I wish I could say that I was shocked and surprised when a friend forwarded me a tweet showing Gigi Gaskins, owner of Nashville HATWRKS, wearing the Yellow Star emblazoned with the text “not vaccinated.” She has a smugly satisfied almost-grin on her face in the picture, and a kind of defiance in her eyes that I’ve seen in gross-out comedians who think they’re funny.
The main point of these stick-on stars was to make money – Gaskins sold them for $5 a pop – but her secondary objective was to advance the claim that Americans who choose not to be vaccinated for the coronavirus are being treated like second-class citizens. Potentially denied access to workplaces, concert venues, airliners, and other spaces if they cannot show proof of vaccination, the reasoning goes, they are being treated just like victims of the Nazi Holocaust.
It’s not like we haven’t heard this one before. A little over a week ago, Marjorie Taylor Greene declared that public health mask mandates are “just like” the treatment of Jews, Roma, Slavs, and others by Adolph Hitler’s National Socialist regime. “You know, we can look back at a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star,” she said in comments that doubtless inspired Gaskin, “and they were definitely treated like second class citizens, so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany.”
This rhetoric has been a common feature in anti-masker, and now anti-vaxxer protests since the pandemic began more than a year ago. Railing against the inconvenience of having to cover their faces in the interests of public health, or of the perceived injustice of having to accept the consequences of the choice not to receive the coronavirus vaccine, mostly white, Christian Americans have claimed the mantle of victimhood.
It is absurd, of course. As inconvenient as it might be, wearing a cotton mask cannot compare to choking on Zyklon B in a death camp gas chamber; and being denied access to a concert venue until you choose to get vaccinated (Gaskins’ fevered imaginings notwithstanding) is not the same as being forced to wear the yellow star. The star was not a choice, and the consequence of being forced to wear it was a great deal worse that having to miss a Blake Shelton concert.
The fact that people like Gaskins and Rep. Greene do seem to believe that their minor pandemic inconveniences are equal to the suffering of the millions of Jews and Roma who died in the camps and killing fields, and millions of others who survived with their bodies and lives destroyed is very revealing, however. The politician and the hatter, not to mention millions of white, Christian Americans just like them, appear to believe that the horrors of the Holocaust were an inconvenience equivalent to having to cover their faces in Home Depot.
That should be shocking, but somehow… it isn’t.
Three-quarters of a century after the liberation of the camps, the deficiency of Holocaust awareness in the United States is appalling. A study published last fall found that some 63 percent of young Americans did not know that the Nazis had murdered six million Jews, and almost half could not name a single concentration camp, death camp, or ghetto. As Gaskins and Greene demonstrate, that awareness does not improve with age; but then, why should it? Only 18 states require Holocaust education as part of their secondary school curricula. Arkansas will make it 19 next year, but neither Georgia nor Tennessee is on the list.
It turns out that the odds that most Americans have any knowledge or understanding of one of the worst crimes in human history are slim. That might explain so many white, Christian Americans on the political right seem willing to model themselves on and explain away Nazis while minimizing the suffering of their millions of victims. If “Holocaust,” “death camp,” and “yellow star” are merely floating signifiers that can be configured and reconfigured without regard to history, then it was inevitable they would be appropriated by reactionary, white, Christian anti-vaxxers.
The darker side of all of this – and there is a darker side – is what it all says about how people like Gaskins and Greene regard Jews.
For better or worse, Holocaust remembrance is central to Jewish life. We may disagree on a great number of things, but “never forget” is not one of them. “Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself,” Elie Wiesel wrote in 1958. We remember on Yom haShoah, on Tisha b’Av, and on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and we have insisted that the world remember along with us, with museums and memorials in Washington, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and in Berlin. There are even memorials in Nashville and Atlanta.
Yet, in the minds of Gaskins and Greene – and the millions of white, Christian Americans who agree with them – all of this commemoration and remembrance is for an event of no greater horror than the inconvenience of wearing a face covering or having to accept the consequences of refusing vaccination.
Despite Gaskins’ grudging, halfhearted apology that “In NO WAY did I intend to trivialize the Star of David or disrespect what happened to millions of people” (Greene has just doubled-down), what she and her supporters really think is that they have been victimized yet again by those whiny Jews. In their imaginations Jews are whiners, and it is only thanks to all that whining, (with maybe a soupçon of international banking and control of the “Jewsmedia”) that the suffering of the Holocaust has been recognized while their suffering is ignored.
The narcissistic obliviousness displayed by Gaskins and Greene is one of the defining characteristics of the antisemitism that pervades the life of this country and threatens to erupt in a paroxysm of violence at any moment, as it did in Pittsburgh and Poway. Inclined, as we might be, to roll our eyes at the absurdity of these antics, or dismiss them as just so much more stupidity from the ignorant American right, we must take them seriously. Gaskins and Greene are a warning.
Never forget.