Judge makes decision on whether to force Alaska to reprint 800K ballots<\/a>]<\/ins><\/p>\n“Social media companies have said hate speech is not something they want to be promoted,” Taylor said. “A social media company gives a platform and a megaphone, all companies have said hate speech is not part of that.”<\/p>\n
Facebook is an exception to that, Taylor said.<\/p>\n
“Facebook has not defined Holocaust denial as hate speech,” Taylor said. “They said certain kinds of Holocaust denial is hate speech, but it’s very clear from the studies what’s behind Holocaust denial is anti-Semitism.”<\/p>\n
The Claims Conference is currently in talks with Facebook about their hate-speech policies, he said.<\/p>\n
Not surprised but still disheartened<\/p>\n
The presence of anti-Semitism both nationally and in Alaska is not surprising to Patricia Armstrong Custard, a member of Juneau’s Congregation Sukkat Shalom.<\/p>\n
“I have to admit that I was not surprised, but I was disheartened,” Custard told the Empire. “I know there is a lack of awareness in our country nationally, and in Alaska specifically. There isn’t a lot of overt anti-Semitism, more of what we call microaggressions. A lot of times there are, on a daily basis, when you go out and about, you hear things that have become turns of phrase ‘Jewing things down.’ It all comes down to an unawareness of people. Alaska has always had really deeply ingrained Jewish activities, Anchorage has had Jewish mayors, basically since Anchorage was around. We’re within politics in Alaska, we’ve been here for a long time, we’re ingrained in the community.”<\/p>\n
Custard too cited the spread of misinformation as a concern, one that’s followed the Jewish people for some time.<\/p>\n
“This whole ‘fake news’ business, this is how things start, Custard said. “Germany at the time was a modern, first world, educated country. The Holocaust slowly happened through propaganda and ‘othering’ of people.”<\/p>\n
Custard said “othering” is “making people seem less than human.”<\/p>\n
“Once you do that, then it’s very easy to think of people as not being human, instead of your neighbors,” Custard said.<\/p>\n
More than half of Alaskan respondents, 59%, said they had seen Nazi symbols in their community, on social media or both in the past five years.<\/p>\n
There were recent events in Alaska that showed what a lack of understanding about the Holocaust and anti-Semitism can lead to tension, Custard said. In May, state Rep. Ben Carpenter, R-Nikiski, likened stickers given to those who’ve been screened for COVID-19 upon entering the State Capitol Building to the yellow Stars of David Jewish citizens were made to wear in Nazi Germany.<\/p>\n
Custard recalled an incident in 2018 when mailers were sent out opposing state Sen. Jesse Kiehl, who is Jewish and was running for Senate at the time. The mailers showed a man in a dark suit, putting a stack of money into his jacket with the words “If you give Jesse Kiehl your vote…you may as well give him your wallet.”<\/p>\n
Custard and other members of her congregation felt the mailer played on anti-Semitic tropes about Jews and money. But she said it was more troubling that when the congregation reached out to the group behind the mailers, Republican Women of Juneau, their overtures to meet were turned down.<\/p>\n
“We reached out to them to talk to them about it and to help educate them about different tropes, and they would not sit down with us to talk about it all,” Custard said.<\/p>\n
Sukkat Shalom sent out offers to several local groups on what she called “anti-Semitism 101,” but that offer was only taken up by the local Church of Latter-Day Saints.<\/p>\n
Republican Women of Juneau President Ginger Johnson declined to comment for this article.<\/p>\n
Nationally, 59% of respondents said they felt something like the Holocaust could happen again today, 51% of Alaskan agreed. Yet 16% of Alaskans said they thought people talk too much about the Holocaust and 11% believe there is no anti-Semitism in the U.S. today.<\/p>\n
A desire to learn<\/p>\n
The survey’s findings were not all bad, Taylor said, and showed a strong desire on the part of young people to be educated about the Holocaust. Seventy-three percent of Alaskan respondents said they felt teaching about the Holocaust is important, partly so it doesn’t happen again, that number was 80% nationally.<\/p>\n
Nationwide, 64% said Holocaust education should be compulsory in schools, 60% of Alaskans said the same. Likewise, 60% of nationwide respondents said schools and teachers should be responsible for Holocaust education, 57% in Alaska.<\/p>\n
“I think we have a limited window of time,” Taylor said. “While this generation cares about the issue, it doesn’t know about it. But they’re trying to put effort into learning the lessons of the Holocaust. Holocaust education is as much about the future as it is the past. When Holocaust education is prioritized in the school system, the lessons are transmitted to a younger generation to ensure the racial hatred that was so devastating at the time is not something that creeps back into our society.”<\/p>\n
[Police investigate racist graffiti near middle school<\/a>]<\/ins><\/p>\nTaylor made the case a lot of anti-Semitism comes from a simple lack of understanding of the historical events that led to the Holocaust. Both pointed to the Nazi propaganda integral to the spread of misinformation about the Jewish people.<\/p>\n
“We’ve seen where Nazism takes us,” Taylor said. “We saw that in Germany in the 1930s. What starts with expression of viewpoints of extremist ideology, we think that’s a concern for those views to be taking hold. We’ve seen that expression of those kinds of viewpoints could potentially lead to the kind of attacks that took place in California and New Jersey.<\/p>\n
But the strong response from young people showed there was a desire to learn about the Holocaust, and Taylor said he believed society should respond to that call.<\/p>\n
“At the end of the day, education is done at a local level, state local, home,” Taylor said. “But education is covering the entire gamut of our system of living. What we’re hoping is a sense of the importance of educating the younger generation about the Holocaust. We need to make those tools available in whatever school they’re working for. This is a partnership, it’s not something that can be forced or imposed. We hope this survey would say to people, ‘Yes, it’s disturbing, but on the other hand they want to understand.’ We hope this will be a collective, joint effort. Let’s use this survey as a wake-up call.”<\/p>\n
• Contact reporter Peter Segall at psegall@juneauempire.com. Follow him at @SegallJnuEmpire.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Alaska ranked 41st in US for Holocaust awareness in new survey <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":531,"featured_media":63684,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":9,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,4],"tags":[746,230],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-63683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home","category-news","tag-holocaust","tag-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/531"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63683"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63683\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63683"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=63683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}