacon-wrapped scallop, is a Jew, and the Satmar Rebbe is a Jew.

When I was growing up, there was a raging battle between militant Jews and the ACLU-backed Nazi Party Of America, led by Frank Collin, who planned to march with his fellow Nazis on Skokie, IL.

Obviously the Nazis of the Third Reich murdered 90% of Europe’s Jewry in the most barbaric soul-crushing ways imaginable.

Whereas Frank Collin never killed a single Jew. For that matter, the Nazi Party of America has never, to the internet’s knowledge, murdered a single Jew.

Frank Collin is still a Nazi. And obviously the Nazi Party of America = Nazis.

The same label applies because both are on the Nazi continuum. It’s not insulting to Holocaust victims to acknowledge that Frank Collin and his ilk in the U.S. are Nazis. It’s merely the truth.

Having said this, are ICE officers technically Nazis? Well, we do know quite a few are actually neo-Nazis, Groypers, Proud Boys, J6ers, and other white nationalists. Are they all of that description? Of course it’s more than likely that not all of them are. But I’m not sure why that technical specificity in this one context is so important.

Did the Jews who are super upset by my comparison of ICE to the GESTAPO get equally upset when I compared a keffiyeh worn to cover a face with a Klan hood?

If they did, not one of them said a word about it.

No one in my readership shrieked that antizionist protestors in America are not burning crosses (or crescents) on front lawns or hanging Jews from trees.

But suddenly when it’s ICE and the GESTAPO, they have to be exactly the same.

In the marrow of my bones, I believe Trump and his administration are very much on the Nazi continuum. I don’t say that lightly, but I believe it with every fiber of my being. They consciously invoke Nazi images, slogans, rhetoric and imagery and that’s not an accident or a coincidence. You can think I’m wrong, but I can promise you the comparison is not cavalier or made without fully understanding its implications.

3. It’s disrespectful to Holocaust victims and survivors to trivialize the evil they faced by drawing this comparison.

It remains my opinion that the true way to honor and respect the legacy of Anne Frank and the 6 million is to recognize the way lethal racial hatred infiltrates the government and mainstream society and is brought to bear upon vulnerable populations — and fight tooth and nail to vanquish it.

*
This is the last column I’ll be devoting to this argument, but again, I’m opening the comment section to all and everyone can register their objections as long as it stays civil and respectful.

I believe we can see this issue differently and argue about it and maybe even end up agreeing to disagree without cursing each other out, attacking each other’s character, and going separate ways.

I genuinely trust we are all decent people here, and that we are all more or less on the same side in life, so let’s interact accordingly.

In any event, I will be back on Friday with only uplifting topics.

Much love in the meantime.

Am Yisrael Chai.