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.

April 3, 2017: ‘We are connected in ways both painful and powerful’

By Michael Regenstreif

Last issue (March 20), I wrote about the waves of bomb threats that have plagued Jewish institutions – mostly Jewish community centres, but also Jewish schools and offices of Jewish organizations – over the past three months. I wrote that the bomb threats, all of which turned out to be hoaxes, were “antisemitic in their intent.”

Then, on March 23 – the day before this issue of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin went to press – there was a shocking development in the case. Police in Israel – working in cooperation with law enforcement officials in several countries, including the United States and Canada – arrested a suspect they had determined was responsible for the threats: a Jewish, 19-year-old dual Israeli-U.S. citizen who lives in Ashkelon in southern Israel.

We have not yet heard from the suspect about his motives. Early reports in the Israeli media said he was not answering questions or cooperating in any way with police investigators. At his first court hearing, his lawyer said that he has a non-malignant brain tumour that leads to behavioural issues. The Israel Defense Forces, apparently, had previously found him to be unfit for military service.

The suspect, evidently, was highly sophisticated in his use of computer equipment and software with which he perpetrated the bomb threat hoaxes while disguising his identity and whereabouts. But he did make a mistake while making one of the bomb threats and did not hide his IP (internet protocol) address, which enabled authorities to trace the threat to him. This triggered a lengthy investigation, ultimately leading to his arrest.

The entire Jewish world, to be sure, was relieved that a suspect was caught. Hopefully, these waves of bomb threat hoaxes – there have been nearly 150 since January – will now stop. But the fact that the suspect in this case is Jewish does not change the antisemitic intent behind the crimes.

As Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League – an organization in the United States that combats antisemitism – said in a statement after the suspect’s arrest, “While the details of this crime remain unclear, the impact of this individual’s actions is crystal clear: These were acts of antisemitism. These threats targeting Jewish institutions were calculated to sow fear and anxiety, and put the entire Jewish community on high alert.”

It is a sad fact of recent history – here, in the U.S., Europe and so many other places – that we have been witnessing increased incidents of antisemitism. From Jewish reporters receiving thousands of antisemitic tweets after writing critically about the president of the United States, to graffiti incidents last November in Ottawa, to recent Jewish cemetery desecrations in the U.S., to an imam at a mosque in Montreal referring to Jews as “human demons” and “the most evil of mankind,” the stories come in almost daily.

So, when someone seeks to instil fear in specifically Jewish communities, large and small, by making bomb threats, the acts are most certainly acts of antisemitism – even if the person making the threats is Jewish.

The revelation that the suspect in so many bomb threat hoaxes against Jewish institutions – against Jewish communities – is himself Jewish is very sad and very troubling. After the arrest, the Forward posted an article by Hinda Mandell, a professor in Rochester, New York, whose daughter attends a pre-school in the Rochester JCC that received two bomb threats (the Jewish cemetery in Rochester was also recently desecrated). 

Mandell wrote that she was heartbroken that the suspect was Jewish. “From an emotional perspective, I feel like I’ve just been sucker punched … My gut reaction upon reading the news alert about today’s arrest was straight out of Jewish central casting, a version of ‘What will the goyim think of us now?’”

Last issue, I said that an unintended consequence of the bomb threats and other antisemitic acts was that communities were coming together in solidarity. By the end of her article, Mandell reached the same conclusion.

“So what will the goyim think? They’ll think we’re all in this together. We are connected in unexpected ways that are both painful and powerful.”