See me, not who you fear to see

    Let's start by looking at two very contrasting games.  First, above, is a game made in the Theresienstadt ghetto.  Yes, Monopoly was already popular in the 1930s and yes, the places depicted what was familiar for children of the ghetto: barracks, prison, electrical wires and more.  Scoring a bad "Chance" card would be getting deported...which meant a certain death.  

    In contrast, the game below is an antisemitic propaganda game from 1936 called "Juden Raus" (Jews Out).    The goal was to collect as many disgustingly-depicted "Jews" as possible and expel them from the board. Besides wanting to barf when thinking about this, I have chills while processing that this was not a Nazi sponsored game. It was made by normal people in the ordinary commercial industry. In fact, an SS magazine criticized it for making light of the Jewish problem.  

    Both games make me sick, and I hesitate to share them because I don't want to make you sick.  However, together, they both go to show a large gap between reality and fear, between victims and hatred.  The past few days, I've been thinking a lot about antisemitism (I don't feel like capitalizing the word) and before I go to sleep, I want to share a few bits about it that are jarring to me.

   First of all, I knew that Hitler certainly didn't create antisemitism.  It had been there, festering, for centuries. And it hasn't ended with the Holocaust.  I did a quick Twitter search of the word "Jew" today and came upon so much hatred.  Plus, the news has been abuzz here with anti-Jewish graffiti on antic-jewish state-sponsored posters in Hungary. There are so many stereotypes and false generalizations that are so harmful.

     I hadn't really thought, though, about the role of intellectuals in propagating the hatred and, eventually, in using  propaganda to fuel the ideology of antisemitism and to incite the masses.  Take a look at what Voltaire said; I'm not going to enjoy Candide anymore!




   Because Jews couldn't own land in most countries and  could no longer had a nation of their own, they were relegated to certain careers. From this spread the local stereotypes of the cheating, wandering Jew.   Even though most people didn't read the philosophical words of the likes of Voltaire, these words took flight within a segment of the intellectual community.

The 1800s and 1900s were an era of ideas (in contrast to now, our era of technology) and Nationalism began to spring up.   The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen opened up ideas of human rights and non-discrimination for views.  Consequently, Jewish people were more visible to their peers and many, so many of them, began to take part in society.  In the time before the Holocaust, so many of the Jewish folk were part of secular society.  Just as I am Jewish and American, so too there were people who were Jewish and German, or Jewish and Polish and so on and so forth.  It didn't seem to be a conflict for the Jewish people to have two equal, non-competing identities.

However, now they were more visible. In Germany, at the start of the Holocaust, Jews were only 0.8% of the population. Many people didn't know a single Jewish person.  But now times were poorer and a myth began to arise that Jews wanted a state within a state, that they weren't loyal to their own nation.  The historians and intellectuals wrote and spoke about this problem, feeding the fuel, or sowing the "raw material" (see below) for this misconception.

This wouldn't have made such a mark, though, if the intellectuals didn't take their ideas and feed society's underlying antisemitism with propaganda.    I'm getting exhausted, but just look at the title of the book on the left: "Never Trust a Fox on his Green Meadow, or a Jew on his Word."  Yuck!  Or look at the depiction of a Jewish man as a mushroom in the children's book "The Poisonous Mushroom."  I'll probably explore these more later, but mixing these with the board game above, you can see how the preexisting ideology then was sold to the millions.

Before I wrap this up with some photos from an exhibit on a model street in old Jewish Poland, I want to remind you of my title of this post: See me, not who you fear to see.  Humans are so diverse. I am a member of many groups, not just one.  So are all of you!  Know me, and don't make assumptions.  We all have pasts...with compassion and understanding, we all work toward futures.

So, please take a moment and look, really look, at these pictures from the world that caused companies to be so threatened that they created games like Juden Raus.  Look at the children and ask if they're going to grow up to be as dangerous as a poisoned mushroom. Ask yourself if they really looked that different from photos you've seen of kids growing up anywhere else in the 1920s and 1930s.... See them...not who the fearful wanted to be forgotten.