"White on white crime"

I once wrote that I regard decent treatment of Jewish people as a good test for the decency of any gentile society. I stand by what I said there - click the link if you're interested.

This test is one of the reasons that the USA can claim to be a decent society. Of course, these things are relative. I am aware of the former caps on Jewish admittance to Ivy League universities and the anti-semitism of, for example, the KKK. There is no doubt much more of which I am unaware. But, equally, we all know much about the appalling treatment of Jewish people in so many other societies. The Magistrate of History will punish the anti-semitic offences of America with gentle admonishment and a slap on the wrist, before turning her attention to numerous European countries with fury and awful punishments.

So it was with some sadness that I read this piece, entitled "Stop Being Shocked", by Bari Weiss. I recommend it to you. Weiss writes about a worsening in the climate for American Jews and, as her title proposes, suggests that now is the time to accept that there is nothing surprising about that development. 

Weiss' piece lists many unfortunate incidents and I was reading through them with a resigned sense of deja vu - until I came across this: "Jews are flattened into “white people,” our living history obliterated, so that someone with a straight face can suggest that the Holocaust was merely “white on white crime.”"

"White on white crime"! I had to follow that up. It seems that it is real: indeed, it happened "multiple times", I read at the link that Weiss provides. 

Well, perhaps using the phrase "white on white crime" to refer to the Holocaust is a 'clever' phrase that some undergraduates picked up, used for shock value, and now feel rather embarrassed about. Let's hope so. Let's hope all these straws in the wind are nothing more than straws in the wind.

But one should not be surprised if many people are worried. A society in which educated people speak lightly of the Holocaust is not the kind of society we knew in the West a generation ago. A lot can change in another generation.

In Joseph Roth's book The Radetsky March (recommended), I read that one of the titles of Emperor Franz Joseph was King of Jerusalem, the "highest rank that God had to offer a crowned head". In the book we see the Kaiser taking his duties to his Jewish subjects seriously. And we know (as the author did not - the book was published in 1932) what was to happen to those subjects when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was no more. 

I am not for one moment suggesting that anything remotely similar will happen in America. It is not simply a case of putting a Sousa march in place of the Strauss one. All I am saying is that the history of the Jewish people includes too many instances of societies becoming unwelcoming to them for anyone to read the evidence Weiss marshalls with equanimity.