1938 Vienna, Antisemitism and Palestine

I’m just back from a family vacation that ended with three days of ‘roots’ exploration in Vienna, where four generations on my mother’s side lived in the decades leading to 1938.

We visited the homes where family members grew up and then raised their own children.

We toured the synagogue where my grandparents were married – the only one in Vienna to survive the November 9, 1938 pogrom (a date, I learned, that Austrian Jews prefer not to call Kristallnacht, a name chosen by the Nazis to make it sound less horrific).

We found the schools my mother and grandparents attended. We even discovered that a great uncle built the house where Herzl lived on our family’s block!

Jews were integral to turn-of-century Vienna. They were composers, writers and builders. They were artists, and they were patrons of the arts. Sigmund Freud drank coffee here; over there, Leon Trotsky was playing chess and plotting.

What an amazing – and ultimately tragic – history.

At the synagogue where my great-grandmother watched her son marry, her name is etched in a marble memorial to the 65,000 Viennese Jews exterminated in the Holocaust.

On the street outside her brother’s apartment building, a commemorative plaque called a “Stolpersteine” recalls the 36 Jewish residents who were arrested and then murdered. The plaque lists only three names as “representatives” – but not my great-uncle. Perhaps the authorities thought it would disturb passersby if the entire sidewalk were covered in plaques?

The recorded history of Jews in Vienna dates to the 12^th century. Across the centuries, they at times provided counsel, service and financing to the rulers. As frequently, they were subject to blood libels, mass executions and expulsions.

In the mid-19^th century, Jews couldn’t own property, practice most professions or build houses of worship. When synagogues were finally permitted, they needed to be hidden from view in courtyards. The hate ran deep.

Antisemitism remains part of the landscape. Austria’s far-right Freedom Party – with Nazi sympathies and echoes – is a significant player, campaigning against “globalists” and financiers like George Soros, running the same antisemitic playbook as other far-right European parties (many of whom claim by the way to be ‘pro-Israel’).

There are also high and growing levels of anger over what’s happening in Gaza. “Free Palestine” graffiti was plentiful – as it is throughout Europe. And, we heard, some of the anti-war, anti-occupation anger turns – as it does in the US – into antisemitism.

Having just experienced a spate of attacks in the US on Jewish people and institutions, American Jews are well aware that real danger festers in the space where opposition to Israeli government actions morphs into hatred of Zionists and Jews.

My visit sparked much thought about antisemitism – how today’s variants relate to those of the Nazi era (no, as my friend Steve Sheffey wrote this morning, we’re not living in Anatevka, the fictional shtetl in “Fiddler on the Roof,” today).

How one defines precisely where legitimate opposition to Israeli government actions crosses the line into antisemitism. Whether some of today’s antisemitism on the left would dissipate if the Israeli government would change its self-destructive course.

One question in particular challenged me: how to relate my family’s story of loss and displacement nearly nine decades ago to Palestinian stories of loss and displacement from nearly eight decades ago.

Even writing about the two in one sentence will, I’m sure, draw rebukes and anger. But my mind wouldn’t stop going there, though I recognize that the two tragedies cannot and should not be compared.

My family lost so much – lives, homes, friends. Now, decades later, I can reclaim citizenship in Austria. My mother was eligible for reparation payments (though she refused to accept them). Members of my extended family reclaimed property (there’s even a tenuous family connection to Adele Bloch-Bauer, the subject of the Klimt painting and Oscar-nominated movie, “Woman in Gold”).

Palestinians too lost so much not only eight decades ago – but right up through today. Lives, homes, friends.

Recently I debated a former Member of Knesset, Einat Wilf, who maintained that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will only end when Palestinians acknowledge that they lost, “get over it” and give up their claims to land and homes – and, frankly, to their history. [You can watch our whole debate, “Is Trump Good for Israel?” here.]

Speaking only for myself, I will never ‘get over’ what happened to my family 80-90 years ago. The anger and sadness will never stop.

How, therefore, can one expect – as Einat Wilf and the right-wing demand – Palestinians to give up their connectivity to and sense of loss over the homes and histories of their parents and grandparents? Is demanding that the side that has suffered a loss renounce their history, memory and rights really the route to conflict resolution?

My experience in Austria this week strengthens my belief in the absolute necessity of mutual recognition and acknowledgement of pain, rights and tragedy.

If we hope to ever resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israel will need to acknowledge the tragedy that befell the Palestinian people nearly 80 years ago. And the Palestinian people will need to acknowledge the Jewish people’s history in and connectivity to the very same land.

If they do, then maybe one day in a generation or two, a Palestinian family will take their children to visit the land where their great-grandparents lived, went to school and married.

Maybe they’ll see the land their family had to leave. They will welcome the plaques and memorials to villages and history lost. And they’ll go home - whether to the independent state of Palestine next door or to somewhere else they will have chosen to call home.

And perhaps – hopefully – that Palestinian will be able to, as I now can, find a measure of peace and closure, without giving up the memory of their family’s tragedy or fully “getting over” the pain of their loss.