I’m Suing the White Supremacists from Charlottesville. Joe Biden Will Be a Leader in Fighting Back Against Their Hatred
In September 1930, the Nazis in Germany had just secured the second-largest number of seats in the Reichstag. It was a staggering victory for Adolph Hitler. And yet there were many Jews who did not seem particularly troubled by the result.
One of them was Sigmund Warburg. He was a prominent, German businessman who also happened to be Jewish, famed for his integrity and judgment. And, to play the game of Jewish geography, he also happened to be the father of the husband of my mother-in-law’s sister. As Niall Ferguson notes in his biography of Warburg, after the 1930 election, Warburg was optimistic. “[O]nce they are in government,” he wrote, “they will immediately become. . .more sensible.” This, of course, could not have been more wrong.
Warburg’s statements were written almost a century ago — in a different place and time. The Nazis rose to power in a different political environment. They didn’t have our laws, our courts, or the United States Constitution. The events of the Holocaust took place in Europe: a place with a long and storied history of political extremism and antisemitism. Conspiracies to commit violence against despised groups could not happen to us here like they happened there.
Or could they? Just over three years ago, hundreds of neo-Nazis, Klansmen and white supremacists from across the country descended upon the college town of Charlottesville, Virginia. People of color, immigrants, Jews and their supporters were singled out as targets for violence. And violence there was, including the death of Heather Heyer.
When we filed our lawsuit against the leaders of the violent conspiracy in Charlottesville, even we were not fully aware of the extent of the dark forces at play — nor the singlemindedness of the hatred. As defendant Andrew Anglin posted on the Daily Stormer website during the events on August 11–12: “Someone is getting gassed! My guys on the ground can’t see who — LET’S HOPE IT’S JEWS!” The chants that rang out on the University of Virginia campus on August 11, 2017 speak for themselves: “Jews will not replace us.”
A year later, violence came again. A community in Pittsburgh gathered together on Saturday morning, just as they do every Shabbat. A gunman burst into the synagogue with a semiautomatic weapon, murdering eleven Jews while they were praying. And then a mere six months later, another gunman fired shots inside the Chabad of Poway, California — killing one woman and injuring three others, including the rabbi.
Let me be clear: while the men who planned Charlottesville and the murderers in Pittsburgh and Poway truly hate all minorities, the single passion that seems to inspire them the most is hatred of Jews. That is clear not only from their chants and logos, but from their online harassment of me, which focuses on the fact that I am Jewish: “in the oven Kike dyke, no antisemitism without Semitism.”
So, how did we get here? President Trump’s victory in 2016 was hailed by the so-called alt-right as a clarion call to action. “Hail Trump! Hail our People! Hail Victory!” proclaimed Richard Spencer, one of the ringleaders in Charlottesville. He was speaking, days after the 2016 election, at a “think tank” that publishes reports touting the supposed genetic superiority of white people. “Hail victory” is the English translation of “Sieg Heil,” the victory salute used by Nazis at political rallies in the 1930s.
Flash forward four years. On September 29, 2020, at his first debate against Joe Biden, and with 29 million Americans watching, Donald Trump was asked by moderator Chris Wallace whether he would “condemn white supremacists and militia groups.” His response? Trump refused to do so, instead encouraging them to “stand down and stand by.” And what was the reaction? The Proud Boys, neo-Nazis and other extremists celebrated his comments as a call to action. Andrew Anglin, for example, posted on the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi site: “I got shivers. . .He is telling the people to stand by. As in: get ready for war.”
Joe Biden knows in his heart and soul that we have no choice but to fight back. Charlottesville is the reason Joe Biden got into this race. He has made that clear from the very beginning.
Sigmund Warburg managed to save himself, his wife and children. The story in our family is that he knew it was time to leave Germany when the German Finance Minister refused to meet with him. Obviously, and tragically, millions of others were not so lucky.
We cannot take the collective security of the Jewish people for granted ever again. To state what should have been obvious in August 2017, there were not “fine people on both sides” in Charlottesville. To quote the rabbis arrested while marching with Martin Luther King in 1964: “We came as Jews … second only to silence, the greatest danger to man is loss of faith in man’s [or woman’s] capacity to act.” That’s why we must act by voting to elect Joe Biden as the next President of the United States.
Roberta Kaplan is the co-founder of the TIMES UP Legal Defense Fund and founding partner at Kaplan Hecker & Fink LLP. She is currently representing a group of plaintiffs injured in Charlottesville, suing the organizers of the violence under The KKK Act of 1871, in partnership with Integrity First for America.
