Have we forgotten about the Holocaust already?
This International Holocaust Remembrance Day, it’s time to start seeing the Jew hatred all around us.
The idea of remembrance evokes something that happened long ago. A distant memory, not an urgent one. On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, though, we’re called to remember a tragedy that happened only 75 years ago.
You’d think the death of 6 million Jews and about 4 million other people wouldn’t be so easily forgotten. But a September survey of millennials and Gen-Zers across the US indicated 63% of respondents didn’t know 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust and 36% believed 2 million or fewer were killed. 48% could not name a single concentration camp. 11% believe the Jews caused the Holocaust.
What privilege, to forget. Privilege of people who have cousins and great aunts and uncles and great grandparents, while I have a deep hole in my family tree.
My grandfather survived Auschwitz, but his parents and his siblings were among the million who did not. They were eradicated for no other reason than their Jewish blood. My grandfather came to the US and built a life here, now with nine grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. But I see the hole where his brother’s nine grandchildren and sister’s nine grandchildren — my 18 second cousins — should be. I look at my nephews and niece who can spend time with their loving great-grandfather and I feel the loss that I never met mine.
We don’t talk about the Holocaust much in my family, so it’s disconcerting for me to write this and publicly share my intergenerational trauma. But the world has caused it to bubble under the surface of my skin, and I cannot stay silent while my great-grandparents, great aunt, great uncle, and millions more are forgotten.
They are forgotten not just when Holocaust knowledge fades, but when Jew hatred is minimized. (I have chosen to use the term Jew hatred, not antisemitism, because “Semitic” is a language group, and other speakers of Semitic languages have used that as a veil to claim they cannot be antisemites because they are semites themselves). When I’m told by friends that I shouldn’t be afraid of white supremacy and that I don’t know what it’s like to face discrimination because my skin is white, my relatives’ memories are forgotten.
When the word “Nazi” is used casually, they are forgotten. Not all flawed, bad, or even reprehensible actions are akin to Nazi-ism, and with each incongruous comparison, the memories of those who died or suffered at the hands of true Nazis are diluted. Nazis are the people who gassed up to 6,000 people a day at Auschwitz. Nazis are not the same as neo-Nazis, despicable as they may be. Wearing a Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt is vile, gross, and wrong, but it’s not the same as systematically murdering millions of people. Nazis are the people who threw Jewish babies out of windows just to watch them die. Nazis are not the Israeli government or Israeli citizens (Israel, like many countries, is imperfect and engaged in a complicated geopolitical conflict. Taking a shorthanded, narrow view of any conflict is wrong, all the more so when it’s done to the only country in which Jews have the right to self-determination by invoking the most recent mass murderers of the Jewish people).
The thing about Jew hatred is that it is unlike other hatreds. It did not begin and end with the Holocaust, but has been around for centuries, all across the globe. Jew hatred isn’t simply racism, since Jews aren’t all of one race, but it isn’t only religious discrimination, either, since Jews are killed for being Jewish even when they don’t practice the religion at all.
Jew haters come in all forms, too. While I’ve been lucky to personally only experience microaggressions and not violence, it’s come from all around. The white front desk clerk at a Super 8 in rural Idaho who, when I asked for a new room key because mine was broken, told the maintenance person “This Jew doesn’t know how to use a room key and thinks she’s entitled to a new one.” And the Black girl I volunteered with at the zoo one summer who, not knowing I was Jewish, confided in me that she left her post at an exhibit whenever a Jewish camp group came through because she couldn’t stand to be in the same room as them, and asked if I was also scared of their funny hair and hats. And the car full 20-somethings who rolled down their windows to shout “Free Palestine” as my friends and I left our synagogue after holiday services. As a people, Jews are targets of white supremacists who shoot up synagogues and Black radicals who stab Jews at Chanukah parties.
Because it comes from different places and manifests in different ways, it’s easy to conceal or ignore Jew hatred. If you see having money, influence, or power as a communal goal, you might mistake someone saying “Jews control the world” or “Jews are rich” as a compliment, without realizing that’s an age-old, hateful conspiracy theory that’s been used in country after country to blame and ultimately expel or execute Jews. If you see Jews as an extension of white, European colonialism because many American Jews benefit from white privilege, you’re ignoring the history of Jews in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, the ghettoization and different laws for European Jewish communities, and the forced conversions, pogroms, expulsions, and murders of Jews across the globe. In doing so, you’re creating an environment where Jew hatred driven by propaganda can flourish.
Hate crimes and incidents against Jews rose to an all-time in 2019, but AJC’s 2020 Survey of the General Public on Antisemitism found that 39% of respondents believed antisemitism had stayed steady over the last 5 years and 52% reported having not “seen any antisemitic incidents, such as negative remarks or online content about Jewish people, or physical attacks on Jewish people or their religious facilities” over the past 5 years. That means more than half of respondents missed the news about Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018, the deadliest attack against Jews on US soil.
Those numbers make me feel like I’m living in a parallel universe. But my antennae are tuned to preserve my own safety; intergenerational trauma will have that effect. What’s hard is when I try to express these fears, I’m not heard. According to that same AJC survey, 65% of respondents reported that if a Jewish person or organization considered a statement or idea to be antisemitic, it would not impact their view of the event as antisemitic; I can shout about my experiences with Jew hatred at the top of my lungs, and most people will shrug and say, “I don’t see it that way.” This removes my agency for self defense and self preservation. More importantly, it fosters an environment like the one in Germany in the 1930s. Before the Holocaust.
Or have we already forgotten?