Kristallnacht Not Merely Historic Event but Also Cautionary Tale
Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass) was a state sponsored terrorist action against Jewish people, businesses, homes, and synagogues, a pogrom planned and executed by SA paramilitary forces and civilians throughout Nazi Germany, 9–10 November 1938. Most German law enforcement officials looked on without intervening.
Kristallnacht and the eventual murder of six million Jewish souls resulted from the longstanding hatred of the Jewish people, what some refer to as “The Longest Hatred,” dating back millennia.
Kristallnachmittag (The Afternoon of Broken Glass) was a government sponsored action on 6 January 2021 against the United States Constitution and the legal transition of power planned at the highest levels of the US government and executed by cult following insurrectionists at the Capitol in Washington, DC. It took government troops many hours to eventually intervene.
Antisemitic imagery and tropes helped fuel and ignite the paramilitary forces of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys with some people wearing a black “Camp Auschwitz” T-shirt emblazoned with a skull and crossbones, and beneath it the words “work brings freedom” – an English translation of the Auschwitz concentration camp motto: “Arbeit macht frei.”
Some of their words and writing make it clear that they hope to provoke the “Great Revolution” based on a fabricated account of a government takeover and race war that would ultimately exterminate Jews.
Hate speech generates hate crimes resulting in harassment, violence, loss of limb and loss of lives on the individual, then the community, and eventually on the national and international levels.
“The Holocaust did not begin with killing; it began with words. The Museum calls on all American citizens, our religious and civic leaders, and the leadership of all branches of the government to confront racist thinking and divisive hateful speech…” stated a press release from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.
We witnessed hate filled antisemitic words coming from Doug Mastriano, former Republican candidate for Pennsylvania governor against his Jewish rival, Josh Shapiro.
Kanye West has doubled and tripled down on his scathing antisemitic rhetoric, and Kyrie Irving, star NBA player for the Brooklyn Nets, finally backpeddled and apologized for posting a link to a film containing offensive antisemitic material.
Stereotypes and tropes used to maintain and perpetuate oppression are many. Regarding those employed again Jewish people, a partial list includes:
- Killers of God
- In Service of / Fathered by the Devil
- Host Desecrators
- Poisoners of Drinking Wells & Transmitters of Diseases
- Usurers
- Ritual Murderers & Abusers of Christian Children
- Forced Circumcisers of Non-Jewish males
- Immature / Inadequate Religious Consciousness
- Clannish
- Alien “Race”
- Wanderers / “Stateless”
- Holders of Dual / Multiple Loyalties
- Proselytizers to Judaism
- Freedom-Killing Communists
- Super Capitalists
- Sexually Perverse
- Oversexed or Sexually Frigid Females
- Lecherous Males of Christian Women and Girls
- Feminized and Non-Athletic Males
- Controller of World Economic Systems and Governments
- Greedy for Wealth
- Financially Cheap and Cheaters
- Controllers of the Media
- Exaggerators of the Extent of Anti-Jewish Oppression
- Exploiters of the Oppressed
When anyone “uses” an already marginalized group to advance their own agendas or careers by stereotyping and scapegoating, that itself is an act of oppression.
“Every time some Anti-White, Anti-American, Anti-freedom event takes place, you look at it, and it’s Jews behind it.”
This headline in October 2018 blamed Jews for sexual assault charges lodged against then newly confirmed United States Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh, printed in bold capital letters on covertly posted extremist fliers distributed at the Universities of California at Berkeley and Davis in addition to Vassar and Marist colleges in New York state.
Fliers depicted a photo of Kavanaugh surrounded by distorted caricatures of Jewish United States Senate members, including Diane Feinstein and Chuck Schumer, with Magen Davids (Shields or Stars of David) branded on their foreheads.
The fliers also included Jewish billionaire, George Soros, whom the political right has unjustly branded for funding anti-Kavanaugh opposition, allegedly paying protesters, and funding the so-called “migrant caravan” (group of asylum seekers) then inching its way toward the US southern border.
Approximately one hour after police captured a man on October 26, 2018, in Florida suspected of sending approximately 15 pipe bombs through the mail to prominent Democrats, an anonymous man phoned my home, someone who apparently knew I am a professor, who spouted, “Hey, how can I donate to your university, you Jew Kike.”
I immediately hung up the phone, but he called me back and I did not answer his second attempt to discharge his message of hate.
One day later my heart broke as I watched TV reports of a shooter who entered the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh 2018, Pennsylvania killing at least 11 people and wounding several others, including 4 police officers. The shooter was said to have ties to pro-neo-Nazi white supremacist organizations who reportedly shouted during his carnage that “Jews must die!”
As a fairly visible writer and columnist, I have gotten many antisemitic and heterosexist emails, Facebook, Twitter, and telephone threats through the years, some anonymous, some not.
I am an out and proud queer Jew. I have been involved in the struggle for civil and human rights most of my life, and I declared to myself long ago that the cause is just and that I would never shrink from the battles and never allow others to intimidate me. That said, while making me somehow stronger and even more committed to work for a socially just society, the venomous insults have taken an emotional toll on my psyche and on my overall self-esteem.
And what are the effects on other members of Jewish communities and especially young people who are progressing through their identity development process? Victims of marginalization and systematic oppression are susceptible to the effects of internalized oppression, whereby they internalize, consciously or unconsciously, attitudes of inferiority or “otherness.”
This internalization, created by oppression from the outside, plays itself out where it has seemed “safe” to do so in two primary places according to Re-evaluation specialist Suzanne Lipsky: 1. on members of their own group, and 2. upon themselves.
In the case of religious minoritized communities, this can result in low self-esteem, shame, depression, prejudiced attitudes towards members of their own religious community, and even conversion to a dominant religious denomination.
A Jewish student expressed to me in private that since he came to our Midwestern university campus when I was a tenured professor there, that he went into a “religious closet.” To avoid marginalization by his peers, he told them that he was raised Methodist because he has often heard other students express cruel anti-Jewish sentiments regarding Hitler and the German Holocaust as well as every-day expressions such as “Don’t Jew me down” (translated as “Don’t cheat me like a Jew”) and “That’s so Jewish” (like “That’s so gay,” both intense put-downs).
The clearly antisemitic fliers posted at the Universities of California at Berkeley and Davis, Vassar, and Marist colleges in New York state announced they are “Brought to you by your local Stormer book club.”
The Anti-Defamation League describes the chapters of the Daily Stormer Book Club as “small crews of young white men who follow and support Andrew Anglin and his neo-Nazi website, the Daily Stormer,” and that “SBC members present themselves as American Nationalists and are part of the alt right segment of the white supremacist movement.”
“You Jews will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!”
The estimated 1500 neo-Nazi white supremacists blared out this disgusting chant as they marched with their Tiki Torches in hand through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, August 11-12, 2017, in their “Unite the Right” protest rally over the scheduled removal of a statue commemorating Civil War General Robert E. Lee.
This march was reminiscent of similar events held throughout Germany, and particularly in Nuremberg during the Nazi era.
So why do people all along the political spectrum, from far left to far right, from self-described “white supremacists” to many people who are otherwise well-intentioned target Jews, many who appear “white”?
The partial answer, stemming from a long and complex history, is that though Jewish people are members of every so-called “race,” even Jews of European heritage (Ashkenazim) have been and still continue to be “racially” othered by some dominant Christian European-heritage communities.
For this reason, members of white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups engage in religious, ethnic, and racial bigotry against all groups they consider non-white, including Jews. In other words, anti-Jewish prejudice and discrimination (a.k.a. antisemitism) is a form of racism.
Anti-Jewish hatred, while a mainstay of political, religious, and social discourse in the United States, appears nevertheless to be on the rise. Incidents in the U.S. hit an all-time high in 2024 with 9,354 recorded cases. This amounts to a 5% increase from the 8,873 incidents recorded in 2023, a 344% increase over the past five years and a 893% increase over the past 10 years.
As we commemorate Kristallnacht in early November, we must not merely acknowledge it as an historic event, but more importantly, as a look into the not-so-distant future if we remain silent.
Politicians, celebrities, sports personalities must step up to the plate and hit a home run against all the multiple forms of oppression, including antisemitism.
“Under the Hitler regime…the most important thing that I learned…was that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problems. The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful, and the most tragic problem is silence.” Joachim Prinz, Rabbi of Berlin, exiled in 1937 to the United States, from his speech August 28, 1963, Washington, DC.
