It stopped me dead in my tracks as I was walking down Newark Ave. in Jersey City one morning in the winter of 2016, on my way to the Grove Street Path station: Someone had painted a large black swastika, surrounded by repeated instances of the doppelte Siegrune icon of the SS, on the chipboard barrier of a construction site overnight.
Part of me wanted to brush it off as merely the rebellious graffiti of a snot-nosed teenager. Nothing flips the bird to authority quite like an affront to common decency or, as bad-boy poet Vladimir Mayakovsky proclaimed in 1912, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste.” I was once myself a punk in torn black jeans and Doc Martens; I remembered well how it was possible to mobilize the signs of history to piss-off my elders.
Yet, at that moment, it really felt that there was something more to it. Just the day before, the former Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon and spiritual guide of the Alt-Right David Duke proclaimed his endorsement of Donald Trump for the Republican nomination. “Alt-Right” wasn’t even a commonly used term in those days, it always appeared in quotation marks, and Breitbart News was still just noise from the fringes – Steve Bannon was only a year or two into expanding it into the juggernaut of neo-totalitarianism it was destined to become – but still… at that time and place, it felt ominous.
It seems even more ominous now.
I had seen the Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers parading in their lethal stormtrooper cosplay regalia in footage of the Ferguson, MO uprisings against police brutality in the summer of 2014, and I kept hearing whispers though the grapevine of a neo-Nazi street gang that was forming in New York. It would soon announce itself with a brawl as the Proud Boys. These graffiti were not, I knew, empty or meaningless, they heralded a coming storm.
In the summer of 1938, mere months before Kristallnacht, the Austrian novelist Joseph Roth sat in a Paris bistro watching the demolition of a hotel across the street in which he had resided during part of his exile. It seemed to signal something profound, although he could not quite put his finger on it. The day’s newspapers lay spread on the table before him. “All the world’s horror is in them, all the horror of the whole gruesome day…”
My graffiti was Roth’s demolition: a momentary encounter with what could only be an inchoate prophecy still coalescing into meaning. In the same bistro on the day after the Night of Broken Glass, the novelist wrote of a taxi driver who had exclaimed “No more conscience in the world!” the other patrons laughed, believing he’d “polished off a few – which he had. In any case, it’s expected that people of today, when they are drunk and hear the truth and recognise it as such, live in hope that it’s only the incoherent monologue of someone as drunk as them.”
On that morning on Newark Ave., with the benefit of a hindsight denied Roth, the thought “Kristallnacht is coming” flashed through my mind. I kept it to myself as I taught my class and sat through an interminable office hour. That night, I told my spouse, who was then away in another city, as is often the case with academic couples, of the swastika and my fears, and she comforted me. Yet, she recognized the looming horror, and her reassurances could only go so far.
“Kristallnacht is coming.”
The phrase remained in my thoughts as I went on with my life; I couldn’t shake it. Like Roth, I found it impossible to put aside the sense of impending doom. He had once written to his friend, the author Stefan Zweig, chiding him for his complacency in the luxury of his hilltop home in Salzburg. Nazi “bestiality was there from the start,” he wrote. “It didn’t suddenly set in a couple of months ago, the vilification of the Jews.” Why was Zweig and others so tardy to take a stand?
As if to provide an answer, three years after his friend’s death, and mere weeks before he took his own life in a squalid flat in Rio de Janeiro in the winter of 1942, Zweig would write, in effect, that “we didn’t expect it.” It is “an iron law of history,” he wrote in The World of Yesterday, “that those who will be caught up in the great moments determining the course of their own times always fail to recognize them in their early stages.” He did not recognize the danger because it “is difficult to rid yourself… of thirty or forty years of private belief that the world is a good place.”
My knowledge of the history of the last century, and of the fates of Roth, Zweig, and the Six Million precluded any possibility that I could ever hold such belief. And even so, the rising tides of hate in our own time are not easily ignored. The graffiti got worse in Jersey City and in New York; the Proud Boys bloodied the streets of Brooklyn at the very first meeting in July 2016; one of my students had to ask for an extension for an assignment she missed while sitting with her brother, who had been hospitalized after an anti-immigrant assault.
Even before the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in the summer of 2017, where neo-Nazis chanted “the Jews will not replace us” and one of them murdered Heather Heyer, it was impossible to ignore the sounds of marching jackboots. That year began with bomb threats to synagogues and Jewish community organizations, and the shocking desecration of the Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery in University City, MO. One did not have to be a biblical prophet to read the writing on the wall.
“If you’re Jewish, you kind of expect this sort of thing,” I wrote at the time. “It’s depressing, disappointing, distressing – but it’s part of the background noise of daily life. What’s different now is how frequent and numerous these more public, directed incidents have become. This is a step beyond the usual casual antisemitism and, although coincidence is not causation, it’s hard not to see the connection between the political climate and these incidents. What worries me is that these things will inevitably get worse.”
Things were going to get bad: “Just as the archetypal serial killer escalates from torturing pets, to butchering neighborhood animals, to hunting humans, seeking greater gratification with every boundary crossed, so will the antisemite progress from a nuisance, to a problem, to a danger, to a vandal – to a murderer.” One thing was clear, I concluded: “Kristallnacht is coming.”
The violence came. After Charlottesville came the murder of 11 Jews at prayer at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, the carnage at the Chabad Center in Poway, CA, the shooting at a Kosher grocery in Jersey City, where I once lived. And even that toll does not begin to account for the non-Jewish victims of neo-Nazi violence all over the world. These things are all related; the Poway gunman was inspired by the terrorist who killed 51 people at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, and they were all motivated by the hateful ideology of white neo-totalitarianism and incited by the movement’s loathsome leaders.
The violence is routine, and police and armed security guards are now habitually assigned to patrol synagogues and Jewish community centers. You don’t see them… But you see them. On Yom Kippur three years ago, a neo-Nazi terrorist attacked a synagogue in Halle, Germany. I texted my spouse that morning, again in different city, as I left my apartment to attend services at Tzedek Chicago:
Not to be dramatic, but just in case, I want you to know that I love you more than anything. These ten years, for all of our struggles, have been the best years of my life because of you. You are everything.
I will be okay. I know, logically, that I’m safe. But the fear. That constant, nagging feeling… Today, of all days, it’s a bit much.
That sense of impending doom has remained with me every day since I saw that swastika on Newark Ave., and has never gone away; nor should it. There has been a lull in murderous antisemitic violence, but I do not feel that I can rest easy. I worry that it is merely a brief respite, a fear compounded by the audacity of the neo-totalitarian right’s assault on democracy, and the mainstreaming of vicious antisemitism. Majorie Taylor Greene’s accusation of Jewish “space lasers” last year was risibly absurd, and I might have laughed more heartily had it not be made in the context of the of the old libel of the “international Jewish conspiracy” theory, paired with the inevitable denial of the Shoah.
They are intimately linked, of course. When redhats equated mask and vaccine mandates to the suffering of Jews and Roma under the Nazis, they were saying that the Holocaust was merely an inconvenience like being required to cover one’s face. The inevitable corollary is that, if the Jews have been able to have their mere inconvenience commemorated in memorials and monuments, and taught in school as the archetype of genocide, then they must have awesome – and certainly illegitimate – power.
When Georgia Republican Party official Jason Shepherd just last week equated the perfectly-legal services offered by organization and companies to women seeking out-of-state abortion access to the Holocaust in order to score cheap political points, he denied the Shoah’s very reality. In his mind, it seems, providing a service still legal under the laws of many states to women in need is indistinguishable from butchering millions in the killing fields and death camps. That both denies the enormity of the Holocaust and mocks its memory.
But, after all, so many Americans seem to believe, the Jews – who make up less than two percent of the population – are everywhere, sticking our dirty hands and noses into everything, running the world, squeezing the space laser triggers, and pulling the strings behind the scenes. When Tulsi Gabbard announced this week that she was leaving the Democratic Party, presumably to join the redhat ranks, because it is “now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue & stoking anti-white racism, who actively work to undermine our God-given freedoms enshrined in our Constitution…” we all knew what she meant. “Elitist cabal” is not a neutral term; it signifies an illegitimate, anti-democratic (elite), shadowy conspiracy straight out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It is not an antisemitic dog-whistle, it’s a klaxon.
An antisemitic caricature of Volodymyr Zelensky.
The Jewish conspiracy libel is not even limited to the danker cellars of the far right; it has become a consistent trope, reliable in its resonance, deployed across the political spectrum. Those elements of the left who have made it their business to lick at Vladimir Putin’s boots have repeated and amplified the Russian dictator’s accusation that the Ukrainian government – including its Jewish president – is a pack of “Nazis” while at the same time accusing Volodymyr Zelensky of being a front for an international Jewish, Zionist, globalist, “Davoist” banking conspiracy. A caricature of the Ukrainian president that has been making the rounds of left-wing social media lately could have come from Der Stürmer in the weeks before the Night of Broken Glass.
So, when Kanye West laced into Sean Combs on Instagram this week, accusing him of being a pawn of a Jewish conspiracy – “Ima use you as an example to show the Jewish people that told you to call me that no one can threaten or influence me. I told you this was war.” – the phrase that flashed through my mind in Jersey City more than six years ago echoed again. When Elon Musk welcomed his “friend” back to Twitter – a platform that he will soon likely own – after West was locked out of Instagram, it sounded even louder.
Welcome back to Twitter, my friend!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 8, 2022
And when West doubled down in a tweet shortly thereafter, promising to go “death [sic] con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE,” that phrase was deafening.
I cannot simply dismiss all of this as the crazed ramblings of a clearly deeply-disturbed man. Despite considerable outrage from many decent people, and some mildly-disappointed head-shaking on Fox News, West has his supporters. Texas politician Jonathan Stickland leapt to the rapper’s defense, as did redhat celebrity Candace Owens, who insisted “If you are an honest person, you did not think this tweet was antisemitic.” Most Jews are pretty sure that it was antisemitic; thus, her subtext is that Jews (except maybe her shande boss Ben Shapiro) are not honest people.
… And this is just day two.
West will get away with it, face few real consequences, and doubtless accumulate still more supporters and defenders from the ranks of popular culture and populist politics because, as shocking as it might be to hear it said out loud, his antisemitic beliefs are hardly uncommon. A disturbingly large number of Americans firmly believe in conspiracies behind which, they are sure, lurk greedy, swarthy outsiders with long noses, pulling the strings and guiding the world to their ungodly ends. They want to believe… And they do.
I find myself sitting at that table at that Paris bistro with Roth, watching the demolition, and reading the gruesome horrors in the newspapers spread before me. “It didn’t suddenly set in a couple of months ago, the vilification of the Jews,” I think as I reflect back on the graffiti, the desecrations, the libels, the violence, and the murder. But now, the vilification is so common and mundane that popstars, politicians, the richest man in the world, and so many of the social media masses, are comfortable voicing it as if it is common knowledge – no big deal. And that is what has stopped me in my tracks this time.
Kristallnacht is coming.