In advance of the publication of his book Jews Don't Count this week, David Baddiel in today's Sunday Times looks at the way antisemitism gets played down or dismissed altogether in progressive circles - starting with his doubts about that Arnold Schwarzenneger comparison of the Capitol invasion to Kristallnacht, a comparison that was widely lauded at the time:
On January 6, 2021, a building was broken into, many people were scared, some injured, and five died, four of whom were rioters. On Kristallnacht, which went on for two days and nights, more than 1,000 synagogues were burnt, 7,500 Jewish businesses were ransacked, most German and Austrian Jewish hospitals, homes, schools and cemeteries were vandalised, at least 91 Jews were murdered, and some 30,000 Jewish males age 16 to 60 — including my grandfather — were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Many further deaths happened there, and indeed outside the camps: just in Vienna, in Schwarzenegger’s native Austria, there were, in the wake of the pogrom, 680 recorded suicides. Kristallnacht was about much, much more than some broken glass.
However, expressing my discomfort with Schwarzenegger’s comparison — classing it as an example of what the historian Deborah Lipstadt calls “soft-core denial”, by which she means something that diminishes or minimises the Holocaust — was itself, in a binary, tribal world, uncomfortable. On Twitter, many of my non-Jewish, politically progressive friends were keen to tell me either that the comparison was perfectly valid, or more nuanced than I realised.
They were keen, that is, to tell a Jew he was wrong to be uncomfortable, wrong to think of this as in any way problematic... I got a response that is now familiar: of irritation, of a sense that raising a possible Jewish concern was, in the larger picture, just a distraction. [...]
One thing that is touched upon in Schwarzenegger’s speech is his experience, growing up, of watching his father, and other men of that generation, broken by the guilt of their involvement in what he calls “the most evil regime in history”. He talks of his father drinking and abusing his family. He doesn’t, however, specifically say that his father joined the Nazi party, voluntarily, on March 1, 1938, 11 days before Austria was annexed by the Germans. Nor that he also applied to become a member of the SA, the National Socialist paramilitary wing, on May 1, 1939, at a time when SA membership was falling. Gustav Schwarzenegger was not a fellow traveller: he was an active Nazi. It’s likely he would have participated, energetically, in Kristallnacht. Only geography, not morality, prevented him from being the stormtrooper pointing the rifle at my grandfather on his knees in front of the blackened bricks of his synagogue....
Imagine, therefore, that Schwarzenegger had chosen to compare the storming of the Capitol to, say, the Tulsa race massacre of 1921, a horrific racist rampage where many black homes were destroyed and between 85 and 300 black people died. And now let’s imagine that Schwarzenegger’s father had been not Austrian and in the Nazi party but American and in the Ku Klux Klan; in the Klan, and part of that rampaging mob. Perhaps the comparison would have passed without mention. Or perhaps he would have been condemned on social media for a lack of sensitivity: for failing to understand how a person with such a lineage using that atrocity as an inflammatory reference to make his — valid or otherwise — political point might feel to the minority concerned.
The issue here is not about Schwarzenegger and his family. I certainly don’t believe one should be held responsible for the sins of the fathers. What I’m interested in is the differing progressive reactions to such comparisons. Because I know that if there had been black discomfort over such a thing, it would have been — correctly — respected and listened to, and white allies would have done their best to check their privilege and understand it. Whereas, from the same quarters, a Jew questioning the use of Kristallnacht is — was — mainly dismissed. This is because Jews don’t count.
The new ethnic studies program shortly to be rolled out to high schools in California, where Jews are, as Emily Benedek explains, cleansed from the history of racism, sadly confirms the point Baddiel is making.