Blog 23-10, Written by Jerry Elman – July 6, 2023
If you visit Eastern Europe as Janet and I did in 2022, you cannot avoid all the formal and informal landmarks where Jews were rounded up and killed. Every city, every village, has obvious and hidden places all over the landscape where Jews were the victims of the Nazis and the local hatred of Jews. Poland stands out to some historians as a country that killed more Jews than Nazis in WW II. No one knows the real numbers to confirm or dispute that. But we do know 3 million Jews were killed in Poland. Probably not that many Germans!
Wherever you go in Eastern Europe, once home to over 9 million Jews, the tour guides point out the landmarks and history. Over there, dead Jews! Over there, more dead Jews! They used to live there! There is where the ghetto was. There was the old synagogue. They were rounded up here and taken there! They were shot and buried there! There is the concentration camp where they worked as slaves and died! There is the death camp where they were gassed and incinerated! There are the rivers and fields where their ashes and bones were dumped! There is where another pogrom took place after the war!
Jews today? No, they hardly exist here! And no one misses them! In these countries, they only know about dead Jews because very few living Jews exist today.
In the entire world today, only 16 million Jews in total exist. Six million in the United States. About 7 million in Israel. The other 3 million are scattered around the world. Yet many, perhaps, a majority of people in the world today still believe the old myths that Jews control everything and are up to no good, even in countries where almost no Jews exist. Facts don’t matter. Numbers don’t matter. Hate matters! And someone has to be the scapegoat for all that is wrong in a country, in the world. It has to be all those dead Jews and the current 16 million living Jews.
The almost 8 Billion people in the world today seem to have the age-old imagined problem of being controlled by the 0.2% percent of people who are living Jews! In the Arab world, there are 457 million people. Within these same Arab countries today, there are only 12,700 Jews. That is 0.003% of the Arab population! Arabs control 5 million square miles of land. Israel consists of 8,550 square miles of land. That is 0.17% of disputed land. The 12,700 Jews who live in Arab countries are under constant persecution. And the 7 million Jews who live in this 0.17% of disputed land have been under attack and war since before Israel’s founding in 1948.
After WW II ended, most Jews in Poland and Eastern Europe had no place to go. Those that returned to Poland were attacked in pogroms and killed in large numbers. The same happened in other countries. At the same time, the United States, Britain, and other countries refused to admit Jewish refugees who survived the Holocaust. Britain also froze Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine under their control. Over 600,000 stateless Jewish Refugees (200,000 who fled Poland) were stuck in displaced persons (DP) camps with nowhere to go.
The State of Israel was founded on May 14, 1948, and immediately opened the door to accept the 600,000 stateless Jewish refugees. Many of these Holocaust survivors had to fight in Israel’s war of independence. Many died in that war. Israel was attacked by all surrounding Arab countries with the intent to destroy the new Jewish State. Had Israel lost this war, most Jews in Israel would have been killed by the Arabs who declared they would destroy the Jews and drive them into the sea!
Until the conclusion of the 6-day war in June 1967, the common goal of the Arab world continued to be the annihilation of the Jews in Israel with the odds in their favor. The world did not care back then and watched three unprovoked wars happen, expecting the Jews would be annihilated. The world was shocked that Israel defeated the Arabs each time.
That Arab goal continues today! Does the world care? Not really. The world is angry that for the first time since Roman days, the Jews can now defend themselves and no longer be killed in large numbers at whim! The world does not care that if the Arabs ever succeed, visiting Israel will be like visiting Eastern Europe today. Dead Jews there! Dead Jews there! Dead Jews here! No living Jews to see or talk about anymore! The Arabs and “Palestinians” (a term created by the British) have rejected offer after offer for peace. They choose the annihilation of the Jews instead. And yes, world, the Jews will fight and defend themselves. We know that makes many people angry. Jews are supposed to be victims and killed. How dare we stand up and defend ourselves! How dare we defeat those that seek to destroy us! For Jews, this is the real meaning of the term “never again!” We will never again be defenseless; we will never again be stateless with no place to go!
My words may seem too blunt and harsh! But what I am trying to get across, especially to non-Jews, is how a tiny world population of 16 million Jews view the world around them today! How Jews have viewed the world around them since Roman times, over 2,000 years! Why do people believe the same baseless conspiracy theories about Jews generation after generation? Why is it the accepted norm for Jews to be killed?
Even Jews today have become complacent and uncaring about the significant increase in the hate of Jews in the United States, Europe, and the rest of the world. Hate of Jews is rising at rates not seen since the rise of Hitler in the 1930s.
Israelis feel the threat since they face war and terrorism every day. Many American and European Jews do not even care about Israel’s existence today! It interferes with assimilation and not being known as a Jew. So many Jews today believe losing their Jewish identity and “fitting in” unnoticed as other “white” people is the way to survive and be safe. Just what the Jews of Germany in the 1930s thought! We will never be safe unless we stand up for and defend ourselves. That we let the world know we are Jews and will not allow history to repeat itself again! We will never allow ourselves to be innocent victims to be pointed out as more dead Jews again!
It’s quite easy for the world to commemorate dead Jews, especially on Holocaust Remembrance Day! It’s even easier to condemn the Nazis as evil. But what exactly is the point of such an exercise if Jews and non-Jews are unwilling to stand up for living Jews today?
For the generations immediately following 1945, the sheer enormity and horror of the Holocaust was enough to put hate of Jews (antisemitism) — or at least, public expressions of it — out of fashion and unacceptable. After all, hating Jews was something the Nazis did. And who wants to be known or outed as a Nazi? But as the memory and knowledge of the Holocaust fade, along with those who witnessed it, hate of Jews (antisemitism) is again rearing its ugly head globally. The MAGA movement has made it ok to come out again as public Jew haters in the United States. Nationalism worldwide has opened the same door worldwide.
And Radical liberals have also embraced hate of Jews under the false pretenses of being anti-Israel, not antisemites! Jewish students on college campuses across the United States are being harassed and attacked. They are being banned from campus activities. And they live in fear every day! Again, looking at it from a Jewish perspective, these are our children and grandchildren at risk of Jewish hate harm, like our parents and grandparents faced in the 1930s!
Meanwhile, the European Jewish communities that still exist are once again wondering if they have a future on the continent. There are few places where this is as pronounced as France, whose Jews have faced unrelenting and often deadly attacks in recent years, prompting many to leave. As National Geographic noted in 2019, “A third of all the French Jews who’ve emigrated to Israel since its establishment in 1948 have done so in the last ten years.”
Across the English Channel, a few years ago, Britain nearly opened up 10 Downing Street to a radical left-wing zealot so intractably antisemitic that 47 percent of British Jews said they would seriously consider emigrating should he become prime minister. Fortunately, he lost, but antisemitism remains strong in Britain. Its National Union of Students (NUS) (like colleges in the US) has created such a toxic anti-Jewish atmosphere over the years that in 2022 the UK government suspended all ties and funding to the NUS until the antisemitism allegations are “suitably addressed.”)
In her critically acclaimed book People Love Dead Jews, Dara Horn observed:
“Hating Jews was normal. And historically speaking, the decades [after the Holocaust] … simply hadn’t been normal. Now, normal was coming back.”
And it’s back with a vengeance: despite comprising just 2 percent of the US population, Jews were victims of more than half of all religiously motivated hate crimes in the United States in 2020, according to the FBI. But that shouldn’t surprise students of Jewish history in America. After all, a 1938 Gallup survey found that 54 percent of Americans believed that “the persecution of Jews in Europe has been ‘partly” their own fault, while 11 percent believed it was “entirely” their fault.
Many people over the years have tried to mask the Holocaust’s Jewish focus by changing the focus to the non-Jewish victims, such as the Roma. Few have responded to this as well as Dara Horn:
“We … know that other groups have been persecuted too, and this degrading need to recite these middle-school-obvious facts is itself an illustration of the problem, which is that dead Jews are only worth discussing if they are part of something bigger, something more.”
And people can rarely resist placing Jewish suffering in the context of something bigger. Just ask Whoopi Goldberg, who suggested on The View last year that the Holocaust was “not about race” but rather “man’s inhumanity to man.” Or ask Jews how many times they’ve heard that we are “canaries in the coal mine” — in other words, the idea that society should care about attacks on Jews because it acts as a forewarning that real people — people who actually matter — could be next.
But Jewish suffering is not just universalized. The uniquely Jewish experience of suffering and killing is often erased. The Nazis murdered two out of every three European Jews. Poland alone was home to 3.3 million Jews in 1939. By the end of the war, only 380,000 were left. An entire civilization was destroyed in six years. But this reality is erased by making the Jewish annihilation a subset of WW II. A hidden footnote.
This occurs worldwide when the Holocaust is discussed, even when memorials are dedicated. The discussions and dedications now fail to mention that the Holocaust happened to Jews. WW II was a war over territory. The Holocaust was the Nazi state-focused annihilation of Jews. They are not one and the same. One example of this was Canada’s National Holocaust Monument at its 2017 unveiling, after which it was pointed out that its memorial plaque did not mention Jews or antisemitism. Unfortunately, this is part of a growing common habit of erasing the Holocaust — sometimes innocent, sometimes not — of erasing Jews and hatred of Jews from our most traumatic historical experience.
Condemning the plastering of swastikas in a heavily Jewish suburb is easy. It gets all kinds of media attention and press statements of condemnation. But hatred of Jews doesn’t always come with a swastika attached. And here’s where it gets tricky. The Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg explains:
“Because most people associate anti-Jewish prejudice with systematic genocide, they tend not to recognize anti-Semitism when it manifests in its more common but less extreme expressions. When you set the bar for bigotry at mass murder, most of the other expressions don’t make the cut.”
Anti-Israel conspiracy theories don’t make the cut. University student unions passing Jew-hating (antisemitic) motions openly don’t make the cut. Running political campaigns rife with overt anti-Jewish tropes doesn’t qualify either. Attacks on Jewish synagogues and institutions don’t make the cut until killings are involved. Then we are dealing with dead Jews, the norm that makes the cut.
The accepted norms of Jew hate keep increasing today. Jews are being threatened, harassed, and attacked. Jewish students in public schools and colleges live in fear daily because they are targeted for hate only because they are Jews.
Many Jews are reacting by trying to hide the fact they are Jews. No more wearing Star of David necklaces or talking about Jewish holidays. Jews won’t even stand up for being Jews out of fear. I am shocked at how many Jewish organizations (I cannot call them “leaders”) “administrators/managers” are hiding and “laying low” instead of being real leaders and taking charge to lead a coordinated Jewish response to all this.
It shocks me and saddens me that even my own local Jewish community in Rochester, NY has little interest today in the Holocaust or in taking any meaningful public action to deal with the growing acting out of hatred of Jews. The most that gets done is issuing press statements when Jew-hating flyers are left in some Jewish neighborhoods.
But the name of the Jew-hating organization (Goyim Defense League) is not included because that is viewed as giving them recognition. Shouldn’t people know who is threatening them?
No offensive plan exists. Only silence and a bunker mentality are the focus. $10 million is being raised and spent on the security of Jewish organization buildings. But that does nothing to directly take on the Jew-haters. That does nothing to gain overall community support for Jews. It only makes people who work in these buildings doing “Jewish Jobs” think they will be safe at work. I guess they fend for themselves when they go out for lunch or drive home! My father was a partisan fighter during the Holocaust. They did not build bomb-proof bunkers in the ground where they slept. They focused on offensive actions like attacking Germans and blowing up trains with the limited resources they had. They protected others, not themselves!
We are now in the year 2023. Go back to 1933 (90 years), and things are starting to look the same. As the acceptable norms keep moving to allow more and more acceptance of hateful behaviors and acts, violence becomes acceptable, and then killing. And then, someday, a tour guide will again point out where all the dead Jews are!
More Jews, led by our formal Jewish organizations, need to develop action plans to reach out to both the Jewish and non-Jewish communities to create a dialog and build relationships before things get totally out of control. Jews must take ownership of their own fate through organized deliberate efforts to stop the hate. We must focus on educating non-Jews on the Jewish feelings and perspective on events in the world today. And non-Jews need to hear us out and try to understand what it’s like living in a world where the memory of dead Jews far outnumbers living Jews.
We are 16 million. We have still never recovered the numbers we lost in the Holocaust. We want to live our lives on this earth no differently than any other human beings.
