I keep seeing this narrative here about how the Jews were passive and meek during the Holocaust, didn’t protest, and it makes me furious. It is wrong, it is dangerous, and it is harmful af.

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Go learn about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Go learn about the Resistance.

Go learn about the uprisings at Treblinka and Sobibór in ‘43, Auschwitz in ‘44.

Go learn about the underground newspapers.

The spies.

The destruction of Nazi documents.

The assassination of Robert Holzinger, the head of the deportation program, in 1942.

The fact that Jews made up 20% of the French Resistance & also set up the Armée Juive.

“Why didn’t they stand up earlier??” Look up the execution of Helmut Hirsch, who was evidently planning to bomb Nazi headquarters and kill the head of the anti-Semitic Der Stürmer newspaper.

Or the Baum-Gruppe, active starting in 1937–distributed anti-Nazi leaflets, organized semi-public demonstrations, bombed an exhibit organized by Goebbels.

Which—surprise!—resulted in mass arrests, executions, targeting of German Jews.

We were so not meek and allowing ourselves to go to the slaughter that GANDHI criticized us. (Wrongly, he was wrong to do so.) He’s quoted as saying: (+ cotd)

“The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs... It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany ... as it is, they succumbed anyway in their millions.”

Martin Buber wrote to Gandhi in 1939, “do you think perhaps that a Jew in Germany could pronounce in public one single sentence of a speech such as yours without being knocked down? ...Such actions, however exerted, do not have the slightest influence on their (Nazi) opponents.”

We were not passive.
We were not meek.
We didn’t just accept going lto the gas chambers like sheep.
We fought back every step of the way, in all the ways we could.
We used violence not infrequently because, frankly, this was self-defense.

But the powers of the State were greater.

Their armies had more power.

Too many non-Jews just went along with it, didn’t fight back, let it happen.

We always look at the one guy refusing to salute in this photo. But look at all the other ones. Look at every other choice getting made here.

Do not blame victims for their victimization.

Do not tell people who are fighting for their lives that they are resisting wrong, if you are not part of that targeted group.

Ask yourself how you’re complicit and how you can be of service.

Psst in case this thread was too subtle for you, #BlackLivesMatter . Today and every day.

Still too subtle? Don’t make Jews yr poster children for polite protest or making the oppressor comfortable.

Don’t tell Black people that they’re fighting 500 years of brutality, atrocity & oppression the wrong way.

Don’t want to be one of the guys saluting? Show up now.