- Jewish Americans have been politically divided over support for Trump.
- The pro-Trump Capitol riot on January 6 that featured at least one Holocaust reference showed the depth of that chasm.
- While most American Jews voted for Biden, most Orthodox Jews approved of Trump’s job as president.
Among the rioters who stormed the US Capitol on Wednesday, January 6, was a white man with long graying hair and a thick white beard. Emblazoned on his hooded sweatshirt, pictured in several photographs from the insurrection, were the words, “Camp Auschwitz.” Beneath the reference to the Holocaust concentration camp that killed 1.1 million people during World War II was an image of a skull with the phrase “Work brings freedom,” a translation of the German words that were etched into the gates of the camp.
The man in the sweatshirt, Robert Packer, was far from the only rioter driven by anti-Semitism. The insurrection drew a wide range of Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and QAnon conspiracy theorists whose falsities are built in part on anti-Semitic tropes. “It was an ugly weave of kindred historic hatreds still alive in the United States,” Rabbi Menachem Creditor, the Pearl and Ira Meyer Scholar in Residence at the UJA-Federation of New York, told Insider.
Read the article by Rachel Greenspan in Business Insider Australia.