6 Febraury 14 • 2019
jn
T
he past few months, since the
end of working through the
Michigan midterm election
cycle, I’
ve had a lot of time for self-re-
flection. I have evaluated my role as the
sole Republican Jewish
voice and political orga-
nizer in the Michigan
Republican Party aside
from our chairman,
Ronald Weiser. I built
relationships with key
stakeholders in Wayne
County by incorporat-
ing my own identity
and talking about my experience grow-
ing up as a conservative American-
Israeli.
The election outcome took an emo-
tional toll on me, but I quickly over-
came the anxiety. The turning point
came when I revisited the memories of
my participation on the March of the
Living in 2013 with my high school
graduating class.
DEEP IMPRESSIONS
In Auschwitz-Birkenau, I walked
through the eerie silence of the crema-
toria, saw the prosthetics, shoes and
hair of the deceased, and heard the
loud screams of my murdered ances-
tors as I stood in front of the wall of
death. In Treblinka, I held one of my
best friends while he cried his heart out
on the bus after he read the mourner’
s
Kaddish for his family who had been
murdered in the extermination camp.
In Majdanek, I inherited what would
eventually be my permanent mental
scar when I saw Hell right before my
very eyes. Hell is a giant mausoleum in
Lublin that carries the blood, flesh and
ashes of more than 18,000 Jews, mur-
dered on that very spot. Hell is the out-
come of real systemic oppression, the
brutality of a dictatorship that sought
nothing but global dominance through
a regime built on ethnic cleansing.
In Birkenau, I wrote a letter to
myself where I promised to always
remain strong no matter the situation,
to educate people of other faiths and
backgrounds on this experience, and to
carry and embrace my identity wher-
ever I go.
Two years later, on my 20th birthday,
I received that letter in my dorm at
Michigan State University. I collapsed
in the hall and burst into tears upon
seeing it, but the fact that I had hon-
ored the promise I made to myself two
years ago on the frigid train tracks of
Birkenau gave me a sense of pride.
Flash forward four more years, in the
midst of the political divide, and I only
feel a sense of confusion. It is the year
2019, and it is with great disappoint-
ment that I still have to remind people
— sometimes even of my own faith or
my own party — about how truly evil
the Hitler regime was.
TRIVIALIZATION OF THE HOLOCAUST
When people call someone a “Nazi”
or “Hitler” out of a petty political dis-
agreement — or draw historically inac-
curate parallels about the Holocaust to
current events to score political points
— they are cheapening the severity of
what millions of Jews endured.
Although I was distinctly critical of
the Obama administration due to its
mistreatment of Israel, I would never
compare him or his actions to Hitler or
the Holocaust.
Trivializing the Holocaust is the most
damning form of demagoguery. This
disgusting habit of fear-mongering is
practiced by both sides of the aisle and
we can no longer deny it.
Establishment Republicans have
incorporated this tactic primarily in
the “pro-life” argument. A county party
delegate in the 11th Congressional
District publicly compared the exter-
mination of “helpless Jews” to the
extermination of “helpless babies.” He
added on a Facebook thread: “In fact,
the argument can be made that the
evil of abortion is actually magnitudes
more evil than the Holocaust that was
brought against the Jewish people
and other people groups by the Nazi
regime.”
I tried to explain to the candidate
why such a polarizing comparison is
deemed offensive to Jews and how it
draws the line in terms of support and
was threatened with political reprisal.
Seriously, what do women’
s repro-
ductive rights have to do with the
intended genocide of more than 6 mil-
lion Jews? This is a question that radi-
cal, provocative groups such as the reli-
gious California-based Survivors of the
Abortion Holocaust refuse to answer
logically. Its strategies include sharing
memes on Facebook of concentration
camps with the “Planned Parenthood”
logo written on the barracks and
aggressive intimidation protests outside
the facilities.
To my conservative colleagues, if
you choose to continue to advertise the
pro-life cause, that is your legal right,
but our scabs are not for you to peel.
The Democratic Party applies a more
mainstream approach to marketing
their platform under the Reductio ad
Hitlerum fallacy (Latin for “Reduction
to Hitler”), where it is sprinkled around
like confetti.
Members and leaders of the
Democratic Party have linked Zionism
to Nazism, Trump and Netanyahu to
guest column
The Political Trivialization of Trauma
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