To learn from the Holocaust, we must stop with the false comparisons

Four days after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the United States Capitol, former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger compared the mob violence to Kristallnacht, the 1938 Nazi-led destruction of Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues throughout Germany.

“The mob did not just shatter the windows of the United States capitol, they shattered the ideas we took for granted,” Schwarzenegger said in a seven-minute video that has nearly 40 million views. “They trampled the very principles on which our country was founded.”

Schwarzenegger’s comments, though well-intentioned, are one of several recent examples of Holocaust analogies — some made in good faith, others not so much — that ultimately minimize the history.

Recently, leaders of the effort to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom have dubbed him “Adolf Newsom” and photoshopped Hitler’s mustache onto his face; Roseville school board member Heidi Hall compared COVID restrictions to Nazism, and; Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro compared the deplatforming of the social media site Parler, a hotbed of anti-Semitic and white supremacist speech, to Kristallnacht.

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Kristallnacht was a targeted act of national terror during which 91 Jews were murdered, 7,000 Jewish businesses were destroyed, 900 synagogues were set on fire and 30,000 Jews were sent to concentration camps. So how can anyone compare it to a riot that left five dead?

“To me, as a Jewish person, they feel clearly different,” said Shachar-Lee Yaakobovitz, a student at UC Davis whose great grandmother survived the Holocaust.

Holocaust terminology has been secularized and, subsequently, synonimized with just about everything. Think about terms like “feminazi” or “grammar nazi;” think about the pro-life advocates who claim that there’s a modern “abortion Holocaust” and think about the frequency with which Donald Trump has been compared to Adolf Hitler and the GOP to the Nazi party these last four years.

There’s even a term for the likelihood that an online debate will escalate to the eventual Holocaust comparison: Godwin’s Law.

“Those who escalate a debate into Adolf Hitler or Nazi comparisons may be thinking lazily, not adding clarity or wisdom, and contributing to the decay of an argument over time,” wrote Mike Godwin, who coined the term.

The false equivalencies in these types of comparisons astound. Why do they persist?

“We live in a world of relativism, we don’t know what’s good, we don’t know what’s bad. The one thing we do know is that the Holocaust was evil — let’s call it the gold standard of evil, the Olympics of evil, absolute evil,” said Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum, a professor of Jewish Studies at American Jewish University. “Therefore, when we’re trying to shout, ‘Pay attention to what’s happening! This is awful! This is evil!’ you always reach for the Holocaust analogy.”

Learning from the Holocaust

Education plays a crucial role in preserving Holocaust history and ensuring its relevancy.

Liz Igra and her mother escaped the Jewish ghetto in Poland and survived Nazi persecution by walking to Hungary, where they hid until the end of the war. Igra is the president of the Central Valley Holocaust Educators’ Network which has helped educate thousands of students about the Holocaust.

“I want to mitigate the distortions and trivialization of this history — most of the time it’s because people don’t know this history,” Igra said. “It compels me to do a better job teaching what we teach.”

Growing up in Roseville, I was one of just a handful of Jews in my grade. I chalked up the casual anti-Semitism spouted off by classmates as mere ignorance. Indeed, certain students I knew at Granite Bay High School (circa 2016) who loved to use Auschwitz or Anne Frank as the punchline of their jokes have, post-college, rebranded themselves as woke allies on social media.

What continues to faze me, however, is this continued appropriation of the Holocaust — as abortion, as Trump’s America, as coronavirus lockdowns — that minimizes the horrors of the actual history.

“If everybody is Hitler, then nobody is Hitler. If everything is Nazism, then nothing is Nazism,” Berenbaum said. “It’s part of the cheapening of language that takes place.”

Does that mean we can never relate our modern experiences to sensitive histories like the Holocaust? No, Berenbaum says.

“If the Holocaust is not analogous to anything, then it has nothing to say to our generation, but it is not the equivalent of what’s happening,” he said. “We must remember to compare and contrast.”

Intention also makes a critical difference.

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s father, Gustaz, was a member of the Nazi party. In his video, Schwarzenegger spoke candidly about his father, saying he was frequently drunk and abusive. Schwarzenegger’s Kristallnacht comparison was obviously well-intentioned, whereas nonsensical comparisons between the Holocaust and mask requirements are so willfully ignorant as to be anti-Semitic. I’m not angered as much as I am saddened by genuine claims that being required to wear a mask in public must be similar to the experience of Jews under the Nazi regime. The five Jews I spoke to with personal or familial connections to the Holocaust felt similarly — the solution, they all said, is not to shame or cancel someone who makes these claims, it’s education.

Holocaust education: ‘never again’

The Capitol insurrection was not Kristallnacht. But between the smashing of windows by white supremacists and signs like 6MWE (6 Million Wasn’t Enough — a reference to the number of Jews who died during the Holocaust), the riot felt analogous to some individuals with ties to the history.

On the morning of Jan. 6, Lincoln resident Judi Schane was watching live coverage of the insurrection with her mother, a Holocaust survivor. Schane said her mother, who is in her late 90s, has significant hearing loss and slower processing. She didn’t think she would understand what was happening on TV.

“I was trying to explain and all of a sudden she saw Nazi flags with swastikas. She gasped and said, ‘What is that?’” Schane recalled. “It really traumatized her. Just seeing those flags in 2021 was so shocking to her and brought back these terrible memories.”

Micah Lesch, who works at a Jewish non-profit, shared a similar moment on the day of the insurrection when his grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, compared the riot to a Kristallnacht-like event.

Lesch, like Schwarzenegger, said he saw it as an opportunity to use history to emphasize the severity of current events.

There’s a universal lesson that’s been imprinted into every Jew, whether practicing or not: Never again. We say “never again” so often in Jewish spheres that we consider it a cliché. What we mean is this: Everyone, Jews and non-Jews alike, must both understand and remember the events and beliefs that led to the horrific tragedies of the Holocaust so that we never repeat that history.

“The tragedy of the world in which I live and the world I’m giving my children is that the Holocaust remains relevant,” Berenbaum said. “Today we can’t say never again because we’ve seen genocide again. Today we can say never again without my consent, without my protest, without my opposition.”

We can take pride in the fact that the Holocaust has become a universal story of overcoming evil, speaking out in the face of injustice and internalizing a set of moral and ethical beliefs — so long as that universalization does not minimize the history or the Jewish experience or disrespect survivors or the memories of those who died.

Hannah Holzer, a Placer County native and UC Davis graduate, is opinion assistant at The Sacramento Bee. For more information and resources to understand the Holocaust, visit the Shoah Foundation at https://sfi.usc.edu/