Antisemitism in the Oval Office
The encounter in the White House was antisemitic….It was all there, in the Oval Office, in the shouting and in the interruptions, in the noises and in the silences. A courageous man seen as Jewish had to be brought down. When he said things that were simply true he was shouted down and called a propagandist. There was no acknowledgement of Zelens’kyi’s bravery in remaining in Kyiv.
Timothy Snyder, Antisemitism in the Oval Office
https://snyder.substack.com/p/antisemitism-in-the-oval-office
Timothy Snyder is one of the great contemporary historians, especially of the Holocaust. His books include Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, The Road to Unfreedom, and more.
His post today, Antisemitism in the Oval Office, is about the inherent antisemitism of the recent confrontation between Zelensky and Trump in the Oval Office. It is Snyder’s view, and the view of other experts, that this was a clear example of public antisemitism. By the President of the United States.
Please read the post in its entirety. A brief excerpt below.
The attempt to humiliate Volodymyr Zelens’kyi in the Oval Office a week ago was an American strategic collapse. It heralded a new constellation of disorderly powers, obsessed with resources, seizing what they can. Inside that new disaster is something old and familiar that we might prefer not to see: antisemitism. The encounter in the White House was antisemitic.
I am historian of the Holocaust. I was trained by a survivor. Jerzy Jedlicki was nine years old when the Germans invaded, and fourteen when he emerged from hiding in Warsaw, and a prominent Polish historian by the time we met. He talked to me about antisemitism for decades, from the time of the breakup of the Soviet Union until his death in 2018. The way that I reacted to the scene in the Oval Office, and how I have pondered and considered it since, have to do with my research, but also with him….
To conclude that the scene in the White House was antisemitic, one does not need to know anything further. It’s all right there: the demand for deference, the obsession with money, the claims of corruption and dishonesty, the encirclement, the loud voices, the bizarre grievances, the underlying sense that a Jewish person does not fit and must be expelled. The context was evocative enough, and nothing more is really needed: those historical markers of antisemitism; Zelens’kyi’s Jewish origins; the particular way he was treated by non-Jews.
Timothy Snyder, Antisemitism in the Oval Office
