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A Black writer explores how Germany remembers its ‘unthinkable’ past
(JTA) — For his 2021 book “How the Word Is Passed,” winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, poet and journalist Clint Smith explored the landscape of American memory — specifically how the history of slavery is explained, commemorated, distorted and desecrated in sites across the United States.
While on tour promoting the book, he explained in an interview Tuesday, he’d often be asked if any country had gotten it right when it came to memorializing its own dark past. “I kept invoking the memorials in Germany, but I had never been to the memorials in Germany,” Smith said. “As a scholar, as a journalist, I felt like I had to do my due diligence and excavate the complexity and the nuance, and the emotional and human texture, that undergirds so many of these places and spaces.”
The result is December’s cover story in the Atlantic, “Monuments to the Unthinkable.” Smith traveled to Germany twice over the past two years, visiting Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, its Topography of Terror Museum, the museum in Wannsee where the Nazis plotted the Final Solution, and the concentration camp at Dachau, talking to historians and curators along the way. As a Black man wrestling with how America accounts for the crimes of its past, he went to learn from the experience of the Germans, who “are still trying to figure out how to tell the story of what their country did, and simultaneously trying to figure out who should tell it.”
In an interview, Smith talked about the inevitable differences between the Holocaust and the Atlantic slave trade, the similarities in how two countries — and communities — experience their histories, and how his article could serve as a bridge between African-Americans and Jews in a time of increasing tension between them.
Smith spoke to JTA from his parents’ home in his native New Orleans.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Your book is about the ways America succeeds and fails to come to terms with slavery, and your article is about the ways Germany is, in your phrase, “constructing public memory.” I was struck by someone who warned you, “Don’t go to Auschwitz.” What were they saying?
Clint Smith: It was Frederick Brenner, a Jewish man and a remarkable photographer who has photographed the Jewish Diaspora across the world for the past several decades, who said that, because people are standing [at Dachau] and they’re taking selfies, and it’s like “me in front of the crematorium” and “me in front of the barracks.” That was deeply unsettling to him, especially as someone whose family was largely killed in the Holocaust.
I don’t want to be reductive about it and say that you don’t want people to go to these spaces and take pictures. I think it’s all about the sort of disposition and sensibilities one brings to a space. If someone went to the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, I don’t necessarily want them doing puckered-lip selfies in front of a slave cabin. I can understand why people wouldn’t want those places engaged with in that way, but you do want tourists to come, right? I mean, before the pandemic, 900,000 people visited Dachau every year, and part of what brings people to Dachau is seeing and taking a picture of the crematorium, taking a picture of themselves on this land in that space where history happened, and posting it online. And maybe that serves as a catalyst for somebody else to make that journey for themselves.
You did go to Dachau, which you call a “memorial to the evil that once transpired there.”
I am a huge believer in putting your body in the place where history happened. I stood in many places that carry the history of violence: plantations, execution chambers, death row. But I’ve never experienced the feeling in my body that I felt when I stood in the gas chamber at Dachau. And you just see the way that this space was constructed, with the sort of intentional, mechanized slaughter that it was meant to enact on people. The industrialized nature of it was something unlike anything I’d ever experienced before and it made me feel so much more proximate to that history in ways that I don’t think I would have ever experienced otherwise.
Physically standing in a concentration camp and physically standing and putting my body in the gas chamber fundamentally changed my understanding of the emotional texture and the human and psychological implications of it. Because when you’re in those spaces you’re able to more fully imagine what it might have been like to be in that space. And then you can imagine these people, these families, these women, these children who were marched into camps throughout Europe. You can never fully imagine the fear, that sense of desperation that one would have felt, but in some ways, it’s the closest we can get to it if you are someone who did not have family who lived through or survived the Holocaust. It provided me with a radical sense of empathy. And that’s why I took the trip in the first place.
A tourist takes a selfie inside the Memorial to the Murdered Jews Of Europe in Berlin, Sept. 25, 2019. (Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
By contrast, there are the memorials that are not historical sites, but either sculptural or architectural, like Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, nearly five acres of concrete slabs. What do you think makes an effective memorial that isn’t necessarily the historical place itself, but a specifically memorial project?
Well, for example, the big one in Berlin. It’s just so enormous. The scale and scope of it was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. I tried to imagine what an American analog would be like. What if in the middle of downtown Manhattan there was a 200,000-square-foot memorial, with thousands of stone columns, dedicated to commemorating the lives of indigenous people who were killed in the early Americas? Or a 200,000-square-foot memorial in the middle of downtown D.C., not far from the White House, to the lives of enslaved people?
With that said, what I found really valuable were the people I spoke to, who had very different relationships to that space. Some thought of that memorial as something that was so meaningful because of its size and because of its scope, and because it was a massive state-sanctioned project. And then there were others who thought that it was too abstract, that it was too passive, even in its name, right, the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,” which sounds as if something happened to people without naming the people who enacted the harm and who committed the crime. Those are the sort of nuances and complexities that I wanted to spend more time with, and found really valuable because, in the same way, descendants of enslaved people here in the United States have many different conceptions of what the iconography of slavery should look like or what repair and reparations to slavery should be made.
You write about the “stumbling stones” or “Stolpersteine”: Those are the small brass plaques placed in the streets, inscribed with the names of Holocaust victims and placed in front of their last known residence. The stones are exactly the opposite scale of the Berlin memorial.
Right. I think that is the memorial that I was most struck by: the largest decentralized memorial in the world, with 90,000 stones across 30 different European countries. I remember the moment I was walking down the street looking for landmarks and saw my first Stolpersteine, and I only saw it because at that moment the clouds moved and the sun shone off the brass stone. You see the name, the birth date, the deportation date, the death date, the place where the person was killed. You walk past another home, you see seven; you walk past another home, you see 12. You begin to imagine entire lives based on the names and information that exist on these stones. It creates this profound sense of intimacy, this profound sense of closeness to the history and it’s so human, because it’s individual people and individual names.
One of the most valuable things about the stumbling stone project, I think, is all the work that precedes it. It’s the school students who are doing research to find out about the lives of the people who were taken from the home across the street from their school. It’s the people in the apartment complex, who come together and decide that they’re going to figure out who were the Jewish families who lived in that apartment complex before them. And sometimes it’s really remarkable, granular details about people’s lives: what their favorite food was, what their favorite flavor of ice cream was, what the child liked.
Artist Gunter Demnig lays “stumbling stones” that memorialize persecuted or murdered Jews on the streets of Frankfurt. (Boris Roessler/picture alliance via Getty Images)
As Gunter Demnig, the originator of the project, says, 6 million people is a huge abstraction, and now it becomes about one man, one woman, one child, and [people] realize that it truly was not that long ago. There are so many survivors of the Holocaust who are still with us. Gunter Demnig, his father fought for the German army. He represents this generation of people who are engaging in a sort of contrition for the acts of their parents and their grandparents.
You ask in the piece what it would look like for a similar project to be created in the United States as a memorial to enslaved people.
I’m from New Orleans, and the descendant of enslaved people in New Orleans, which was at one point the busiest slave market in the country. And as Barbara Steiner, a Jewish historian, said to me in Germany, entire streets [of New Orleans] would be covered in brass stones! That was such a striking moment for me. That helped me more fully realize the profound lack of markers and iconography and documentation that we have to enslaved people in our landscape here in the United States relative to that of Germany.
Why are physical monuments important? I have sometimes wondered why we spend so much money on the infrastructure of memory — statues, museums, memorials — and if that money could be better used for living memorials, like scholarships for the descendants of victims, say, or programs that study or archive evidence of genocide. Why is it important to see a statue or a museum or even a plaque?
First off, museums and statues and memorials and monuments are by no means a panacea. It is not the case that you put up some memorials or you lay down some Stolpersteine and suddenly antisemitism is gone. Obviously, Germany is a case study and is experiencing its own rise in antisemitism. And that’s something that’s deeply unsettling, and is not going to singularly be solved by memorials and monuments.
With that said, I think there is something to be said to regularly encounter physical markers and manifestations of the violence that has been enacted and crimes that have been done in your name, or to the people that you are the descendant of. I try to imagine Germany without any of these memorials and I think it would just be so much easier for antisemitism to become far more pervasive. Because when your landscape is ornamented by things that are outlining the history that happened there, it is much more difficult to deny its significance, it is much more difficult to deny that it happened, it is much more difficult not to have it shape the way you think about public policy. I do believe that if we had these sorts of markers in the United States, it wouldn’t solve the racial wealth gap, it wouldn’t solve racism, it wouldn’t solve discrimination. It wouldn’t eradicate white nationalism or white supremacy. But I do think it would play some role in recalibrating and reshaping our collective public consciousness, our collective sense of history in ways that would not be insignificant.
And to your point, my hope is that those things are never mutually exclusive. It’s a conversation that’s happening here in the United States with regard to how different institutions are accounting for their relationship to slavery. Universities are coming up with reports, presentations, panels and conferences that outline their relationship to the history of slavery, especially since the murder of George Floyd [in 2020]. Activists and descendants have pushed them to not just put out a report, or put up a plaque or make a monument. It’s also about, well, what are you going to do for the descendants of those people? Harvard, where I went to grad school, put $100 million aside specifically for those sorts of interventions. Places like Georgetown have made it so that people who were the descendants of those who are enslaved have specific opportunities to come to the school without paying. And people of good faith can disagree over whether those initiatives are commensurate with or enough to atone for that past, and I think the answer is almost inevitably no.
Certainly people on what we like to think of as the wrong side of history understood the importance of physical monuments in creating memory.
The origin story of my own book was that I watched the monuments come down in 2017, in my hometown in New Orleans, of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee. I was thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority Black city, and there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslaved people. What does it mean that to get to school I had to go down Robert E. Lee Boulevard? That to get to the grocery store, I had to go down Jefferson Davis Parkway? That my middle school was named after a leader of the Confederacy? And that my parents still live on a street today named after someone who owned 115 enslaved people? The names and iconography are reflective of the stories that people tell and those stories shaped the narratives that communities carry. And those narratives shape public policy and public policy is what shapes the material conditions of people’s lives.
One thing about Germany is that its national project of memory and repentance has been accompanied by a vast reparations program — for Israel, Jewish survivors, their families and programs to propagate Jewish culture. I wonder if you think Germany could have moved ahead without reparations? And can America ever fully grapple with the legacy of slavery without its own reparations?
The short answer is no. America cannot fully move forward from its past without reparations. The important thing is not to be limited and reductive in the way that we conceive of what reparations are or should look like. In some ways, I’m as interested if not more interested in what specific cities and states are doing in order to account for those histories and those crimes. For example, in Evanston, Illinois, they created a specific program to give reparations to Black families who experienced housing segregation, in a certain period of time, given how prevalent redlining was in and around Chicago in the mid-20th century. I know in Asheville, North Carolina, there’s a similar program that’s thinking about how to meaningfully engage in repair to the descendants of communities that were harmed from some of the policies that existed there. This is not to say that those programs themselves are perfect. But I think we sometimes talk about it so much on a federal level, that we forget the local opportunities that exist.
West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer signs the reparations agreement between his country and Israel, Sept. 10, 1952. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Benjamin Ferencz, from “Reckonings”)
Many people who were redlined or experienced housing covenants — all the sort of insidious manifestations of wealth extraction that were part of Jim Crow — are still alive today. So sometimes it’s not even a question of what you have to give the descendants. Sometimes it’s like, what do you give the actual people who are still here?
That’s an important distinction you make in your article, about the difference between grappling with the past in Germany and the United States. In Germany, there are so few Jews, while in the U.S. we see the living evidence of slavery, not the evidence of absence.
That’s perhaps the greatest difference that allows for both a landscape of memory to be created in Germany, and also allows for Germany to pay reparations in ways that the United States is reluctant to do: Jewish people in Germany represent less than one quarter of one percent of the population of Germany. One of the folks I spoke to told me that Jewish people in Germany are a historical abstraction. Because there’s so few Jewish people left, because of the slaughter of the Holocaust. I think about the reparations that were given to Japanese Americans who were held in incarceration camps during World War II. They got $20,000 checks, which is not commensurate with what it means to be held in a prison camp for multiple years, and cannot totally atone for that. But part of the reason that can be enacted is that there’s a limited amount of people. There are 40 million black people in this country. So the economic implications of reparations are something fundamentally different here in the United States.
So let me ask you if there’s anything else you wanted to mention that we haven’t talked about.
I want to name specifically for your readers that I’m not and would never intend to conflate slavery and the Holocaust. They are qualitatively different historical phenomena that have their own specific complexities and should be understood on their own terms. With that said, I do think it can be helpful to put the two in conversation with one another, specifically in the profound ways that these two monumental periods of world history have shaped the modern world and how they are remembered in fundamentally different ways.
And there are similarities as well, which you write about.
I did find so many parallels. The Jewish people I spent time with in Germany explained that some of the manifestations of racism and anti-Blackness in the United States are not so different from the sort of manifestations of antisemitism that exist in Germany, especially as it relates to public memory. When I was at the museum devoted to the Wannsee conference, the executive director, Deborah Hartmann, told me that she and Deidre Berger [the chair of the executive board of the Jewish Digital Cultural Recovery Project Foundation] were talking about how Jewish people did not always have a seat at the table when these monuments and memorials were being built. Jewish people were not allowed to participate beyond a certain extent, because many Germans felt that Jewish people were not objective. Jewish historians couldn’t be taken seriously because they were too close to the history.
That just echoes so much of what Black scholars and historians have been told about their ability, or the lack thereof, to study the history of Black life. The godfather of African-American scholarship, W.E.B. Du Bois, was told by white scholars that he couldn’t be taken seriously because he was too close to the history of slavery.
Meanwhile, Deborah Hartmann talked about how so many of the historians and scholars who played a role in shaping the landscape of memory in Germany were themselves “close to the history,” including former members of the Hitler Youth.
Somebody sent me a message that really meant a lot to me this past week, basically saying that my essay is an exercise in “solidarity via remembrance” — in a moment where, unfortunately, there have been a lot of public manifestations of ideas and antisemitic remarks that might threaten to rupture a relationship between Black and Jewish people. Obviously, we didn’t time it this way: I worked on this piece for a year. But it’s my hope that as someone who is a Black American, who is the descendant of enslaved people, who is not himself Jewish — that my respectful, empathic, curious, journey reflects the long history of solidarity that has existed across Black and Jewish communities and that that I hope we never lose sight of.
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What I learned from 180 pounds of Yiddish books, one ‘interesting and complicated’ Jewish man, and Jorge Luis Borges
I’ve never met Harris Saltzberg, but one day last summer, I went to his house to abduct 180 pounds of his Yiddish books. He lived in a sturdy brown-brick co-op in Chelsea. In the lobby, there was Roz Chastian aroma of long-simmered onions and mothballs, with a subtle undertone of feet.
I took the elevator to the eleventh floor. Once I’d infiltrated Harris’ apartment, I began to get a sense of his personality. From the posters on the kitchen walls, I deduced that Harris liked Van Gogh and Martha Graham. From his box of cassette tapes, I got a taste of his cultured, klezmer-forward musical palate: Puccini Famous Arias sat next to Miriam Kressyn’s Yiddish Folk Songs. Pavarotti and Marilyn Horne kept company with Sidor Belarsky and Jennie Goldstein.
Before I go further, I should clarify: I did not burglarize Harris’ house. I was there as a “zamlerin,” a volunteer collector and schlepper of Yiddish books for the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass. I joined the international legion, some 160-zamlers-strong, at the end of a summer internship at the Center two years ago. Since then, every few months or so, I get a call or an email from an older Jew. Some Yiddish books have fallen into their hands, or maybe the books have been in the family for a long time. We tend to meet at their houses. (Once, though, I met a guy at his synagogue and sat through a full service for the first time in Hashem-knows-how-long.)
Wherever we meet, the pass-off process always feels ceremonial, more like the adoption of a child than the transfer of objects. We schmooze a bisl in Yiddish, a bisl in English while we load up the books, stacking them inside cardboard boxes like a game of 3D tetris. Sometimes, like a Yiddish-speaking Neanderthal, I’ll sound out the title of a book, and my host will light up like an electric menorah, turn the book over, rub its spine up and down, and tell me all about it. This? Oh, that’s Di Yeshiva. See, you can even see Chaim Grade’s autograph on the inside flap. That? Oh, that’s the Yiddish Kalevala. Naturally.
But zamling for Harris was different from zamling for other people, because for one thing, Harris was dead. His niece told me that Harris’ close friend, Andy, would be there to help me pack up the books. Andy was waiting in the lobby when I got there. He was a tall and weathered man of Irish extraction, about 75. His hooded blue eyes and the smoke on his deep, gravelly voice gave me the impression that he’d seen a lot in his time, like a hardbitten reporter in a noir novel. Except, Andy clarified, he was actually in publishing.
He didn’t say much after that.
Harris’ Yiddish bookshelf was right by the front door, so while I did a preliminary inventory, ooing and cooing in a way that would have annoyed me if another person were doing it, Andy shuffled through Harris’ living room and kitchen, shifting his chairs, stacking his dishware, emptying his cabinets. Even with Harris gone for months, the apartment hadn’t lost the ascetic spareness that only monks and longtime bachelors seem capable of cultivating. Dust had already settled over the few wooden tables and shelves. The rugs looked frayed, and a thin white light seeped into the room from in between the vertical blinds. There was a bottle of Cinzano Rosso sitting on the kitchen counter, forever half-finished. It seemed like a place Bernard Malamud might have cooked up for a story about an erudite bachelor character.
But what sort of erudite bachelor, exactly? Before I’d come over, I’d found a few clues on the internet. A Facebook obituary from Camp Kinderland described Harris as “an interesting and complicated person,” adding that he was “often very funny, often thoughtful and generous and warm.” He sounded prickly-sweet, not unlike a jackfruit. I’d also found a LinkedIn profile for one Harris Saltzberg who described his job as “Observer of aging,” employed at “Life.” That sounded about right.
But it was the books that brought Harris into focus. On the shelf, I found at least three Yiddish textbooks. “Harris was insecure about his Yiddish,” Andy told me later, when we were lugging boxes to the lobby. But from the looks of it, he shouldn’t have been. He had the big names on his shelf — Y.L. Peretz, Mendele Mocher Sforim, Sholem Aleichem (who, by the way, is so abundant at the Yiddish Book Center that you can sometimes get a copy of his collected works for free). But Harris was hardcore. He was a proper Yiddish junkie; he’d bought books that would have been challenging to get through even in English, like Klassenkamfn in Altertum, Class Struggles in Antiquity, by a man named Kalman Marmor. He’d collected landsmanshaft periodicals from tiny Besarabbian shtetls, school almanacs from 1929, an instructional book on Yiddish stenography, song books, and one baffling, proto-woke rhyming tale about a white thug with notably sharp elbows (“sharfn elboygn”) who torments a Black boy with sad eyes (“troyerike oygen”).
Sometimes, I would find signs of a bygone reader— maybe Harris, maybe somebody else —scrawled on a book’s inside cover, or tucked away on a scrap of paper. “To Rivke with Love — May you two get well acquainted!” wrote Manya on Jan. 30, 1959. I found grocery lists, and one detailed pencil sketch of a dog. I found a scrap of paper where Harris had scrawled in cursive ciphers, “Tammy Baker,” “Uniforms,” and something that might have been “human want,” or maybe “human meat.”
I had never met Harris and never would. But even as I stuffed the boxes to busting, I felt reluctant to throw anything out. When somebody is alive, odd bobs like scratch paper are replaceable junk. But when somebody is gone, everything becomes evidence that they lived. Maybe that is why Harris saved all those periodicals from towns that could no longer be found on any map, advertisements for pamphlets of essays and satire by long-dead Jews in the Bronx, stenography manuals, children’s books. So long as even one witness to a fading world remained, that world wouldn’t truly be gone.
There is a story by Jorge Luis Borges called “The Witness,” or “El Testigo” that I have thought about several times since visiting Harris’ apartment. It is about the last pagan in England. As church bells ring, he lies dying in a stable in the shadow of a new stone church. This man is the last living person to remember worshipping the wooden idol of the pagan god Woden. “Before dawn he would be dead and with him would die, never to return, the last firsthand images of the pagan rites,” Borges writes. “The world would be poorer when this Saxon was no more.”
In the moment, though, I was not thinking much about books beyond how many of them I could cram into one box. As Andy and I hauled the book boxes down to an extremely patient Uber driver — six boxes total, around 30 pounds each — he told me how Harris had loved opera. He talked about his own two brothers, and about his upcoming trip to the motherland, Donegal, which he taught me to pronounce “Don-ee-GAL.” In the car to the UPS store, we kvetched about how hungry we were. At the curb, he helped me unload the boxes. Then he bent down and hugged me goodbye. I was sorry to see him go. I wondered if we would ever see each other again.
It’s been over a year since that day. Harris’ apartment probably belongs to someone else now, and as for the books, they are living a literally chilled-out retirement in the temperature-controlled vaults of the Yiddish Book Center. I wonder whose fingers will touch those pages next. And whose will be the last. After all, Borges muses, there is a last for everything. There was a day when the last eyes to see Christ closed forever. When the last man to have loved Helen of Troy died. When the last person to remember the Battle of Junín was buried. “Something, or an infinite number of things, dies in each death,” he writes. “What will die with me when I die?”
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With Marine Le Pen on the right and Defiant France on the left, French Jews face an impossible choice
Marine Le Pen is back. And once again, the French Republic and the democratic values it represents, has its back against the wall.
On Wednesday, the judges of a French appeals court reached something of a Solomonic decision. On the one hand, they confirmed the ruling of a lower court that Le Pen, for more than a decade, oversaw the funneling of several million euros, meant for her European Parliament staff, to her political party, the extreme-right National Rally. On the other hand, they shortened the length of her ineligibility to run for political office, thus allowing her to join the fray for next year’s presidential election.
Much can be said about the consequences of this decision. First, there is the stunningly brazen legal dimension. Just as Donald Trump was the first convicted felon to be elected president of the United States, Le Pen — who leads other announced candidates by at least 10% in opinion polls — stands a very good chance to be the first convicted felon, on far more serious charges than Trump’s, to become president of France. (Two earlier presidents of the Fifth Republic, Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, were also found guilty of embezzlement, but only after their presidential terms ended.)
No less significant are the political ramifications. Le Pen’s announcement that nothing will stop her from running in turn stopped Jordan Bardella, her young protégé and president of the National Rally, dead in his tracks. Dismissed as an empty, though always svelte and shiny suit, Bardella proved to be, to Le Pen’s growing discontent, more popular in opinion polls than his mentor. Poised to run in her stead, this young man in a hurry, and with neither practical experience nor university education, was suddenly benched.
It is too early to predict how this will play out. On Wednesday, in their first public appearance together since the court’s ruling, Bardella, standing a few steps behind Le Pen, looked less like a partner than a prop while she bathed in the crowd’s attention. Adding to the tension are policy differences that had begun to appear between Le Pen and Bardella, with the former hewing to her populist image and Bardella leaning towards the traditional right. Tellingly, Le Pen supports the recent rollback of the retirement age to 62, while Bardella seems, like others on the traditional right, to prefer raising the age as high as 67.
More important, Le Pen’s entry may well turn the 2027 election into a choice between equally dismal options. For months, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the turbulent tribune of the extreme-left Defiant France, has portrayed himself as the one figure who can save the republic from Le Pen. In the latest IFOP poll, Mélenchon stands an even chance to finish in second place in the first round of the election. This will mean that for the two-thirds of French voters still allergic to Le Pen, they will have nowhere to go after the second round except to the leader of a party that has repeatedly flirted with antisemitism.
This brings us, finally, to the historical significance of this event. The National Rally is, of course, the party formerly known as the Front National. Equally obvious, the latter, founded by Marine’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was a gaggle of goose-steppers, antisemites, and apologists for Vichy, the collaborationist regime which did its bit for the Final Solution. (By the time he died last year, Le Pen père, who coined the infamous line that the Final Solution was a “detail of history,” had racked up multiple guilty verdicts for Holocaust denial and inciting race hatred.)
Her father’s notorious verbal dérapages, or excesses, finally led his daughter, who had slapped a new coat of paint on the party by renaming it soon after her father gave her the keys, to banish her father from its fold. Undeniably, Le Pen’s relentless pursuit of a policy of “dédiabolisation” or “detoxification,” has largely rid the party of its Nazi-adjacent followers. (As part of this renovation, the more than one hundred National Front representatives who sit on the far-right in the National Assembly — by far the largest parliamentary party — always wear business attire. This makes for a striking contrast with their Defiant France colleagues, who tend to dress as my students do.)
But a bespoke suit does not mean one is not still beholden to racism. Le Pen and Bardella have labored to distance their party from its rancid and racist origin, most recently reflected in the latter’s controversial visit last year to Israel, where he spoke at a sparsely attended conference on antisemitism. (Many of the invitees, upon learning that Bardella would attend, snubbed the event.)
No less contentious was Le Pen’s decision for her party to join the march against antisemitism two years earlier in Paris, along with her vow that the National Rally would serve as the “bouclier,” or shield to protect French Jews. She did not say against whom her party would shield French Jews, but there was no need to: All of France understood who she meant. For her party, the Jew is no longer, if only for now, the dreaded other who threatens the unity and purity of the French people. The Arab or Muslim now fills that role. Hence the party’s insistent demand for a constitutional amendment for “la préférence nationale,” which would limit an array of social privileges to French citizens, as well as the consistent drumbeat of racist and xenophobic declarations on the part of its rank and file.
Apologists for Marshal Philippe Pétain, the leader of Vichy France, insisted that he too served as his nation’s shield against Nazi Germany. They conveniently forgot, of course, that this shield was used to separate French Jews from their non-Jewish compatriots. Between now and next year’s presidential election, the French will have time enough to reflect on the promise, or threat, of a party whose origins warn us against those who use shields to clobber those they decide do not belong to a nation.
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Graham Platner may be gone, but his Nazi tattoo is not fading away
(JTA) — Why did it take sexual assault allegations to collapse Graham Platner’s Maine Senate campaign when the Nazi-linked tattoo was there all along?
Progressive lawmakers, Jewish leaders and conservative commentators posed the question in dozens of exasperated iterations in the hours after Platner announced Wednesday evening that he would suspend his race amid allegations reported by Politico Monday that he had raped a former girlfriend.
“Graham Platner has dropped out of the Maine Senate race amid serious sexual assault allegations,” the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, wrote in a post on X. “But leaders should not have needed another scandal to act. The Nazi tattoo should have been enough.”
Platner, who won his Democratic primary in June on an anti-Israel progressive platform, faced mounting calls to leave the race after the Politico story ran from Democratic groups and progressive leaders who had formerly supported him, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. (Platner has denied the allegations.)
But others argued that those backers should have pulled their endorsements months earlier after it surfaced in October that he had a chest tattoo of a Totenkopf, a Nazi-era skull-and-crossbones design favored by SS officers.
At the time, Platner claimed that he had gotten the tattoo while “inebriated” as a young adult when he was on shore leave from a tour of duty in Iraq, without knowing what it meant. A number of people who knew him before his political ascent, including at least one of the women who accused him of sexual misbehaviour, said he had been aware of the symbol’s provenance. When the revelations emerged, he covered up the skull with a Celtic knot.
His campaign had dismissed as irrelevant noise the backlash the tattoo revelation received, as well as criticism over allegations that he had deployed race and gender stereotypes in the past as irrelevant noise.
“I said, ‘None of this will or should stop him from becoming a U.S. senator,’” Daniel Moraff, a progressive strategist who had headhunted Platner, told The Wall Street Journal last month, before the Politico revelations, about Reddit posts that included homophobic and ableist epithets unearthed in the vetting process. The firm that vetted Platner did not uncover anything about his Nazi tattoo, Moraff said.
The tattoo didn’t seem to be a dealbreaker for voters, either, since he coasted to victory in the June primary after his primary opponent, Gov. Janet Mills, suspended her candidacy in late April, saying her campaign could not afford to continue.
Now the Maine Democratic Party is considering replacements for the disgraced candidate, but the question of why his backers ignored warning signs still looms.
Brian Romick, the president and CEO of the Democratic Majority for Israel, told JTA in a statement that he didn’t understand why progressives had supported “a candidate with so many obvious red flags, including an allegation of sexual assault and a Nazi tattoo.”
And Halie Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, which did not endorse Platner, told the Forward ahead of Platner’s exit that “a lesson for Democrats is that we shouldn’t compromise.”
“There were red flags about Platner from the outset,” Soifer said. “They just continued to compound on each other as more stories came out. But the Nazi tattoo for us alone was one too many.”
On Tuesday, New Jersey Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer argued that warning signs had been apparent long before the latest allegation.
“I said it in June: Nothing about this guy was right. From the first abuse allegations to his Nazi tattoo, the red flags were there. His endorsers just chose to accept them,” Gottheimer wrote in a post on X.
New York State Sen. Julia Salazar, a Democratic Socialist, also argued that supporters had made a mistake by overlooking Platner’s tattoo.
“Sorry to the well-intentioned people who made the mistake of supporting this guy. But: having a Nazi tattoo doesn’t pass the sniff test for running for US Senate, nor did his excuses. And far worse that he faces a credible allegation of rape,” Salazar wrote in a post on X.
Jewish Republicans said the Democratic response to Platner’s campaign was too late.
“I didn’t support Graham Platner as soon [as] we all learned he’s a Nazi,” Republican Max Abrahms, a political scientist focusing on terrorism, wrote in a post on X. “For the Democratic Party his being a Nazi wasn’t disqualifying. They viewed it as an asset. Platner matters politically for what he says about mainstream Democrats.”
The Republican Jewish Coalition also took aim at Democratic leaders who had stood by Platner earlier in the race.
“American Jews will never forget that leading Democrats chose to stand with Graham Platner KNOWING FULL WELL THAT HE HAD A NAZI SS CONCENTRATION CAMP GUARD TATTOO,” the group wrote in a post on X. “There is only ONE party where American Jews can be proudly Jewish and loudly pro-Israel: @Republicans.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Graham Platner may be gone, but his Nazi tattoo is not fading away appeared first on The Forward.
