Jews and the world around them: 90 years, from Nuremberg laws to campus violence

This month in history:

September 1935 – Germany unveiled Hitler’s Nuremberg race laws, in effect decreeing that Jews no longer were German citizens and, thus, no longer would be protected by the rights of citizenship under German law.

September 2024 – Jewish college students face campus violence and assaults across America as pro-Palestinian demonstrators block Jewish students from attending classes and participating in various college activities.

Let’s look at what is happening today in America first

At the University of Pittsburgh, two Jewish students wearing yarmulkes and walking to a Sabbath dinner as fall classes began were attacked by a man wearing a keffiyeh, which usually indicates pro-Palestinian support. The man came toward them from across the street and crashed a glass bottle over their heads.

At Columbia University in New York City,  one of America’s oldest and most highly regarded institutions of higher education, Jewish students faced encampments near the entrance to the university as classes began after Labor Day. The encampments were designed to disrupt campus activities and force divestment of endowment holdings in companies that have ties to Israel.

Pro-Palestinian groups at Columbia have highlighted the privilege of Columbia students in having access to higher education while “young people in Gaza have had their universities reduced to rubble.” Never mind that the Palestinians of Gaza put Hamas in power and have tolerated the party’s use of Gaza’s government resources predominantly for building tunnels and making military preparations for a war they started with Israel.

At the same time, it also is true that Israel has not worked as hard as it might have to prevent civilian casualties in that war. But the fact remains that Hamas has exacerbated the situation by murdering hostages and concealing its fighters and leaders amid the civilian population.

Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate student who is representing the protesters in negotiations with the university alleges that the protest is justified “as long as Columbia continues to invest and to benefit from Israeli apartheid.”

Apartheid? Apartheid is the act of economic, political, and social discrimination by a controlling racial group against another group within a country. Apartheid does not exist in Israel. Palestinians in Israel are allowed to become Israeli citizens. They can own property, vote, hold public office, and enjoy virtually all the protections of citizenship — unlike the Jews of the late 1930s in Germany. Moreover, about 20 percent of Israel’s population is of Arab descent, including many Palestinians.

Still, Khalil appears to have bigger things in mind in terms of disruption and violence on campus. “Not only protests and encampments, the limit is the sky,” he said.

Meanwhile, Elisha Baker, a Jewish undergraduate at Columbia, tweeted, “Jewish students just want to go to class.”

Other colleges

Pomona College near Los Angeles had to convert a recent convocation ceremony to an online event after the Pomona Divest from Apartheid group blocked entrance to the event.

At Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Jewish students and the National Jewish Advocacy Center have filed a federal complaint alleging a hostile anti-Semitic climate, according to the Anti-Defamation League. The complaint describes an incredible array of anti-Semitic activities that the college has failed to rein in. The list includes “genocidal chants; antisemitic slurs; disruptive pro-Hamas protests that prevent people from working and studying; denials that rape and murder occurred on October 7 [in Israel at the hands of Hamas]; destruction of a memorial [on campus] for October 7 victims; and a general atmosphere of palpable hatred directed at Jews and Israelis.” In addition, the complaint alleges pro-Israel groups were “given a bureaucratic runaround” when they sought to counter this anti-Semitic atmosphere by, for instance, displaying 100 small Israeli flags near the college’s Holocaust memorial.

The New York University (NYU) Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine is withholding the services of its employee-members until the university grants amnesty for anti-Israel protesters disciplined last spring for anti-Semitic actions on campus. The organization also, incomprehensively, expressed wonderment and alarm recently when the university clarified that “disseminating tropes, stereotypes, and conspiracies about Zionists” could violate the University’s nondiscrimination and anti-harassment policies.

Divestment

The divestment effort seems to have a nationwide presence. Colleges and universities, however, are pushing back at the efforts to get them to divest holdings in business entities that are seen by some as being supportive of Israel, its war against Hamas, for providing significant military aid to Israel for the war.

There have been several successful efforts over the past 40 years or so to get colleges and universities to sell their investment holdings in businesses and organizations that support controversial activities. These include the tobacco industry, private prison operators, thermal coal production, and fossil fuels; also the government of South Africa during apartheid, according to an article by Zachary Folk in Forbes, May 15, 2024.

Divestment, however, is complicated, a lengthy process, expensive, and has been shown to have minimal impact on the targeted businesses or organizations – although it does serve to increase awareness of and sympathy for the issues that result in divestment. Also, because the list of companies that could be targeted for divestment include such American behemoths as Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet (Google), there couild be enormous pushback.

In addition, there could be legal issues that might block divestment. At least 38 states, including Iowa, have laws or executive orders designed to discourage economic boycotts or divestment that could harm Israel.

Finally, as Columbia has noted, divestment of Israeli-linked companies presents a different set of circumstances than previous, successful divestment efforts relating to such things as fossil fuels and South Africa. Unlike the efforts that led to divestment from companies in these situations, divestment from Israeli-linked companies does not have broad consensus among the University community, according to the Forbes article.

In other words, those who are arguing for divestment may have a limited understanding of how the process works, the obstacles it faces, what its limitations are, and what it might or might not accomplish. 

Now let’s look back at what happened in Germany in 1935

Hitler did not have a limited understanding of how the Nuremberg laws would work or what they would mean for the Jews of Europe and Western Russia.

The announcement of the laws came at the conclusion of a weekend rally of the political party that had taken control of Germany almost three years earlier. The country’s national legislative body met with rally participants to enact the new laws, announced on September 15, 1935, to a cheering, screaming, applauding, saluting crowd.

The two laws provided the framework for what would become a systematic effort to eliminate Jews from the face of the earth. The laws also created apartheid, although no one called it that then.

Few foresaw or understood the impact of what had happened. The top headline on Page 1 of The New York Times the next morning proclaimed, “REICH ADOPTS SWASTIKA AS OFFICIAL FLAG.” There was a reference to the race laws in a sub-headline, and the two actions definitely were linked, but that explanation was reserved for The Times’ most careful readers that day – in a bottom paragraph on an inside page.

The first of the two Nuremberg Race Laws defined Jews based on their ancestry without regard to what religion, if any, they practiced. For the first time in history, Jews would be discriminated against based on who their parents were, not based on what they believed. Jews no longer would be allowed to marry or have sexual relations with anyone who was Aryan by birth. Pre-existing marriages between Jews and Aryans were declared invalid. Jews were forbidden from employing Aryan women under age 45 as household servants. Punishment for violating these restrictions was to be imprisonment and hard labor.

The second Nuremberg Race Law provided that Jews no longer were German citizens.

The laws became effective on January 1, 1936. By that time, the laws also were expanded to apply to Gypsies and Negroes. The laws became the precursors of more anti-Semitic restrictions in 1937 and ’38.  Jews were required to register their property. Aryan-owned businesses were required to dismiss Jewish employees. Jewish business owners were required to sell out to Aryans at extremely low prices determined by the Reich. Jewish lawyers were ordered to stop practicing law and Jewish doctors were limited to treating only Jewish patients.

The goal was to force the country’s Jewish population into poverty. For Jews who did not have Jewish-sounding names, the Nazis added middle names on their ID cards – Israel for all men, Sara for all women. It needed to be easy for officials to enforce the new laws.

Now, back to what played as the big news in The New York Times on September 16, 1935. For those who read down to the 40^th paragraph or so near the bottom of Page 11, Hermann Goering, president of the Reichstag and Hitler’s No. 2, made it clear what path the Nazis were on. The new flag, he said, “was the symbol of racial purity, too. Therefore, no Jew may raise this holy symbol.”

And so, about a year after the oppressive restrictions from Nuremberg were implemented, it began: The Holocaust, the murder of 6 million Jews.

Back to 2024

All of which brings us back to the Palestinian movement of 2024. The goal has been clearly stated: “From the river to the sea.”

That would eliminate Israel from the face of the earth. The target, for the second time in 90 years, is an enormous percentage of the world’s Jewish population, this time, the 7 million Jews of Israel.

NOTE TO MY READERS: I write this column, Arnold Garson: Second Thoughts, as a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. You can subscribe for free. However, if you enjoy my work, please consider showing your support by becoming a paid subscriber at the level that feels right for you. The cost can be less $2 per column.

Sources for this column include but are not limited to: Man charged in attack on Jewish students also suspected in earlier Craig Street incident, University Times, University of Pittsburgh, September 6, 2024, Susan Jones; Campus Crisis Alert, Anti-Defamation League, September 4, 2024; College Protesters Want Divestment From Israel: HJere’s Why That’s So Difficult, Forbes, May 15, 2024, Zachary Folk; The Nuremberg Laws, Archives Receives Original Nazi Documents That Legalized Persecution of Jews, National Archives, 2010; History Unfolded, U.S. Newspapers and the Holocaust, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; The Nuremberg Race Laws, Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; The Nuremberg Laws, britannica.com, Michael Berenbaum, fact-checked by the Editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica. In addition, the section of this article relating to the Nuremberg Laws was excerpted from a Facebook post on September 15, 2020 by Arnold Garson; The sources for this post included some of the same sources listed here as well as extant newspaper coverage from September 1935 regarding the enactment of the laws.

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