Living with hate and anti-Semitism

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/10/2018 (2557 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Since the mid-1990s, I have visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, D.C., on many occasions, absorbing the significant lessons of its powerful exhibits as well as researching in its archives and library.

In the years before the terrorist attacks in New York of Sept. 11, 2001 — after which security at nearly all U.S. public institutions increased — it always struck me as ironic and sad that pre-9/11, of Washington’s many museums, the only one that had airport-style security to gain entrance was the USHMM. Here you have a museum dedicated to teaching about one of the most tragic events in human history — the systematic annihilation of millions of people solely because of their faith, ethnicity and culture — and from the day it opened in 1993, it had to protect itself and its visitors from the very hate it sought to enlighten the world about.

As the mass murder of 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh this past weekend tragically demonstrates, yet again, this anti-Semitic hatred persists 73 years after the Second World War ended and the depth of the depravity of the Holocaust became known.

Hatred of the kind that motivated the killer in Pittsburgh as well as other recent racial shootings in the U.S. and elsewhere — the 2015 murder of nine parishioners at a black church in Charleston, S.C., the killing of two black people by a white shooter in a Kentucky grocery store less than a week ago, and in Canada in January 2017, the mass shooting at Quebec City’s Islamic Cultural Centre mosque that led to the death of six and injured 19 — will never be entirely quashed.

Prejudice is endemic, especially in countries with visible minority groups. Jews account for only about two per cent of the U.S. population and 1.2 per cent of Canada’s, yet during the past few years, anti-Semitic incidents have increased in both countries. Most of these are stupid acts of vandalism, but there are also more concerning instances of harassment and physical assaults that should not be readily dismissed.

Once, anti-Semitism was deeply entrenched in the day-to-day life of both countries. Until at least the early 1960s, discrimination against Jews was routine through restrictions, quota systems and property covenants, and practised openly and without shame. Now, such actions are no longer legal or tolerated by a majority of Americans or Canadians. Witness the outpouring of grief and sympathy from non-Jews across North America and western Europe over the Pittsburgh killings since Saturday. Suffice it to say that this would not have happened, or certainly not to the same extent, 50 years ago.

However, as minorities such as Jews and others have gained equal rights and became welcomed as members of the societies in which they reside, and in which they have achieved a level of success once never thought possible, a heightened sense of fear persists among individuals — haters like the killer in Pittsburgh, but also people who pine for the imaginary “old days.”

If there is one main difference between the U.S. and Canada, it is that U.S. President Donald Trump, with his absurd conspiracy theories, appeals to white nationalists and anti-immigration diatribes, and his refusal to absolutely condemn a Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017, has stoked this fear without regard to the consequences of his words.

No, Trump is not responsible for a deranged gunman opening fire in a synagogue. But he is responsible for perpetuating the worst climate of intolerance in the U.S. in decades. Add in America’s irrational access to AR-15-style rifles and other guns, and you have a dangerous and volatile environment sufficient to push some individuals over the brink. That’s what happened in Pittsburgh.

Canada is not free of hate, as the shooting in Quebec City and other tragedies have shown. And Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, while by no means perfect, must be credited for standing up to hate and denouncing all forms of intolerance.

I’m no fan of government apologies; there have been a lot of them. Yet it is notable that next week, a day after the U.S. mid-term elections on Nov. 6, which has Trump criss-crossing the U.S. and attacking Democrats during his rallies in language rarely used by a president in public, Trudeau will deliver an apology specifically for Canada’s refusal in 1939 to permit more than 900 German Jewish refugees, passengers aboard the M.S. St. Louis fleeing Nazi Germany, into the country, and generally for Canada’s “None is Too Many” treatment of the refugees.

At the time, some non-Jewish Canadians did object to the federal government’s rigid policies, but most did not. The majority would have agreed with this observation made in 1938 by the Toronto Telegram, which had opposed Jewish immigration: “It cannot be denied that Jewish people as a class are not popular in Canada.”

Trudeau’s apology won’t alter the past, but it is an official recognition that the country has learned its historic lessons and has decisively changed for the better. Teachers will acknowledge it in their classrooms and their students (hopefully) will comprehend its significance. That bodes well for the future.

Historian Allan Levine’s most recent book is Seeking the Fabled City: The Canadian Jewish Experience.