The ‘subculture of hate’ that feeds modern-day antisemitism
After two years hiding from Nazis behind a false wall in the attic of a flour mill in Tarnow, Poland, seven-year-old Israel Unger developed a strange habit.
For most of those two years, the nine people crammed into that small space had eaten the only thing they'd been able to get. That was a basic bread made of flour and water and a soup" made of hot water and the barley that Unger's father managed to sneak into the room - along with the flour - from the mill downstairs.
When young Israel got his soup in the evenings - his meal of the day - he'd stand a spoon up in it, checking the level of the soup in the bowl. Then he'd take spoonful of soup, maybe two, and stand the spoon up in the bowl again to see how much soup was gone.
So it went, measure, sip, measure, sip - each sip a step closer to an empty bowl - until the bowl was finished.
Today, the 84-year-old version of that boy, now a retired University of New Brunswick chemistry professor living in Fredericton, has developed a few quirks of his own.
He will never, ever allow himself to run out of the things he needs. If his gas tank is even three-quarters empty, it gets filled up immediately. With food especially, he says, he has a massive need to resupply before anything starts to run low.
He's emotional, but he never cries, he says, though he's unsure whether that traces back to the boy behind the false wall in the flour mill having to stifle all noises so he and his family wouldn't be found and hauled off to death camps.
He's not positive that these quirks are relics of living through a period of time when six million Jews were killed because there's no version of Israel Unger that did not live through the Holocaust. There's no control Unger, the chem prof might say.
On International Holocaust Remembrance Day - chosen for the anniversary of the day Jews were liberated from Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the Nazis' concentration camps, in 1945 - Unger will likely be called on again to tell the story of his Holocaust experience. But the days in which he and Holocaust survivors like him are able to do that are limited.
And, despite best efforts to record their stories, telling nuances - a boy, living in fear, measuring his bowl with a spoon to see how much food is left - will likely be lost.
And those stories are important.
At a time when voices of antisemitism and hate speech are getting louder across the globe, one of the biggest weapons against such sentiments - the first-hand accounts of Holocaust survivors - is getting fainter.
I'm keenly aware that Holocaust survivors are dying out," he says. The time will come where there'll be very few or no survivors. But their stories will have been recorded. Their books will have been written. And hopefully we will continue to remember the Holocaust and continue to try to learn from it."
That antisemitism is on the rise - that hatred itself is on the rise - is not really in question.
The 2021 B'nai Brith audit of antisemitic incidents reports that, in Canada alone, for the sixth consecutive year, records were set for antisemitic incidents. The 2,799 incidents recorded in 2021 represented a 7.2 per cent increase over the year before. And the number of violent incidents rose from nine in 2020 to 75 in 2021.
And Statistics Canada, using police-reported statistics, noted that in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, crime in general declined nationally but hate crimes spiked 37 per cent from 2019, reaching the highest levels since record-keeping began.
Antisemitism is on the rise once again, but the truth, says Unger, is that it never really went away.
I thought, naively, that when the world confronted the horrors of the Nazis, of the Holocaust in 1945, that that was the end of antisemitism," he says. It wasn't.
What it was is it was now impolite to express hatred of Jews. But that didn't mean that the hatred had stopped."
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the director of social action for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, agrees with Unger on underlying hatred.
Hate is as old as civilization, he says, and antisemitism is almost that old itself. Hate simmers beneath the veneer of civilizations waiting for cracks to occur that enable it to bubble to the surface.
A coronavirus pandemic is once such set of cracks.
But every disease needs a vector. And for antisemitism, for extremist hatred in general, Cooper points the finger directly at social media.
I think the most telling reason for the sustained hatred, and in many cases, antisemitic attacks, including violent ones, is the subculture of hate that has spawned on social media," he says.
A worldwide pandemic set the stage for hatred to bubble up, leaving people isolated, turning to social media for connections, frustrated with the pandemic restrictions and looking for scapegoats - Asians, Jews, health-care workers.
People weaponized the COVID pandemic, says Cooper. Hatemongers pre-positioned themselves to take advantage of people seeking to blame. Some politicians - natural targets for that blame - sought to capitalize on the divisions between people for their own gains.
But social media was the conduit for all that hate.
When rapper Ye - formerly Kanye West - went on an anti-Jewish rant late last year, he reached some 30 million social media followers with it.
The so-called number one social influencer in the United States suddenly was the number one spreader of hate," says Cooper.
On Twitter, where Elon Musk had recently welcomed back all users that had been formerly banned, neo-Nazis were ready, he says. Hate messages flashed across social media. Shirts bearing a Star of David with swastikas embedded quickly went on sale online.
People who hate Blacks saw an opportunity to sort of hitch a ride on his social media influence and that went immediately into the mainstream," Cooper says.
Bad actors - whatever society is ready to give to them in terms of access, they'll take it. And for sure the front lines in the marketplace of ideas today are on social media.
What that also means is that every local incident becomes global, and every global incident or trend impacts locally."
The ersatz solution, he says, is for the big social media companies to degrade the marketing capabilities of antisemites and other racists and bigots" - to come up with a transparent set of rules to identify the individuals and groups responsible and deal with them.
That will require, from those companies - and from society at large - constant vigilance, says Jeremy Maron, curator of Holocaust and Genocide content at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.
Time distances each generation from the horrors of the Holocaust. Today, for most the idea of it happening again is unthinkable. We believe we live in a post-Holocaust world. And therein lies a real danger says Maron.
There's a phrase: History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes," he says. And when I hear (today) things that rhyme with things that happened in the past - sentiments that were expressed in the past that contributed to horrific instances of human rights violations, I think that's where you have to become very vigilant.
There are always the sentiments that percolate. You have to be vigilant because they will bubble up again. The world is different now than it was in the 1920s ... But there are rhymes here and now that require us to be careful and speak out against hatred where it's bubbling up."
Human rights violations, he says, are very often accompanied by efforts to suppress or deny the truth of what happened. And those efforts proliferate in silence.
So, the key first steps to responding to burgeoning hatred and creating a human rights culture are to preserve the truth through education, to not allow hateful sentiments to go unanswered and to be aware that doing that requires constant vigilance, he says.
Holocaust Remembrance Day ... one of the things that it allows us to do and kind of calls us to do to remember that the Holocaust is not an abstract horror story that happened long ago and far away."
Steve McKinley is a Halifax-based reporter for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @smckinley1