July 22, 2019: We know not to trivialize the Holocaust

By Michael Regenstreif

Last month, U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a left-wing progressive who was first elected in her New York district in 2018, came under attack when she referred to the detention centres used by the United States government to warehouse Central American migrants – including children needlessly separated from their parents – as “concentration camps.”

As horrible as the conditions are at those detention centres – and from all credible reports the conditions are truly horrible – Ocasio-Cortez quickly came under sharp attack from political opponents, scholars, and several American Jewish organizations for her use of a term that conjures comparisons to the camps used by Germany’s Nazi regime in its perpetration of the Holocaust, a genocide in which six million Jews were murdered in an attempt to eradicate European Jewry.

“Concentration camps assured a slave labour supply to help in the Nazi war effort, even as the brutality of life inside the camps helped assure the ultimate goal of ‘extermination through labour.’ Learn about concentration camps,” Yad Vashem – The World Holocaust Remembrance Center, in Jerusalem, tweeted to Ocasio-Cortez.

Even U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, a candidate for the Democratic Party’s 2020 U.S. presidential nomination usually seen as an ally of Ocasio-Cortez, distanced himself from the comparison. While saying, “locking up children and keeping them in deplorable conditions for weeks in places that are not meant for kids … is absolutely unacceptable,” Sanders stressed that he didn’t and wouldn’t “use that terminology.”

We have learned not to trivialize the Holocaust – the worst genocide and the ultimate manifestation of antisemitism in history – with comparisons that do not rise to that horrible standard. That is why objections were raised to Ocasio-Cortez’s use of the term “concentration camps” and why we bristle when Israel is fallaciously accused of behaving like Nazis toward the Palestinians.

And yet, perhaps the most trivial of comparisons to the Holocaust in recent memory came from no less a figure than Rafi Peretz, Israel’s minister of education.

Peretz, who served as chief military rabbi of the Israel Defense Forces from 2010 to 2016, was elected leader of the Jewish Home Party in advance of the last Israeli election after former leader and former education minister Naftali Bennett, and former justice minister Ayelet Shaked, left Jewish Home. In a deal brokered by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Jewish Home and Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power), a Kahanist successor to the banned Kach Party, stood together in the April election as the United Right, winning five seats in the short-lived 21st Knesset. A new election is scheduled for September 17 after Netanyahu failed to build a governing coalition.

On July 1, during an Israeli cabinet meeting, Peretz compared intermarriage – when a Jew marries a non-Jew – to “a second Holocaust” and rhetorically said that six million Jews have been lost to intermarriage over the past 70 years.

The comment came after a cabinet briefing on trends in Jewish communities around the world from Dennis Ross, chair of the Jewish People policy Institute.

As Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League tweeted in response to Peretz, “It’s inconceivable to use the term ‘Holocaust’ to describe Jews choosing to marry non-Jews. It trivializes the Shoah. It alienates so many members of our community. This kind of baseless comparison does little other than inflame and offend.”

Surely, the minister of education of the State of Israel should have known better.

December 10, 2018: We can’t be complacent as hate crimes increase

By Michael Regenstreif

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau rose in the House of Commons on November 7 to offer Canada’s apology for turning away Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany on board the MS St. Louis in 1939 – 254 of whom were ultimately murdered in the Holocaust after the ship returned to Europe – he offered a chilling statistic about antisemitism in today’s Canada:

“According to the most recent figures, 17 per cent of all hate crimes in Canada target Jewish people. Far higher per capita than any other group,” he said.

Trudeau noted manifestations of antisemitism including Holocaust denial, graffiti attacks on Jewish institutions, BDS-related intimidation on college and university campuses, and said, “Discrimination and violence against Jewish people in Canada and around the world continues at an alarming rate.”

While Trudeau’s apology was scheduled well in advance to take place just before the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the anti-Jewish pogrom in Nazi Germany and Austria that signalled the start of the Holocaust, it also took place while Jewish communities around the world were in shock from the antisemitic Shabbat morning massacre at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in which 11 worshippers were murdered – the single worst case of antisemitic violence in American history.

Trudeau pledged to bolster the Security Infrastructure Program so that synagogues and other places at risk for hate crimes are better protected.

“We must guard our communities and institutions against the kinds of evils that took hold in the hearts of so many more than 70 years ago, for they did not end with the war,” he said.

On November 29, three weeks after Trudeau spoke in Parliament, Statistics Canada released its report on police-reported hate crimes for 2017 and the figure for antsemitic hate crimes had actually worsened from the earlier statistic the prime minister quoted.

Hate crimes against Jews accounted for 18 per cent of all hate crimes reported to police in Canada in 2017 (while Jews represent only about one per cent of Canada’s population). Ontario and British Columbia were the provinces with the largest increases of hate crimes against Jews.

By contrast, hate crimes against Muslims accounted for 17 per cent of all hate crimes reported to police in Canada in 2017, while there are about three times as many Muslims than Jews in Canada. It must be noted that the single worst hate crime in Canada in 2017 was the massacre at the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec City when six worshippers mere murdered and 19 others were wounded.

Other groups that suffered from significant numbers of police-reported hate crimes in 2017 included Black Canadians (16 per cent) and the LGBTQ community (10 per cent).

While Canada is one of the world’s most enlightened and highly educated countries, it is clear that antisemitism and other forms of irrational hatred have not disappeared in the decades since the Holocaust and civil rights movement – that the situation continues to worsen.

In response to the latest figures from Statistics Canada, Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) CEO Shimon Koffler Fogel released a statement expressing alarm about the “spike in hate crimes against the Jewish community and other groups in Canada. It is disturbing to think an antisemitic hate crime takes place every 24 hours in our country. History demonstrates that those who target Jews and other minorities pose a threat to society as a whole. All Canadians should be vigilant in standing against hate.”

The CIJA statement went on to call on the federal government to expand the Security Infrastructure Program to cover training costs; to develop a national strategy to combat online hate; and to increase the capacity of law enforcement agencies to combat hate crimes – including enhancing measures against hate speech.

CIJA began a campaign on the first night of Chanukah urging members of the Jewish community to contact the federal government in support of those proposals. It is important that we must not be complacent.

Update to previous column

My November 26 column (written on November 16) discussed the fragility of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition after former defence minister Avigdor Liberman took his Yisrael Beiteinu party out of the coalition with several other ministers and parties threatening to follow suit. The other parties – most notably Education Minister Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home – backed down, thus preserving the coalition’s slim majority, now at 61 of the Knesset’s 120 seats, for the time being.

September 3, 2018: What were they thinking?

By Michael Regenstreif

I was recently reminded of “What Was I Thinking,” a clever piece written in the 1990s by New York City singer-songwriter Christine Lavin. In a series of verses, Lavin documents some dumb choices made by various people that lead into a chorus that variously asks, “What was I-he-she thinking?”

The song came to mind when news surfaced about a fashion photo shoot that was held here in Ottawa at the National Holocaust Monument.

On August 12, Montreal-based designer Michèle Beaudoin posted a photo on Instagram of a model at the National Holocaust Monument wearing a rather revealing dress. She credited the model, the makeup artist and the photographer, and promised more photos to come.

The Instragram post was deleted later that same day after several irate people who witnessed the photo shoot contacted the media. Community leaders – including Rabbi Reuven Bulka, rabbi emeritus of Congregation Machzikei Hadas, and Mina Cohen, director of the Centre for Holocaust Education and Scholarship at the Max and Tessie Zelikovitz Centre for Jewish Studies at Carleton University – spoke out about how absurdly inappropriate it was to do a fashion photo shoot at what must be regarded as a sacred place.

What, indeed, were the designer and her associates thinking? In response to an Ottawa Citizen enquiry, photographer Richard Tardif told the reporter via email, “After further consideration, we decided to end the session and discontinue the project. Also, all material has been deleted.”

That sad incident in Ottawa was not the only inappropriate event related to a Holocaust site that day. Two young Israelis, on a school trip to Poland to learn about the Holocaust, were caught on video dancing naked at the site of the Majdanek concentration camp, where an estimated 78,000 Jews were murdered during the Holocaust.

A statement from Israel’s Education Ministry said it views “with great severity any behaviour that could harm the status and values represented by the trips to Poland. In the case in question, due to the students’ improper and inappropriate behavior, disciplinary actions have been taken against them to the fullest.”

Surely, one would think that Jewish students, studying the Holocaust, would know better. What were they thinking?

Corbyn and Trump

Since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, observers have been attempting to understand the hold that Donald Trump has over his right-wing base. No matter how outrageous, offensive, or even racist Trump’s statements and actions have been, his base has remained fiercely loyal.

Watching the steady stream of revelations about antisemitism in the British Labour Party, particularly as it relates to party leader Jeremy Corbyn – who might well be the United Kingdom’s next prime minister if the polls are correct – one begins to understand the hold that Trump has over his base. Corbyn, whose left-wing populism seems to parallel Trump’s right-wing populism, has a similar hold over his base.

No matter how disturbing the revelations are about Corbyn’s associations with Hamas, Hezbollah or Black September terrorists. No matter the revelation that he has appeared on the Iranian government’s propaganda TV station to denounce the BBC for recognizing Israel’s right to exist. No matter the revelation that his principal secretary advised his supporters not to vote for candidates who have appeared in Jewish newspapers – the list of examples grows longer by the day – Corbyn’s base sticks by him with unwavering loyalty.

In late-July, the United Kingdom’s three Jewish newspapers jointly published front-page editorials declaring that a Corbyn-led government would pose an “existential threat to Jewish life” in their country.

Historically, most British Jews have found a political home in the Labour Party. But, now in 2018, Marie van der Zyl, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said, “It’s like Jeremy Corbyn has declared war on the Jews.”

It is a frightening situation for the Jewish community in the U.K.