Nov 11, 2018 4 min read

On Nov. 11, 1938, 80 years ago today, The Washington Observer’s front page carried news that Washington & Jefferson College was going to celebrate Homecoming and Founder’s Day. Above it was a bigger and much more grim headline, in black and in capital letters:

NAZI MOBS PLUNDER JEWISH STORES

A wire story went on to detail the carnage that greeted Jews in Berlin and across Germany, Austria and Sudetenland (the latter of which later became part of Czechoslovakia) in response to the killing of Nazi diplomat Ernst vom Rath by a 17-year-old Polish Jew. It was, according to the dispatch, “a nationwide day of vengeance.”

“Bands of youths roved the streets of Berlin and other cities from early morning on, smashing windows of Jewish shops. In many places, crowds which gathered after daybreak pushed into the establishments and came out with loot. Most of Berlin’s Jewish stores were plundered.”

All told, what came to be known as Kristallnacht – meaning “Crystal Night,” for the broken glass that littered the streets of German communities – ended up claiming at least 91 lives. Additionally, 7,000 Jewish-owned businesses were destroyed or damaged, 267 synagogues were destroyed and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and thrown into concentration camps.

A few days later, The Washington Observer ran a follow-up story, which included a comment Michael Joseph Curley, the archbishop of Baltimore, who stated that “the savageries of Hitler exceed any recorded in history.”

Little did the archbishop know what lay just a few years down the road.

The 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht would have been an occasion for sober remembrance in any circumstance, but has become even more solemn in the wake of the Oct. 27 massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Despite the horrific slaughter not too many miles from Washington, anti-Semitism is neither as prevalent nor as acceptable as it once was in the United States. High-profile public figures on a par with Henry Ford or Father Charles Coughlin do not spew blatantly anti-Semitic rhetoric, and Jews are not subject to discrimination when they try to enter universities or gain footholds in various professions. But the killing at the Tree of Life demonstrated all too horribly that anti-Semitism is a storm that has never fully gone out to sea.

In fact, over the last couple of years, the storm has appeared to gather strength. The Anti-Defamation League reported a 57 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents the U.S. in 2017, a tally that includes vandalism, bomb threats and assaults. Last year, the torch-bearing white supremacists marching through Charlottesville, Va., were chanting, “Jews will not replace us.”

Certainly some of the blame must be pinned on officials who try to push anti-Semitism with a wink and a nudge. By, for example, accusing financier and Jewish emigre George Soros of masterminding conspiracies and other dark misdeeds without a smidgen of proof, they are pushing anti-Semitism out of the fringes and into the mainstream. And since the 2016 election, white supremacists and rabid nationalists in this country have come to believe they have allies in high places.

Deborah E. Lipstadt, a professor of Holocaust history at Emory University in Atlanta, told The New York Times, “I’m not a Chicken Little who’s always yelling, ‘It’s worse than it’s ever been!’ But now I think it’s worse than it’s ever been.”

The possibility of something akin to Kristallnacht happening in this country in our lifetime is probably remote. But even the slender possibility that hate could build to such an ugly crescendo should be enough to give us all pause.