All three years of middle school I learned about the Holocaust. The idea always seemed so old, a piece of history that was simply that: history. I still have to remind myself that there are survivors of the Holocaust alive today, it just wasn’t as long ago as I imagine. I never felt very different from Christians, and I thought anti-Semitism had largely died with the Holocaust, which I now know was very ignorant of me to think, especially since I am Jewish.
So when Trump started to name choices for his cabinet, I was surprised when my mother told me some of his picks were anti-Semites. Anti-semites? Hadn’t America learned a lesson after 6 million Jews died in World War II? I thought. Don’t we teach about the Holocaust in schools so that history won’t repeat itself? I asked myself. Wasn’t the term ‘Nazi’ only used to talk about people in the past, not the present?
But the answer I realized was no; whether they call themselves alt-rights or white nationalists, many are Nazis who are living and acting in the present, though their ideas may be those of the past.
Wake up call: the 1930s wants their bigotry back.
Steve Bannon is Trump’s chief strategist. Along with being a racist and Islamophobe Bannon is also known to be an anti-Semite. In 2007, Bannon’s ex-wife accused him of saying the following when deciding which school to send his daughters to: “[he] went on to say the biggest problem he had with Archer is the number of Jews that attend. He said that he doesn’t like Jews and that he doesn’t like the way they raise their kids to be ‘whiny brats’ and that he didn’t want the girls going to school with Jews.”
In more recent events, according to the Washington Post, at least 100 gravestones were knocked over and vandalized at a cemetery in Philadelphia just a week after similar incidents in St. Louis. These were very intentional, and we cannot pretend they weren’t hate crimes.
What I believe to be the scariest news is that since Jan. 1 of this year, 91 Jewish organizations in the United States, including many schools and daycares, have received a total of 116 bomb threats. None so far have been carried out. These numbers are terrifying. We are so lucky no threats have been carried out, but that does not mean they won’t be in the future.
This news really came to life for me last week. My mom was driving me to school on Van Ness Avenue in Washington, D.C., and we were passing the Israeli Embassy when my mom pointed to a police officer walking with a large dog who was sniffing around the Embassy grounds. “That’s a bomb-sniffing dog,” she said, “they’re checking for bombs because of all the recent threats.” To see this with my own eyes and hear it from my mother was very different from reading about it on social media.
We cannot pretend these events are not a result of President Trump being elected. When he was put into power and chose Bannon as one of his chief advisors, it gave many people the idea that it was okay to be bigoted, that it is now safe to be bigoted because, if the President and his right-hand man can do it, so can I! We must get rid of this attitude.
After the Jewish cemeteries had been desecrated, the Muslim American community came together to raise money to help repair them. This warmed my heart, and I hope this kind of support between targeted communities continues.
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