Stop comparing pandemic mandates to the Holocaust. Those analogies are helping to make antisemitism acceptable. even fashionable, all over again

 

As the pandemic approaches its two-year mark, there’s no question that pandemic fatigue is understandably real, and we should all be encouraged by what appears to be --- yet again --- a sharp drop in COVID-19 cases across the country. That cautious optimism is good news, though we should never forget that the United States' death toll from the virus stands at 928,000 and counting at this writing.
Still, it's good news that many states are easing their vaccine and masking mandates, but opponents of those mandates have time and again overstepped the bounds of decency in their opposition, by threatening the lives of local officials, becoming a public nuisance by holding loud protests outside officials’ homes and by assaulting flight attendants, among other questionable tactics.
But one of the most despicable overreaches has been the comparisons  of those mandates to the Holocaust --- not only by people who, by making that comparison, showed their ignorance about the Holocaust, but by many government officials at all levels. Such comparisons are not only wrong, but they promote the normalization of antisemitism, as they dehumanize those who support the mandates, just as the Nazis dehumanized Jews in the 1930s before they shipped off millions of European Jews and slaughtered 6 million of them, and at least 11 million total.
I’ve had it up to here with such foolish comparisons, and this column --- published Thursday, Feb. 17 in The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro, MA --- expresses my concerns with those scary comparisons.

This column appeared in the Thursday, Feb. 17 edition of The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro, MA. (The link to this column on the paper’s website follows: https://www.thesunchronicle.com/opinion/columns/larry-kessler-we-must-always-remember/article_1ffac234-e0fe-5130-b293-560737812a36.html

“But the hatred of the Jew is unfortunately not as complicated. It’s deep-seated. It’s millennia old. We don’t seem to have a cure for it. So, it’s not so easy to put a label, to put a name on what it is to be Jewish. But it’s certainly easy to see what it is to be antisemitic.”
--- Greg Schneider, the executive vice president of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany

Schneider made that statement in an Associated Press story in The Sun Chronicle (“American Jews and identity,” Saturday-Sunday Feb. 12-13, Page B5) in response to one of the latest ill-advised remarks about the Holocaust, this one by Whoopi Goldberg, who on the ABC-TV show “The View” said the Holocaust wasn’t about race, but rather about “man’s inhumanity to man.”
Goldberg later acknowledged she had failed to note that the Nazis considered Jews an inferior race. She got a two-week suspension from the show for her remarks, but her comments were made with no malice, compared to the frightening resurgence of antisemitism that’s plaguing the country.
That’s why Schneider is spot on about antisemitism being an ancient form of hatred. It’s something I’ve dealt with to varying degrees for most of my life, though the incidents never approached the depth of the bias that my parents and grandparents faced.
In the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, Jews were routinely excluded from joining clubs and they were barred from certain professions; an uncle had my mother’s family name changed from Rosenblatt to Ross so he could become a pharmacist.
In addition, it was legal for employers to ask about an applicant’s religion, and my father was denied jobs in the 1950s because he was Jewish. That happened after he moved his family from Philadelphia to Boston. A World War II Navy veteran, Ike had worked for the Philadelphia Inquirer as a linotype operator, and he thought he’d easily find a job at one of Boston’s newspapers.
But bigotry dashed those hopes. He was told by two of them, including The Boston Globe, that they didn’t hire Jews; the Boston Daily Record and Evening American (which later became the Record-American and the Herald-American, the predecessors to the Boston Herald) hired him.
Over the years, my newspaper career took me north to Vermont and south to Florida, and there were some awkward moments. With my then-full beard’s red highlights and my thick Boston accent, I’d pass for Irish, but when I’d acknowledge my Judaism, I’d occasionally get this reaction: “Oh, I didn’t know. You’re not like the rest of them.” 
To which I’d retort: “Oh, I’m terribly sorry. I left my horns at home.”
Over the years, I’d overhear antisemitic remarks at gatherings, usually involving the tired stereotype about Jews controlling the money markets or being rich. Following my mother’s advice to “ignore the ignorant,” I did that, but the remarks were hurtful. One particularly painful instance came at a holiday party several years ago. The comments were from people I didn’t know and, out of respect for the host, I kept quiet.
But I can’t keep quiet any longer about the hate-spewed return to overt antisemitism that’s plaguing the nation, especially since the pandemic.
Swastikas and other hateful graffiti are being regularly found scrawled on the grounds of schools, colleges and other public places across the state to the point where it’s become an epidemic.
In addition, the instances of people comparing vaccine and mask mandates to the Holocaust are especially sickening. Those foes of pandemic policies are engaging in a particularly dangerous form of antisemitism. Similar to how the Nazis scapegoated European Jews for that era’s economic woes, they’re invoking the Holocaust to demonize doctors and public officials who back health mandates, and in doing so, they’re making it acceptable --- even fashionable --- to be a virulent antisemite.
One of the most egregious examples of that occurred in Salem, where its public health officials, reported The Boston Globe, were targeted by threats and antisemitic messages. Salem’s website reported that members of the city’s health board and department staff “with names perceived to indicate that they are Jewish” were sent “hateful, antisemitic messages and threats.” That smacked of the fear-mongering in 1930s Germany that led to the Holocaust, during which the Nazis killed 6 million Jews and at least 11 million in total.
It’s bad enough when people who are ignorant of the Holocaust use such heinous analogies, but when politicians such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., members of Congress and other government officials --- including a Dighton-Rehoboth Regional School District school board member last summer --- insist on comparing the pandemic’s medical policies to the Nazis’ Final Solution, it’s time to say enough!
One antidote to these attacks is to educate people about the Holocaust, something that was recently given a boost when Massachusetts became the 24^th state to require Holocaust education in its schools, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Gov. Charlie Baker in December signed the genocide education bill into law, which requires middle and high schools to incorporate the history of genocide, including the Holocaust, into their curriculum. The new law also creates a Genocide Education Trust Fund, ensuring teachers have the resources and training to teach the curriculum.
Education works, and the Foxboro Regional Charter School’s Holocaust Stamps Project is proof of that. Started by now-retired elementary teacher Charlotte Sheer to teach her students about the Holocaust, the effort inspired more than 11 million stamps being collected from 2009 to 2017.
The stamps have since found a permanent home at the American Philatelic Society’s center in Bellefonte, Pa --- and they offer hope that the post-Baby Boomer generations can learn about the Holocaust at a time when surveys show a disturbingly high number of people are either unaware of it or its gruesome details.
Larry Kessler is a retired Sun Chronicle local news editor and can be reached at larrythek65@gmail.com. He blogs at larrytheklineup.blogspot.com