Buffalo

Like most American Jews (and, I imagine, most American non-Jews as well), I was confused back in 2017 when white supremacists marched through the streets of Charlotteville, Virginia, chanting “Jews will not replace us.” At first, I supposed that the slogan referenced some crazy belief that Jews were slowly taking over the nation and pushing non-Jews out of their jobs, their communities, and even their place in American society. That there are hundreds of millions more non-Jews in the United State than there are Jews seemed not to matter; all that I thought I heard those people saying was that they were afraid that, one by one, the non-Jews of the nation would somehow be replaced by Jews. But then I learned that that was not at all what they meant and that the idea was that Jews, by controlling the federal government and its immigration policies, were behind the effort to bring gigantic numbers of non-white foreigners into the country and that it was those people—dark-skinned types from Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa—it was those people whom the Charlottesville marchers were afraid were slowly going to take over their jobs, their churches, and eventually their state legislatures and their delegations to the Congress. So the verb was transitive, not intransitive: the marchers were insisting that the Jewish plan was to replace them not with themselves but with various kinds of people of color and foreign ethnicity, but that that was not going to work because they were not going to permit it to happen.

At the time, this theory—that white “legacy Americans” (to use the more recent term of choice) need seriously to fear being replaced by non-white newcomers who will slowly become the majority in their towns and states, and eventually in the nation itself—was new to me. But that was then. And, in the meantime, it has taken off in the blogosphere and on the kinds of internet websites that appeal to white supremacists. Brenton Tarrant, the man who murdered more than fifty worshipers in two different mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand on March 15, 2019, left behind a seventy-five page long manifesto that he called “The Great Replacement,” in which he detailed his theory that people of color—and particularly Muslims—were on their way to becoming the majority in New Zealand and that it was only a matter of time before they replaced the white population and were in a position to elect their own officials who would complete the task of transforming New Zealand from a republic of primarily white people with European ancestors into some version of a caliphate. That Muslims currently constitute a mere 1.3% of the population of New Zealand did not apparently strike the shooter as a relevant statistic.

Closer to home, Robert Gregory Bowers, the man accused of murdering eleven and wounding six worshipers at the Tree of Life Synagogue on October 27, 2018, is also a proponent of this “Great Replacement” theory. (He apparently chose his target in Pittsburgh because one of the congregations housed there was part of the HIAS-sponsored “National Refugee Shabbat” intended to build support for treating refugees seeking asylum in our nation kindly, generously, and fairly.) And Patrick Crusius, the man charged with murdering twenty-three people in a Wal-Mart’s in El Paso on the third of August in 2019, appears also to have written a manifesto similar to the one composed by the Christchurch killer, one in which he writes openly that his belief in that same theory prompted him to take action against the Latino population in his home state.

And now we have Buffalo, a tragedy allegedly perpetrated by a teenager earlier this week in which ten people were killed and another three injured. Of the thirteen, eleven were Black Americans, which was apparently the point: the young man accused of the crime, Payton S. Gendron, allegedly drove hours from his home in Conklin, New York (south of Binghamton on the border with Pennsylvania), to a supermarket he had already scouted out and which he correctly imagined would be filled with Black shoppers on a weekday afternoon. And he too was a fan of the “Great Replacement” theory, as evidenced by the fact that the manifesto he posted on Google Docs was to a large extent cribbed from the manifesto composed and posted by Brenton Tarrant before he shot all those people in New Zealand. For good measure, he wrote approvingly as well both about Anders Breivik, who murdered seventy-seven people, mostly teenagers in an Oslo summer camp, in July of 2011, and Dylann Roof, who murdered nine Black worshipers at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston in 2015, and who has since been sentenced to death.

Where did any of this come from? Even if we are prepared to ignore the illogic of someone killing innocents in a supermarket, none of whom was an immigrant to these shores or a refugee, to address the nefarious plot to replace white Americans with darker-skinned replacement citizens, it is still hard to imagine what could motivate someone to adopt a worldview so little in sync with reality. Is this then just a kind of mental illness in which an outlandish theory takes root in the psyche of a group of fellow travelers and leads them to act in a way that would be explicable if the theory were grounded in fact? Or is this something else, perhaps the poison fruit of some sort of malign nostalgia for a fantasy version of bygone days—when the Congress was completely white, gas was thirty-five cents a gallon, and women had no ambitions other than marriage and motherhood? (Just for the record, women have been part of the work force since Colonial days and Congress hasn’t been completely white since the middle of the nineteenth century when the first Black members of Congress were elected in the 1860s. Gas, however, really was once thirty-five cents a gallon, and in my very own lifetime too.) Or is this merely traditional racism dressed up to sound slightly less disreputable than it otherwise would—in other words, an effort to justify the hatred specifically directed at Black people or Hispanic people by asserting that such people are provoking the hatred directed against them and therefore deserve to be hated. (In other words, is “Great Replacement” theorizing just a refurbished version of the favorite theory of old-school anti-Semites—that we Jews are responsible for the hatred directed against us—revised to suit prejudice based on race or ethnicity rather than religion?)

The irony in all this is that, of all peoples, Jews really do know what it means to be replaced. In my opinion, Aharon Appelfeld’s book, Blooms of Darkness, is one of the best Shoah-based novels ever. (I’ve written about it in this space too: click here and here to revisit two of those letters.) It’s an understated work about a little boy, Hugo, whose father has already been deported and whose mother, facing her own imminent disappearance, has the notion of begging an old friend , a Ukrainian woman named Mariana, to hide her son. Mariana agrees, but fails to make clear that she lives in a brothel where she works as a prostitute and that most of her clients are German soldiers. The story is dramatic and extremely moving, but the most powerful part of the book is at the end. The war is over. Mariana is arrested as a collaborator who gave comfort to the enemy and is summarily executed. Hugo is alone in the world, then somehow realizes that the city he is in is actually his home town, that his parents’ neighborhood is nearby, that he finally actually can return home. And so he set forth, this little boy of eleven, and eventually does find the right neighborhood. But everyone—every single Jewish soul—has vanished and been replaced by Gentiles who have taken over their homes and their businesses. He actually finds his parents’ home and, peering through the window, sees some other family seated at his parents’ dining room table enjoying their evening meal. The sense of unimaginable loneliness a child in that situation would feel is effectively conveyed in the author’s sparse, unadorned prose; what made Appelfeld a truly great author was his ability to tell complicated, emotionally overwhelming stories plainly and simply. If Hugo, the little boy, were somehow to step out of his book to visit in jail with the Buffalo shooter, he could explain what it means actually to be replaced, to be dragged away from the stage on which your life is unfolding so that your own murderers and their relations can settle into your space and eat their meals on your mother’s good china. He could explain that this really did happen, but who is going to explain to people caught up in the concept of replacement theorizing that nothing even remotely like that is happening to white Americans?

Questions relating to immigration and the bestowal of refugee status are legitimate topics for debate among principled citizens eager to promote the best interests of the nation and its citizens. But when that debate crosses the line to invoke a phantom phenomenon by its nature so unnerving and upsetting that it encourages its adherents to conclude that only violent action can resolve the matter fairly—then the discussion no longer serves the nation and instead becomes part of the problem it was undertaken in the first place to address.

It's hard to feel sympathy for a mass murderer and I don’t. Not really. Not at all, actually. But another part of me wonders where the real responsibility here lies if not with those who intentionally and maliciously got a young person—a boy not yet old enough to buy cigarettes legally in New York or to order a glass of beer in a bar—to imagine that he would be acting nobly and patriotically by murdering innocent men and women shopping in a supermarket on a sunny afternoon. The fate of the accused will be decided in court. But the matter of what role others played in prompting him to act—that too is part of the issue our nation needs to face in the wake of the massacre in Buffalo.