The Lesson We’re Forgetting from 1933

It was a gray, chilly spring day, April 7, 1933. Just months earlier, a new leader had risen to power in Germany. That morning, Adolf Hitler signed the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. It sounded bureaucratic. But its effect was immediate and chilling.

Jewish professors, teachers, and researchers, many of them giants in their fields, were expelled from universities overnight. It did not matter if they were Nobel laureates, beloved mentors, or pioneers of their disciplines. It was one of the regime’s first sweeping acts, a quiet and devastating purge of the intellectual class.

This was not yet the machinery of genocide. But it was a beginning. A clearing of the field so that only one kind of voice, one kind of truth, could remain.

I find myself thinking about that day more than I would like.

In recent weeks, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has detained multiple international students at universities across the United States under opaque and troubling circumstances. Students like Mohsen Mahdawi, Rumeysa Ozturk, Yunseo Chung, Momodou Taal, and Badar Khan Suri have emerged in news reports. Students who engaged in some forms of political protest, particularly around Palestinian issues. Some were held for hours or days without access to legal counsel or clear explanation. Others were deported or barred from re-entry, with little recourse.

I am Jewish. I believe in Israel’s right to exist, to exist in peace, and to always defend itself. As a recent graduate student at Stanford, I heard chants and slogans on campus that were crude, clearly antisemitic, and often ignorant of history’s weight. Those protests at White Plaza, at the core of Stanford’s campus, still disturb me.

But I am also an American. And to be American is to believe, fiercely, in the sanctity of free speech. Especially on college campuses, where the clash of ideas is not a threat to democracy. It is what makes this country different from the authoritarian regimes we study in history books.

What troubles me is not the content of the speech. It is the response. Students are being surveilled and detained. Not for violence. Not for incitement. But for speech. For speech I find misguided. Speech I reject. But speech nonetheless.

I am not defending the ideas. But these students are not terrorists. They are not Hamas enemy combatants. In a free society, we do not disappear people for having the wrong sign or shouting the wrong slogan.

In 1933, Germans were told that Jewish intellectuals had to be removed to “restore order” to the academy. That the universities needed cleansing. That disorder needed discipline. Most people stayed silent. Some applauded.

No, America today is not the tale of Weimar Germany. In no way do I wish to minimize the unique horror of the Holocaust and Nazi totalitarianism. I fear that drawing such parallels may blur the line between overreach and genocide, and can potentially hinder rather than help constructive dialogue. But history echoes in choices we justify, liberties we trim, and principles we put on pause “just this once.”

To support Israel, we do not need to abandon the First or Fourteenth Amendment. In fact, the opposite is true. If we want to defend Israel on moral grounds, if we want to champion the values that distinguish liberal democracies from tyrannies, we must extend constitutional protections to those whose views we find abhorrent.

That is the hard part of a democratic society. It is also its genius.

In 1933, the purges started with professors. Then they came for students. The intellectual class was not crushed by violence. It was undone by compliance, bureaucratic silence, procedural nods, and the shrugging away of dissent.

The point is remembering who we are, and why our Constitution was built to protect not the comfortable, but the contested. Ideas should be met with better ideas, not exile.

If we forget that, then the lesson of 1933 is no longer history. It is prophecy.