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Jews and Hitler: The Germany Lesson
What American Jews Must Learn Before Warning Becomes History
From the essay
Naumann’s followers represented less than 2 percent of Germany’s approximately half-million Jews. They did not elect Hitler. They did not cause the destruction that followed. The lesson is not collective Jewish guilt. Their failure was a failure to recognize what was directly in front of them. The Germany lesson is not that every contemporary danger will end in another Holocaust. It is that Jews cannot wait for another Holocaust before deciding that the danger was real. The clock did not begin at Auschwitz. It began when explicit threats were dismissed as rhetoric, when violence was excused as an excess, when unequal treatment became normal.