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A Jewish teacher from a NYC high school attended a pro-Israel rally and held up a sign saying "I Stand with Israel." Students saw photo of this teacher and staged a mini pogrom in Hillcrest high school, rioting through the halls, seeking the teacher, aiming to harm her. They memorialized their threats in social media. The teacher took refuge in a locked room.
Students posted videos online of their mini pogrom. The rioters appear to be majority non-white.
In response, schools chancellor David Banks soft pedaled the mini pogrom. It is important to "listen" to the teen pogromists, he insisted.
From the New York Post:
“Over 400 students threatened the life of a teacher, solely because she is Jewish,” ...
Banks "failed to recognize the deep-seated Jewish hate present in our school ,,.
“We have heard from employees and parents who have shared experiences and evidence of Jewish hate across the school system,”...
Graffiti “depicting Jewish hate” in the bathroom of her school went untouched for more than a month ,,,
“I can’t imagine how these students must feel in New York City, 2023, knowing that so many people in school are wishing them harm solely because they are Jewish,” she said.
From a subsequent Post article
Banks faulted TikTok and other social media for exposing students to daily depictions of “children and young people in Palestine being blown up”: The students “feel a kindred spirit with the folks of the Palestinian community. This is a very visceral and emotional issue for them,” said Banks, noting that 30% of the Hillcrest student body is Arab.
I find it ironic that a special term (pogrom) exists for even relatively minor acts of violence against Jews. No special terms exist for violence against any other group of peoples. It is just something commonplace, and unworthy of any special term.
ReplyDeleteTo an anti-Semite, even the mere existence of the word "pogrom" is proof of Jewish privilege.
ReplyDeleteThe thought processes here boggle the mind.
The word "pogrom" exists because the phenomenon of pogroms existed and exist.
Any curious person can learn about this through a google search of the term.
From etymology on line
pogrom (n.)
"organized massacre in Russia against a particular class or people, especially the Jews," 1882, from Yiddish pogrom, from Russian pogromu "devastation, destruction," from po- "by, through, behind, after" (cognate with Latin post-; see post-) + gromu "thunder, roar," from PIE imitative root *ghrem- (see grim).
Pogroms were, initially, a specific tactic used to terrorize and ethnically cleanse Jews in the Russian empire.
One estimate is that 100,000 Jews were murdered.
These were not combatants, but civilians, going about their day to day lives. They were menaced and murdered exactly because of their ethnicity.
Millions of Jews had to leave the area to save their lives.
And this Russian Empire history is not the beginning nor the end of organized violence and murder of Jewish civilians for no other reason than because they are Jewish.
Yes, we need a specific term for this phenomenon.
Bravo, Ms. Goska, for your historically informative correction of this [unflattering noun deleted]. As for whether a mob with harm in mind constitutes a mini pogrom when their target managed to stay out of their reach, reasonable word mavens may differ.
ReplyDeleteI get your point, that "pogrom" might be an overstatement.
DeleteMy point is this
A civilian Jew in a civilian setting was targeted for violence by a mob for no other reason than because she is Jewish.
The mob made clear that they intended to hurt her. They said as much in their social media posts. They made clear that they wanted to hurt her because of her ethnicity.
Danusha, thanks for posting about this.
ReplyDeleteThat a high school teacher, IN THE UNITED STATES, should have to lock herself inside a room because of an innocuous Facebook post … well, it does boggle the mind.
There is little evidence that the tsarist Russian authorities instigated the sporadic violent acts against Jews. We must also remember that most of the 100,000 Russian Jews that perished did so in the context of the Russian Civil War, where more non-Jews died than Jews.
ReplyDeleteFinally, peoples other than the Jews at times faced exclusion, scapegoating, etc., and underwent mob violence because of their ethnicity, but they do not get a special term for their unfortunate experiences. So my original comment about the discriminatory term pogrom still stands.
I note that the above post includes no citations to support its points about Russian pogroms.
ReplyDeleteOther sources disagree and one can find those sources in the notes to this web page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogrom#Russian_Empire
or here
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/pogroms
or here
https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/pogroms
or here
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/pogroms-2
There are certainly terms for other people's experiences. It's false to say that there are no terms.
ReplyDeleteWar crimes, ethnic cleansing, lynching, massacre, mass rape, etc etc etc
It's false that the word "pogrom" is used exclusively in reference to Jews.
ReplyDeleteIt began as a word to describe anti-Semitic violence by non-Jews against Jewish civilians.
More recently the word has been applied to mob attacks on other civilians because of their ethnicity
Indonesian mobs attacked Chinese; those attacks are often referred to as "pogroms."
https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/11/beijing-wont-let-indonesias-chinese-burn-again/
Catholics have been depicted as victims of a Protestant pogrom
https://www.newsletter.co.uk/news/opinion/letters/remember-victims-of-anti-catholic-pogrom-in-1920-2953955
Christians in India have been identified as victims of Hindu pogroms
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-6-2008-6453_EN.html
Danusha, I forgot to add my name to the post above. Apologies.
ReplyDeleteYour posts here are spot-on.
Liron
D, The comment about no evidence (?!?!?!) of pogroms reminded me that I owed you the link about people not believing evidence even when presented if it's simpler to do mental back-flips. I may get his book as it goes with the propaganda part of the research.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.c-span.org/video/?530484-1/misbelief
Jan Peczkis, please feel free to provide links to established experts who cite peer reviewed scholarship. You sent in a link to your own website and I would prefer not to link to your website for reasons we've discussed before.
ReplyDeleteGood article.
ReplyDeletePlease tell us what Masha Gessen said.
ReplyDelete"Poles now wanted a version of history in which they were victims of the Nazi occupation alongside the Jews, whom they tried to protect from the Nazis." Which Poles? All German Nazi crimes are researched in Poland, discussed, taught. The Germans killed about 2 million Christian Poles, the vicitms are unknown outside Poland. The Yad Vashem does not inform about Ładoś and about Poles who died with the Jews, so the government of Poland has to research and inform.
ReplyDeleteThank you.
ReplyDelete"The Holocaust memory wars in Poland have run in parallel with Germany’s." Any comparison of Germany and Poland is disgusting.
ReplyDelete"entire communities or structures of the pre-occupation Polish state, such as the police or city offices, carrying out the mass murder of Jews—was common." This is historical revisonism. Such structers existed in Western Europe, but not in Poland. The police was dissolved in 1939 and the former policemen were drafted to German police. Many policemen joined the Home Army. Many were killed by the Germans for any resistance. Some policeme demoralised, participated in German crimes, were punished by the underground. Gessen does not inform about parallel structures in ghettos, which influenced the fate of 90% of the Jews.
ReplyDelete"Poles killed more Polish Jews than Germans." The phrase has to meanings - the Poles killed more Jews than the Germans did, which is obviously false. the other one - the Poles killed more Jews than they killed Germans. This is Grabowski's obession, he claims that the Poles killed directly and indirectly 200,000 hiding Jews. Grabowski's academic research does not prove the number, but rather 40,000. Tomasz Frydel explains the problems of police and killing Jews. https://www.tabletmag.com/contributors/tomasz-frydel
ReplyDeleteThanks, Jerzy, for providing the link to historian Frydel's excellent and courageous article that tells the truth. I have reviewed Frydel's entire Phd thesis on my website.
ReplyDeleteBIG BULLETIN: POLISH NON-COMPLICITY IN THE HOLOCAUST
ReplyDeleteJan Peczkis
Polish non-complicity? Note that “Polish Complicity in the Holocaust” is an undefined, finger-pointing term. How much of the local population, acting in unambiguous solidarity with Hitler, must do acts against Jews for it to be presumably valid? 1 in 100,000? 1 in 10,000? 1 in 1,000? Who decides this?
Goebbels asserted that the British and Americans secretly approve of what the Nazis were doing to the Jews. (Johnson 1989). When Jews today accuse Poles of delighting in the demise of the Jews, they are making common cause with Nazi German propaganda!
Polish non-complicity: The “fugitive Jews were totally at the mercy of the Poles” mantra is false. A large fraction, perhaps majority, of fugitive Jews were found directly by the German gendarmes, who regularly combed the Polish countryside (Gradzka-Rejak 2018).
Another large fraction of fugitive Jews was denounced or killed not by ethnic Poles, but by Volksdeutsche (Polish-speaking Germans) (Zychowicz 2018).
Only some 21,000 Poles were convicted of collaboration. This is a staggering ONE-TENTH OF ONE PERCENT of the Polish population. (Brechtken 2019). This is in spite of the fact that the Communist government was pro-Jewish.
It is untrue that there was no Polish Quisling because the Germans never wanted one. Germans did seek to form a Polish collaborationist government (Karski 1943, Tory 1990, Witos 1964), but no Pole of any significant prewar stature agreed to serve in this role.
In fact, according to leading SS man Schoengarth, “Not a single Pole would now come forward and really work for the government.” (Piotrowski 1961).
The 200,000 figure of fugitive Jews killed by Poles, is propaganda and media sensationalism: It has been pulled out of thin air! No hard evidence (surveys, censuses, archives, etc.) has ever been presented to justify the widely quoted alleged fantastic death toll of Jews (200,000) from Polish acts (Berendt 2017).
In fact, only 3,000 Polish Jew-betrayals and Jew-killings can be considered “reliably authenticated” from archival sources (Gutman et al. 1986). This is a far cry from the mythical 200,000 and is dwarfed by the tens of thousands of Poles murdered by Jews (Jewish Communists). (Szwagrzyk 2005).
Bechta and Zebrowski. 1997. Narodowe Sily Zbrojne na Podlasiu. Tom 1, p. 68
Berendt. 2017. Zydowski Uciekinerzy I Tulacze w Okupowanej Polsce. IPN BULLETIN 6(139)55
Bjerregaard. 2017. Danish Volunteers in the Waffen-SS, p. 8, 221.
Brechtken. 2019. Political and Transitional Justice in Germany, Poland, and the Soviet Union, pp. 162-165. (Article by Paczkowski)
Browning. 2010. Remembering Survival, p. 11
Chodakiewicz. 1997. Tajne Oblicze Gl_AL I PPR, volume 1, p. 102
Domanski. 2020. Korekty Ciag Dalsze, p. 27
Domanski and Majcher-Ociosy. 2019. Policja Granatowa w Generalnym Gubernatorstwie w Latach 1939-1945, pp. 25-29.
Fernyhough. 2013. Pieces of Light, pp. 211-213
Friedman. 1957. Their Brothers Keepers, pp. 114-115, 206
Frydel. 2021. Village Society and the Holocaust in the General Government. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO Phd THESIS, many pages
Gieron. 2017. Postepowanie karne prowadzone…ANALECTA CRACOVIENSIA 49: 236-237, 242
Gradzka-Rejak. 2018. The Holocaust and Polish-Jewish Relations, pp. 149-151, 206
Gutman. 1986. Unequal Victims, p. 238
Hempel. 1990. Pogrobowcy Kleski, p. 133
Johnson. 1989. A History of the Jews, p. 503
Karski. 1943. Story of a Secret State, p. 132, 155-163
Katz. 2013. Gone to Pitchipoi, p. 213
Markiewicz. 2021. Unlikely Allies, p. 43
Marwell. 2020. Mengele: Unmasking the Angel of Death, pp. 77-78
Piotrowski. 1961. Hans Frank’s Diary, p. 143
Porat. 2009. The Fall of the Sparrow, pp. 158-159
Ribak. 2008. “They are slitting the throats of Jewish children”. AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY 94:175
Szwagrzyk. 2005. Apparat Bezpieczenstwa w Polsce 1944-1956, p. 59
Tory. 1990. Surviving the Holocaust, p. 108
Wieviorka. 2006. The Era of the Witness. pp. xiii-xiv.
Witos. 1964. Moje Wspomnienia, p. 12
Zelkovitsch. 2003. In Those Terrible Days, p. 306