Rabbi Message
12/10/2021 03:56:00 PM
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Dear KHN Chevre,
***Just a reminder that we are not having services through KHN this evening. We will be joining other Reconstructionist communities. Please sign up before 5 pm to gain a password. Zoom services begin at 8:00 pm this evening. Meeting ID: 441 857 610. To receive the password, please send an email to info@adatshalom.net
As we know there has been a resurgence of anti-Semitism in North America.
Recently one of my colleagues came across a Facebook profile picture that showed a yellow star of David which said “Not Vaxed” inside it with the words, “…slowly and quietly. Hardly anyone will even know it’s a holocaust.”
This disturbing trope of comparing Holocaust motifs with vaccination and mask mandates has appeared all over North America.
A police officer in Calgary was upset about the COVID vaccine mandate and compared the policy to the Holocaust: “[Hitler] slowly, but surely, took away, the rights, the privileges, all that stuff people find worthwhile in life.” He urged people to look at the “correlations”. At one time he was Calgary’s hate-crimes and diversity unit.
There has been a rising use of Nazi imagery by some in the anti-vaccination movement. In this view, Nazi policy and current health policy are considered one and the same. Some actually wear the yellow star of David. According to social activist Bernie Farber, any but by no means all anti-vaxxers can be connected to the hard-right, neo-Nazi and white supremacy movements, who in other circumstances would be looking at Jews with derision and hate. Instead, they appropriate symbols from the Holocaust like the yellow star of David and use it for themselves, pretending they are being persecuted. This trivializes and belittles history and dehumanizes our history. We need to condemn this false connection especially in terms of social media where hundreds of thousands see it.
Just last week in the United States, Lara Logan, the former host of 60 minutes compared vaccine mandates and Dr. Fauci to Joseph Mengele, and said that COVID kills at the same rate as influenza. Writer Dara Horn who recently wrote, “People who Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present”, said that those who appropriate Holocaust imagery are part of a pattern that pre-dates the current pandemic. “People tell stories about dead Jews that make them feel better about themselves, and people erase actual Jews and Jewish culture and Jewish history in order to do that.” Horn calls this Holocaust trivialization and appropriation, a clear form of anti-Semitism which in this case compares public health measures designed to save lives to the dehumanization and industrialization of millions of Jews.
Horn states, “About one centimeter under this Holocaust appropriation and trivialization is just blatant anti-Semitism.” Horn believes that anti-Semitism is a conspiracy theory which appeals to people who want a simple explanation for complicated problems and who don’t want to take responsibility for their problems. She likens it to when Jews were blamed for the Black Death in the 1300s. Jews were dying disproportionately not by the plague itself as much as by their neighbors who accused them of poisoning the wells and killed them. Horn teaches that the Holocaust has been “universalized” and turned into a metaphor which erases thousands of years of anti-Semitism in the West and since then. People tell stories about dead Jews that make them feel good about themselves: we all look great compared to the Nazis and it’s absolves people of any responsibilities.
What can we do as a Jewish community to combat some of this misinformation? For starters, we can listen to what Dara Horn tells her children: that anti-Semitism is something that appeals to people who are afraid of responsibility. And that following what Judaism asks us is inherently at odds with conspiracy theories. Judaism requires literacy, knowledge and study; critical inquiry; and it requires taking on responsibility to others and contributing to a community. It is a tradition based on community obligation. As we are facing those who say that “freedom” doesn’t require any responsibility to others, we can double down and gain strength from our own tradition which keeps us growing, learning and taking care of each other.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Diana
SOURCES:
Most of the material I gathered this message from came from The Current with Matt Galloway:
Here is an article by an ADL leader and a Holocaust survivor denouncing the sharp rise of antisemitism in the criticism of COVID-19 mitigation measures.
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2021/11/30/media-lara-logan-fox-fauci-mengele-comparison/].
Thu, April 25 2024
17 Nisan 5784
