Mein Kampf 100th Anniversary: Has the World Learned Anything?

July 18, 2025 By Robin Itzler

On July 18, 1925, Adolph Hitler’s book Mein Kampf (My Struggle) was published. Written while he was in Landsberg prison, where he was serving a relatively relaxing sentence for the failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch coup, Hitler made very clear what he would do if the German people put him and the leftist National Socialist Party in power.

Mein Kampf is in two volumes. Part 1 has stories about Hitler’s life, including serving as a soldier in World War I. The book sold a paltry 9,473 copies in its first year. At the time, few people cared what a short man with a funny moustache thought.

Part 2 was published in 1927. Unlike many politicians who hide their true goals, Hitler put it all in his book for the entire world to read. He was very clear about his antisemitic views and what he would do to make Germany Judenfrei if he gained power and could implement his Third Reich agenda.

Sales of the two volumes continued to be slow as many Germans viewed Hitler as more of a comic (funny moustache, short, feminine speaking mannerisms, etc.). At first, they didn’t take him or his left-wing National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) seriously. In “Hitler Was Incompetent and Lazy—and His Nazi Government Was an Absolute Clown Show,” Tom Phillips writes about how many viewed Hitler as a fool:

In fact, this may even have helped his rise to power, as he was consistently underestimated by the German elite. Before he became Chancellor, many of his opponents had dismissed him as a joke for his crude speeches and tacky rallies. Even after elections had made the Nazis the largest party in the Reichstag, people still kept thinking that Hitler was an easy mark, a blustering idiot who could easily be controlled by smart people.

In Hitlerland, Andrew Nagorski discusses the American media’s early impressions of Hitler and the Third Reich:

Yet you had Americans meeting Hitler and saying, ‘This guy is a clown. He’s like a caricature of himself.’ And a lot of them went through this whole litany about how even if Hitler got into a position of power, other German politicians would somehow be able to control him. A lot of German politicians believed this themselves.

Surprisingly, German Jews also did not take Hitler seriously during his early years. In 1925, only a few German Jewish newspapers even bothered to review Mein Kampf. As Raphael Ahren wrote in The Times of Israel article “Why Jews Didn’t Blink an Eye When Mein Kampf First Came Out”:

When Mein Kampf came out for the first time, German Jews hardly noticed it. They certainly did not view it as a threat to their existence, or even as a harbinger of a changing political climate in the Fatherland.

Rahel Straus, a physician who grew up in Karlsruhe, Germany, and emigrated to Palestine in 1933, wrote in her memoirs:

We passed by the boxes of the Volkisher Beobachter (the official organ of the Nazi Party), read the incendiary articles and indignantly continued working. We didn’t realize that this Volkisher Beobachter was one of the most read newspapers in Germany at the time. We saw Hitler’s Mein Kampf on display in every bookstore; none of us bought it, none of us read it.

Slowly, that short man with the funny moustache and his leftist Nazi Party chiseled away at the Weimar Republic. The worldwide depression that started in October 1929 gave them a growing audience of supporters. By 1932, the Nazi Party had become the largest political party in the Reichstag (the German parliament).

One year later, on January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by the aging President Paul von Hindenburg. When the 86-year-old Hindenburg died on August 2, 1934, Hitler announced that the office of president and chancellor would merge under the title of Führer und Reichskanzler (leader and chancellor). Those who disagreed were free to discuss the matter at the end of a gun barrel or while laboring in Dachau.

Suddenly, sales of Mein Kampf rose to more than 1 million copies. In 1935, the Franz, Eher, Nacht publishing house suggested to Hitler that a special Mein Kampf version should be given to every newlywed couple on the day of their wedding.

The western world, still reeling from the horrors of World War I, watched what was happening in Germany and worried that another massive worldwide conflict was on the horizon. Meanwhile, Germany was ignoring the Treaty of Versailles while the Allies embraced appeasement.

After signing the Munich Agreement on September 30, 1938, between Great Britain and Germany, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew back to London believing he had prevented a second European war. When Chamberlain, whose name would become synonymous with appeasement, reached the prime minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street, he read a prepared statement:

My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time….

British Prime Minister Chamberlain and, to a lesser degree, President Franklin Roosevelt bent like pretzels to avoid a second colossal world war. In the meantime, Winston Churchill, who in 1935 had read the unedited English version of Mein Kampf, was repeatedly telling anyone who would listen that it would be better to stop Hitler now before he rebuilt Germany’s army and arsenal.

Few were listening to Churchill.

By May 10, 1940, when Churchill succeeded Chamberlain as prime minister, Mein Kampf had been in the public square for nearly 15 years and was a best seller in Germany and the occupied Nazi nations. Chamberlain’s years of appeasement had resulted in:

• March 7, 1936: Germany invaded and remilitarized the Rhineland.
• March 12-13, 1938: Germany annexed Austria (Anschluss).
• March 15, 1939: Germany invaded the Czechoslovakia via the provinces of Bohemia and Moravia.
• September 1, 1939: Germany invaded Poland.
• September 3, 1939: Great Britain declared war on Germany.

Keep all this in mind when laughing at memes mocking intelligence-challenged politicians such as New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Texas Representative Jasmine Crockett, or New York’s Communist-Democrat mayoral candidate Zohan Mamdani.

One of them might soon be writing a book called “My Struggle.”

Robin M. Itzler is the founder and editor of Patriot Neighbors, a free weekly national newsletter. 

The Holocaust Didn’t Really Change Anything

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

Philosophers, writers and thinkers insisted that the Holocaust was an inflection point in history, but it’s clearer now than ever before that it did not change history, it only accelerated it. 

Israel was not, as politicians all too often insist, “born out of the ashes of the Holocaust.” It was born out of the blood, sweat and determination of a relatively small group of Zionists who defied the traditionalists and leftists in their own communities to go and rebuild their own homeland.

Liberal Jews have made “If you will it, it is no dream” into an airy cliche when it was actually meant as a hard wake up call to a European Jewry that had spent too long living in dreams. Even after the Holocaust brought an iron end to many of those dreams, they still linger on.

Nor did the Holocaust secure political support for Israel. How could it when it did not even secure the ability of European Jews to flee to America or even to their homeland in Israel? The politicians and nations who voted at the UN to recognize Israel did so for varying reasons, Truman was facing a difficult election and the USSR wanted to undermine the UK, and the closest the Holocaust entered into it was the hope that a homeland would keep the Jewish refugees who could not return back to Poland lest they be murdered from moving elsewhere.

The Holocaust killed a lot of Jews and produced a rich body of literature, memoirs and historic works, but it did little to alter the trajectory that the Jewish people had already been on.

If the Nazis and their local collaborators had not exterminated the Jews of Eastern Europe with mass graves and death camps, the Communists would have done it with gulags and bans on Judaism. Jewish life under Communism was ultimately as unsustainable as under Nazism.

The religious centers of Jewish life would have inevitably shifted to America and Israel, and the secular ones to America and Western Europe. The Islamic colonization of Western Europe would have put paid to Jewish life in Western Europe even if the Holocaust had not happened. And in America the growing political radicalization is making Jewish secular life unworkable.

The post-Holocaust myth of a new tolerance has been dying by the death of a thousand cuts and the worship of diversity and civil rights peddled by Jewish leftists is a major factor. Even while Abraham Joshua Heschel, in the pivotal ‘spiritual’ moment of Reform Judaism, marched with MLK, Jewish shopkeepers were having their windows smashed by antisemitic black mobs.

If Reform Judaism were to have a future, it would have put up pictures of those smashed windows in its temples instead of the photos of Heschel with MLK now taking their pride of place alongside rainbow colored magen davids and posters about defending illegal alien migrants.

But the Holocaust did not actually change how Western Jews thought about anything.

Liberal Jews became more liberal. Traditionalist Jews became more traditionalist. And the Jews of Israel alternated between winning wars against Jihadist armies and trying to get along with them. If it had been up to European Ashkenazi Jews, Israel would have carved itself up into pieces by now. It’s mostly the doing of the Middle Eastern Sefardi Jews and the Religious Zionists, who combine traditionalism with a commitment to holding the land, that it has not.

Middle Eastern Jews for the most part did not experience the Holocaust. They did not need to. Instead they lived through over a thousand years of Muslim oppression and ethnic cleansing. And they understand what the Holocaust did not seem to have taught much of Western Jewry.

The latest International Holocaust Remembrance Day was marked by articles noting the small number of living Holocaust survivors, examinations of more movies about the Holocaust, the narratives of ‘third generation’ descendants of survivors and other such absurdities all while the world’s largest Jewish population has been fighting for its survival every single day last year.

It’s as if American Jews had spent the 1940s commemorating the Chmelnitsky Massacres while hardly paying attention to what was happening to the Jews in Germany and Poland.

The day was also marked by a pregnant Jewish woman being dragged out of a ‘Holocaust’ event at which the President of Ireland expressed his sympathies for the current mass killers of Jews. Some leaders in the Irish Jewish community condemned her instead of the pro-genocide president. Other ceremonies marking the official UN designated day were equally terrible.

To meaningfully commemorate a tragedy as more than a loss of life, you have to ask what it means. And rather than coming up with any new answers, the various strands of Jewish communities looked at the Holocaust and saw what they had seen all along. They doubled down on what they had been doing before, good or bad, and worked the Holocaust into it.

And so the Holocaust didn’t really change anything.

It took parents from children and children from parents. It wiped out families, villages, traditions and entire ways of life, but it didn’t change the fundamental adaptability of the Jewish people.

But what is true on a communal level isn’t true on an individual level.

I lost over 50 members of my family in the Holocaust (and others to Communist brutality). From a very young age, I understood that the worst was possible and complacency was never an option. I have a young daughter because my father-in-law, while looking at a Jewish cemetery in Eastern Europe decided that he would not allow Jewish history to die in that place.

The Holocaust was not the first mass murder of Jews and, as Oct 7 reminds us, not the last.

What death ought to teach us is how to live. And how to survive in the face of certain death. The greatest challenge for the Jewish people remains complacency in the face of evil. If that is to change, the momentum will not come from leaders or organizations, but from individuals who see the threat. Death, no matter how vast or brutal, alone will not change complacency into awakening. To wake up, we must remember who we are. That is what Zionism at its best did by allowing us to imagine ourselves as more than the fallen state we had been reduced to.

The Holocaust could not change who we are. Only we can change ourselves.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.Thank you for reading.

 

Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left tells the untold story of the Left's 200-Year War against America. And readers love it.

FDR: New Files Reveal His Role In The Holocaust

The Jews Should Keep Quiet reassesses the hows and whys behind the Roosevelt administration’s fateful policies during the Holocaust. 

Michael Flores Mar 30, 2024

Rafael Medoff delves into difficult truths: With FDR’s consent, the administration deliberately suppressed European immigration far below the limits set by U.S. law. His administration also refused to admit Jewish refugees to the U.S. Virgin Islands, dismissed proposals to use empty Liberty ships returning from Europe to carry refugees, and rejected pleas to drop bombs on the railways leading to Auschwitz, even while American planes were bombing targets only a few miles away—actions that would not have conflicted with the larger goal of winning the war.

What motivated FDR? Medoff explores the sensitive question of the president’s private sentiments toward Jews. Unmasking strong parallels between Roosevelt’s statements regarding Jews and Asians, he connects the administration’s policies of excluding Jewish refugees and interning Japanese Americans.

The Jews Should Keep Quiet further reveals how FDR’s personal relationship with Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, American Jewry’s foremost leader in the 1930s and 1940s, swayed the U.S. response to the Holocaust. Documenting how Roosevelt and others pressured Wise to stifle American Jewish criticism of FDR’s policies, Medoff chronicles how and why the American Jewish community largely fell in line with Wise. Ultimately Medoff weighs the administration’s realistic options for rescue action, which, if taken, would have saved many lives.

For years after war’s end the full horror of the holocaust was hidden from the public. A short 1955 film NIGHT AND FOG a decade after the war began to reveal the truth. You can watch it here: Click this link for NIGHT AND FOG 

• "This highly original work addresses the U.S. government’s unwillingness to undertake serious rescue efforts and the deep divisions within American Jewry over how to respond to U.S. indifference to European Jewry’s plight. Expanding on David S. Wyman’s pathbreaking work on America’s response to the Holocaust, using new archival materials and interviews with persons then on the scene, Medoff provides the best assessment to date of the relationship between America’s foremost Jewish leader, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt.”—Professor Stephen H. Norwood, author of The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower and coeditor of Encyclopedia of American Jewish History
• “The Jews Should Keep Quiet reveals in troubling detail how FDR manipulated American Jewish leaders to suppress criticism of his abandonment of Europe’s Jews during the Holocaust. Our family was certainly impacted. I was two years old on January 30, 1933, the day Hitler became Reichschancellor and my Dad told my Mom: ‘We are leaving Germany forever.’ It took us two and a half years of seeking a sympathetic American consul to overcome the barriers of FDR’s State Department. We need to learn from Dr. Medoff’s disturbing but necessary and enlightening study of moral failure and its consequences.”—Rudy Boschwitz, U.S. Senator (1978–1991)
• “The Jews Should Keep Quiet conclusively documents, far better than anything else I have read, how Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s private attitude towards Jews motivated him to close America’s doors to Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Medoff adroitly exposes how FDR suppressed Jewish immigration with the unwitting assistance of Rabbi Stephen Wise. This book is a revelation—courageous, scholarly, and chillingly honest. You will never think of FDR the same way after reading it.”—Irving Abella, president of the Academy of the Arts and the Humanities of Canada
• “The Jews Should Keep Quiet is of lasting importance for the teaching and understanding of the Holocaust. Dr. Medoff’s incisive examination of the complex relationship between the US president and America’s foremost Jewish leader shines a light on troubling aspects of American history that many would prefer to ignore. This book is must reading.”—Dr. Zsuzsanna Ozsvath, director of Holocaust Studies, Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies, The University of Texas at Dallas
• “The Jews Should Keep Quiet is a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of elite complicity with government inaction. Rabbi Stephen S. Wise regarded Franklin D. Roosevelt as a friend, even though the Roosevelt administration was unfriendly to the plight of Jewish refugees, opposed the bombing of extermination camps, and remained ambivalent toward Zionism. Meticulously researched, engagingly written, and eminently fair-minded, The Jews Should Keep Quiet deserves a wide audience.”—Dean J. Kotlowski, author of Nixon’s Civil Rights and Paul V. McNutt and the Age of FDR
• “In this important volume, Medoff shows there was a great deal Roosevelt could have done despite the various political circumstances and limitations. The new material and analysis he brings to light are vital study in a field rife with apologetic, consensus historians—and dare not to be forgotten.”—Allen H. Podet, professor emeritus, Philosophy and Religious Studies, Buffalo State, State University of New York
• “The Jews Should Keep Quiet is a meticulously researched and disquieting history of the reasons behind America’s failure to rescue Europe’s doomed Jews. Readers may rightly conclude that if there is a Roosevelt they can admire, it is Eleanor and not Franklin.”—Dr. Alan L. Berger, Raddock Family Eminent Scholar Chair in Holocaust Studies, Florida Atlantic University
• “An essential study shedding further light on a watershed period, attempting a challenging balanced approach with irrefutable evidence condemning two major figures whose close collaboration ultimately carried disastrous consequences.”—CCAR Journal/The Reform Jewish Quarterly

Scientists have long been puzzled by the frequent disappearance of ships in the Bermuda Triangle. In his new Holocaust documentary, filmmaker Ken Burns has managed to make the entire Bermuda Conference on Refugees vanish....................How, then, could Ken Burns have omitted any mention of Bermuda from his six hour-long PBS series on “The U.S. and the Holocaust”? Was it because one of the themes of the series was to minimize President Roosevelt’s responsibility for America’s harsh refugee policy, and the Bermuda Conference conflicted with that narrative?...............To Read More......

Jewish Studies Has an Anti-Semitism Problem

Daniel Greenfield June 07, 2021 @ Sultan Knish Blog

 When Sultan Doughan signed a hateful letter falsely claiming that Israel and Zionism were based on "Jewish Supremacy", a term popularized by Neo-Nazi leader David Duke, that ugly rhetoric wouldn’t have attracted much attention in an antisemitic time... except for one thing.

Doughan is a Muslim postdoctoral associate at Boston University's Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies.

Her work at a center named after one of the most prominent writers about the Holocaust includes the “case of a German-Palestinian museum guide who lost her job over a controversy that was triggered by her comparing her own family’s traumatic past in the Nakba with Jewish experiences during the Holocaust.”

More accurately, the guide compared the Jews to the Nazis at the Anne Frank House.

In her thesis, Doughan complains that "Muslims have to submit to the Holocaust" and that the "Holocaust remains an exceptional event in German discourse, authorizing immigration policies, citizenship tests and discrimination" against Muslims.

Muslims emerge as the "new Jews" who are being victimized by the Holocaust, not just in Israel, but in Germany, where they are asked not to spew hate at Jews as a condition of citizenship.

Doughan appears to suggest that compensation funds for the Holocaust be used for Muslims.

She smears a Muslim social worker fighting antisemitism over his shock at a woman declaring, “I’d rather send my daughter to Tel Aviv to blow herself up." Doughan accuses him of being a "driver of imported 'Muslim anti-Semitism'” because his worry over "the idea of killing Jews was greater than his worry for this concrete girl possibly dying in the course of such an act."

This would be a moral abomination anywhere, but it’s especially horrifying within the context of a Jewish Studies center named after Elie Wiesel.

But the hateful anti-Israel letter using Neo-Nazi language toward Jews reveals just how deep the rot in Jewish Studies has become. While African-American Studies departments promote positive narratives about black people, Jewish Studies departments do the opposite to Jews.

Often they’re used to attack Jews from the inside while advancing anti-Jewish narratives.

Pratima Gopalakrishnan, another signatory to the "Jewish Supremacy" letter, is a post-doc at the Duke Center for Jewish Studies who rants about Israel on Twitter and ponders "how intro classes on the ancient Near East can make intentional connections to Palestine today".

Pratima claims to be studying "ancient Judaism" using "theoretical approaches drawn from feminist and queer theory". That hostile lens is supplemented with a column on the Torah for Jewish Currents, a former Communist publication that celebrated the Muslim rape and murder of Jews, and firing off social media blood libels about “Israel’s military aggression against the people of Gaza”, and false claims about the “ethnic cleansing of Palestinians”.

Lila Corwin Berman, who holds a chair in American Jewish History at Temple University, is also one of the more prominent figures in Jewish studies as chair of the Academic Council of the American Jewish Historical Society. Her signature on the hateful letter is unsurprising considering her opposition to anti-BDS measures, and support for anti-Israel groups.

Berman has appeared with Peter Beinart, who has called for the destruction of Israel, and supported him, and promoted material from the JVP pro-terrorist hate group.

She also took part in a webinar for the former Communist Jewish Currents anti-Israel site.

Beyond her anti-Israel activism, Berman has labored to rid Jewish Studies of Jews.

In "Jewish History Beyond the Jewish People", Berman argues that "Jewishness may help us interpret a person, a place, an idea, a text, an object, or a relationship without first having to meet any preexisting condition of being Jewish." What then makes Jewish Studies, Jewish?

"Is it possible to think of Jewishness as anything other than real Jewish bodies and spaces?" Berman wheedles. "When we write Jewish history beyond its foundational claims—the Jewish people or a Jewish space—we must announce that these claims are neither inevitable nor eternal." That is a prerequisite to the destruction of the Jewish people.

Mostafa Hussein, another signatory to the "Jewish Supremacy" letter, has a PhD in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis. He's currently teaching at the Department of Judaic Studies at Michigan University where he's working on a book arguing that Zionism was based on Arab and Islamic ideas. Hussein, a graduate of Egypt's Al-Azhar University, claims that Jews constructed "the identity of the new Jew and his sense of belonging to the Land of Palestine/Israel" by having "exploited Arabo-Islamic knowledge".

The problem is not simply that some people involved in Jewish Studies hate Israel in their own free time, or even that they sign letters using the language of David Duke, it’s that they center their own extremist agendas at the expense of the Jewish people, whose heritage and legacy they exploit in a broader campaign to attack Jews using Jewish Studies as their weapon.

At the University of Massachusets, Alon Confino acts as the Pen Tishkach Chair of Holocaust Studies when he isn't complaining that Germany isn't antisemitic enough.

"The situation in Germany today is absurd. Any harsh critique of Israel’s occupation or its policies is deemed antisemitic. Is this really a lesson Germans want to draw from the Holocaust?" Confino whined in an article equating Israel with Nazi Germany and urging that, as "Holocaust scholars", it was important to listen to the voices of Israel's Muslim “victims”.

Amos Goldberg, the co-author of the article with Confino, and another signatory to the “Jewish Supremacy” letter, is the co-editor of “The Holocaust and Nakba: Memory, National Identity and Jewish-Arab Partnership.” The Nakba is the Arab Muslim name for their failed genocide of the Jews that has become an annual “Lost Cause” commemoration and an orgy of racist violence.

The abuse of the Holocaust to attack Jews and support antisemites is routine in Jewish Studies.

Atina Grossmann, a Cooper Union professor and a fellow the United States Holocaust Museum, is a signatory to the letter that uses the Neo-Nazi trope of “Jewish Supremacy”. But when the Museum protested Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s description of illegal migrant detention as “concentration camps”, Grossman rushed to the defense of the antisemitic leftist who is allied with Jeremy Corbyn and whose blood libels have encouraged hatred toward Jews.

The letter signed by Grossman wailed that “the Museum’s decision to completely reject drawing any possible analogies to the Holocaust, or to the events leading up to it, is fundamentally ahistorical.” But comparing American immigration policies to the Holocaust is entirely historical.

Grossman was also one of the signatories to a letter warning Facebook not to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism. As were Amos Goldberg, Lila Corwin Berman, Alon Confino, and multiple other signatories to the “Jewish Supremacy” letter including Hasia Diner.

Diner, an NYU prof of American Jewish History, and another member of the Academic Advisory Council of the Center for Jewish History, is refreshing in that she makes no effort to disguise her raving hatred for the Jewish State behind the obscure academic jargon of other academics.

In a hatefilled rant, Hasia Diner wrote that though she abhorred “bombings and stabbings”, the murder of Jews is what “oppressed individuals resort to out of anger and frustration”.

“I feel a sense of repulsion when I enter a synagogue in front of which the congregation has planted a sign reading, ‘We Stand With Israel’”, Diner wrote. She described Israel as “a place that I abhor visiting, and to which I will contribute no money, whose products I will not buy”.

She also complained that, “it is impossible to have a conversation about Israel or BDS because one is accused of being anti-Semitic.”

Maybe that’s because they are.

Jewish Studies has an antisemitism problem and it’s only been getting worse.

The signatories to the “Jewish Supremacy” letter are many of the same ugly figures in Jewish Studies who sign on to every anti-Israel letter that comes their way. They signed the letter opposing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the letter opposing campaigns against campus antisemitism, opposing the IHRA definition of antisemitism, and opposing, well, Jews.

Jewish Studies, as Lila Corwin Berman implies, ought to have little to do with actual Jews. But it’s not enough for Jewish Studies to displace Jews, burying a people in a mass grave of academic verbiage and social justice buzzwords, it must also set out to eliminate the Jews.

As has happened so often, the theft of Jewish ideas and narratives is sealed with genocide.

Jewish Studies has become an academic war on the Jews. And no matter how good the intentions of the donors subsidizing chairs in Jewish history, Holocaust studies, and religious studies were, the academics who seize them adopt an eliminationist ideology, resenting the confines of Jewish identity, and seeking to destroy it by satanizing the Jews.

The same old narrative of Jewish history is playing out on campuses where the physical body of the Jewish people and the bodies of Jews are being ideologically separated from “Jewishness”.

Academic ‘Jewishness’ is constructed to mean anything and everything but actual Jews. Jews are reframed as the enemies of true Jewish values and ideas who must be destroyed to save “Jewishness” from the Jews.

Divorcing the study of Jewish history and ideas from Jewish communal institutions and peoplehood has repeatedly created monsters, whether it’s Holocaust museums that promote Black Lives Matter and accuse Jews of Nazism, or Jewish Studies departments that are friendlier to Hamas than to Israel. Donors have to stop funding academic organizations detached from connection and accountability to the people whose peoplehood they exploit.

Academics have rediscovered the old notion that Jewish ideas are appealing, but actual Jews are not. Jewish ideas are pitted against real Jews, and the idea is used to beat to death the reality proving once again that the students of history are the last to learn from the past.

Antisemitic academics may not be able to learn from the past, but Jews don’t have that luxury.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center

 

The Left's Metaphorical Holocaust Denial

Sunday, July 07, 2019 Posted by Daniel Greenfield 0 Comments @ Sultan Knish Blog

The Revolutions of 1989, which ultimately brought down the Soviet Union, were marked by major symbolic events and minor ones. One of those seemingly minor events was a Holocaust memorial.

In that year, it was announced that the first Holocaust memorial had been permitted in the USSR.

Soviet policy in the past had been to refer to the millions of Jews massacred in the Holocaust as “victims of fascism”. Information about the atrocities circulated through Samizdat and covert channels. The Black Book of Soviet Jewry was censored and would not be published until the fall of the Soviet Union.

Memorials to the Jewish victims were held covertly by political dissidents.

The Soviet ban on the Holocaust was not merely due to anti-Semitism. It followed the same political line as the current progressive historical revisionism which erases the Jewish character of the victims while emphasizing that the atrocities could only be the result of a right-wing, not left-wing, political ideology.

Jewish Communists, like their non-Jewish counterparts, worked to minimize the Jewish element of Holocaust histories. Vasilij Grossman, the co-author of the Black Book of Soviet Jewry, urged replacing "Jews" with "people" and "civilians". This approach defined the USSR’s approach of memorializing millions of undefined people murdered by the former allies and later political foes of the Communists.

The erasure of the Jews in the Holocaust was not limited to the leftists in the Soviet Union.

The Diary of Anne Frank, the play seen by more people than any other depiction of the Holocaust, was hijacked by Lillian Hellman, a militant Stalinist, who turned it over to Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, the Communist-linked married couple who excelled at churning out heartwarming leftist propaganda from traditional material, whether it was It’s A Wonderful Life or the story of Anne Frank.

The Jewish elements of Anne’s story were purged. “We’re not the only people that’ve had to suffer,” the fictionalized version of a dead Jewish girl declares to applause. “Sometimes one race, sometimes another.” The real message soon became about the evils of segregation and racism. The various Anne Frank memorial organizations have promoted BDS, banned Jewish clothing and compared Jews to ISIS.

Just as in the USSR, the erasure of Jews from the story of the Holocaust paves the way for anti-Semitism.

Last year, a Los Angeles theater put on a production of Anne Frank with a Latino cast hiding from ICE. After a backlash from Holocaust survivors and Jewish organizations to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Rep. Ilhan Omar equating immigration law enforcement to the Holocaust, the media doubled down. A plethora of leftist essays defending the slur spread the historical revisionism through the echo chamber.

Rep. Omar and Rep. Ocasio Cortez had their own anti-Semitic moments. By transforming anti-Semitism and the mass murder of Jews from a reality to a metaphor about the oppression of minorities, they become the metaphorical victims and the Jews objecting to them become metaphorical Nazis.

The USSR mastered this technique when having renamed the dead Jews as “victims of fascism”, it was free to work toward the murder of millions of Jews in Israel by denouncing them as “Zionist fascists.” A typical example was a Pravda article, “Fascism and Zionism” which claimed that Israel, like Nazi Germany, was guilty of capitalism, imperialism and genocide. The Communist article argued that Jews everywhere were a “fifth column” while insisting that the USSR was anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic.

Modern leftists also argue that Jews are the real Nazis. Hating them isn’t anti-Semitism. It’s anti-Zionism, which is really anti-Fascism and anti-Nazism. Killing Jews becomes the real message of the Holocaust.

Turning the Holocaust into a political metaphor makes Nazis out of its victims and its commemorators.

Instead of condemning evil, the transformation of the Holocaust into a metaphor whose protagonists are interchangeable, turns a real event into a blank slate on which any agenda can be superimposed. If everyone can be Hitler and anyone can be the Jews, then the Holocaust becomes a myth. A fairy tale into which any of us can read our own meaning and offers us no morality we do not already possess.

The Holocaust is not a metaphor. It is not a toolset to apply to every political event to demarcate the borders of the political spectrum. It was not the work of fascists, as the Soviet Union insisted. The Franco regime in Spain made efforts to save Jews even while the Soviet Union was executing some Jewish refugees as spies. FDR, a progressive hero, blocked the entry of Jewish refugees to the United States. El Salvador, governed by a fascist dictator, turned a blind eye to thousands of visas given to Jews.

When you study the Holocaust as history, rather than metaphor, it becomes impossible to reduce the events to a simplistic progressive parable about the virtue of tolerant lefties who resist racism. Bigotry is inherent in human beings and mass murder is how totalitarian regimes implement their utopian visions.

The Nazis and the Communists both imagined an ideal world in which the Jews did not exist. They went about implementing it in somewhat different ways because, like all fanatics whose morality comes from ideology, they had different theories to explain their own supremacism and the inferiority of the Jews.

The Nazis believed that they were superior for genetic reasons and viewed the Jews as a racial phenomenon that had to be physically eradicated at the genetic level. The Communists believed that they were superior for political reasons and the Jews had to be eradicated as a cultural phenomenon. The erasure of Jews from the story of the Holocaust, then and now, is part of that leftist genocide.

Erasing the Jews makes it easier to eliminate these complex realities while leaving only the metaphor. But the danger of reducing people to metaphors is part of the reason why the Holocaust happened. Lefties universalized the Holocaust, shifting it from a story about Jews to a universal tale about the wickedness of being mean to people, of bigotry, discrimination and general meanness of spirit.

And yet, anti-Semitism has come roaring back and is bigger than it’s been in generations.

The trouble with universal messages is that they’re meaningless. Most people already believe that being mean to others is wrong. They just disagree on the specific implementation of it. For leftists, the story of Anne Frank or the Holocaust is, at the moment, about the evils of deporting illegal aliens. It has nothing to say about the evils of anti-Semitism or of Islamic terrorists who cheer Hitler and murder Jews.

Learning about the Holocaust hasn’t made them better people, only more self-righteous about their views. They haven’t questioned their beliefs, instead they appropriated the Holocaust to support them.

When you turn history into metaphor, all you’re really doing is manufacturing propaganda.

On the campaign trail, Senator Cory Booker attacked President Trump’s immigration policies by invoking the Holocaust. “There was a ship that came here during World War II with a bunch of folks trying to escape the Holocaust, and we turned it around where they got killed in the Holocaust. The shame of that, you think we would learn our lesson about people coming here to seek asylum escaping terror.”

The “folks” in question were Jews.

Booker’s anonymization of Jews as “folks” strongly echoed Obama’s dismissal of a Muslim terrorist attack on a Jewish supermarket before the Sabbath, as “randomly shot a bunch of folks in a deli.”

The 2020 candidate, who had condemned criticism of Rep. Omar as Islamophobia, has announced that he would be okay with meeting with “Minister Farrakhan”, a bigot who has praised Hitler. This was the second time that the New Jersey senator had good things to say about a man who praised Hitler.

"I am very familiar with Minister Louis Farrakhan and his beliefs and his values," Booker told an audience member in South Carolina.

Those values include calling Hitler, a "very great man".

Previously, Booker had favorably quoted Stokely Carmichael in a Senate speech whose most famous line was, “The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist, we must take a lesson from Hitler.”

Historical revisionism isn’t just denying that the Holocaust happened, it’s also eliminating the history. When you wipe out the context, then before you know it, you can end up next door to Hitler.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Thank you for reading.

The Betrayal of the Holocaust

Posted by Daniel Greenfield 20 Comments Thursday, April 12, 2018 @ Sultan Knish Blog

When we talk about the Holocaust, we are talking about the mass murder of millions of Jews.

The dead included my grandparents and countless others, shot, starved, gassed, beaten to death and buried in mass graves. And yet the lessons of the Holocaust in its commemorations rarely have anything to do with Jewish lives. 

Millions of dollars have been spent building memorials to the victims of the Holocaust, even as Iran is spending its millions on building another kind of memorial to the Holocaust, in the form of nuclear technology. Ben Rhodes, the Obama crony who helped sell the Iranian Big Lie, sits on the board of the Holocaust Memorial Council. The Washington D.C. museum ignores the murder of Jews in Israel, but is very worked up over the deaths of Muslims in Myanmar, in Egypt and around the world.

Millions more are spent, by some of the same groups that claim an interest in Holocaust education, on bringing Muslim migrants to America and Europe to carry out the promise of an Islamic apocalypse in which, as the Hadith states, "The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him."

That is what the Islamic Holocaust looks like.

If you want to see it slowly getting underway, visit Paris or Jerusalem.

But the murder of Jews, in Israel or Europe, somehow has nothing to do with the Holocaust.

Virtually every major Jewish organization, even the Orthodox Union, were pressured into signing on to obscenely despicable statements equating Muslim migrants to Holocaust victims.

The Holocaust isn't just an uncomfortable subject for Germans, Russians or Poles. It's a very uncomfortable subject for American Jews. The same liberal Jewish organizations that took a vocal part in the civil rights movement remained deathly silent about the murder of six million Jews.

Why the silence? The same reason they didn't protest the Iran Deal too loudly.

The Obama of the Holocaust was named FDR. His administration was equally anti-Semitic. And chose to ignore the mass murder of Jews until protests by Zionist activists became too loud to ignore.

Saving six million Jews was not a feel good liberal cause. The civil rights movement was.

And it's never about doing the right thing. It's about what looks good. It's what's popular.

The same organizations that stayed silent during the Holocaust then rebranded it as a universalist civil rights program. The real lesson of the Holocaust isn't, "Don't allowed Jews to be killed."

It's fight for every leftist cause on the planet... except that outmoded "not killing Jews" one.

The same Jewish organizations that wouldn't dream of missing a Holocaust commemoration broadcast their commitment to the "Two State Solution" almost as loudly as to the Holocaust.

The only lesson they learned is that another Holocaust needs better marketing.

The Final Solution, with its immediate extermination of the Jews, has been replaced by the Two State Solution, an intermediate process in which the land on which Jews can live is partitioned into smaller and smaller pieces.

The Lebensraum of Islam demands ever more breathing room. And fewer breathing Jews. Israel is carved up into smaller indefensible ghettos. And Jews are barred from living outside those ghettos. Those who are are "settlers" who must be evicted for the sake of the peace that Islam always brings.

Even if they're "settling" in Jerusalem.: the oldest Jewish city in history.

But the real lesson of the Holocaust is that if we don't destroy Israel, and bring the migrant synagogue bombers and senior citizen murderers of tomorrow to Europe, we're no better than the Nazis.

Just ask a leftist.

The Holocaust isn't very complicated because murder isn't very complicated. The easy lesson of murder is don't let it happen again.

It is easier to build another memorial than to look into your heart and ask why two generations later, the majority of the American Jewish community was still too cowardly to stand up to a liberal icon in the White House... when the lives of millions of Jews were on the line.

From FDR to Obama, American Jewish leaders had two opportunities to stand up to a liberal icon and save Jewish lives. No amount of memorials can disguise the fact that they learned nothing.

The best memorial to the dead is to stop aiding their murderers.

Every Jewish organization that bowed to FDR and Obama have blood on their hands. Every Jewish organization that trumpets the Two State Solution has blood on its hands. Every Jewish organization that mainstream BDS activists, that criticizes Israel and America for fighting terrorism, that imports Muslim migrants while demanding the expulsion of Jewish "settlers" has blood on its hands.

I don't remember the Holocaust because of a museum. I remember because of my grandparents. I remember because my Jewishness doesn't come from a memorial, it's always been a part of me.

The Holocaust told us a harsh truth about the world and human nature. Its commemorations soften the edges. But we need those harsh truths to know what lies behind the comfortable curtain.

Death is the harshest truth. The next harshest truth is betrayal. And the Jews have most often been betrayed by Jews escaping their Jewishness. Some, like George Soros, did it in the most literal way possible. Others did it by kvelling to an FDR speech while ignoring the ash drifting over Europe. Today, they affirm the Two State Solution, ignore Iran's nuclear program and click on that inspirational speech by Obama, Cory Booker or the political culture hero next in line.

They ignore the Jews being murdered in Israel or in Paris. Dead Jews have nothing to do with their Holocaust. That refusal to listen and understand is how it began. The Jews of Poland didn't pay attention to what was going on in Germany. The Jews of Hungary didn't pay attention to what was going on in Poland. And American Jewish organizations all too often ignored all of them.

The Holocaust doesn't need hundred million dollar museums. To commemorate it, we must pay attention. And we must never let the propaganda of the killers blind us to their crimes.

That's easy to say about the Nazis, it's a lot harder when it comes to the PLO, Iran and Hamas.

It's easy to feel good about disavowing a discredited and fallen ideology. There's no act of courage there. But try disavowing the Two State Solution and the Iran Deal. That's a commemoration.