"Jews will not replace us!"
That vile anti-Semitic slur was chanted on the streets of Charlottesville. Gun-toting, tiki-torch-bearing white supremacists repeated a lie that Jews remember well: Jews control the world, or may soon.
The accusation is Pharaoh's, who says "Look, the Israelite people are much too numerous for us. Let us deal shrewdly with them, so that they may not increase; otherwise in the event of war they may join our enemies in fighting against us and rise up from the ground."
"Jews," Pharaoh exclaims, "will not replace us."
The allegation is repeated in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Anti-Defamation League explains: An early 20th century forgery by the "Czarist secret police, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion ... spell[s] out the alleged secret plans of Jewish leaders seeking to attain world domination."
The century that fabricated these Protocols also produced the Holocaust. Nazis made sure: "Jews will not replace us."
Jews remember. Perhaps memory is what we do best. We recall that we were slaves in Egypt. We remember the Holocaust. We know that anti-Semitism could rear its ugly, violent head once again.
Lest we forget, remembrance is thrust upon us: "Jews will not replace us!"
Jews, of course, weren't the main target of that malevolent march. Even the anti-Semitic chant began its life as, "You will not replace us!" "You" did not refer to Jews, but to people of color. To immigrants. To LGBTQ Americans. To Muslims. To women with the temerity to seek power or authority. To anybody who isn't white, Christian, and native-born. And that does include Jews.
The greatest commandment of the five Books of Moses is repeated 36 times: "Remember the heart of the stranger, for you were strangers in the Land of Egypt." Charlottesville reminded us: When any group is attacked as "strangers," the Jewish people are under attack. To the tiki-torch marchers, Jews are strangers in the land of America. "You will not replace us" and "Jews will not replace us" are one and the same. A battle cry against people of color is a call to war on us. An attack on immigrants is an assault upon the Jewish people.
We Jewish people are not, of course, alone in our claim on memory.
The Charlottesville uprising began as an alleged act of remembrance. The protesters faced a threat: The glorious history of the Confederacy might be erased. A monument to Robert E. Lee might be removed from a town square.
And yet, as Rabbi David Stern teaches, Confederate monuments are not about remembering. They are about forgetting. Forgetting that slavery was the reason for secession. Forgetting that slavery was the justification for the Confederacy, the cause of the lost cause that wreaked death and destruction upon this nation.
Instead of recording the ignominious history of African American slavery, these monuments create a myth of Southern white heroism. No teachers of real history, these memorials distort history. Erected in the 20th century, they are shrines to Jim Crow.
Instead of binding a society together with a shared heritage, these statues divide our communities, perpetuating the purpose for which they were erected. These monuments announce to black Southerners: You do not share "our" heritage. "Our" glorious history is founded upon your subjugation. You are a stranger here, properly feared and forced into slavery. These memorials insist that Pharaoh was right.
If we are to construct a community of love and equality, then we must first tear down the infrastructure of hate and injustice. Confederate monuments must go.
Let our Confederate monuments be placed in a museum of slavery and Jim Crow. Let us not seek to destroy history but to build an accurate record.
And let us build new monuments: memorials to martyrs, not of a cause that deserved to lose, but to the men, women, and children who lost their lives to cruel slavery. Let our shrines honor real heroes--champions who stood up to oppression and segregation.
History is important, and monuments matter, defining and shaping our society. A state that honors Confederate traitors as heroes is one that will replace a black-majority school board with one white man. States across a region replete with Confederate monuments will enact laws that suppress minority voting in the name of addressing the nonexistent problem of voter fraud. A nation whose parks are filled with shrines to oppressors will incarcerate an unconscionable percentage of young black men.
Removing statues will be empty symbolism if we do not root out racism deep in our own hearts and transform our society. Let us tear down shrines as a step toward healing our nation. Let us transform Charlottesville's tiki-torches into a flame of American passion for educational opportunity, voting rights, criminal justice, residential desegregation, and so much more, burning down slavery's legacy once and for all and reconstructing a nation of righteousness.
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Rabbi Barry H. Block leads Congregation Bnai Israel in Little Rock.
Editorial on 10/05/2017