Trump vs Jewish Values: Are Holocaust-era comparisons ever appropriate? Yes. Exhibit A: What he said Monday
When a candidate attacks a group on racial, genetic grounds, that's literally racism. Trump did it again on Monday.
On Monday, Donald Trump the went full-on Adolf with a slightly revised version of his oft repeated Big Lie, the declaration on Hugh Hewitt’s show that immigrants commit horrendous crimes because “it’s in their genes.” Here’s the full quote:
How about allowing people to come to an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers, many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States. You know now a murder, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.
It’s all false - and yet another example of Trump’s use of the Big Lie to demonize groups, typically on ethnic and racial grounds, using their status as outsiders (often, like the Haitians in Springfield, here legally) and accusing them, falsely, of being uncontrollably, naturally, even genetically, violent.
Big Lies are a big deal for aspiring autocrats and were a hallmark of Hitler and his followers. Equating immigrants with vermin and attacking their genetic make up is boilerplate Nazism.
Which brings me to our perfectly-timed question of the day:
Is it appropriate to use Holocaust-era analogies in describing Trump?
The answer is yes.
It took a long time for mainstream media outlets to call him a liar. Only in 2019 did those myriad “falsehoods” become “lies.” Now, thankfully, he is called a liar routinely. Clergy like me need to get used to calling him evil. And it’s past time for clergy and journalist alike to call him what he in fact is: a racist, and not just a racist, but one cut from distinctively Hitlerlian cloth. Not to mention a grave danger to freedom, democracy, national security and human life.
I do not share these words lightly. My reverence for the victims of the Holocaust is part of the reason why I hesitate to make Hitler comparisons. The Holocaust was a unique evil, and nothing, not even last October 7, nor anything Trump has done - yet - approaches it. But thankfully Hitler never had nuclear weapons. The damage an unchecked Trump can cause is unlimited.
The point here is that he is following the Nazi roadmap, and we had best take notice. And in order to do that, we need to get over our reluctance to use both H words in describing him.
Below I share one of my favorite Trump-related pieces from his time in office: Are Holocaust analogies ever right? Yes. Now. It appeared in its original form in the Times of Israel on Oct. 20, 2020.
See also my prior posts in this series: Trump vs Jewish Values. Please share them!
I wrote Are Holocaust analogies ever right? Yes. Now, in 2020, after Trump’s refusal to disavow white supremacist groups at his first debate that fall, but before he went full-on fascist with his Presidential Putsch and tried to overturn the election, eventually with violence. Please note that I find it uncomfortable to invoke the Holocaust too frequently, because so often the memory of the martyrs is stained by comparisons that are inappropriate - as most are - but in this case it’s absolutely necessary to call attention to the lessons of the past.
Before I share the 2020 piece, here are some other articles on whether it’s out of bounds to compare Donald Trump to the Nazis and how Trump actually invites those comparisons. It’s as if he is daring us to do it - like it’s a matter of pride, the rhetorical equivalent of shooting someone on 5th Avenue.
Right hand salutes at Trump and Mastriano rallies draw comparisons to the Nazi ‘Sieg Heil’ (JTA).
See also Trump calls Nazi hand salute comparisons ‘ridiculous’ (PBS)
The reich stuff – what does Trump really have in common with Hitler? (Guardian)
See Post-truth is pre-fascism": a Holocaust historian on the Trump era (Vox)
With ‘Gestapo’ comment, Trump adds to numerous past Nazi Germany references (PBS)
This is where the Trump-Hitler comparison works (LA Times Letter to the Editor)
To the editor: Some of your letter writers seem to think that making any comparison of former President Trump to Adolf Hitler is inherently more divisive than anything Trump does. But these comparisons are not to the Hitler of World War II and the Holocaust; they are to 1930s Hitler.
He gained power by stoking grievance;
accusing the elected government of treasonous behavior;
creating a cult of personality; defining patriotism as loyalty to him personally;
identifying a scapegoat population that could be hated and subjugated with impunity;
dehumanizing opponents as “vermin”;
and promoting militia groups to under-gird his position with the threat of violence.
The current election cycle makes 2020 seem quaint by comparison. In Catherine Rampell’s recent Washington Post column, Trump merits being compared with history’s great villains because his rhetoric is that bad. She writes:
At a rally this past weekend in North Carolina, Trump declared that “a vote for Kamala Harris means 40 or 50 million more illegal aliens will invade across our borders, stealing your money, stealing your jobs, stealing your life.” Chillingly, he added that migrants were already “attacking villages and cities all throughout the Midwest.
Rampell writes of the semi-satirical theorem, known as Godwin’s Law, which posits that if any online discourse goes on long enough, it inevitably leads to a Hitler or Nazi comparison. No professional pundit wants to be guilty of tripping this law.His rhetoric keeps getting more and more unhinged and inflammatory.
But last year, even the guy who came up with Godwin’s Law, Godwin himself, threw up his hands and wrote in the Washington Post that Trump is the exception. Rampell writes:
He agrees the Hitler analogy is not just apt but necessary. He cited Trump’s authoritarian instincts for consolidating state power in a single leader; dehumanizing political enemies as “vermin”; and claiming that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” an infamous Hitler talking point.
So with those current events in mind, see below an op-ed I wrote way back in those halcyon days of 2020, those innocent times when we couldn’t even imagine a candidate so unhinged that he would claim legal immigrants are eating cats and dogs. This appeared just days ahead of a fateful election that we prayed would save democracy. It did, but we soon understood that one victory would not be enough.
In the wake of President Trump's refusal to disavow white supremacy at last month's first presidential debate, the Jewish Democratic Council released a powerful 30 second ad making the direct comparison between Trump's tactics and the rise of fascism in 1930s Germany. Many cried foul, including the Anti-Defamation League, though prominent Jews like historian Deborah Lipstadt and former ADL director Abe Foxman sympathized with the ad's message.
So the question that has hovered over political debates and cocktail party conversations for decades once again came to the fore:
Is it ever appropriate to use Holocaust analogies, and if so, when?
Yes it is appropriate, when done judiciously and respectfully and when necessary.
In my house, back when my kids were growing up, we had the “Anne Frank Rule.”
One night during a school vacation, my family was engaged in a stimulating round of "Apples to Apples" - that popular game where a rotating judge picks a descriptive card (like "refreshing," or "feh!") and other contestants select cards that they hope the judge will consider the best possible match (like "Passover" and "Alan Dershowitz"). Naturally, we were playing the Jewish version.
This particular game was one of our all-timers. It came down to the final hand, with my two sons and me each having a chance to win. With the game on the line, we doubled the stakes and pulled out two descriptive cards: "odd" and "offensive."
My sons played "Crown Heights," "my bedroom," "J-Date" and "Dennis Prager." I suppose any of those could have been the best match. But I held the trump card in my hand. You see, I had just drawn "Anne Frank." We have a little rule in my family, one suggested to us by a close friend. Whoever plays the "Anne Frank" card automatically wins that hand. No questions asked. The idea is that it would be offensive to Anne's memory, and by extension, all Holocaust victims, for Anne to lose to, say, "Joan Rivers" or "potato kugel."
But here, the exact opposite would be occurring. Anne would win for matching "odd" and "offensive." How could we shame her in this way?
I succumbed to that logic and pulled back the card. I lost the battle but won the war, as my family then engaged in a dialogue about how, just as Anne's is no normal card, the Holocaust is not just any old piece of the Jewish identity puzzle.
The "Anne Frank Rule" applies to our culture writ large just as it works for "Apples to Apples." Once the Holocaust is invoked in an argument, it usually is game, set and match-but only when the subject is raised at the proper time and by the proper person, and only if it is not overused. The Holocaust has been brought into so many political arguments, on all sides of the spectrum, that a new rule was created: Godwin's Law, stating that if a discussion continues long enough, inevitably someone or something will be compared to Hitler, which ends the discussion.
The Shoah offers numerous potential lessons that can be applied to contemporary situations, but it's debatable as to which analogies "work." Comparing any concession in international negotiations to the appeasement at Munich, for instance, is a tactic that has been so overused that its potency has been drained. Google "Netanyahu" and "Munich," for instance, and you get over 1,080.000 results. And President Trump was totally out of line when he recently compared New York City's crackdown on Orthodox Jewish anti-lockdown demonstrations to Nazi-era roundups.
So the Holocaust card, like the Anne Frank card, must be played sparingly and with due deliberation.
But in the Trump era, all bets are off.
When the Holocaust-related term "Concentration Camps" was used in July of 2019, in describing the crowded and squalid detention facilities used by the Trump administration for asylum seekers and other refugees at the U.S.-Mexican border, the U.S. Holocaust Museum cried foul. I winced a bit myself. But in an essay for Slate, Yale historian Timothy Snyder explained how and when Holocaust analogies are not only appropriate, they are necessary. He called the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s decision to speak out against Holocaust analogies a moral threat.
To forbid analogies makes the Holocaust irrelevant to future generations. If an American child can identify with Anne Frank, an American child might ask what it is like for immigrant children to be separated from their parents. To forbid analogies is to forbid learning, and to forbid empathizing . . . The point of historical comparisons is not to seek a perfect match - which can never be found -but to learn how to look out for warning signs.
Even Michael Godwin, the originator of Godwin's Law tweeted after Charlottesville that his law had met its match in the Trump era. "By all means, compare these (expletive)-heads to the Nazis," he wrote. "Again and again. I'm with you."
The use of the Shoah in conversations about refugees or hate groups is completely appropriate, especially in light of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who were turned away at the door to freedom, including-it must be noted-the family of Anne Frank, whose father Otto sought to bring his family to America. Had she survived, Anne Frank would have turned 90 last year-and she could have lived a perfectly uneventful, happy life.
Holocaust analogies should be used sparingly, to be sure, but when used appropriately, there is no question as to who has the moral authority to play that card. Jews do.
I've never been a big fan of calling the Jews a "chosen people." Still, I never saw the concept as a signal of superiority, but rather as a summons and a responsibility, to bring Sinai's vision of holiness, justice and love to the world. Chosenness still calls on us to strive to repair the world, as it did at Sinai; but now our moral voice has been amplified 10 times over by historical experience. When Jews invoke Auschwitz, the world listens - because we were there. Many hate us for that, especially if they idealize fascism. Others admire us. But everyone listens.
We need to hold the Anne Frank card close to our vest, play it when necessary, and appreciate the moral power of its message.
And that message has never been more relevant than right now.