OPINION:
My grandparents, people I never met but whose images in a very few surviving photographs indicate that they were ordinary individuals, did not seem to me to have had any characteristics that warranted the horrible fate they met in the Nazi death camp where they were murdered.
In those photographs, they appear to be decent, religious people. It seems so difficult to imagine that anyone could have hated them so much as to have been incited to kill them, but it was so.
Like other descendants of Holocaust victims, I have struggled to understand why this tragedy could have happened. How could humans treat other humans in this manner?
In my lengthy efforts to confront the motivation of those who would cause such terrible harm to fellow humans, I have had to conclude that most acts of evil perpetrated against a particular group, such as the killing of Jews in the Holocaust or the enslavement of Africans, are the product of one prominent common element that seems to undergird the efforts of one group to cause so much harm to another group.
That common element is the demonizing of the other: the refusal to see another human being as a fellow human — in other words, to denigrate another individual or group to the point of excluding them from the human family. In order to make it possible to engage in the mass extermination or enslavement of any group of humans, it is necessary to demonize them. It is necessary to make them appear as being something other than human.
To the extent that this exclusion can be categorized within a long historical context, it can be given the additional veneer of tradition and the purported validation of history.
Evidence of this kind of dehumanization is explicit in the language of the leaders of Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler, in “Mein Kampf,” the Nazi bible, referred to Jews as “maggots.” Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister of the Nazi regime, regularly described Jews as “rats” who were bringing diseases and destruction to the Aryan race. For the Nazis and their followers, Jews were deemed to be and regularly described not as humans but as a kind of vermin that was allegedly sapping the purity of the German race.
Thus, when the Nazi hierarchy called on ordinary Germans to help implement the Final Solution, many were without qualms about joining the effort. Killing Jews was not a matter of killing fellow humans. Rather, it was the extermination of vermin, whose destruction did not imply an immoral act. After all, eliminating vermin is not a sin; it can even be characterized as a virtue.
It is rather shocking that we are now witnesses to a new attempt to dehumanize a group of Americans, a prospect that, for those of us whose families were victimized by such an effort within recent memory, has a profoundly disturbing resonance. Today, it is the mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, a major American government official, who is espousing rhetoric that echoes the past pattern of dehumanizing Jews.
Mr. Mamdani has demonstrated an animus and obsession with Israel, the world’s only Jewish nation, and, in expounding on his obsession, has been using language that suggests that Israelis and, by extension, Jews, are not fully human. He may be more subtle in his use of language than some past antisemites, but his meaning is clear and, over time, can assuredly have a nefarious impact.
Specifically, Mr. Mamdani has expressly stated that AIPAC, a legitimate American entity, and certain pro-Israel political and lobbying forces are “monsters.” He has said this knowing that most American Jews are strong supporters of Israel, the historic Jewish homeland. Suggesting that many of his Jewish constituents are “monsters” is the beginning of a process of dehumanizing Jews. Even the youngest among us knows that a monster is a danger that needs to be eliminated. History tells us that characterizing Jews as monsters is an invitation to violence and worse against Jews.
Because we know where this kind of characterization can lead, it is incumbent upon our political leaders to denounce Mr. Mamdani’s hateful and dangerous rhetoric. Anything less than a condemnation of such demonizing language is simply unacceptable.
Despite past errors, the United States has fought extensively to eliminate harmful prejudice and has sought to prevent incitement to violence. The mayor of New York is edging ever closer to inciting such behavior. This behavior needs to stop, and if it does not, then the American legal system may have to come to the rescue, as it has in the past when it has intervened to stop the marginalizing and demonizing of other vulnerable minorities.
• Gerard Leval is a partner in the Washington office of a national law firm. He is the author of “Lobbying for Equality: Jacques Godard and the Struggle for Jewish Civil Rights during the French Revolution,” published by HUC Press.
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