I’ve spent the last couple of days listening to Rachel Maddow’s book, Prequel, which tells the tale of American Nazis, Nazi sympathizers and agents in the U.S. prior to WWII. I knew the book would show the parallels to what’s happening in our nation today. I didn’t know that an equally important theme in the book was antisemitism.
I was born both a first generation Jew (my father was an immigrant) and 2nd generation (my mother’s parents were immigrants) in the middle of the 20th century. My parents made sure I was well aware of the Holocaust. When I was 10 years old, they took me to see a 1947 documentary, The Nuremberg Trials, all of which was actual footage of the trials and Nazi-filmed footage of the horrors of their almost successful genocide against the Jews. While the Nazis also attempted extermination of the Roma, LGBTQ community, disabled, dissenters and others, their biggest success was against the Jews. They killed 2 out of every three European Jews. So I knew why we Jews, across the world, so desperately desired a nation we could count on for refuge.
What I didn’t know was the extent of antisemitism in the U.S. before, during and for some time after the Holocaust. I had heard a little about my parents’ struggles with antisemitism. I had heard of the wildly popular and wildly antisemitic Father Coughlin. But I didn’t realize the pervasiveness of antisemitism that directly affected my parents’ childhood and early-to-middle adulthood. I grew up in a liberal community and had only a little bit of experience with antisemitism myself. I was a white girl growing up with white privilege and antisemitism dinged me only rarely.
But listening to Rachel Maddow’s description of what was going on in the 30s and early 40s in America was a revelation. The antisemitism was open, violent, and frequently proclaimed by elected officials and charismatic figures who commanded millions of (often armed) followers.
Most Jews of my generation and the previous one have some degree of trauma – I thought it was mainly because of the Holocaust — both the utterly horrifying facts of what the Nazis did to our fellow Jews and also the very personal loss of large portions of our families. But it’s clear to me now that at least some of the trauma among U.S. Jews is because of the public, ugly and widespread antisemitism in our own nation. While I might have experienced very little of that directly, the awful and repeated experiences of my parents’ generation, their resulting fear and anxiety, and their dream of safe refuge in a Jewish state, certainly had an effect on next generations of Jews.
Which leads me to what this diary is really about.
As a person who has been an advocate for Palestinian rights for many years, as the mother of a daughter who is deeply involved in the ceasefire movement, I have not really understood my fellow Jews, both Israeli and American (including some beloved members of my extended family), who seem to be unable to acknowledge Palestinian pain. How can we, with our ancestral and recent history of being the victims of repeated efforts to eradicate us, not understand the Palestinians’ desperate need for a nation, for safety for their families and future generations? How can we, who know what it’s like to experience the murder of massive numbers of our community including children, stand by while 30,000 civilians, the majority of whom are families and children, are massacred and many thousands more are dying of starvation and disease.
But I am becoming aware that for some members of my Jewish community, the reaction to the Hamas attack was so overwhelming that it’s almost as if the empathy they normally have for others who are suffering has been drained dry. The trauma of the Hamas evil has triggered the trauma of the Holocaust and of the intense antisemitic experience of past generations and has rendered many normally caring, kind, good people unable to get past their own pain, unable to see what is happening to our fellow humans in Gaza. The recent upsurge in antisemitism has only reinforced the internal walls many Jews have built since Oct. 7, further blocking their empathy.
That doesn’t make it okay for the destruction of Gaza to be dismissed as justifiable retaliation, doesn’t make it okay to accept or ignore the terrible suffering of non-Jews at the hands of mainly Jewish Israelis.
As a Jew, I was raised to view oppression of any group as requiring us to take a stand, to press for social justice and protection of the oppressed. Tikkun Olam תִּיקּוּןעוֹלָם, Repair the World.
Learning about the massive antisemitism in the U.S. may have helped me understand a little better why so many of my fellow Jews are not reacting the way we were taught, but I have no idea how to break through their pain so that they can feel the pain of those in Gaza who are suffering so terribly.
p.s.
I wrote this yesterday, the day my son would have turned 40 years old. He was a funny, active, smart and loving little boy who made our lives better with his sense of humor, his fascination with all things mechanical, his adoration of his grandfather and admiration for his big sister, his dancing and his smile.
His life was destroyed by a stroke when he was almost 3. He died 4 years later. Unlike the children in the concentration camps and the children in Gaza, his suffering was not caused by other human beings — there’s not a thing we could have done to prevent it or ameliorate it.
