The Danger of Silence

For the most part, I live my life in a bubble of privilege: I am a straight, Christian, white, educated, professional woman living in the United States of America. My gender on occasion provides some obstacle to my path, but mostly, being a woman means I suffer through such odious and obnoxious moments as mansplaining, condescension, and surprise that I’m actually highly proficient in my profession rather than outright discrimination. I choose my battles carefully when it comes to confronting outdated attitudes about women, mostly because sometimes it’s better to win the “war” than to let skirmishes distract from the bigger goal: doing the job. My silence does not indicate approval in these instances, merely a different tactic than that preferred by others who prefer to confront every little offense. I am privileged to be able to make that choice for myself and I usually follow other women’s lead as to whether I should confront it when the offense is not aimed specifically at me. Is that cowardly? I don’t know. Sometimes I think it is. Other times, I have realized that other women had more at stake than I did and that silence was in their best interest in the moment. 

I cannot, however, be silent or inactive when it comes to blatant hatred and bigotry. My Christian faith requires me to call it out, work against it, and offer hope and healing to those who have been on the receiving end of hatred and bigotry. My humanity also requires it of me. My experience wouldn’t allow me to stay silent even if my faith and my membership in the human race didn’t. I went to Poland in 1989 with a mostly Jewish group, traveling to visit Auschwitz, Majdanek, and a small village that once was a center of Jewish academic and religious life in Poland. On that trip, I experienced two indelible instances of anti-Semitism that gave me a tiny hint of what anyone who is targeted by haters goes through on a daily basis.

The first incident happened in that village as we walked down the main street. People, mostly men, stopped and stared at us. At first, I thought it was because we were so obviously American—the first phase of the Cold War was still going and we had been briefed that most places outside the main cities didn’t see much in the way of tourists from the West. But the rabbi leading our group disabused me of that idea when he started translating the mutterings of the crowd. I refuse to write what was said; suffice to say that such vile slander could have come straight out of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The words, harsh as they were, could have been bearable except for the angry, hateful eyes over the mouths that spewed such venom. The men with us, who mostly wore yarmulkes and had visible fringes of their tallits hanging outside their street clothes on an unusually warm March day, garnered the worst of the words. Us women, modestly dressed and clearly traveling with the men, bore the looks, not just of anger and hatred but of animal lust. I don’t say that lightly, either the animal or the lust. I have never again in my life been looked at that way and I pray God I never am. I pray God no human being ever is, but I sense that it happens every day here and around the world: we were objects to be used, abused, and tossed away like yesterday’s fish bones. That kind of hatred is learned from social norms and it was solely due to our identity as a Jewish group, as the men didn’t look at the village women the same way at all. I haven’t told that part of the story very often if at all because it feels so degrading and raw even today. Usually, it’s enough to speak of the language.

The next day, we went to Auschwitz-Birkenau, which at the time was far more a monument to the heroic Communist victims of Nazi atrocities than a memorial to Jewish, Roma, LGBTQ, and disabled victims of the Holocaust and all that systematic, planned action entailed. Our tour guide seemed to relish the task of relating gory details about each building we visited. His description of Josef Mengele’s experiments haunted my nightmares for several months. But it was at Birkenau that he reached his zenith as a ghoul with a heart of something other than love. Birkenau is where the main gas chambers and crematoria dominated the landscape, the gas chambers taking in victims by the trainload and the crematoria reducing vital, loving, hopeful people to ashes 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for over two years. Because of the ashes that blew out of the smokestacks, all of Birkenau is considered a cemetery in Jewish practice. It is holy ground, not of the kind for which God invites bare feet but of the kind for which God commands respect and reflection. Our tour guide repeatedly picked up handfuls of the soil and dropped them casually along the paths, occasionally calling us to halt when he saw a particularly large piece of bone in the mix. At one point, he even asked if we thought the victim was a Communist or a Jew, then said, “Probably Communist. More of us died here than Jews.” The blatant lie contained in his statement reflects both a nationalist wish and a propaganda victory: the Jews, who were not Polish for the most part, were a minor afterthought in the story of Communist persecution before the triumph of the USSR over Nazi Germany.

I had immense trouble processing those two events. My college friends who experienced it with me put it in the context of their daily experiences in Chicago, Boston, and Jerusalem among both majority Jewish communities and minority Jewish communities, which helped. Getting grilled by El Al security on our way home from Israel several days later also helped, in part because the rabbi with us said it was reverse discrimination. He even said so to the security officer’s face to rescue me when it seemed as though they might detain me for further screening simply because my very Jewish sounding name marked me as suspect because I’m not Jewish. What helped most was our group debriefing over the next few weeks back in Boston as other members of the group talked about their experience of the events in Poland as well as their experiences of what we now call “microagressions” in their everyday lives. I became much more aware of the words, behaviors, and actions of people toward other people as a result.

This is what I concluded: we were utterly dehumanized in those moments. By word, behavior, and action, the perpetrators displayed their belief that Jews do not have a place among human beings. Even the blatant lie told by our tour guide is evidence of dehumanization because the party line was more important than the truth. It’s worth noting that the party line also dehumanized again Roma, disabled, and LGBTQ people targeted by the Nazis as “subhuman” as well as Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christians, clergy and lay, who spoke out against the Nazi regime and lost their lives in the very concentration camps they decried, though “the Holocaust” specifically refers only to the planned “Final Solution” genocide of the Jewish people.

Mass deportations to concentration camps under Nazi rule did not start with roundups. Dehumanization happened over time and its early stages included what we have seen here since January 1. Physical disrespect for what others value as sacred is designed to raise anxiety in a community, putting members on edge and creating feelings of insecurity. The precise aim at Jewish graves in cemeteries in Missouri, Pennsylvania, and New York belies any claim of mere vandalism on the part of the aggressors. Bomb threats to community centers in do the same thing, only one level higher on the terror scale because it’s not headstones (the past) but children (the present and future) under threat. Since January 1, Jewish Community Centers and Jewish day schools in 33 states have received bomb threats, according to the JCC Association of North America. The sickening displays of anti-Semitism in the past month are, put simply, terrorism. So are the mosque burnings, at least four since 2017 began. Sacred space desecrated and community centers menaced make the people affected by these events victims of homegrown terror. 

This is not just about anti-Semitism, of course. The language used about people is part of the process that leads to desecrated cemeteries, bomb threats against community centers, and mass murder. The process is well under way against immigrants now, documented and not. Accusing an entire group of people of more violent crimes than the civil infraction of overstaying a visa or the misdemeanor of crossing into the United States without a visa or other entry document without any evidence delegitimizes them off the bat. “Illegal immigrants” puts an emphasis on their actions rather than on their personhood: dehumanization 101. “Illegal aliens” is even worse—we aren’t talking about E.T., we’re talking about real people with families, histories, and futures. Indian immigrants were targeted based on the color of their skin by someone who assumed they were Iranians, and now one man is dead and two wounded simply because someone had dehumanized an entire group of people, or perhaps several groups. Research projects have been put on hold, education delayed, medical procedures postponed, and general daily activities disrupted because of rhetoric that delegitimizes and dehumanizes people from other countries without thought beyond “THEY DON’T BELONG HERE.”

It is WRONG to do this. We have no business disrupting the lives of millions of people based on where they were born or how they came to be in the United States. Violent criminals, of course, should be held accountable for their acts up to and including deportation, but to dislodge productive members of society simply because of how they got here puts us on a path toward horror. I’m speaking up against anti-Semitism, against anti-Muslim activities, and against wholesale deportations and immigration enforcement because I don’t want to see my country further dehumanize the people who are a part of what makes our nation great…in the past, the present, and the future.