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Why the ‘No Kings’ marches reminded me of Germany in 1933
Germany’s parliamentary election on March 5, 1933 was the most fateful in the nation’s history, securing Hitler’s hold on power and launching 12 years of despotic rule and, eventually, a world war.
Like Germany nearly a century ago, as the United States enters the campaign season for our midterm elections, we too stand at destiny’s threshold. The outcome will determine whether Donald Trump can continue his assaults on democratic institutions, or whether he is checked by a Congress he has rendered virtually powerless since beginning his second term.
The moods of Germans in the spring of 1933 and Americans in the spring of 2026 are strikingly similar — a shroud of foreboding hangs over defenders of democracy. Yet beneath the gloom runs a pulse of defiance. In the United States, that defiance took visible form this past Saturday, when millions joined anti-Trump No Kings marches and rallies across the country.
As impressive as the Saturday protest was, America’s protectors of the republic would do well to heed what happened in Germany in the run-up to the two parliamentary elections of 1932 and the Weimar Republic’s final parliamentary election in March 1933 — moments when democratic hopes briefly rose, only to be extinguished.
In America under Trump, Indivisible has emerged as the most visible national organization in the anti-Trump resistance. During the Weimar Republic, its counterpart was a broad pro-democracy coalition called the Reichsbanner, led by the Social Democrats. Over the past century, memory of the Reichsbanner has nearly vanished, which is a shame given its dauntless devotion to democracy in the face of constant danger.
During the Weimar Republic’s final election campaigns, multitudes of Germans — rank upon rank, singing and chanting — marched through Berlin and other cities and towns across the country, gathering at rallies where orators denounced the fascists and vowed to defend the republic.
“1932 will be our year, the year of final victory of the republic over its enemies,” declared Karl Höltermann, the Reichsbanner’s national leader.
As the Weimar Republic was attacked by extremists on the right and left in its early years, and after Hitler’s abortive Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, the Social Democrats, the German Democratic Party, and the Center Party joined forces in 1924 to create a pro-republic defense organization, which they called the Reichsbanner.
In 1931, the Nazis, the German National Peoples’ Party, the veterans’ association Stahlhelm, and other anti-democratic forces joined to form the Harzburg Front. The Reichsbanner and its allies countered by marshaling Germany’s democratic constituencies — workers, veterans, liberals, Catholics — into a coordinated force known as the Iron Front.
As the Great Depression threw millions out of work, street violence intensified, cracks widened, and fragile coalition governments collapsed. The ranks of the Nazi and Communist parties swelled. Votes for Nazi candidates in the July 1932 election more than doubled — from 6.4 million to 13.1 million — making Hitler’s party the largest in the Reichstag with 230 seats, about 100 more than the Social Democrats, although short of a majority.
Enthusiasm for Hitler waned as Germany’s economic crisis eased, reflected in the November 1932 election. The Nazi bloc fell from 230 to 196 seats. It was a blow, but they remained the largest party.
The Reichsbanner’s years of defending democracy hurtled toward an ignominious end as Hitler used the burning of the Reichstag as a pretext to suspend civil liberties, the Nazis won a slim majority of parliamentary seats in coalition with the Nationalists in the March 5, 1933 election, and the last nail was driven into the republic’s coffin 14 days later when the parliament voted to give Hitler complete power.
During these tumultuous months defenders of democracy were intimidated, beaten, murdered and tortured, and many wound up in concentration camps, including Reichsbanner members. Höltermann fled to Britain, where he lived out the rest of his life in exile, dying in 1955.
This past Saturday’s No Kings protests looked nothing like the anti-Hitler demonstrations led by the Reichsbanner nearly a century ago. But the posters carried by anti-Trump activists, their anti-fascist slogans, the frogs, unicorns and other creatures cavorting among the marchers, and above all, the dauntless defiance, all came from the same impulse that drove the defenders of the Weimar Republic.
As in communities across the nation, Saturday’s rally and march here in Portland, Ore. was truly impressive. There were so many people in the march that they simultaneously filled two bridges spanning the broad Willamette River dividing downtown from the east side.
A drum corps of anti-Trump activists was so precise in close-order drill that they might have surprised out-of-town visitors who think of Portland as a hipsters’ paradise. But the Portlandia stereotype was rescued by a guy on a unicycle riding in front of the drum corps — wearing a frog costume and juggling tennis balls.
Equally striking were three 13-foot puppets created by an Indivisible Oregon arts team and towed along the parade route — Donald Trump stuck in an oil barrel and holding a Boeing 747 in one of his tiny hands, Stephen Miller dressed as Dracula, and RFK Jr. as a mad scientist with a giant worm coming out of his head.
Although the Saturday nationwide protests appeared peaceful, confrontations broke out that night outside Portland’s ICE facility and at the Los Angeles Metropolitan Detention Center. Federal officers in Portland used tear gas to move protesters away from the gates, and in Los Angeles, authorities arrested dozens during a brief clash outside the detention center.
What’s next?
Indivisible co-founder Ezra Levin — sort of a Karl Höltermann of the 21st century — said plans are in the works for a general strike on May 1 to protest government policies that favor billionaires over workers. It is an idea inspired by a January 2026 general strike in Minneapolis, shuttering more than 700 businesses, to demand a halt to an escalation of federal immigration enforcement that led to the shooting deaths of two activists. Labor unions, religious organizations, community advocacy groups, teachers and students were among those involved.
“The next major national action of this movement is not just gonna be another protest. It is a tactical escalation,” Levin said at the No Kings rally in Saint Paul. “It is an economic show of force, inspired by Minnesota’s own day of truth and action,” .
I wish Levin well. But I worry.
General strikes are extremely rare in the United States. And there are reasons for that. Before Minneapolis, the last one occurred in Oakland, Calif., in 1946, when 100,000 workers staged a two-day walkout. Over the decades, as labor muscle has weakened, general strikes have become more difficult to organize. While workers have the right to strike, the Taft-Hartley Amendments of 1947 prohibit strikes organized for political purposes or directed at secondary targets..
A nationwide general strike in Germany in 1920 indicates some potential pitfalls.
In March 1920, when right-wing officers attempted to overthrow the republic in the far-right Kapp Putsch, the nation’s democratic forces responded with a general strike so vast that it quickly brought the coup to its knees. But the victory came at a steep price. Instead of unifying Germans around the defense of their republic, the strike widened the fissures already running through the nation.
As I was riding the bus to Portland’s protest on Saturday, I thought back to Karl Höltermann and the Reichsbanner. And I reflected on this fact: Germany’s anti-Hitler movements failed because not enough Germans thought democracy was worth preserving. Back then, democracy was not a historic tradition in Germany, unlike our 250 years of experience.
If we rescue our democracy, it will be because enough of us chose to.
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Marilyn Monroe would be 100 today. Are we making too much of her conversion?
Back in 2019, Marilyn Monroe’s menorah, a gift from her former in-laws, sold at auction for more than $112,000. The candle in the wind jokes wrote themselves, but how exactly the tragic actress lived her life has long been a point of Jewish fascination.
The effort to make Monroe a Jewish icon is almost certainly strained, though not baseless.
Born Norma Jean Mortenson, she converted to Judaism in 1956 ahead of her nuptials with Arthur Miller. That this detail still commands such attention can’t easily be divorced from certain stereotypes of their mismatched pairing: the beauty and the brain. He, balding and bespectacled, she, a peroxide paragon of bombshell beauty. Philip Roth didn’t need to write about it — Joyce Carol Oates did instead.
But Monroe’s attachment to Judaism, beyond leaving behind such effects as the menorah and an annotated siddur (sold for $21,000 in 2018), may be overstated, even as she continued to identify as a “Jewish atheist” after her 1961 split with Miller. That she engaged with her lessons with some seriousness, according to the rabbi who converted her, may be more a testament to her curiosity and intelligence than a true demonstration of faith.
In 2015, the Jewish Museum in New York offered a useful contrast. An exhibition hosted Andy Warhol’s portraits of Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor presented as a diptych. Taylor’s conversion came about after the death of a Jewish husband and remained important to her through the rest of her life, extending to pro-Israel causes and activism on behalf of Soviet Jewry. (Taylor was buried by a rabbi, Monroe by a Lutheran minister.)
Both women had their films banned in Egypt on account of their adopted faith — in the case of Taylor, this meant completing Cleopatra in Rome. Only one could be said to have lived a thoroughly Jewish life, though Monroe’s death is certainly a mitigating factor, the subject of so many “what ifs.”
When we look at Marilyn as a coreligionist, it may say more about us than her. I suspect the fact she didn’t “look Jewish” is what makes her affiliation matter to so many.
But the affiliations that truly matter are in the credits: Billy Wilder, Tony Curtis, Charles Lederer, Lee Strasberg. The work, or Avodah, is captured in celluloid: the way Sugar Kane takes a belt from her flask and tucks it in her garter or Lorelei Lee swats at her suitors with a fan.
It is Marilyn, not Norma Jean, not Miriam bat Sarah, who continues to have immense cultural cachet, already long exceeding her brief time on earth.
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Retracing the epic journey of the world’s oldest Jew
I, A Wandering Jew. A Five-Century History of our Modern Condition
Yair Mintzker
Princeton University Press, 272 pages, $29.95.
My father, an American-born son of Belarusian immigrants, bought the record when it first came out in 1960 and we enjoyed listening to it to no end. Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner’s album The 2,000 Year Old Man featured Brooks as a somewhat laconic old man who responded in Yiddish-inflected English to Reiner’s guileless questions about his long life.
The improvised sketch had apparently begun 10 years earlier, when Reiner, who worked with Brooks on a TV show, turned to him, while testing a new tape-recorder, and asked, “Is it true you were at the scene of the Crucifixion, 2000 years ago?” Jesus Christ, Brooks quipped, was a “nice boy, wore sandals.” William Shakespeare, however, had “the worst penmanship” and when asked if he knew Joan of Arc, Brooks blurted out, “Knew her? I dated her!”
As a kid of 9, I didn’t think that their shtick was anything other than funny. But in retrospect, I can see that the Yiddishkeit tone and audacity of the conceit also answered something bigger and much more sinister. The Shoah had only just ended, the weekend before, as it were. So, the immortality and know-it-all comedy of Brooks’ hero expressed resiliency and social integration in the face of nothing less than genocide. “The 2000 Year Old Man” was, in a Borscht Belt voice, an affirmation of life. My fondness for Brooks resurfaced during the haze of high school, and remained in the back of my mind as decades went by, but it wasn’t until reading Yair Mintzker’s new book, I, Wandering Jew, that I came to appreciate another dimension of its significance, namely, its evocation of the figure of the Wandering Jew.
Originally, the Wandering Jew was an antisemitic trope Christians used to explain the marginality and foreignness of Jews in European society. A cobbler stood at the doorstep of his Jerusalem shop, according to the story, as Jesus labored by, hauling his burden to his death. Refusing his request for help, Jesus cursed the cobbler, who inexplicably came to be known as Ahasverus, the name of a Persian king, to live eternally in exile until the Second Coming. The Jews were thus condemned to a de-territorialized, homeless fate as Christ deniers.
Ahasverus appears and reappears in various forms over the course of European history — often as a tall, severe man who spoke several languages, never laughed and criticized people for moral failures. His story spread in ballads, poems and novels — and eventually in Nazi propaganda — to support the claim that Jews were not only alien to European culture and society but could never live together with Aryans.
Mintzker, a Princeton history professor, has written an intriguing book that traces the legend of the Wandering Jew over the centuries in reverse chronological order, eventually to arrive at the salience of the figure’s story in the author’s own life and times.
The first of his five examples is set in Israel, just a few years after the nation achieved independence, when a mysterious man, known by some as Ben Shoushan, caught the attention of a journalist as he disembarked at the port of Haifa with a forged Moroccan passport that dated his birth in 1902. He seemed to be both middle-aged and ageless, perhaps mad or possibly a genius. The author Eli Weisel had met him at one point immediately after the war and also couldn’t quite make sense of who he was — perhaps a “Kabbalist, comedian and anarchist”? The mystery man, lacking an origin or an income, claimed to speak 30 languages and was said to love riddles.
He spent time in two religious kibbutzim near Tel Aviv. The kibbutzniks recalled him as a harsh, unbearable, eccentric man who lectured on the Talmud, rotating between the communities until he was expelled from both. Leaving Israel in 1956, he was spotted in a Jewish community in Uruguay, where he was regarded as a Wandering Jew, an identity he apparently embraced. In other words, Shoushan was at once a real person, in Mintzker’s view, who also seemed to project a post-Holocaust trope, as of the survival of the Jewish stranger but also the survival of the unconventional Jewish intellectual.
Another version appeared in The Nag, which was an allegorical, 1873 Russian novel by Sholem Yakev Abramovitch in which a broken-down, talking horse declares herself to be a “wandering mare” and demands justice rather than mercy from her tormentors. Abramovitch’s image of the Wandering Jew was somewhat veiled, although the reticent, pitiful animal does admit to being both a horse, passing from one harness to another, and something else. Unable to live or die, she says she wants only to belong — but is dismissed as not human.
In Jewish Memorabilia, Jacob Schudt, who was a Protestant scholar from Frankfurt, adopted the sort of doctrinal view of the legend that the eternal exile of the Jews from Israel was a punishment for having rejected Christ. The final installment of the four-volume work apparently brimmed with antisemitic views that criticized how Jews looked, their lack of hygiene, and purported greed, as well as their supposed penchant for self-flattery. Schudt dismissed the Wandering Jew as nothing more than a fable by which the lower classes could perceive and understand Jews. Yet he also recognized certain flaws in the story — that it contradicted Christ’s compassion, for one. Lacking historical support, Schudt went on to conclude that the story was probably of Catholic origin, or perhaps the result of nothing more than a publisher’s money-making scheme. The figure of Ahasverus, in other words, was a contradiction that featured a real personage who simultaneously never existed.
Mintzker then turns to the centerpiece of the story, an anonymous German broadsheet, the Kurtze Beschreibung, which was a wildly popular text that was first published in 1602 and then republished a dozen times throughout the rest of the century.
It cast Ahasverus as a strange man who met a Lutheran theologian and explained to him that he was a Jewish shoemaker who had been born 1,500 years earlier in Jerusalem, when and where he had refused to help Christ on his way to the Crucifixion and had been cursed to wander the earth until the return of the Messiah. The account included details of the Crucifixion, the deaths of the Apostles, and about Ahasverus himself — for example that he spoke German with a Saxon accent.
Mintzker strives to pin down the author of the pamphlet and how its contents changed over the course of the 17th century. He marshals quite a bit of detailed evidence that leads him to conclude that Paul von Eitzen, a leading a 16th century Lutheran official and contentious pastor in Hamburg who claimed to have met Ahasverus in the 1540s, must have written it. Readers of the pamphlet, Mintzker also notes, would certainly have been able to identify both von Eitzen and the man he called Ahasverus in this version of the story, who was likely a notoriously uncompromising anti-Calvinist named Tilemann Heshusius.
In the final chapter of his well-paced book, Mintzker turns his gaze upon himself — to the meaning of the Wandering Jew in his own life as a yored, an Israeli expatriate.
Mintzker was born and raised in an upper middle-class, progressive Ashkenazi family in Jerusalem, but eventually left the country to go study and then work in the United States. He had learned about Ahasverus from a close high school friend but only came to identify with him in New Jersey, where the image of exile, and of Jews as “eternal strangers,” haunted him and became more and more salient, particularly amid the violence of the past few years in Israel. With the rise of anti-Zionism, Mintzker admits, he came to “embrace the figure of Ahasverus … as a model for political life” but also for his own sense of self.
The 2,000 Year Old Man clearly echoed the legend of the Wandering Jew, in a chutzpadik voice that entertained diaspora American Jews during the immediate post-Holocaust years. But wasn’t this precisely Mintzker’s point? The trope’s meaning, as his book shows us, shifted across time and place. Thus, in this last expression, he comes to own it as an acknowledgement of his own disquiet and alienation, which he connects to his yored autobiography and recent events in Israel that have called Zionism into question. In doing so, the story of the Wandering Jew has shed its antisemitic, racialized roots, or justification for exile once again, to be read anew as a trope of Mintzker’s (and perhaps our) estrangement from contemporary Israeli society. A timely read.
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The mayor missed the Israel Day Parade. Many who went didn’t miss him.
(JTA) — The energy was palpable Sunday as thousands packed a dozen blocks of Fifth Avenue waving Israeli flags for New York’s annual Israel Day Parade. Organizers said the turnout was the largest in the event’s six-decade history.
The procession featured its usual mix of Jewish nonprofits, schools and synagogues marching to blaring Israeli music alongside parade floats sponsored by groups including Nefesh B’Nefesh, the UJA Federation of New York and the Maccabiah Games.
But this year’s parade, which was themed “Proud Americans, Proud Zionists,” unfolded amid growing political polarization over Israel and without New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who became the first mayor in decades to skip the event.
For all the criticism Mamdani has received over his campaign pledge not to attend the event, many of those who did turn out told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency they were glad he wasn’t there.
“He doesn’t like us,” said Andrea Roman, who attended the parade wearing an Israeli flag cape and thought it was “good” that Mamdani hadn’t come. “Why should you be some place where you don’t like? He does not promote peace. This promotes peace, but of course he’s not going to be here.”
Jeremy Bell, 39, also said wasn’t bothered by the mayor’s absence – and that there were many more who felt as he did.
“I don’t think that he was really wanted here,” Bell said, adding, “I don’t want to be here with someone who doesn’t believe in our right to exist and obviously associates with people that don’t have our best interests in mind.”
Despite Mamdani’s absence, the event, known as the largest pro-Israel parade in the world, featured a lengthy roster of political officials and lawmakers. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, New York Attorney General Letitia James, U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler were among those in attendance, as were former New York City Mayors Eric Adams and Mike Bloomberg.
NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who on Thursday said that security preparations for the parade would be “the most extensive” that the NYPD had ever put together, also joined the festivities as an honorary grand marshal.
While many paradegoers said that they never considered staying home because of security concerns, several said they appreciated the presence of thousands of police officers and extensive barricades that blocked the streets surrounding the event.
“We are grateful that tens of thousands of participants and spectators were able to gather safely and proudly in the heart of New York City,” Mitchell Silber, the CEO of the Community Security Initiative, said in a statement. “Today’s success reflects the extraordinary planning, coordination, and professionalism of the NYPD and our law enforcement partners.”
That number was boosted in some cases by participants who said the mayor’s decision to skip the event factored into their own decision to come.
Karene Hermon, 22, said that while previously she would have been more “neutral” about attending, hearing that Mamdani had chosen not to come drove her to “be with my people.”
“I think it sends the wrong message,” Hermon said of the mayor’s refusal to participate. “I think we’re trying to come together, not separate people, regardless of … how you feel about a cause.”
First-time paradegoer Luis Margules travelled to the march from Pennsylvania. He said that he had come because it felt like “a moment to be with Israel.”
“This is my first parade, but I think this year it’s one of the most important ones,” Margules said. “I think the world doesn’t understand the situation with Iran and the Palestinians, and everything is blamed on Israel.”
Ofir Akunis, the consul general of Israel in New York, said in a statement that the parade “delivered a resounding answer to all those who hate Israel.”
“This year’s parade was an unprecedented demonstration of strength by New York’s Jewish community and the people of Israel,” Akunis said. “It sends a clear and unequivocal message: We are here to stay, and we are not going anywhere.”
But not all of the spectators Sunday were there in support.
While there was no large-scale protest visible during the parade, roughly 25 people demonstrated along the route to oppose the inclusion of a record delegation of roughly 10 Israeli Knesset members, including far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and two members of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s ultra-nationalist Otzma Yehudit party.
As the delegation passed the demonstration, which was organized by the progressive groups Israelis for Peace and Friends of Standing Together New York, protesters shouted “shame” and “war criminals,” according to Tamar Glezerman, an organizer for Israelis for Peace.
“We were there to protest against the Israeli Knesset delegation, the largest of its size of all of the parades, that sent members of the coalition and the so-called opposition to do hasbara and march victoriously up a New York avenue,” Glezerman told JTA in a phone interview Sunday, using the Hebrew word for public relations.
While the focus of the demonstration centered on opposing the Knesset delegation, Glezerman added that “a parade that very much champions unexamined, unchecked and non-critical support of Israel is perhaps important for people here. It is not good for Israelis. It sure as hell isn’t good for Palestinians.”
Margules, in contrast, said that seeing the Israeli Knesset members pass by had made him feel “proud.”
“It’s good to know that even in these dark times we can still be together without violence, and we can disagree on many things, but we have to agree on something,” Margules said. “We are here because Israel exists.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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