Americans have a moral imperative to prevent Donald Trump and maga Republicans from normalizing evil behaviors

Echo opinion letter published in the the Louisiana Times-Picyune NOLA newspaper: 

The term “the banality of evil” is a philosophical concept coined by Hannah Arendt*, a Jewish philosopher, after attending the trial of Adolf Eichmann, who sent millions of Jews to their deaths during the Holocaust during World War II.

Arendt concluded that individuals can commit hideous acts due to a failure to engage in independent thought and moral reasoning.

I am bothered that in today’s America, we have normalized and desensitized individuals to acts of evil. When cruelties are rooted in everyday routines and policies, they may be perceived as "normal" or even necessary, diminishing individual responsibility and moral awareness.

We expect evil to have a tail, horns and a pitchfork, appear in red or slither on the ground. It’s far more likely that it will look like your favorite uncle or your sweet grandmother. It just might cover itself in platitudes like “equality,” “social justice” and the “common good.” It could even be a prominent member of your church or in government.

The lesson is that ordinary people can do the wrong thing if they don’t step up to the moral imperative of reflective thinking.

This makes this process as much of a spiritual process as it is a political one. Questions that need to be asked are:

• Is there a willingness to challenge authority or question the status quo if it is believed to be leading to unethical outcomes?
• Are injustice and harmful behaviors being spoken out against, or is one choosing to remain silent, thereby allowing them to persist?
• Are the consequences of actions for others considered, or is the focus primarily on what I am told?
• Is a "deep and compassionate fighting spirit" being nurtured to keep goodness alive, or is one becoming complacent in the face of injustice?

You need to think for yourself in order to describe the reality you find yourself in, so that you can then resist it.

From Sister Beth Mouch in New Orleans

*From Nazi-Occupied France to New York

While in France, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)worked for the organization Youth Aliyah, which rescued Jewish youth. There she met the man who would become her second husband, Heinrich Blücher. 

Arendt was imprisoned in a detention camp in Gurs in southwest France. After escaping, she and Blücher fled Nazi Europe, and in 1941, they arrived in New York. Through the 1940s, Arendt wrote essays on anti-Semitism, refugees, and the need for a Jewish army for Aufbau and other German émigré journals. She worked as an editor for Schocken Books and served as Executive Director of The Jewish Cultural Reconstruction organization. She and Blücher lived on Riverside Drive in NYC and in Kingston, NY near Bard College where Blücher taught for 17 years.

 

Donald Trump and maga Republicans want to rewrite American history to eliminate American slavery history

“It has been said that history repeats itself,” Theodor Reik, a Jewish psychoanalyst..."

As a German, Trump’s push to eliminate shameful history sounds familiar. It’s a bad idea. Opinion essay published in The Philadelphia Inquirer by Adrian Schultz. 

Annalena Baerbock places flowers at Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe on the 85th anniversary of the November 1938, pogroms in Germany and Austria, in 2023.

Donald Trump’s targeting of displays at national parks reminds writer Adrian Schulz of his country’s far-right politicians' call for burying Germany's dark past.

“It has been said that history repeats itself,” Theodor Reik, a Jewish psychoanalyst, wrote in his 1965 book, Curiosities of the Self: Illusions We Have About Ourselves. “This is perhaps not quite correct; it merely rhymes.”

Sometimes, the attempts to get rid of history also rhyme.

As a German journalist visiting Philadelphia, I find a familiar echo in Donald Trump’s targeting of displays at national parks that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.” 

Trump's actions reminds me about what my country’s far-right politicians call for doing with our own dark past: they want to eradicate it.

“Rather than bringing the following generations in touch with the great benefactors, the well-known world-changing philosophers, the musicians, the genius discoverers and inventors, of whom we have so many,” Völkisch politician Björn Höcke said in 2017, German history, he claimed, “is slammed and ridiculed.”

Compare that with Trump’s Executive Order 14253, which posits that “rather than fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe.”

The order — issued in March and titled, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” — specifically names Independence National Historical Park as an example of the “corrosive ideology” it denounces and aims to “restore” in time for the nation’s Semiquincentennial next year. The directive is the basis for the U.S. Department of the Interior’s current effort to review texts, most prominently at the President’s House, about the role slavery played at the time of the nation’s birth.

Liberation of Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland, January 27, 1945

Of course, the atrocities of slavery and those of the war, suffering, and genocide that Germany brought upon the world and its own Jewish, Romani, and queer population during the Nazi era are not the same. But the ways in which nationalistic ideologists today try to deny these historic realities are.

As a German, I am heavily indebted to America. Without the United States, my country would not be free, let alone one of the leading nations in the world today.

It is often claimed that Germany has reckoned with its past. Probably the most eager to claim that are Germans themselves. 

As Germans, we even have a word for it: Erinnerungsweltmeister — the world champions of memory. If you have messed up so badly, you have to find your pride somewhere.

This claim is only partly justified. The Nazi years are dealt with extensively in school. In the streets of nearly every German region, you will find small golden Stolpersteine, “stumbling stones,” in the pavement before the houses in which deported Jews used to live, to memorialize them. Since 2005, in the city center of Berlin, right next to the federal parliament, stand the 2,711 gray concrete stelae that constitute the 4.7-acre Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

But in spite of all that, remembrance was always contested. And it is still.

In 1986, two in three Germans said the Nazi years should be “left behind” and not be talked about so much. In 2005, 54% still agreed with that. After a decline in 2018, when 45% argued in favor of setting history aside, the number rose again to 55% this year, mirroring the rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland, known as the AfD, which is now Germany’s second-largest political party despite being considered a danger to democracy.

The decision to build the Berlin Holocaust memorial wasn’t an undisputed one, either. In 1998, influential author Martin Walser called it the “concreting of the capital’s city center with a nightmare the size of a soccer field.” 

In 2017, Höcke, one of the AfD’s most dominant figures, voiced that Germans are the “only people in the world that has planted a memorial of shame in the heart of its capital.”

But memorials keep people from letting history be just the past. They make it present. They confront you with it every day. Thus, they become a target for those who’d prefer to not see, not hear, not talk about reality.

The global right is on the hunt for historical facts. It aims for national pride through denial. But that is a fragile basis. It ultimately means that the horrors can happen again, because the heirs refuse to learn from them.

Like it or not, the past lives on. You cannot get rid of it. If you try, you risk a vicious cycle of defiance and hate.

Both America and Germany deserve better.

Adrian Schulz is a journalist with Der Tagesspiegel in Berlin and an Arthur F. Burns fellow at The Inquirer.

Donald Trump and Republicans continue to divide Americans with fear and Democrats cannot remain silent

Sunday Paper echo essay by Maria Shriver:  Beautiful essay!

Elon Musk went off the rails this week, but I’ve got to admit that I wasn’t surprised. In fact, I’ve been waiting for this moment.

That said, I can’t believe how embarrassing and depressing it was to watch the fighting that unfolded between him and Trump.

I know many people are laughing at their back-and-forth, but make no mistake: it’s serious when someone starts to unravel in the public square.

This president has somewhat normalized insane tweets—the kind people laugh at and share—but to me there is nothing funny about this...

That said, I can’t believe how embarrassing and depressing it was to watch the fighting that unfolded between Musk and Trump. I know many people are laughing at their back-and-forth, but make no mistake: it’s serious when someone starts to unravel in the public square.

"....but make no mistake: it’s serious when someone like Musk goes off in the public square and then the president jumps in."

This president has somewhat normalized insane tweets—the kind people laugh at and share—but to me there is nothing funny about this...between Musk and Trump. 

Governing is really serious business, especially at this moment. The economy is fragile. People are struggling as they try to make decisions for their families and their businesses. There are multiple wars going on. Chaos isn’t good for the business of running our country, and our leadership is chaotic right now. That hurts us at home and abroad.

While many are obsessing over this spectacle, fear is quietly taking over our lives. And for some, it’s not quiet at all.

Here in Los Angeles this weekend, fear is front and center as federal immigration agents clashed with hundreds of people protesting a recent series of raids in the city. 

So many of our country’s immigrants, our friends and neighbors, are living in daily fear that they or someone they love will be swept up in a raid and separated from their families. 

As of Saturday evening, the White House announced Donald Trump is ordering 2,000 National Guards to be deployed in Los Angeles County, which will undoubtedly stir up even more fear.

Fear seems to be everywhere I look. This week, it was another headline that really stopped me in my tracks. It said “Jews Are Afraid Right Now."

I stared at it for the longest time. Then I closed my eyes. I have so many friends who are Jewish and I wanted to take a moment to pray for each of them. In fact, I wanted to pray for everyone of Jewish faith.

I know many say thoughts and prayers do nothing, but I don’t agree. I know they’re not the only solution to our problems, but I do think they are essential parts of our toolbox. They’re by no means the only tools, but they are two important ones in my life. This I know to be true.

Another important action I believe in is condemning violence, like what we witnessed in Boulder and what happened to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. His op-ed after a targeted attack on his home and family (you can read it here in case you missed it) still resonates. It’s a call to each of us to rise up, call out hate, and tap into our better angels, because now is a time when we need to collectively do better and be better.

Together, we have to start using our voices to speak up instead of allowing fear to stop us from taking action. We have to let others know where we stand and what we believe. Jews are afraid, yes, and that’s wrong. It actually turns my stomach, fuels my anger, and breaks my heart. It also breaks my heart that people in Gaza continue to face death and starvation amid a terrifying war.

Fear is in every conversation I have. In fact, this week when I traveled to Cleveland for our forum on women’s health and research, fear came up several times in people’s questions.

People are often afraid to question doctors and advocate for themselves. 

But you often have to push for a second opinion. You always need to speak up in the doctor’s office and believe in your own instincts, because often times your life depends on it.

Speaking of one’s life last week, I posed a question about bravery and a reader responded with her own heartbreaking but powerful story, which you can read here. This is a headline that will stop you cold as well. In "This Is What Being Brave Means for Me," this Sunday Paper reader writes that after being a victim of assault, she is still fighting for justice—not just for herself, but for other women. That’s courage. That’s pushing through fear.

It’s also brave to tell the truth, as Molly Jong-Fast has done in her new memoir How to Lose Your Mother. In the book, she writes how she inherited a world of complexity from her famous mother, and finally decided to tell her side of the story. In doing so, she embraced her grief and found grace.

That’s what bravery looks like in real time. That’s what fear transformed into power can do.

The other night, two longtime friends (who just happen to be Jewish) came to dinner. We started talking about fear in our political dialogue, and somehow the topic turned to women. We started talking about how the fear women face isn’t just in health care or religion—it’s everywhere. That’s when my son Christopher spoke up in the conversation and said, “Men are scared too.”

“In fact, do you all know that the number one predictor of suicide today is just being a man?” he said.

Men are taking their lives in record numbers. They are lonelier than ever. They are losing jobs to AI. And when a man loses his provider role, he often spirals into depression, addiction, despair, and suicide. I listened as my beautiful, strong, tender-hearted son spoke about the challenges men face in today’s society. My heart cracked.

Jews are scared. Women feel afraid. Men are hurting. Gays are worried. Scientists and researchers are in panic mode. Journalists speak about the challenges our profession faces. Even CBS, the one-time “Tiffany Network of News,” is afraid to fight a lawsuit by a sitting president—so afraid that they’re discussing folding, much like another network already did. Ugh, ugh, ugh.

Fear is everywhere. The synagogues in my city look like armed military establishments. So do schools. People are afraid to walk down the street, live in our neighborhoods, or post on social media. What in God’s name is happening to us?

All the while, millions of podcasts and newsletters and TikTok accounts pop up daily, telling us how to draw boundaries with our parents, how to deal with toxic relationships, how to breathe, emotionally regulate, jump in cold plunges, dress to feel young, exercise to ward off aging, and build our brands so we can compete in this brand-obsessed society we are all players in.

My friends, that is not going to dissolve our fear. That is not going to ease our heartbreak, our pain, our fear of one another, our fear of retribution if we speak our minds.

So then what will?

Dare I suggest… love? 💖💙💛Dare I suggest compassion? 

Dare I suggest community? Dare I suggest friendship? Dare I suggest prioritizing our own healing so that we can step forward without taking out our fear, anger, or rage on one another?

Fear is going to back us further and further into our collective corners. Fear is going to make us silent at a time when our voices are our most powerful weapons. Fear is paralyzing.

I’ve felt its effects in my life. I’m not proud to say it, but there have been times in my own life when my fear got the better of me. When I didn’t act. Didn’t use my voice.

But over time I found that every time I was scared and acted anyway, I gained strength. I gained courage. I found my footing—often on behalf of others, then eventually on behalf of myself. I gained courage by watching others. I gained strength by feeling their friendship, their love, and their support.

Love is expensive. Courage comes from recognizing our fear and then using our voices anyway. It comes from reaching out anyway and standing with others who may be afraid in order to ease their fear.

Standing with one group doesn’t mean you can’t stand with another one. People who stand with Jews can stand with Palestinians who are afraid for their lives. Women can stand with men. And vice versa.

My circle is broad and diverse. I want to be able to stand with men and women, with the LGBTQIA* community, and with Jews and Black Americans. I have friends who immigrated here from Ukraine, from Russia, from Iran, from Israel and Palestine. I’m a Catholic who has friends from different faiths.

The Pope inspires me, and so do my other fellow Catholics including Father James Martin, Father Richard Rohr, Father Greg Boyle, and Sister Joan Chittister. But so too do Rabbi Steve Leder, Pastor Ed Bacon, and Pastor Sarah Jakes Roberts and Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde.

My father, Sargent Shriver, Jr. (1915-2011), was an ardent Catholic, was the first person who spoke to me about the dangers of Hitler and the power of Jesus Christ’s message of love, forgiveness and peace.

My parents introduced me to the Berrigan brothers, who spoke out fiercely against the war; Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Worker Movement and spoke out against poverty; Cesar Chavez, who fought the establishment for workers’ rights; Rosa Parks, who said, “No, I will not get off the bus”; Fred Guttenberg, who has turned his own pain into purpose by speaking out against gun violence, hoping to spare another parent what he and his family have gone through. The list goes on.

These were the days before social media could scare you into a corner. Before the days when the leader of the free world called people derogatory nicknames in the public square.

Maybe it’s time for us all to look back and remind ourselves that there have been many fearless people throughout the ages who used their voices to stand up and stand alongside their neighbors—and often total strangers. Human beings who felt afraid due to their faith, the color of their skin, or their gender, but who spoke up anyway.

There will always be people who are afraid. May we believe there will also always be people needed who will stand up straight alongside them. Otherwise, fear will win, and we will all lose everything worth caring about.

That’s what this moment is asking of us: to recognize our fear, and the fear of our fellow humans, and turn toward them instead of away.

Perhaps turning towards one another looks like this:
T.U.R.N.

• Talk - Have one honest conversation this week with someone who might be afraid.
• Unite - Stand with at least one group or person facing fear (even if it's outside your usual circle).
• Reach out - Contact a friend, neighbor, or community member who might feel isolated.
• Name it - Speak up against hate or fear-mongering when you see it, even in small ways.

May we rise up collectively in friendship, in love, and in community. This moment demands that of us. There’s no doubt about that.

*lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual

Holocaust curricula must be supported and taught because the world must "Never Forget!" Nazi terrorism

Echo opinion essay published in the Seattle Times, a Washington State newspaper by Lisa Wellman and John Braun. 

Holocaust and genocide awareness are crucial lessons in schools.

Check the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum at this site here for resources to help teach about the Holocaust. 

Antisemitism and other kinds of hate are on the rise across our nation. American Jews are experiencing levels of harm not seen in 45 years — hate-filled protests, antisemitic vandalism and the spread of dangerous conspiracy theories.

Disturbingly, these incidents are often fueled by a troubling ignorance of history.

A 2020 survey of Americans in the millennial and Generation Z age groups — meaning younger than 40 at the time — revealed 63% did not know 6 million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. Even more alarming, 11% of respondents believed Jews were responsible for their own genocide. Today, conspiracy theories and the Holocaust-denial movement exploit social media and increase bias and bigotry against Jews and other groups. These trends are deeply troubling, not just for the Jewish community, but for the integrity of our democracy and society as a whole. Hatred festers in the shadows of ignorance. That is why we, as leaders in our caucuses, are committed to combating hate and fostering understanding. One foundational way we can do this is ensuring access to Holocaust and genocide awareness education for Washington’s teachers and students.

The Holocaust was not onlt a horrible Jewish tragedy; it was a humanitarian tragedy. The systemic persecution and murder of at least 6 million Jews and 5 million others — Roma, people with disabilities and political dissidents, who were all targeted for being different, highlights the devastating consequences of unchecked hatred, scapegoating and authoritarianism.

Nazi Germany committed mass murder on an unprecedented scale. The Nazis and their allies and collaborators killed six million Jewish people. This systematic, state-sponsored genocide is now known as the Holocaust. The Nazis and their allies and collaborators also committed other mass atrocities. They persecuted and killed millions of non-Jewish people during World War II.

The lessons of the Holocaust are not about history alone, they are for now. Today, more than ever, they show us how unchecked dehumanization and propaganda erode the moral fabric of society. And they compel us to confront our biases, challenge misinformation and stand up against hate in all its forms.

From encouraging Holocaust and genocide awareness be taught over two decades ago, to finally passing a bill in 2019 to “strongly encourage” Holocaust education, to funding that work to ensure it is successful, legislators have committed to ensuring school communities have access to these critical resources.

This effort cannot rest solely on teachers. It requires the leadership of policymakers, community leaders and parents. We must ensure educators have the resources and training needed to address this sensitive topic with accuracy and compassion.

But sadly, in this year’s budget crisis, continued funding of this work is at risk. We have tough decisions to make. We have to ask ourselves, what kind of society do we want to create? What will the consequences be if our youngest Washingtonians are not able to learn these critical lessons? We must preserve maintenance level funding for Holocaust and genocide awareness education in the next two-year operating budget.

The fight against antisemitism and hate requires more than condemnation — it demands education, empathy and action. In a time of rising division, Holocaust education is a powerful tool to foster unity, remind us of our shared humanity and uphold the values of justice and equality.

Now is the time for continued collaboration and sustainable funding. Together, we can continue to provide this critical work and educate the next generation to be better-informed citizens with fundamental lessons that foster critical thinking, media literacy and social responsibility, empowering individuals to create positive change.

Let us not forget the words of Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, who said, “To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.” By committing to robust Holocaust education, we honor the memory of those who perished and ensure future generations understand the stakes of allowing hate to go unchecked.

It is our shared duty to say, “Never Again”❗ — and to mean it.

Lisa Wellman: is a Democrat representing the 41st Legislative District and is chair of the Senate Early Learning & K-12 Education Committee.

John Braun: represents the 20th Legislative District and is leader of the Senate Republican Caucus.

Rise of antisemitism violence is the "canary in the coal mine" warning about a future with worse to come

Echo opinion republished in The Boston Globe by Jeff Jacoby from the newsletter "Arguable". 

Elijah and the Burning Synagogue - Tablet Magazine

Melbourne, Australia- Shortly after 4 a.m. on Friday, two people in masks were spotted dousing the main entrance of the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne, one of Australia’s largest and busiest shuls, with gasoline. Moments later, the building was set on fire and rapidly became an inferno. At that very early hour, only a few men were in the sanctuary; they had come to study before morning prayers began two hours later. They realized what was happening when they heard glass shattering and were able to get out of the building through a rear door, though one suffered burns to his hand and two had to be hospitalized for smoke inhalation. Had the arsonists struck an hour later, far more people would have been inside. There is no telling how many might have died.

The damage was massive. Much of the interior was gutted. Many religious books were turned to ash. It took 60 firefighters and 17 trucks to put out the fire. At least six Torah scrolls — the most venerated objects in Jewish worship; each one typically takes 12-18 months to write — were damaged by heat and water.

Adass Israel was founded after World War II. Many of its first congregants were European immigrants who had survived the Holocaust. Rebuilding their lives following the Nazi nightmare in which one-third of the world’s Jews were murdered, they would have remembered only too vividly the smashing and burning of synagogues across Germany and Austria in November 1938 — the Kristallnacht pogrom that foreshadowed the genocidal whirlwind to come.

To Jews of that era, born in a world where antisemitic violence and destruction was not only routine but often promoted by political and religious leaders, it would not have come as a bolt from the blue that Jew-hating arsonists would attack a synagogue. Not so for the 21st-century Jews of Melbourne, some of whom naively believed that in civilized societies, such atrocities are no longer possible.

”I’m shocked, just absolutely shocked,” Benjamin Klein, an Adass Israel board member, told Australia’s 9News TV network. “We didn’t think it will happen here in Melbourne to us. We’re a quiet community. We have our heads down, we don’t bother anybody, we wish everybody well.” Klein practices strict Orthodox Judaism, but there was a similar reaction from less religious Australian Jews. Benjamin Preiss, a Melbourne newspaper editor and a self-described “largely secular” Jew, wrote in a column Monday that even as he was covering the burning of the Adass Israel synagogue, “I struggled to believe that anyone in Australia would so brazenly target a place of peaceful prayer. The fact that there were people inside at the time of the attack makes it all the more sickening.”

Yet there had been no shortage of reminders for Australia’s Jews, especially since October 7, 2023, that many of their fellow Australians hate them. Just two days after the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, a mob of Hamas supporters rallied in front of the Sydney Opera House, waving Palestinian flags and yelling “F*ck the Jews” and “Gas the Jews.” Last week the Executive Council of Australian Jewry reported that almost 2,100 anti-Jewish incidents had occurred in the 12 months following Oct. 7 — a fourfold increase from the year before. “With a few honorable exceptions,” the council noted, “the response from political and community leaders, university executives, and civil society has been tepid at best. The result has been a ratcheting up of antisemitism from hateful words to steadily more serious hateful actions.”

Such as screaming antisemitic slogans outside Jewish schools. Or vandalizing Jewish homes. Or physically assaulting Jews in the street. Or torching Adass Israel.

The burning of synagogues is one of the oldest evils perpetrated against Jews. Long before there was a Third Reich or a modern state of Israel, those who hated the Jewish people often expressed that hatred by setting ablaze the places where Jews gathered to pray.

The historian Robert Wistrich, in his sweeping history of antisemitism, “A Lethal Obsession,” describes the fourth-century Church father St. John Chrysostom, who “justified the burning down of synagogues” on the grounds that they were “a temple of demons devoted to idolatrous cults, a criminal assembly of Jews … a gulf and abyss of perdition.” Chrysostom’s contemporary, St. Ambrose of Milan, shared that view. 

When a synagogue in Mesopotamia was burned down in 388 at the instigation of the local bishop, the Roman emperor Theodosius ordered that it be rebuilt at the expense of those responsible. An outraged Ambrose argued forcefully that the order should be rescinded. No Christian should be punished for burning a synagogue, he declared, since any building where Jews worshiped was “a home of unbelief, a house of impiety, a receptacle of folly which God himself has condemned.”

When the First Crusade reached the Holy Land in 1099, recounted Simon Sebag Montefiore in “Jerusalem: The Biography,” they fought not just the ruling Muslims but also the beleaguered and powerless Jewish community. “The Jews sought refuge in their synagogues, but the Crusaders set them on fire,” Montefiore wrote. “The Jews were burned alive, almost a climactic burnt offering in Christ’s name.”

Martin Luther, the central figure of the Protestant Reformation, was one of history’s great antisemites. In an infamous 1543 treatise, “On the Jews and Their Lies,” he offered his “sincere advice” for dealing with “this rejected and condemned people, the Jews.” His list of recommendations began: “First, set fire to their synagogues or schools and bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn.”

In the Muslim world, too, synagogues  burned were to the ground again and again: in Persia in 1839, in Cairo in 1945, in Algeria in 1956, in Istanbul in 2003, in Damascus in 2013, in Tunisia in 2023, and in numerous other instances.

Even when Jewish communities have ceased to exist, the synagogues they leave behind have been destroyed by arsonists. In 2005, Israel ended its occupation of the Gaza Strip, unilaterally turning over the entire territory to the Palestinian Authority, dismantling the 21 settlements that had been built there and removing the 9,000 Jewish residents who had lived in them. But they left the synagogues intact. The buildings were both sacred and beautiful, and Israelis didn’t have the heart to flatten them. It was thought that even if the former synagogues would no longer be used for Jewish prayer, the Palestinians could put them to good use — as community centers, perhaps, or office facilities, municipal buildings, or schools.

But upon taking over the land that Israel had voluntarily relinquished, the very first thing the Palestinians did was to put the synagogues to the torch. “Gaza’s night sky turned orange as fires roared across the settlements,” the Associated Press reported. “Women ululated, teens set off fireworks, and crowds chanted ‘God is great.’ “

What happened last week in Australia has happened in the United States and Canada, too. Congregation Beth Israel in Gadsden, Ala., was firebombed by a Nazi sympathizer in 1960. The similarly-named Beth Israel synagogue in Austin was burned in 2021. A Vancouver synagogue was doused with fuel and set on fire this past May; fortunately the damage was confined to the front doors and no one was hurt. Six months earlier, Molotov cocktails were hurled at a synagogue in suburban Montreal.

There will be more. As overt antisemitism becomes increasingly normalized, the hate crimes will continue to pile up. 

Tragically, more Jews will be menaced and assaulted, more antisemitism will be pumped into social media, more cities will experience “Jew hunts” — and more synagogues will go up in flames. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, to borrow Yeats’s phrase. Our world is deeply disordered and increasingly out of control. Something truly frightful is coming. Jews, as always the canary in the coal mine, are the first to be targeted. But they won’t be the last.

This column is excerpted from Arguable, Jeff Jacoby’s weekly email newsletter. To subscribe to Arguable, visit globe.com/arguable.

Rosh Hashanha - Starting a new year of fighting against evil antisemitism

Antisemitism and the power of the big lie

Echo opinion by Jeff Jacoby published in the Boston Globe:

Throughout the centuries, even educated people have been induced to believe the most audacious falsehoods about Jews.

Last October 7, 2023, was the deadliest day of violence against Jews since the end of the Holocaust. It was also the start of the most virulent eruption of antisemitism in the West since World War II. 

To mention but a single statistic, in the first three days following the ghastly Hamas pogrom, online calls for violence against Jews surged by 1,200 percent, according to the Antisemitism Cyber Security Monitoring System. The orgiastic spilling of Jewish blood drove antisemites into a frenzy of hatred that has yet to subside.

A year ago, it might have been possible to believe that the post-Holocaust taboo on openly loathing Jews was still in force. Though outbursts of antisemitic viciousness had been occurring in recent years with increasing and alarming frequency — and coming from both the right and the left — they seemed the exception to a broadly enforced rule. No longer. Even in America, antisemitism is being mainstreamed, particularly among the young. The post-Holocaust reprieve has ended. Antisemitism is back with a vengeance, brazen and self-assured.

Over the millennia, the hatred of Jews has assumed predictable patterns, none more fundamental than the “big lie.” Antisemites — whether they hate the Jewish people, the Jewish religion, or the Jewish state — have expressed their hatred not merely by exaggerating negative stereotypes, denying inconvenient truths, or recycling bigoted slurs. Time and again they have also promoted falsehoods so monstrous and vicious, so audaciously and aggressively untrue, that their utter implausibility gives them the illusion of truth.

“In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility,” wrote Adolf Hitler in “Mein Kampf.” Many people “tell small lies in little matters,” he observed, but “it would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” That is the paradox and power of the big lie, especially when it is repeated often enough: Even reasonable minds gradually accept it as fact. After all, they subconsciously assume, why would government officials or the press or social elites make claims so shocking and scandalous unless they were true?

Hitler launched his war against the Jews with the big lie that Germany was defeated in World War I because it had been “stabbed in the back” by Jewish traitors. In reality, German Jews were exceptionally loyal to the fatherland — more than 100,000 had served in the German army during World War I and 12,000 had fallen in battle. Later came an even more unspeakable lie: the grotesque claim that Jews were racial subhumans who defiled the purity of Aryan blood. 

Today, it seems incredible that citizens of Germany, the most sophisticated and cultured nation in Europe, could have believed such insane falsehoods. But tens of millions of Germans did believe them. And when the Nazis set about ostracizing and then exterminating Europe’s Jews, it was with the avid support and participation of innumerable German citizens.

Jewish history is replete with such deadly lies.

Beginning in the 12th century, Jews were adly accused of kidnapping and slaughtering Christian children, in order to use their blood for baking Passover matzah. 

On the strength of these “blood libels,” revived again and again in medieval Europe (and recycled to this day in the Muslim world), countless Jews were imprisoned, expelled, or murdered. The accusation was not just false, it was a wholesale inversion of the truth. In Jewish culture, the consumption of blood is forbidden; indeed, it is one of the first prohibitions in the Hebrew Bible. 

An essential step in preparing kosher meat is to meticulously rinse it clean of blood. Yet this demented big lie was believed by vast numbers of Europeans.

So was the big lie, spread during the devastating Black Death of the 14th century, that Jews caused the plague by poisoning wells and springs. They intended, it was said, “to kill and destroy the whole of Christendom and have lordship over all the world.” The charge was ludicrous, not least because Jews were dying of the plague like everyone else. Yet so effective was the lie, and so fervent the antisemitic hunger to believe in Jewish culpability, that it resulted in thousands of Jews being rounded up and burned alive.

From era to era, the big lies told about Jews mutate. At the start of the 20th century, Jews were accused in the notorious “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” of conspiring to control the world. In the aftermath of 9/11, they were accused of having plotted the terrorist attacks. Louis Farrakhan has for years indoctrinated his Nation of Islam adherents in the libel that Jews were to blame for “the horror of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, plantation slavery, [and] Jim Crow.” 

A thriving industry denies that there was ever a✡️ Holocaust,🕯, insisting that the most comprehensively documented genocide in history is a Jewish fiction. 

All of these are lies so crazy, such obvious reversals of reality, that they ought to be impossible for any sane individual to believe.

Yet all of them have been believed, often in great numbers and by celebrated and influential people.

In the modern era, the most lethal antisemitic big lies have been those spread about Israel. The Jewish state has been slandered for decades as being founded on racism and practicing apartheid. Israel is smeared as a colonialist intruder with no legitimate right to exist. Long after it withdrew entirely from Gaza, it is routinely condemned as an “occupier.”

Holocaust children Nazi genocide

For decades, whenever Israel has been forced to fight in own defense, antisemites have raged that it slaughters civilians with a wanton disregard for decency and international law. 

In the year since October 7, these lies have been taken to fantastic extremes — that Israel deliberately bombs hospitals, that it knowingly induces famine, and even, in an updated imitation of Holocaust denial, that it faked the October 7 massacre for propaganda purposes and concocted the evidence of mass rape and sexual torture.

The biggest of these big lies is that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians. Once again, this is not just a falsehood but a wholesale inversion of reality. It is Hamas that unleashed genocidal violence against Israel on Oct. 7, Hamas whose leaders publicly vow to carry out the “slaughter, extermination, and annihilation” of the Jews, and Hamas whose strategy explicitly relies on maximizing Palestinian deaths. To believe that Israel — which has always gone to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties — is actually trying to exterminate the Palestinian people is about as logical as believing that Jews would spread the Black Death by poisoning the drinking water.

But when it comes to Jews, people — even educated and sophisticated people — have always been willing to believe the most monstrous big lies. And the horror of October 7, far from making such lies seem more deranged than ever, has led even more people to embrace them.

Columnist Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jeff.jacoby@globe.com. Follow him on X @jeff_jacoby.

Springfield Ohio is a tragically sad example of how an evil lie travels around the world "before truth gets its boots on"

Echo opinion with chilling imagry published in the Albany Herald, a Georgia newspaper, by Gene Lyons:

The formal term for what the *Trump Cult* has visited upon the Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, is "blood libel." 

Trump campaign's newest evil nonsense constitutes a blood libel

Although foreigners and outsiders have doubtless been blamed for everything from droughts and floods to outbreaks of disease throughout human history, conspiracists have traditionally blamed Jews.

Historians generally trace the *evil👿👺💀* term to the year 1144 in Norwich, England, when the corpse of a 12-year-old child was found. As part of a campaign to establish the dead boy as a martyr and the church where he was buried as a (profitable) pilgrimage site, an enterprising monk wrote a series of tracts blaming local Jews for his ritual murder.

And so it has gone for centuries: a totally imaginary slander kept alive by bigots and crackpots from Russia to Southern California.

"You are not forgotten, Simon of Trent," wrote a gunman who shot up a synagogue near San Diego in 2019, referencing a slain toddler allegedly martyred in 1475.  Medievil horror❗

🏰🗡️⚔️⚔🐴🗡🛡⚜🏹👑🐲🤺🛡️💢👹

"The horror that you and countless children have endured at the hands of the Jews will never be forgiven."

Events in Ohio demonstrate that anti-Semitism is far from the only form of racist scapegoating in America today. 

The Trump Cult has gone downright medieval on undocumented immigrants. Donald Trump himself calls them "vermin" 🐍who are "poisoning the blood" of (white) Americans. 

During his catastrophically bad debate with Kamala Harris, the former president charged Haitian immigrants in Springfield with unspeakable crimes.

"In Springfield, they are eating the dogs," Trump said as the split screen broadcast showed Harris looking on incredulously. "They're eating the cats," Trump continued, repeating an internet conspiracy theory that local police call totally unsubstantiated. They attribute the rumors to a Facebook post citing its source as a "neighbor's daughter's friend."

The author has herself admitted that she has no idea if it's true, and regrets posting it online.

Challenged by debate moderator David Muir, Trump doubled down. "But the people on television say their dog was eaten by the people that went there."

Would it shock you to learn that no such firsthand accounts exist? Not even on Fox  (Fake❗)News, presumably because nobody in Ohio can be found who's willing to endorse so crazy a story even for the sake of the orange messiah. It would turn their lives upside down.

For most Americans, kidnapping and cooking a family pet would be a more shocking crime than, well, pretty much anything I can imagine. That's what makes it a blood libel: a false accusation that seeks to render its targets subhuman. Beneath contempt.

It follows that anybody who would endorse it deserves nothing but scorn. For all the predictable whining of his supporters about how terribly unfair it was of ABC moderators to correct this grotesque lie, the simple truth is that Trump hurt himself.

"You stupid mf'ers just got Trump to repeat your lie about the pets," right-wing talk radio host Erick Erickson wrote on X. "Congrats on setting the news stories tomorrow by lying so Trump picks it up."

Yeah, well, nobody made him do it. The combination of Trump's own ignorance, credulousness and bigotry caused him serious political harm.

So, it's only fitting that the worst vice presidential candidate in recent American history, J.D. Vance, not only  doubled down on the libel, but went on national TV and bragged about it❗

Seriously, what is wrong with J.D. Vance? The reason he endorsed the anti-Haitian scare stories, he said, wasn't that they are true, he admitted to CNN's Dana Bash, but to correct news media bias.

"If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people," Vance said, "then that's what I'm going to do, Dana, because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast."

Incredulously, the normally unflappable Bash emphasized that Vance had just admitted the whole pet-eating business was a 🤥 made-up story. (IOW- lies❗)

The candidate - Marine Corporal Vance.... didn't deny it.

"I say that we're creating a story, meaning we're creating the American media focusing on it," he insisted.

Meanwhile, the kinds of MAGA cranks who appear to see Trump as semi-divine and incapable of error sprang into action. The small city of Springfield was besieged by bomb threats and warnings of impending violence that led to school, hospital and university closings. Predictions of mayhem caused panic among the Haitian community.

They are legal immigrants actively recruited to the community to fill factory jobs that had gone begging, as local authorities, business leaders and Ohio's Republican Gov. Mike DeWine emphasized. 

It's all nonsense, a classic blood libel blaming the Haitians for the panic some benighted Ohioans feel at their black faces and Creole-accented voices. To Trumpers, poor deluded fools, that makes them frightening and evil.

Arkansas Times columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000).

Antisemitism in Nazi Germany and Communism created barbaric totalitarian evil systems where many millions were murdered

The swastika stands for evil and mass murder. 

So does the hammer and sickle.

In January, two gruesome anniversaries are noted in the history of 20th-century totalitarianism. Echo opinion published in The Boston Globe by Jeff Jacoby:

Russian Revolution of 1917, Revolution that overthrew the imperial government and placed the Bolsheviks in power.

Sunday was the centennial of the death of Vladimir Lenin. The architect of the Bolshevik Revolution and first ruler of the Soviet Union was 53 when he died of a brain hemorrhage on January 21, 1924, in Russia.

From among 230 000 children deported to KL Auschwitz only 700 were liberated.

Saturday was the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the extermination camp in Poland where 1.1 million victims were murdered by Nazi Germany between 1940 and 1945. The United Nations in 2005, designated January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Why has the UN never dedicated a similar day of remembrance for the victims of communism?

In fact, the communist system introduced by Lenin led to more slaughter and suffering than any other movement in history. 

For sheer murderous horror, there has never been a force to compare to it. The Nazis didn’t come close. Although the Adolf Hitler’s evil regime eradicated 6 million Jews in the unprecedented genocide of the Holocaust, the Germans also killed at least 5 million non-Jews, among them ethnic Poles, prisoners of war, Romani people, and the disabled.

But the Nazi toll adds up to barely a tenth of the lives that have been extinguished by communist dictatorships. 

According to “The Black Book of Communism,” a magisterial compendium of communist crimes first published in France in 1997, the fanaticism unleashed by Lenin’s revolution has sent at least 100 million men, women, and children to early graves. 

Beginning in 1917, communist regimes on four continents — from Russia and Eastern Europe to China and North Korea to Cuba and Ethiopia — engineered death on a scale unmatched in human annals.

Yet communism rarely evokes the instinctive loathing that Nazism does. To this day there are those who still insist that communism is admirable and wholesome, or that it has never been properly implemented, or that with all its failings it is better than capitalism. Many people who would find it unthinkable to deck themselves in Nazi regalia — when Britain’s Prince Harry wore a swastika armband to a costume party in 2005, a major scandal ensued — view communist-themed fashion as trendy or kitschy.

In Manhattan’s East Village, the popular KGB Bar — named after the USSR’s terrifying security network of secret police and torture sites — features Soviet propaganda posters and literary readings. Would any New York hipster ever set foot in a pub called Gestapo?

Amazon sells scores of shirts with hammer-and-sickle designs or the images of communist dictators like Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, who were among the greatest mass killers in history. Search for “Nazi T-shirts,” on the other hand, and what comes up are shirts showing a swastika in a red circle with a slash (“No Nazis”) or proclaiming: “Punch a Nazi.”

What accounts for the difference? Both Nazism and communism filled the world with pain, terror, and death. Yet communists are not regarded with the same revulsion that Nazis are. 

In the public’s perception, Hitler and his Nazi Party have no equal as incarnations of supreme evil. Why isn’t communist tyranny viewed the same way?

A number of reasons suggest themselves.

First: In the war against Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union ended up fighting alongside the Allies. World War II gave way to the long-drawn-out Cold War, but America’s alliance with Moscow left in many minds the belief that when it mattered most, the communists were on our side. 

Really❓ Russia on "our side"❓

After all, the free world had labeled Nazis as the supreme evil. So anyone who helped destroy Nazis must not have been supremely evil themselves.

Second: The Nazis made little effort to disguise the abhorrent malignance on which their movement was based, above all its genocidal antisemitism. They made no secret of their implacable hatred for Jews and other “subhumans” or their belief that an Aryan master race should rule the world. Conversely, communist movements have almost always cloaked their malice and brutality with tempting rhetoric about equality, peace, and an end to exploitation. Partly as a result, the myth persists to this day that communism is really a noble ideology with the potential to liberate mankind.

Third: Nazism was utterly discredited by the fate meted out to Nazi Germany — unconditional surrender, an Allied occupation, war-crimes trials, and the hanging of senior Nazis. By contrast, communist dictatorships in Moscow and elsewhere entrenched their hold on power. The end of the Cold War eventually brought down communist governments in Russia and Europe, but even then, there was no public accounting for the ghastly crimes they had committed.

Fourth: The Holocaust became such a “byword for modern barbarism,” as the authors of “The Black Book of Communism” put it, that even mass murders of greater magnitude in the communist world seem to recede in significance. In crucial ways, the Holocaust stands alone: Nazi 卐 Germany deployed every resource at its command to construct a vast industry of death with the goal of rounding up and destroying every single Jew in Europe — not as a means to an end but as an end in itself. There is good reason that so much attention has been paid to the Holocaust by scholars, historians, educators, and artists.

As a result, however, the far greater level of bloodshed committed by communist regimes has never achieved the same public awareness.

Fifth: There are pictures of what the Nazis did. Filmmakers and photographers entered the death camps in 1945, and recorded what they found, providing images that shocked the world’s conscience and became iconic emblems of human savagery. But there were no Allies to liberate the Soviet gulag or to halt the agonies of Mao’s Great Leap Forward. If there are photos or films of those atrocities, few have ever seen them. The victims of communism have tended to be invisible — and suffering that isn’t seen is suffering most people don’t think about.

These are explanations only, not justifications. Nazism was unspeakably evil and only an ignoramus or a monster would deny it. Communism, too, has been unspeakably evil — no “ism” in history has spilled more blood or crushed more lives. From anyone with a conscience or a working moral compass, the response to both should be the same: Never forget, never forgive.

Journalist Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jeff.jacoby@globe.com. Follow him on X @jeff_jacoby. To subscribe to Arguable, his weekly newsletter, visit globe.com/arguable.