Eighty years ago, an infamous anti-Jewish riot broke out in Germany: Kristallnacht, which sparked an international debate about asylum. In 1938, starting on Nov. 9 and continuing through Nov. 10, thousands of members of the Nazi police force and Hitler Youth torched synagogues, vandalized Jewish homes, looted Jewish-owned businesses, destroyed schools and killed close to 100 Jews. In the aftermath of this destruction, some 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to Nazi concentration camps. The initial claims were that this was a spontaneous riot in response to the murder of a German official in France, but it soon became clear that it was a coordinated state effort to advance the Nazi agenda of making Germany judenfrei, or free of Jews.
Kristallnacht may seem like an event in the distant past with little relevance to the United States today, but anti-Semitism, nativism and anti-immigration sentiments in the United States abound. In fact, this week, the Trump administration initiated a new restriction on asylum claims. To be sure, President Trump condemned the mass-shooting rampage at Tree of Life synagogue two weeks ago. But his continued deployment of anti-Semitic tropes, such as the specious claim that George Soros is funding the Central American immigrant caravan and his abolishing of asylum for people coming from the southern hemisphere shows how the lessons of Kristallnacht still need to be made clear.
