100 Dead Jews

What's the over/under on outrage

My latest in The Progressive Populist

I dated a woman once whose father was a Holocaust denier.

He had heard one of my commentaries on public radio — actually, his daughter played it for him — about a visit I made to the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen in Germany. He told her he wanted to talk to me about it.

“Please don’t get into it with him,” she begged me.

There was no way I was not getting into it with him.

“I think Nazis killed Jews,” he said when we met, “but I don’t believe the 6 million figure,” a number I had mentioned in the commentary.

“Then how many do you believe were murdered?” I asked.

My girlfriend closed her eyes, shook her head.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe a hundred, maybe more, but nowhere near 6 million.”

“The Germans built thousands of concentration camps, death camps, and work camps for a hundred Jews. Think about that for a second. When have Germans ever been that inefficient?”

I didn’t care that he didn’t laugh.

“All right, it might have been more, but not 6 million. “Why makes you think they killed so many?”

“Because they kept great records, they took photos.”

“Well, I don’t want to get into a numbers game with you.”

He didn’t hate Jewish people, his daughter told me later, as much as he hated Jews. Jewish people to him could be generous and funny and participate in business dealings with him, but Jews killed Christ and control the banks and the media.

“In the first 50 days of the Trump Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has made 32,809 enforcement arrests. To put this figure into perspective, in the entire fiscal year 2024, ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations made 33,242 of these at-large arrests.”

That figure is not from some left-wing media outlet underscoring the horror of the current administration — it comes from the Department of Homeland Security, the organization headed by former South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem. She has been in the news recently for standing in front of a video from a high-security prison in El Salvador in which she wore a $60,000 watch.

Todd Lyons, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said recently, “We need to get better at treating this like a business . . . like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”

(In March this year, Thomas Homan, Trump’s director of ICE during the first horrendous administration and now Trump’s “Border Czar,” said, “I think it’s an insult to the brave men and women of the border patrol and ICE to call law enforcement officers Nazis. They are simply enforcing laws enacted by Congress.”)

You say “enforcing laws,” I say “following orders,” let’s call the whole Reich off.

During the Holocaust, Nazis referred to Jews as rats; now the Trump administration is calling Latinos props and packages. In a 2023 Veterans Day speech in New Hampshire, Trump pledged to “root out . . . the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

(In America, how many radical left thugs are Jews?)

The administration has deported hundreds of noncitizens to El Salvador’s infamous CECOT prison, alleging that all of these people are criminals. According to 60 Minutes, though, 75 percent of them did not have criminal records, including Andry Hernandez Romero, an artist, whose crime was having crown tattoos on his body that look like gang symbols.

What they have in common is that not one of those deported or standing behind Noem looks like my ex- girlfriend’s white, Holocaust-denying father.

It’s insidious what the administration is doing.

This from The Guardian: “ICE does not appear to keep count of how many people it has arrested at check-ins. But The Guardian estimates, based on arrest data from the first four weeks of the Trump administration, that about 1,400 arrests, or about 8% of the nearly 16,500 arrests in the administration’s first month, may have occurred during or right after people checked in with the agency.”

They were arrested while in the process of attending mandatory immigration check-ins or court appearances? Arrested for doing what they were asked to do to stay in America.

What is the threshold, then, for outrage? What if Hitler had killed only a million Jews, or 500,000, or 875, or 100? Would Jews still have gotten a state? What if Pol Pot had massacred thousands and not millions? Does Hollywood still make The Killing Fields?

When do we get to revulsion?

How many Kilmar Abrego Garcias and Andry Hernandez Romeroses have to be sent to Central American gulags? How many families, like the one in Oklahoma City -- whose names have not been released for their own safety -- have to stand in their underwear in the rain because ICE executed a search even though their names weren’t on the warrant? How many professors, like Rasha Alawieh from Brown University, and who knows who else, have to be deported for not towing the administration or Netanyahu's line on history? How many Canadian journalists, like Jasmine Mooney, have to be arrested for being considered “shady” by a border official and sent to an ICE facility for two weeks? And, finally, how many smiling, Rolex-wearing, dog-killing Trump shills have to be posturing in front of prisoners in a cage, and how many holding facilities under construction in Texas and elsewhere to detain Latinos and professors and who knows will make the list in the coming weeks and months before it all starts to matter to those to whom it hasn’t mattered so far?

Somewhere between 100 and 6 million dead Jews deserve an answer to that.