Greenblatt - It Could Happen Here: Why America Is Tipping from Hate to the Unthinkable―And How We Can Stop It

Dedicated to Bernard Greenblatt, my paternal grandfather,

whose bravery and courage continue to inspire me every day

In writing this book, Ive aimed to give you your own ADL handbook against hate, filled with the wisdom and tools you need to identify and push back on prejudice. Accordingly, Ive drawn heavily on blog postings, handouts, frameworks, speeches, and other materials from the ADL library. Although Ive often indicated in the endnotes where Ive adapted language and concepts from previously published material, Ive also freely borrowed text from ADL without attribution. I hope youll find the final product not only readable but also accessible, engaging, informative, and inspiring.

I d dreamed of this place for so long. It was charming and quaint in my mind, with cobblestoned streets and green, well-kept parks. Now, gazing around on the train platform, I found a cold and desolate winter landscapesoulless brick industrial buildings, steam rising from nearby chimneys, graffitied walls, just a few bare trees, even fewer pedestrians.

The platform itself was empty save for two gangly soldiers at the far end, guns slung over their shoulders, a light snow falling onto their thick, green Soviet-style overcoats. I made for a small white wooden box of a building about a hundred yards from the station. It wasnt much bigger than an average suburban garage. A sign indicated it was the visitors center, but that seemed almost ironic. I couldnt imagine many tourists coming here.

Two women sat inside at the counter, one middle-aged, the other elderly. They clutched their sweaters around them against the draft as I closed the door behind me. There were some shelves that held books in German, but otherwise the room was bare.

I addressed the middle-aged woman. Excuse me, bitte. Gute tag. Hello. Using hand gestures and speaking slowly in English, I communicated my request. My grandfather is from this town. Im from America. He passed away, but Im interested in learning about his life, so Ive come here. Id love to meet people from the Jewish community. Id love to see the synagogue.

Blank stare.

I tried again, this time pulling out the pocket German-English dictionary I had picked up in Berlin the day before. It was thick with a blue and orange cover. I hadnt even cracked the spine.

My, uh, Grovater, hes Magdeburg, hier, here he grew up. Jewish. Jude.

She squinted. Dein Grovater? Jude?

We went back and forth like this for a while, and she seemed to grow frustrated. The elderly woman asked her a question, and for the next few minutes they conversed with each other in rapid-fire German, pointing and nodding at me. Finally, the older woman turned to me and in heavily accented English said, Your question, we no understand. Nobody has ever asked it. There are no Jews here. What do you want?

There are no Jews here.

I knew this, of course, but hearing it out loud felt like a punch in the face. I stared back at her, sadness slowly enveloping me.

Many Americans think it unimaginable that hate will ever come for us or our loved ones. We live in the United States, after all, a place of laws and human rights and democracy. Nothing like what happened to the Jews in Germany could ever happen here.

My grandfather used to think that way. He rarely spoke of his youth beyond a passing comment here and there. But a few years before he died, we sat down at my kitchen table and I probed him about his past for a school project. I held a minitape recorder in my hand and, trying to understand his life, asked him question after question with the overeager enthusiasm of a high-school junior. Finally, I asked whether, as a young person, he could ever have imagined his grandsons would be Americans, not Germans.

He smiled at me, shook his head, and in his thick accent admitted he never could have. He was born and raised in Magdeburg. He grew up riding his bicycle on its cobblestoned streets. He boxed in the towns youth league and was a fierce player on the soccer pitches. Magdeburg and Germany were all he knew.

Where else would we be? he said, sighing.

Hate doesnt devastate its victims right away. You might not feel particularly threatened where you live. But make no mistakehate can come for you. Half a century from now, your grandchild might visit the town where you currently live, inquire about you and your community, and receive nothing but a blank stare.

One Demagogue Away from Disaster

The organization I lead, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), is the worlds oldest organization dedicated to fighting hate in all its forms. The catalyst for its founding in 1913 was a brutal episode of anti-Jewish hate, the infamous Leo Frank affair. At a pencil factory outside Atlanta, a young girl was raped and murdered. Frank, the factorys Jewish manager, was accused and, despite exculpatory evidence, wrongly convicted of the crime. After his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, an enraged mob lynched him. At the turn of the twentieth century, antisemitism was a staple of American life. Jews routinely were maligned in the press and discriminated against in public life. The injustice done to Frank galvanized members of the Jewish community to do something about it.

Remarkably, though, the ADLs founders didnt limit their scope solely to Jews. The organizations original charter calls on the ADL to secure justice and fair treatment for all. Stopping the defamation of Jews was the ADLs immediate object, but the organizations larger purpose was to secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens alike and to put an end forever to unjust and unfair discrimination against and ridicule of any sect or body of citizens. The founders of ADL believed in the simple but powerful premise that America could not be safe for its Jews unless it was safe for all its people.

Today my team and I are on the front lines of the global fight against hate, tracking invective and violence and working with law enforcement to prevent tragedies. The trends were seeing are alarming. Hate is on the rise everywhere, much more than many people realize. Between 2015 and 2018, the United States saw a doubling of antisemitic incidents. In 2019, the United States saw more antisemitic incidents than it had in any year in the past four decades.

The individuals behind antisemitic incidents subscribe to a range of ideologies. A white supremacist perpetrated the April 2019 attack on a synagogue in Poway, California, while Black Hebrew Israelites shot up a New Jersey kosher supermarket in December 2019. In 2020, QAnon-inspired candidates spouting antisemitic conspiracy theories were elected to the U.S. Congress, and antisemitic imagery was on startling display among perpetrators of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

In recent years, so-called activists hostile to the State of Israel and sympathetic to the Palestinian cause held rallies that unapologetically banned cops and Zionists. Although banning Zionists might not sound like antisemitism to some, it most certainly is. Since a strong majority of American Jews regard the State of Israel in favorable terms and most American Jews feel a bond with the State of Israel as part of their Jewish identities, banning Zionists from a rally is tantamount to saying Jews dont belong here. Moreover, while impassioned criticism of Israeli policies is reasonable, a seething and obsessive hostility toward the worlds only Jewish state and its supporters becomes almost indistinguishable from outright hostility toward the Jewish people.

Relatedly, when fighting broke out between Israel and Hamas during the spring of 2021, so-called activists around the world all too often deployed rhetorical violence against the Jewish state and its supporters by, for example, equating Israel and Zionists with Nazis, calling for Israel to be eliminated, and directing anti-Israel messaging at synagogues and other Jewish institutions. That rhetoric in turn likely helped trigger a frightening spike in real-world violence against Jewish people in the United States and around the world.