Silence in the face of global antisemitism isn't an option anymore - opinion

Near the end of World War II, US Army Master Sgt. Roddie Edmonds of the 422nd Infantry Regiment was the senior non-commissioned officer among a group of prisoners of war in Germany’s Stalag IXA, near Ziegenhain. One day in January 1945, Nazi forces instructed all Jewish POWs to report the following morning. 

Edmonds, the leader of the POWs, which included Jews and non-Jews, ordered all of his soldiers to stand together with the Jewish prisoners. When the Nazi officer in charge saw that all the camp’s inmates were standing in front of their barracks, he turned to Edmonds, saying, “They cannot all be Jews.”

“We are all Jews,” Edmonds replied.

The Nazi drew his pistol and threatened the master sergeant, who remained unfazed. “According to the Geneva Convention, we only have to give our name, rank, and serial number,” Edmonds said. “If you shoot me, you will have to shoot all of us, and after the war, you will be tried for war crimes.”

The German officer stalked away.

Edmonds, who had participated in the landing of United States forces in Europe and was taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge, was later honored by Yad Vashem as a Righteous Among the Nations, an official designation for non-Jews who risked their lives to protect Jews during the Holocaust. 

A blatant example of antisemitism, prompting action 

His story came to mind when I viewed one of the latest acts of blatant antisemitism that occurred in a New York City subway car last week. 

As people boarded the car, masked anti-Israel protesters demanded to know if there were any “Zionists” on the train, warning them: “This is your chance to get out,” in a video circulating on social media. The video shows the slogan being yelled inside the packed subway car by a man with the crowd of activists echoing his words. No one is seen responding to the question, nor does anyone object to the verbal assault on Jews. 

Some American Jewish leaders are now calling for a ban on masks in New York City, given the explosion of antisemitism by mobs of people with their faces hidden. However, while banning demonstrators from hiding behind masks is probably a good thing, it is a weak response to a burgeoning worldwide problem.

What people of conscience must begin doing when such events happen is for the entire community to identify as Zionists or Jews, as the case may be. 

Communities need to realize that these attacks, while seemingly catalyzed by Israel’s war against Hamas, have relatively little to do with Jews or Israel. Rather, the people who are probably well remunerated to organize these scenarios are actually attacking Western values using antisemitism as a convenient excuse to do so. After all, as was noted at so many of the recent university encampments, the shouting often turned from antisemitic vitriol to chants of “Down with America” and its values, which seems to be the real driving force behind this latest manifestation of the world’s oldest hatred.

In 1994, the citizens of Billings, Montana, then a town of 80,000 with less than 50 Jewish families, rose up in unison against spreading antisemitism. After a spate of incidents leading up to Hanukkah, when several Jewish homes bearing visible holiday markings had their windows broken by Jew haters, the local paper printed a picture of a Hanukkiah so that the entire community could place the picture in a window of their respective homes, in effect saying to the antisemites, as did Master Sgt. Edmonds in 1945: “We are all Jews.”

Jewish communities under threat need to engage urgently with non-Jewish community leaders and mount a well-organized campaign to educate the greater community about the danger to everyone if antisemitism goes unchecked. 

Community organizations, religious communities, the press, and the entertainment industry need to get on board to project the message that hatred of a single group will not be tolerated. History is replete with sorry examples of communities where the non-Jewish population looked the other way and eventually found themselves, too, locked in the vise of hatred and prejudice. That cannot be allowed to happen again.

It is still not too late to respond. Those people in the subway car who remained silent last week should be ashamed for letting themselves be cowed by a gang of masked people who represent the worst of America. Hopefully, they will not one day also have to pay a price for their silence. But continuing the silence makes them complicit in the crime.

Elie Wiesel, humanity’s conscience for the last 80 years, said: “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” 

It would seem that the world has not yet learned this lesson.

The writer, who has lived in Israel for over 40 years, is founder and chair of Atid EDI Ltd., an international business development consultancy. He is also the founder and chair of the American State Offices Association, a former national president of the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel (AACI), and a past chairperson of the board of the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies.