Historien upprepar sig.
SAPIR Editor-in-Chief Bret Stephens was awarded the World Jewish Congress’s Teddy Kollek Award for the Advancement of Jewish Culture in New York on November 9, 2023. Previous winners of the award include filmmaker Ken Burns and violinist Itzhak Perlman. This is an edited transcript of Bret’s remarks.
The Road to a Second Kristallnacht
...We’re now in a season of reminders, and it’s fitting that this ceremony takes place on the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht. We commemorate that night not because, in and of itself, it represents a particularly great tragedy: Ninety-one or so murdered that night is almost minor in the long history of Jewish calamities, including what befell us last month.
We commemorate Kristallnacht, rather, for what it presaged and for what it symbolized.
What it presaged was the impending destruction of European Jewry. What it symbolized was the shattering of a moral order that might have prevented their destruction. Kristallnacht was more than a pogrom in the heart of supposedly civilized Europe. It was the signal that all the old categories — decency, order, fairness, justice, reason — no longer applied. Broken glass was a reminder of how brittle the barrier between civilization and barbarism could be...
This moral shattering did not happen overnight. It was years in the making. It first required the preparation of the public mind to accept that anything was permissible when it came to the Jews. And anything was permissible because, as Joseph Goebbels insisted, “the Jews are guilty.”
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