My grandmother fled Hitler in 1938. She’d be skeptical of panic over antisemitism today
Yes, antisemitism is on the rise — but that doesn’t always mean what we might think
A Nazi Party parade in Vienna in 1930. Photo by FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
In the story of my Jewish family’s migration from Europe to America in the 1930s, my grandmother has always been portrayed as the supreme realist. Eyes wide open to the growing danger, with two young children in tow, she uprooted herself from Luxembourg after Hitler’s invasion of Austria in 1938. She was a widow and barely spoke English, but she had seen enough to weigh the costs of staying. So while other family members rationalized, she headed to the American embassy for visas, leaving behind her mother and sisters.
This story celebrated my grandmother’s attentiveness to the rise of a xenophobic, militaristic state, and foresight about the ways in which it was likely to target her and her family. My grandmother had been vigilant about the evidence, and had seen that Hitler’s regime was not just dedicated to the violent dispossession and removal of Jews, but was also capable of carrying out that policy. Her strength lay in rejecting a comfortable denialism that was spreading, infecting others of her generation.
From pulpits and opinion pages, we are now told that the safety and security of Jewish people has been threatened once again. If my grandmother were here, I can guess what she’d say: Look carefully at the evidence before making any major moves, and judge that evidence independently rather than simply accepting the consensus viewpoint. I don’t think, taking such a look, she’d agree that this is another moment in which Jewish panic is warranted.
This is not the position of many Jewish leaders, however, whose rhetoric around Jewish safety certainly sounds concerning.
A Dec. 11 letter signed by the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and the Jewish Federations of North America asserted that, since the onset of the Oct. 7 war, Israel’s opponents “have verbally and physically attacked Jews, protested in front of Jewish religious and communal institutions, and attacked Jewish owned businesses.” This sounds quite a bit like the environment faced by our ancestors on the eve of World War II.
But there are key differences, and rather than give into anxiety, we must examine them critically.
Antisemitism has undeniably reared its head over the past 14 months, just as Islamophobia and other forms of hatred have. Our media culture of outrage and attention-grabbing breeds these hatreds, especially during wartime.
But the current uptick in antisemitic expression is marginalized and disorganized. Sweeping comparisons between backlash to the Gaza War and early 20th-century antisemitic movements fail to apprehend the reality of the protests. In hindsight, the discomfort felt by many Jews — including college students during last spring’s encampments — has stemmed from inflammatory rhetoric and confrontational tactics, not from any organized effort to oust Jews from civic life. Some may claim that such rhetoric and confrontation are precursors to an organized campaign aimed at Jews. But nothing like this has materialized.
Despite their alarmist language, the writers of the Dec. 11 letter were not responding to physical or verbal assaults on Jews; protests of communal institutions; or attacks on Jewish businesses. The occasion, instead, was the National Association for Independent Schools (NAIS) People of Color Conference, held from December 4-7 in Denver, Colorado — where I live — which featured two speeches that described Zionism as a colonialist project and the war in Gaza as a genocide.
For the letter writers, the problem with the NAIS speeches was that they threatened to inhibit Jewish pride. “Perhaps the most heartbreaking report we received,” they wrote, “was from a Jewish student who stated that he and his peers ‘felt so targeted, so unsafe, that we tucked our Magen Davids in our shirts’….No student should ever be made to feel this way because of their identity.”
Yes, it’s concerning that any child should feel unwelcome because of their identity. But the letter fails to note that while the students felt fear, there is no evidence of their Jewishness being an issue of any kind. No one was, in the end, actually targeted for wearing the Magen David.
What I think my grandmother might say: Fear is a feeling. When we confuse it with a piece of evidence, we lose the ability to see clearly and act wisely. There’s no reason to think the conference involved the endangerment of the health, lives, or livelihood of Jewish people. Does a feeling of being unsafe amount to a violation, when there is no objective evidence of targeting?
Certainly, the student’s experience does not belong in the same bucket of antisemitic persecution as the assaults on an earlier generation of European Jews. If anything, I think my grandmother might be concerned about the extent to which American Jewish organizations are focusing on experiences like that of the students at the NAIS conference over the efforts of a state to subdue an unwanted population — in this case Israel and the Palestinians.
Weren’t we Jews the ones who were taught to be especially attentive to this kind of development?
Many Holocaust survivors and their descendants, including me, view the idea of looking away from a people’s potential destruction as entirely at odds with Jewish values. We have always been taught to be vigilant about the predilection of nation-states to abuse power, and to take the magnitude of devastation that they can cause seriously — especially when acknowledging that threat makes us uncomfortable.
In 1938, that kind of unflinching vision was my grandmother’s best tool for survival. Her understanding of the stark facts came with a cost that she was willing to pay — namely, flight to an alien environment and the leaving behind of family, many of whom were killed in the Holocaust. Now, an unflinching vision requires a willingness to hear arguments and see evidence that might bruise Jewish people’s feelings — but help us hold on to our values.
I continue to cherish my grandmother’s example, but the nature of her lesson has shifted with history. Living with eyes wide open right now means seeing beyond simply a rise in antisemitic rancor and bigotry. It means seeing the difference between circumstances and responsibilities as they were in her time — and as they are for me.
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