This Jew Doesn’t Accept Sean Spicer’s Apology Because I Remember the Past

Spicer’s Latest Comments Are a Throwback to Easter Pogroms of the 1800s

Any student of history – and particularly Jewish history – will know that the time around Passover and Easter and into the rest of the Spring and Summer was, for many centuries, a strange mix of religious euphoria and life-threatening fear. 

Passover is the Jewish holiday that celebrates liberation from slavery. It’s a time of pure happiness and gratitude as Jews focus on the miracle of freedom and redmption from the darkest moments of our collective history. And, from the 1800s through the middle of last century, (and probably earlier than that) it also marked the start of our darkest season. 

As Easter approached every year, Christians across Eastern Europe and Russia would terrorize – and even kill – Jews in the name of Jesus. The military or police never stepped in to stop them. Sometimes, they secretly (and even publicly) helped them. 

Why Easter? Ruth B. Bottigheimer explains:

For centuries, Christian churches all over the world taught children to hate Jews. Not only to hate them — but to justify their murder. They did so with one crucial choice: to tell the Gospel story in the words and the content of the book of Matthew rather than in alternate tellings by Mark, Luke, or John.

Matthew repeatedly used his telling of Jesus’ final days to exonerate Romans but to excoriate Jews for Jesus’ crucifixion. He magnified his vision of Jewish perfidy (choosing clemency for Barabbas, a murderer, rather than for Jesus) and violent Jewish unrest (leading Pilate to fear civic riot). He provided the historic justification for centuries of retaliation against Jews for Jesus’ death (Pilate washes his hands, tells the crowd to “see to it yourselves”), and provided the fateful formula, “His blood be on us and on our children.”

So when Sean Spicer gets on TV and parrots rhetoric used by Holocaust deniers to push the idea that Hitler “didn’t sink to using chemical weapons” while calling concentration camps that killed 11 million people (6 million of them Jews) with Zyklon B gas,  “Holocaust Centers,” red flags went up across the world.

To add insult to injury, many of us Jews strictly observe the holiday and spent our mornings in synagogue services and the rest of the first (and second, for some) day offline and purposefully disconnected from the world, so we weren’t able to join the conversation or speak out against his statements until now.

This has been quite a conversation to come back to. 

For his part, Spicer attempted to clarify his statements, issuing an absurd number of revisions and eventually apologizing (badly).

For me, Spicer’s apology rings hollow, for many reasons.

Spicer first called Jewish mega-donor Sheldon Adelson to apologize before apologizing to the rest of the world, as though Adelson speaks for all Jews (he doesn’t) or as if any of us care about his opinion (we don’t). Spicer’s apology to Adelson is a hallmark of anti-Semitic behavior. If/when Adleson forgave him, Spicer would be able to say, “See! This Jew thinks what I did was fine, so clearly I don’t hate ALL Jews! I can’t be anti-Semitic if I have a Jewish friend!” 

Plenty of folks lined up to be the administration’s token Jew – even though that role is already filled by Jared Kushner – including former George W. Bush Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, and some Jews even spoke out in support of Spicer’s comments, furthering the idea that Jews aren’t ever full citizens of a country where they live because Jews are both a religion and a ethno-nation unto ourselves.

That’s literally the kind of talk that historically gets Jews kicked out of wherever we’ve lived – and we’ve been kicked out of just about everywhere. 

I don’t need to explain just how damaging this can be to Jews – history has already shown that. And history has shown, over and over, how people can be persuaded into ignoring warning signs in favor of keeping quiet for the sake of not making waves. 

Because many Jewish folks were offline observing Passover, a majority of the voices in the conversation weren’t Jewish. The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway wrote a very long piece explaining that Spicer just made a mistake – nevermind that he parroted the exact same language Holocaust deniers use – he just made a mistake, and we’re worrying too much. Because if there’s anyone who knows what types of anti-Semitism we should or should not be worrying about, it’s definitely someone who’s never experienced anti-Semitism, right?

God help me if I ever take religious – or life – advice from The Federalist. 

When it comes down to it, it really is possible that Sean Spicer just made a mistake. In his defense, he’s incredibly bad at his job. To fully understand why his comments, matter, though, we have to look at the bigger picture:

• This is an administration that purposefully left any mention of Jews out of its International Holocaust Memorial Day statement and makes Holocaust “jokes”.

• This is an administration orchestrated and run by a known anti-Semite.

• This is an adminstration that refused to condemn anti-Semitic violence and threats for weeks, waiting until hundreds of sites and hundreds of thousands of people had been affected.

• This is an administration that is wildly supported by anti-Semites and neo-Nazis and has barely attempted to separate itself from them.

One occurrence is a mistake. Two is a slip-up. Spicer’s comments were just another in a long set of anti-Semitic dog whistles and rhetoric. That they came on the first day of Passover and following a pattern of hundreds of years of anti-Jewish violence is no coincidence.

Follow Robbie Medwed on Twitter: @rjmedwed

To comment on this article and other NCRM content, visit our Facebook page.