It appears we realized nothing from Anne Frank.
Historical past warns us that the road between safety and persecution will be dangerously blurred. The thought of an immigrant registry within the U.S. — a system that tracks individuals based mostly on their nationality or faith — is just not solely discriminatory however harking back to one in all historical past’s darkest chapters: the Holocaust. After we mentioned never again, we meant by no means once more for anybody.
However right here we’re, practically 100 years later, dangerously repeating historical past.
In Nineteen Thirties Nazi Germany, one of many Hitler regime’s first steps towards genocide was bureaucratic. Jews had been registered, recognized and separated from the remainder of the inhabitants by means of lists, identification papers and census information. These information made it attainable to implement more and more repressive legal guidelines, prohibit the rights of these on the registry or required to register, and ultimately, orchestrate mass deportations and homicide.
It didn’t occur all of sudden. The very first thing that occurred — together with to our (Rabbi Mordechai’s) mother and father — was that their papers had been stamped “Jews.” It started with a registry. With “simply monitoring.”
The parallel we see unraveling is disturbing. The administration’s proposal to create a registry for immigrants, significantly these from Latin and Muslim-majority international locations, isn’t about nationwide safety; it’s about racism and oppression. We have already got in depth immigration monitoring and vetting programs. As a substitute, these concepts are about branding total populations as suspicious due to their religion or homeland. It is not about what individuals do — it is about who they’re.
That distinction is the foundation of injustice, and it’s the foundation of evil. The Torah tells us in Exodus 1, “a brand new king got here to energy in Egypt, he was frightened of the facility and variety of the Hebrew individuals.” This led to a regime of oppression and compelled labor to exert his energy over the individuals. Matthew 2:16 reads, “Herod ordered the extermination of boys underneath 2 years outdated in Bethlehem.” The basis of this evil was worry. We hear these echoes as we speak of how immigrants are dehumanized and punished.
America is just not Nazi Germany, however the administration’s behaviors are main us down the identical highway. It could be a grave mistake to imagine we’re resistant to the identical temptations that led to its horrors. Germany within the Nineteen Thirties was a extremely superior, educated society. Its descent into fascism was gradual, constructed on worry, nationalism and the idea that some individuals had been inherently harmful. And the incremental isolation that blinded individuals from the mass horror happening made the Holocaust sneak into society nearly quietly. Many individuals participated in piecemeal injustice to help the huge power of the Nazi regime.
Normalizing harmful and discriminatory insurance policies is just not hypothetical — it’s historic.
Japanese internment camps had been justified as nationwide safety measures throughout World Conflict II. It took generations earlier than we, as a nation, acknowledged that these had been shameful violations of American ideas.
The Trail of Tears was the compelled relocation of tens of hundreds of First Nations, together with the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole tribes, from their ancestral lands within the southeastern U.S. to designated “Indian Territory” west of the Mississippi River in the course of the 1830s. This brutal journey, carried out underneath the Indian Removal Act of 1830, resulted within the deaths of hundreds resulting from illness, publicity and hunger. It’s estimated that 90 percent of the individuals of this land had been exterminated. The land they got to settle didn’t respect their sacred traditions nor their humanity, as they had been despatched to a land that was not as fertile as the place they initially resided.
Registries based mostly on identification lay the groundwork for systemic oppression. They make it simpler to focus on, exclude and finally hurt. They don’t make us safer — at finest they make us smaller, morally and constitutionally. At worst, we lose our personal humanity and enact a regime of impunity and whole depravity.
America’s power lies in its range and its values: liberty, equality and due course of. After we single out teams based mostly on identification, we abandon these values. We commerce freedom for worry. And we betray the very thought of democracy.
Historical past has already written the result of such paths. We should have the braveness to study from our previous — and refuse to stroll these paths once more.
Rabbi Mordechai Liebling is a board member at Religion in Motion, and is the son of Holocaust survivors; all of his grandparents, aunts and uncles had been killed. Pastor Julio Hernandez is the manager director of Congregation Motion Community, a federation of Religion in Motion. He organizes interfaith-rooted communities to guard and uplift immigrant communities by means of advocacy, accompaniment and collective motion.