16 August 2022 – In my forthcoming film series on the life of Jacques Semelin, the Holocaust and genocide, I note that right-wing, anti-government groups are more and more ascendant. It is a subject I discussed at length with Serge Klarsfeld, one of the best known Nazi hunters who documented the Holocaust in order to establish the record and to enable the prosecution of war criminals.
Today is is easy for a group, or even a single mentally unstable person, to unleash mass carnage in the name of … oh, whatever. Last week’s search of Trump’s Florida abode showed just how frighteningly real the U.S. stands at a most perilous moment. I covered this here last week and will not repeat those points other than to say the Pavlovian reactions of Trump’s base and the ranks of the Republican Party simply underscore Trump’s toxic influence on the entire country as it is once again plunged back into the thicket of the Trumpist autocracy.
But there is a detail that isn’t receiving enough attention but that points to a dangerous reality in the United States today, raised only by Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner in their Substack “Steady” and I want to highlight a few points they have made plus a few of my own.
It centers on Bruce Reinhart, the magistrate judge who signed the FBI’s search warrant. As his name became public, he has faced a withering volume of threats from those who believe Trump should be above the law. In today’s America, with the MAGA crowd revved up for attack, that was to be expected. But that attacks were to be expected should not obscure the fact that they are dangerous. Very. The possibility of their leading to violence should not be underestimated.
Many of these threats focused on the fact that Judge Reinhart is Jewish. It got to the point that the synagogue where Judge Reinhart sits on the board had to cancel Shabbat services:
“Temple Beth David in South Florida has canceled its Beach Shabbat this week under a deluge of antisemitic threats about Bruce Reinhart, the judge who signed the Mar-a-Lago search warrant and sits on the synagogue’s board.”
Antisemitism is on the rise in America, as those who track such nefarious trends will tell you. And I can tell you because my team is tracking it. It can be found in some form across the political spectrum, but it has become a particular hallmark of elements of the Republican Party, especially in the age of Trump. As Dan Rather notes:
In the wake of the FBI search, the New York Young Republican Club resorted to well-worn antisemitic tropes, for example. “Internationalist forces and their allies intent on undermining the foundation of our Republic have crossed the Rubicon,” read their statement, in part. The conspiracy theory that Trump is being thwarted by a global cabal of “elites” funded by “George Soros” in ways that will undermine traditional American “values” represents coded language (and by “coded,” I mean as subtle as a marching band through a library) that is pushing a dangerous line of attack. Dangerous on a personal level and dangerous for our country as a whole.
While there are extreme fringe groups who speak bluntly and declaratively of hating Jews, most American antisemitism is less obvious. Republican supporters of Trump say they can’t possibly be antisemitic because Trump’s own son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is Jewish, as were many members of his administration. They say Republicans have strong supporters in Israel, including former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They point to Democratic politicians who have been critical of Israel, or others with ties to more overt antisemites.
All of this is true. But it is not an excuse for what is taking place now.
It should be noted with emphasis that antisemitism isn’t limited to one political party or ideology. Furthermore, the Israel issue complicates the discussion, because criticism of Israel as a country is not necessarily antisemitic. Many American Jews object to Israeli policy. But there are also ways Israel is spoken of that clearly cross into antisemitic language.
But it is impossible in a column such as this to parse the morass of antisemitism in America. It is huge, it is complex. But it is vital that we see how the fundamental rhetoric that has propelled antisemitism over many centuries around the globe helps fuel the larger Trump movement. This is about the “othering” of Americans who don’t support Trump. It is about dividing the country into “us” and “them.” It is about claiming that only those who back the former president are “patriotic.” As Dan Rather notes:
What the Trumpification of the Republican Party has achieved (though we recognize that some of this existed prior to Trump) is labeling two Americas, one “real” and one supposedly not. And that is the purpose of all this Soros and internationalist talk: scapegoating. It tells people that they can and should direct their anger, which can easily escalate to violence, at those who are “different.” And those people are often Jews, or Black people, or people of Asian or Hispanic heritage, or LGBTQ+ folks, or other groups considered not sufficiently “American.” The fact that it isn’t all Jews or all Black people (the GOP lionizes Clarence Thomas, after all) doesn’t excuse the larger message.
We should be on guard not to make imperfect analogies to the past. For numerous reasons, I do not believe the U.S. is on the brink of becoming Nazi Germany. But that doesn’t mean it does not face great peril. Or that it is not on that slope. But as soon as we start playing to stereotypes, as soon as we interpret people’s race, religion, or other background demographics as a measure of their worth as citizens or humans, we risk destroying our society. Any society.
It . is . sickening. It . is . vile. And it will destroy America’s historic mission as a citadel of freedom and high ideals. Which is why every God damn one of us has to speak up. Because “Never again” doesn’t mean only that we must do all we can to avoid another Holocaust. It means never again shall we be silent. Never again shall we look the other way. Never again shall we allow hate to take deep root.
Look, I am not naive. In fact most of my friends say I am a cynic. I see reality. I know that hate has always been a part of the human experience. But it has wreaked havoc across history, causing the pain, suffering, and death of countless people. It is fueled by seeing others as enemies rather than as fellow members of the human species.
But antisemitism is one virulent manifestation of this “us vs. them” mindset. To survive and thrive, America must reject it in all of its forms.
And I am gripped by history and by the present day. I am gripped by Trump’s anti-semitism, by the war in Ukraine, and by the Holocaust. Anyone who researches the history of Jews will sooner or later experience a moment of similarly heart-stopping resonance. When I was reading In the Midst of Civilised Europe about the pogroms of 1918-21 and the onset of the Holocaust, there was Ukraine on the map on the inside cover. Reading this book in 2022 makes it impossible not to contemplate the significance of place. The Holocaust was a European phenomenon with many different starting points. Veidlinger has produced a riveting and nuanced account of developments in one very specific location: the area claimed by the Ukrainian People’s Republic in the aftermath of the First World War.
Which brings me almost full circle to the Galicia Jewish Museum located in the historic Jewish district of Kazimierz in Kraków, Poland which I visited earlier this year when I was filming at the Auschwitz death camp. The Museum does a marvelous job documenting the remnants of Jewish culture and life in Polish Galicia, which used to be very vibrant in this area.
It was there that I picked up a copy of Czesław Miłosz’s book The Captive Mind (published in 1953). I had read Milosz’s “To Begin Where I Am”, the most comprehensive selection of his essays. But The Captive Mind was different. It remains possibly the best book ever written about the lure and trap of totalitarian ideology. The rewards of the book begin with its epigraph, which Miłosz attributes to “An Old Jew of Galicia”:
When someone is honestly 55 percent right, that’s very good and there’s no use wrangling. And if someone is 60 percent right, it’s wonderful, it’s great luck, and let him thank God. But what’s to be said about 75 percent right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well, and what about 100 percent right? Whoever says he’s 100 percent right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal.
Where Miłosz found this epigraph, I cannot say. But it resonates today, in large part because the old Jew he quotes is from Galicia, the medieval name for a region stretching from eastern Poland to western Ukraine, whose principal city, Lviv, is now overflowing with refugees fleeing a scorched-earth invasion ordered by a twenty-first-century fanatic claiming to be 100 percent right.
And Miłosz talks about Americans. Having never undergone what Europe underwent, Americans were cursed with an “appalling” lack of imagination, and would never know the horror of which human nature is capable. That antisemitism and bigotry could become endemic.
For Milosz, Americans would need to know “the fire, the hunger and the sword” that Europeans have known, to live through terrible terrible disasters. And just maybe … way back in 1953 … he understood the American culture. A mode of life “learning about the distress of its distant fellowmen only from movies and newspapers.”
Apart from adding the Internet to his warning, Milosz’s words have not lost an iota of relevance for all of us today.