I spent Thursday evening speaking at a Kristallnacht commemoration about whether the rise in antisemitism — and authoritarianism — we are experiencing is an echo of the 1930s Europe that produced that horrible pogrom. None of us knew that while we were talking in the safety of a Manhattan synagogue, a modern-day pogrom was unfolding on the streets of Amsterdam.
The videos of mobs chasing and beating Israeli soccer fans who’d traveled to the Netherlands to cheer the Maccabi Tel Aviv team are, as Foxman said, horrific. Also chilling, terrifying, outrageous and all the other negative adjectives you can think of. But this is not the 1930s.
There are crucial differences between what erupted on Amsterdam’s streets last night and the Night of Broken Glass that shattered Germany and Austria 86 years ago, chiefly the existence and strength of the Jewish state of Israel.
Israel dispatched two planes to rescue the soccer team and its fans Friday afternoon, and sent its foreign minister to meet with his Dutch counterpart. A stark contrast with Kristallnacht, which happened days after Hitler ordered the expulsion of some 12,000 Polish Jews living in Germany. They were given a single night to leave their homes and loaded onto trains to the border of Poland, where most were denied entry.
Germany’s ruling Nazi Party orchestrated Kristallnacht, in which Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues were looted and burned, and 100 civilians were murdered while police stood idly by or participated. Dutch officials may have ignored warnings by Israel’s security services about the potential for violence around the Europa League soccer game, but they arrested 62 rioters and on Friday morning made strong statements condemning the attacks that sent five Israelis to hospitals and injured another five.
“We failed the Jewish community of the Netherlands during the Second World War,” the king of the Netherlands told the president of Israel in a Friday phone call,“and last night we failed again.”
Amb. Deborah E. Lipstadt, the U.S. special envoy on antisemitism, tweeted Thursday night that the attacks were “reminiscent of a classic pogrom,” a post viewed more than 655,000 times over 12 hours. Lipstadt is first and foremost a Holocaust historian, so I called her to ask if history was repeating itself.
“It’s not the same because Kristallnacht was government sponsored — in the 1930s, it was government-sponsored, this is not government-sponsored,” she noted. “If you’re down on the ground and being kicked, does that make you feel better? No. But if you’re sitting back and thinking about it, it matters.”
Lipstadt said she hoped to visit Amsterdam as soon as next week. “We are flabbergasted, completely gobsmacked — I guess shocked is the best word, we are shocked to see something like this happen in the capital of one of our close democratic allies,” she told me. “The authorities were AWOL and the Dutch have admitted that. So we express our dismay, we express our shock, and we tell our allies we expect better.”
There is another crucial difference between the 1938 attacks on Jews that took place solely because they were Jewish and the 2024 attacks on Israeli soccer fans because they are Israeli. It’s not an excuse for the violence — there is absolutely no excuse for the kind of wanton mob violence captured in video clips in Amsterdam last night — but it is still true that last night’s rioters were motivated at least in part by geopolitics as well as Jew-hatred.
The reality is that Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza — a war spawned by the Hamas terror attack of Oct. 7, but also a war that has now gone on far too long and cost far too many lives — has combined with underlying Jew-hartred to make it unsafe for Israeli soccer fans to travel abroad and cheer for their team.
That, too, is horrific and terrifying and shocking.
