The promise of “Never again,” that the Holocaust won’t recur, won’t be realized by “guilting the world” but instead by “being strong, by having institutions, by having firearms, by knowing how to defend them.”
That’s according to David Azerrad, assistant professor and research fellow at Hillsdale College’s school of government in Washington, D.C., who spoke to JNS on Tuesday, on Yom HaShoah, after delivering a lecture about Jew-hatred on the online Right on Monday night.
Azerrad, 48, gave the April 13 talk at Southern Methodist University, in the Dallas area. The private school and the SMU Chabad sponsored the talk, which part of the school’s Nate and Ann Levine endowed lecture in Jewish studies.
A Moroccan Jew from Montreal who lives in Potomac, Md., with his wife and baby, Azerrad told JNS that he differentiated between Jew-hatred on the political Right and “wokeness on the Left” and spoke about the growing number of online “influencers” like former Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly and antisemitic podcasters Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens pushing a “blame the Jews” approach to politics.
“It’s a race to the bottom,” Azerrad said. “They earn a revenue, but it’s not issued by an institution.”
“My thesis is that this is more worrisome for the Right than it is for Jews,” he said.
On the Left, “it’s institutionalized in universities, in corporate America and every HR department. It’s the law of the land that you ought to discriminate against men and whites in order to achieve equity,” he told JNS. Where the Left blames straight white males, “for a segment of the online Right, the answer is Jews,” Azerrad said.
He previously worked for nine years as director of the Heritage Foundation’s B. Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics, where he said he “never once encountered antisemitism. I felt perfectly at home,” he said.
“The biggest threat confronting American Jews is not online antisemitism on the right. It is intermarriage and assimilation,” Azerrad said.
The lesson that Jewish communities should take from the Holocaust and modern Jew-hatred is that “no one’s coming to the rescue,” according to Azerrad. “We should defend ourselves. The congregants should be armed.”
For followers of Fuentes, Holocaust revisionism is transgressive. “They feel that they are in the know, and that all of the Boomers and the Fox News viewers and the old people have no idea what’s going on,” he said.
Online influencers often make statements that can’t be disproved, like “prove to me that the Mossad didn’t assassinate JFK,” Azerrad said. “They shift the burden of proof onto you.”
“One ought to refute the nonsense, but, if I may disagree with Ben Shapiro, this is a case where feelings don’t care about your facts,” he told JNS. “They feel aggrieved. They’re angry.”
“They see their country falling apart,” he added. “They see a regime that is hostile to them.”
Some will eventually realize that it is “a worldview for losers that robs you of your moral agency and cultivates the mental habits of victimhood and passivity,” Azerrad said. But the truly committed cannot be persuaded with arguments, he thinks.
“I don’t like the victimhood mentality in the Jewish people,” he said. “We need less Woody Allen Jews, More Israelis.”
