Jonathan P. Baird

This piece appeared in the Concord Monitor on 12/16/2018 under the title “Hatred Rising”.

As an American Jew, I must say that I have been surprised by the resurgence of antisemitism here. Probably, like many others, I did not see it coming.

The relative economic success of American Jews, awareness of the horrors of the Holocaust and the American tradition of religious tolerance have all mitigated against seeing antisemitism as a formidable threat. We have been through a long period during which antisemitism undeniably receded.

There is a foundational American history of welcoming Jews and immigrants of all nationalities and religions that is symbolized by the Statue of Liberty. For me, and I expect for many other American Jews, the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting shook that foundation.

I think it would be a mistake to view the Pittsburgh shootings as an isolated event. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has reported 1986 antisemitic incidents in the United States in 2017. Antisemitic incidents are defined as harassment, vandalism, and physical assault.

The 2017 statistics represent a 57% increase over 2016, the largest single-year escalation since ADL began tracking these incidents in 1979.

Unfortunately, there is also good reason to think the numbers are an undercount. Studies show that only about half of all hate crimes get reported to the police. Many local law enforcement agencies do not provide hate crime data to the federal government because the reporting requirement is voluntary. There is also uncertainty as to whether all hate crimes have been properly identified.

While many rightly point to the Trump campaign and presidency as a supercharger of bigotry, I would like to focus  on the largely forgotten history of antisemitism in America to explain recent events. As with racism, antisemitism has deep roots here.

One hundred years ago, antisemitism and racism had far more social acceptance than they do today. Jews and people of color were excluded from neighborhoods, jobs, clubs, and colleges. Indeed, very prominent Americans – Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh and Father Charles Coughlin – publicly voiced antisemitic or pro-Nazi views.

Ford, the auto magnate, was singled out by Hitler for praise in his book, Mein Kampf. His collection of articles titled “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem” was a Hitler favorite. Ford attributed all evil to Jews or to Jewish capitalists. He distributed half a million copies of his volume to his vast network of dealerships and subscribers. Ford did business with the Nazis during the war and he was the first American recipient of the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, Nazi Germany’s highest honor.

Lindbergh, the much-admired aviator, was an America-Firster. He spoke against the “mongrelization” of America, in favor of white racial purity. He claimed Jews, through their ownership of the media, were trying to drag America into war against Germany, something he opposed. Lindbergh also received the Grand Cross of the German Eagle from Hitler.

Father Coughlin, a Catholic radio priest from the Detroit area, with an audience of an estimated 30 million listeners, used his radio program to promote antisemitism. In the 1930’s, Coughlin supported Hitler and Benito Mussolini. He saw Jewish bankers behind the Russia revolution. He was eventually forced off the air in 1939 because of his pro-fascist views. At the time, he was one of the most prominent Catholic speakers on political issues in America. He was a forerunner of the rise of televangelism.

In the 1930’s, there was an active Nazi movement in the United States, the German-American Bund. At its height in 1939, the movement packed a rally with 20,000 supporters at Madison Square Garden in New York.

Also, of note, the Ku Klux Klan had achieved massive national popularity in the early 1920’s with an estimated membership of four million. The Klan emphasized white supremacy and opposing Catholics, Jews and immigrants. In that period, the Klan’s widespread campaigns of lynching and terror commanded their widest popularity.

I think the nativist, anti-immigrant political tendency of the 1920’s and 1930’s is entirely consistent with the anti-immigrant hysteria directed against Latinos, Syrians, and Muslims today. History reveals the dangerous repercussions of such racist and anti-immigrant perspectives, which cannot be emphasized enough.

Exhibit A is the experience of the Jewish people. When over 1.5 million Eastern European Jews arrived in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many nativist organizations advocated for federal restrictions on Jewish immigration. Following in the tradition of the racist Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the Immigration Act of 1924 drastically decreased immigration of specific groups of Europeans, including Eastern European Jews, by imposing strict quotas.

Supporters of the 1924 Act believed that bringing in more immigrants would adversely affect employment for native-born Americans. They sought to establish an American identity that favored native-born white Americans over Jews and people of color. Eugenics, the science of selective breeding aimed at improving the genetic quality of a population, was a big influence on those favoring the quotas.

A Roper poll in the late 1930’s showed that 70 to 85% of Americans opposed raising quotas to help Jewish refugees enter the United States. I think that atmosphere of hostility to Jewish immigration paved the way for what came later.

We can now see the tremendous harm caused by the restrictionist immigration policies. Thousands of Jews who wanted to escape the hell of Nazism were turned away and not allowed into the United States because of the strict quotas. As a result, hundreds of thousands needlessly died in the Holocaust.

Both before and during World War II, the U.S. government played a shameful role in abandoning the European Jewish refugees. They were joined in this abandonment by newspapers and churches. They failed to respond, adopting a posture of passive acquiescence and worse.

I would place antisemitism as the fundamental reason Americans and the other European allies did not respond sooner to the Holocaust. Many people in the United States and Europe knew what the Nazis were up to with their Final Solution but looked the other way. The dehumanization of Jews by antisemites contributed to their indifference and passivity. The response by all the Allies was too little, too late.

To this day, the story remains little known about how U.S. government officials deliberately created bureaucratic obstacles for refugees seeking visas. I would particularly mention Breckinridge Long, a State Department official, a diplomat, and a powerful antisemite. Under Long, 90% of the quota places available to immigrants from countries under German or Italian control were never filled. If they had been filled, an estimated 190,000 more people could have escaped the Nazis.

The story of the European Jewish refugees is best captured in the famous 1939 voyage of the German liner St. Louis which carried 937 passengers. The U.S. government did not allow the passengers to land since they did not have U.S. immigration visas and had not passed a security screening. The boat was ultimately forced back to Europe and 254 of those passengers were killed by the Nazis.

If anything, the consequences of curbing Jewish immigration in the 1920’s and 1930’s highlights the present danger faced by immigrants in our era. Many of them are literally running for their lives, a reality that is not sufficiently appreciated.

The fact that antisemitism has a very long and tragic history in no way lessens our collective responsibility to oppose it now, especially given the alarming rise in hate crimes in this country. It is the same regressive force it has always been, redirecting popular anger onto a convenient scapegoat. All who oppose antisemitism, racism, and the alt right need to join together in solidarity.

Sometimes a story comes along that is so instructive and inspirational, it demands to be told. I think the story of Derek Black, who transformed from a top leader of the white nationalist movement to a committed anti-racist, is such a story.

Derek Black was not any routine, rank-and-file racist. He was the heir apparent to the American white nationalist movement. The son of Don Black, a long-time leader of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, and the godson of David Duke, Derek had impeccable white nationalist movement credentials.

Yet, even though Derek was expected to become the new American Hitler, in 2013 he left the white nationalist movement, rejecting and repudiating it.

How that transformation happened is a tale that offers critical lessons for anti-racists. The story of this transformation is told in a wonderful book, Rising Out Of Hatred, by Eli Saslow, a Washington Post staff writer.

As a young boy, Derek was heavily influenced by his birth family. Both his parents were active white supremacists. His father was instrumental in setting up Stormfront, probably the largest neo-Nazi website. Derek was a regular contributor, posting thousands of times on the site. He started a white pride website for children. Derek also started an online racist radio station. He and his dad had a daily talk radio show.

At a white nationalist conference organized by David Duke shortly after the election of President Obama, here is how Duke introduced Derek:

“I’d like to introduce the leading light of our movement. I don’t know anybody who has better gifts. He may have a much more extensive national and international career than I’ve had.”

Derek was a smooth racist. Committed to mainstreaming white nationalism, Derek did not use racist slurs. He never advocated violence or breaking the law. He favored sanitizing and repackaging white nationalism. Instead of donning Klan robes for cross-burnings, Derek favored business suits with a message against illegal immigration. It was an approach pioneered by Duke.

Derek saw white people as the victims of discrimination. He aggressively argued that there was an ongoing white genocide. Derek marshaled pseudo-scientific arguments to justify his views. He maintained that whites had bigger brains than non-whites and were genetically superior.

Saslow describes the debate in the white nationalist movement over what they called the Jewish question. At issue was whether Jews were considered white or outsiders. In 2008, Derek wrote, “Jews are the cause of all the world’s strife and misery.” He felt Jews were not white.

Because Derek was an excellent student, in 2010 he got admitted into New College of Florida, the state’s honors college. New College had a reputation as an alternative school, welcoming to non-conformists.

Once at college, Derek quickly realized the danger in going public with his racist identity. As a survival move, he decided to hide it. In his first year, Derek made friends with a Peruvian immigrant student and two Jewish students. He also started dating a Jewish woman.

Derek had difficulties squaring his ideological beliefs with his personal relationships. He struggled between the different parts of his life. He liked his friends and he agonized over the contradictions. He believed white Europeans needed to date only white Europeans but still he dated a Jewish woman.

Things came to a head for Derek when he was outed as a white supremacist by another New College student who was writing a thesis on extremists. The student accidentally discovered the Derek Black he read about was a student at New College. The student decided to share this information online with the entire New College community. Derek was studying in Germany at the time.

Derek decided he was not going to leave New College.The disclosure about Derek provoked a major split among New College students about how to relate to Derek. The split was between advocates for inclusion or exclusion. Some favored reaching out to him and some wanted to shame and shun him.

Genuinely liking him, Derek’s two Jewish friends on campus decided to engage him with the hope he could evolve over time. They regularly invited him to Friday night Shabbat dinners. Although they were horrified by his views, they did not write him off. They maintained an active dialogue. They practiced what Saslow calls non-judgmental inclusion.

While it took a period of three years, Derek eventually could not reconcile his old ideology with his friendships. Critical to this evolution was the role of Derek’s girlfriend Allison who challenged his views continuously. In an email Derek sent to the Southern Poverty Law Center, he renounced white nationalism, saying:

“I can’t support a movement that tells me I can’t be a friend to whomever I wish or that other people’s race requires me to think about them in a certain way or be suspicious of their advancements.

Derek’s story provides a powerful lesson about the positive value of inclusion. It is an argument against the dehumanization of political opponents. We are all more than our current political positions. It is reductive to view our current political opponents statically rather than dynamically. To quote Derek again:

“Outreach and discourse won’t magically solve the problem of hate. But without those private conversations with people I cared about, I might not have seen the weaknesses in my arguments.”

At a time when America is so bitterly divided, Derek’s example shows the value in reaching out to those with whom we disagree. If a top racist in the country can transform into an antiracist, there is hope for all kinds of people to grow and change. There remains no substitute for the power of persuasion.

Usually in trying to understand the reasons for murder, the motives and thinking of a gunman are not starkly etched. A degree of mystery is the norm. That cannot be said in the case of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, Robert Bowers.

Immediately before shooting and killing eleven people in the Tree of Life Synagogue, Bowers left a record. He went online and posted on Gab, an extremely anti-semitic and racist social media site.

In his last post before the shooting, Bowers singled out HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a little known immigrant advocacy organization. Bowers wrote:

“HIAS likes to bring invaders that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

Witnesses at the temple said that before he started shooting, Bowers shouted, “All Jews must die”. It would appear that Bowers blamed Jews in America for an invasion of non-white immigrants. Somehow he saw these immigrants as destined to slaughter white people.

Bowers had a history of making disparaging comments about Jews on Gab. He had previously written “Jews are the children of Satan”. He posted a picture of a fiery oven like those used in Nazi concentration camps to cremate Jews with the caption “Make Ovens 1488 F. Again”.

In considering Bowers’ acts, context and timing matter. The invasion he feared, the so-called caravan, has been a recent obsession of President Trump and Fox News. By relentless fear-mongering and constant repetition, Trump and his media servant worked to create a boogeyman.

The caravan, a collection of up to 7,000 Hondurans, seeking to escape violence in their home country and to obtain asylum, was made out to be an existential threat to the United States, even though it was still in southern Mexico.

It is inconceivable Bowers would have acted as he did when he did without the caravan narrative promoted by Trump and Fox News. That narrative flipped Bowers’ switch and led him to act out.

Those who fail to see the connection between the hate and fear Trump promotes and the actions of Bowers are kidding themselves. While Trump may have seen the caravan as a ploy to mobilize his voters to the polls, Bowers’ murders are a form of collateral damage. Trump’s anti-immigration rants have emboldened and inspired white supremacists and neo-Nazis.

Right wing authoritarian movements invariably collect and surface unhinged sociopaths like Bowers. The fact that he was even more extreme than others in the alt right does not minimize Trump’s responsibility. With his support for the “good” Nazi collaborators at Charlottesville, Trump has given the alt right a pass on violence.

People like Bowers and other white supremacists are an integral part of Trump’s base. They totally stand behind his presidency because they see him advancing their racist and anti-semitic movement, mainstreaming their views.

I was surprised by Bowers’ focus on HIAS. I have a personal connection to the organization. My sister, Lisa Baird, was HIAS Pa’s first staff attorney. Based in Philadelphia, Lisa primarily handled asylum claims. She had an extremely diverse caseload representing clients from all over the world. She worked for HIAS from 1993 to 1998.

HIAS Pa now has a staff of 40 and about 14 attorneys. It is the largest nonprofit provider of immigration legal services in Pennsylvania, specializing in representing unaccompanied minors and survivors of domestic violence and victims of crimes.

There is also a part of HIAS that focuses on refugee resettlement. It is largely a social service department, providing case management to newly arrived refugees assigned to the agency.

HIAS has actually been around for well over 100 years. On TV, I saw the writer Masha Gessen explain that HIAS had helped her emigrate from Russia. The organization has a history of helping Russian Jews, escaping anti-semitism there, come to the United States.

Bowers’ view that Jews are behind immigration of non-whites is part of the white nationalist world view. In this fact-free perspective, Jews are the puppet masters pulling the strings, financing the caravan and promoting non-white immigration.

To these folks on the alt right, any immigration of non-whites conflicts with their goal of a white ethno-state. For them, just the presence of non-white people equals slaughter of white people. They want to deport all whom they classify as non-white, including Blacks, Latinos and Jews.

In the aftermath of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, I do feel the need to address Trump supporters. I expect many of you were horrified by Bowers’ actions. I also expect many would deny that Trump bears any responsibility for these events. But if you oppose anti-semitism and racism, maybe you should think about how Trump’s pronouncements promoting fear and hatred of different racial groups fuel domestic terrorists like Bowers.

As a society, we have underestimated the danger coming from the far right. An ABC News/Washington Post poll taken in the wake of Charlottesville in August 2017 found that roughly 22 million Americans call it “acceptable” to hold neo-nazi or white supremacist views. Willful indifference is not an option. It is imperative that we actively resist this pernicious form of homegrown extremism.