Smoking out Hitler on 4/20: How Jews erased Hitler’s birthday

In 1967, Mel Brooks’ first film The Producers featured Jewish comedian Dick Shawn who portrayed a stoner who got cast in the lead role of the Broadway production of “Springtime for Hitler.” The mockery of his drug-fueled portrayal of der Führer was designed to diminish Hitler’s standing in the cultural memory. Little did Brooks know that this was not just a comedy, but a prophesy.

On 4/20, we should stop and appreciate how Jewish stoners erased Hitler’s birthday.

The living history of Nazis symbols 

After a violent insurrection he led failed to topple the government to install a racist authoritarian regime, a conservative court went easy on Adolf Hitler, giving him a short jail sentence. He used to the time to write Main Kampf. The book not only sets out Hitler’s biography, but also contains a blueprint for the way he was going to take his project back up once released from incarceration, an approach that was tragically and devastatingly effective.

Hitler, who had self-trained to be an artist, saw symbols as central to building the movement. He personally designed the uniforms, flags, and emblems. He labored for days perfecting the swastika he wanted, trying various orientations and dimensions. He understood that these symbols held tremendous psychological power.

When you are a part of a group that has its own signs and codes, using them not only allows for communication of a message, but the further communication of connectedness. Knowing that you understand what others do not gives you an inflated sense of belonging. The us versus them dynamic is enhanced and you feel pride in being one of us. As such, the group, with its beliefs and mythology becomes a part of your identity through your embrace of the symbology.

The modern white supremacist and neo-Nazi movements learned this lesson from their master and the original Nazi symbols have been maintained and augmented with new entries. The ubiquitous “Heil Hitler” was abbreviated “HH” and as h is the eighth letter of the Roman alphabet, the number 88 became an underground representation of hate. In the same way, Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, so the American way of abbreviating that date 4/20 likewise becomes a number with a hidden evil subtext. To these bigots, 4/20, April 20th, would become a high holy day.

What they did not realize was that a bunch of kids, the majority Jewish, would unknowingly appropriate this, diminishing the day as holy, but amplifying it as high.

Where’s Waldo

Four years after the release of The Producers, in 1971, five students at San Rafael High came in possession of a map to a secret garden of marijuana that was being grown not far away. The person who planted it worried about being busted and so granted this group of friends who referred to themselves as “The Waldos” the a-ok to harvest what he had grown.

Meeting after school at 4:20 p.m. at a statue of Louie Pasteur on campus, the five partook of their own stash and set off to find the gold of pot at the end of the rainbow. They would refer to the substance thereafter as “420 Louie” for the time and the place they started their search, but ultimately dropped the reference to Monsier Pasteur, leaving the term “420” which unexpectedly spread as an effective shorthand for the leafy substance.

Counterculture, Jewish Culture, Drug Culture, and Mainstream Culture

In the 1960s, marijuana became enmeshed in the rising counterculture that was emerging in the region around San Rafael. It developed in response to the creation of suburban middle class life that resulted from the new world after World War II.

Those who fought in the war received benefits under the GI Bill that included free college tuition and low rate mortgages. Together, they powered the development of the American middle class and the suburban existence that sat at its core.

Because young Jewish men enlisted in outsized numbers to take the fight to Hitler, Jewish life radically changed after the war. From sweatshops to white collar jobs, from tenements to green lawns with white picket fences, it was a miracle of social elevation. Within a single generation the lived experience of being Jewish in America had been forever altered.

While the security and comfort of the suburban life and the invitation to assimilation that came with it were appreciated, the inequities of the exclusivity of the lifestyle became apparent to Jews who were new to being considered white, or at least off-white. Not having been generationally acculturated into American bourgeois concepts and being sensitive to exclusion, a sense of ambivalence began to appear, concerned with the shallowness and racism that were a part of the new way of being.

Objections began to be raised on a range of fronts and Jews found themselves in leadership roles in many of them. Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin became faces of the anti-war movement. Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner paid the ultimate price, being murdered by Klansmen, for being a part of the Civil Rights movement. Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Bella Abzug were major figures in the feminist movement. Harvey Milk and Larry Kramer were major parts of the gay rights movement. Wherever there was a call for liberation and social evolution, Jews were a part of the counterculture.

While these movements objected to the status quo, new possibilities were considered. Ways of living better, healthier, and more peacefully were explored. In this way, the use of substances to open one’s mind became a part of the counterculture.

Marijuana had been often used by jazz musicians and it made its way through the Beats into the bourgeoning bay area hippie scene. Harvard psychologists Timothy Leary and his Jewish colleague Richard Alpert, who changed his name to Ram Dass, considered the possibility that drugs like LSD could allow the curtain between the individual mind and what Carl Jung called the collective consciousness to be raised. The idea of expanding one’s consciousness became a central part of the lifestyle.

It also became a central part of the music. Jewish folk musician Bob Dylan turned on the Beatles in a limousine after having misinterpreted the lyrics to “I Want to Hold Your Hand” thinking that instead of “I can’t hide” they sang “I get high.” After spending time with Dylan, they did. And in part as a result of their music, so too did many of their fans. It became prevalent enough that at Woodstock in 1969, fellow Jewish folk singer Arlo Guthrie would sing about coming into Los Angeles, bringing in a couple of keys.

As the changes that were being advocated by the baby boomers moved from the fringes into the mainstream, so too did pot use. As it became common while remaining illegal, coded references were required and along with the plethora of other terms, “420” became increasingly common in its usage with GenX smokers, which then became standard for Millenials and GenZ, so that now “420” is everywhere.

The number originally referred to a time—something users will often refer to themselves—but it can also be a date. As such, 4/20 has come to be a holiday in honor of the smoking of weed. The use of the date to represent something designed to be peaceful supplanting its use as a symbol of racist, homophobic, and antisemitic hatred was certainly not intentional. But when you see that the erasing of Hitler’s birthday was led by a group of stoners who were majority Jewish, there seems to be “nothin’ left to do,” as the Grateful Dead who themselves lived in San Rafael back then famously sang, “but smile, smile, smile.”