Social movements rarely, if ever, can be viewed as monolithic. Members of these movements often hold varied views and advocate different, sometimes opposing strategies to achieve their goals. To highlight this point, I offer the case of Stephen Miller in the historical context of the Association of German National Jews.
Serving as a chief adviser to Donald Trump during his first administration and recently elevated to chief of staff in the second, Miller has been the major force behind Trump’s xenophobic policy agenda.
Related
Miller’s influence is behind the administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement methods, including turning the streets of many major U.S. cities into military encampments by raiding communities and workplaces throughout the nation.
He is responsible for demanding that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) meet a high daily quota of arrests and incarceration of suspected “illegal aliens,” and he is also to blame for the often-harsh terror tactics they use, even against people who have no criminal charges lodged against them, and even against U.S. citizens.
Dive deeper every day
Join our newsletter for thought-provoking commentary that goes beyond the surface of LGBTQ+ issues
In aninterview last year, Miller announced the administration’s policy regarding ICE actions. “To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. Anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony.”
Though Miller had no legal authority to make this claim, several people have been killed by ICE because of it.
Miller isalso responsiblefor the travel ban from Muslim-majority countries in 2017 and the horrifying zero-tolerance family separation policy at the southern border in 2018. He is also responsible for terminating Temporary Protected Status (TPS), the U.S. humanitarian immigration program created under the Immigration Act of 1990, for most countries that had it; for ending other refugee programs; and for working to apply the Alien Enemies Act to end birthright citizenship.
Miller sees no value in diversity within the population or in the teaching of our children. He has somehow forgotten that he would not exist without the United States of America allowing his distant relative to immigrate to its shores to escape certain death. Miller grew up in a liberal Jewish household in Santa Monica, California. His father, Michael D. Miller, was a real estate investor, and his mother, Miriam (Glosser) Miller’s family immigrated to the U.S. in the early 1900s as desperate refugees from Belarus to escape horrific antisemitic pogroms.
On the foreign policy and security front, Miller has taken uncompromising radical stands on Trump’s homicidal bombing campaigns – implemented without evidence or due process on small seagoing vessels off Venezuela and throughout the Caribbean – and in Trump’s unjustified war on Iran. Miller has also crafted the expansion of executive powers tied to regional military operations and on issues of national security.
His hardline immigration stances have made Miller the favorite Jew of David Duke, former KKK Grand Wizard and rabid antisemite.
If Miller had been born toward the beginning of the 20th century, he undoubtedly would have been a ready recruit for a relatively small group of other Jewish pro-fascists.
The Association of German National Jews
Founded during the Weimar Republic in 1921 by a politically conservative Jewish man, Max Naumann, the Association of German National Jews lasted into the early years of Nazi Germany. Naumann was closely aligned with German national conservatism: a nationalist strain of conservatism that promoted upholding national and cultural identity by emphasizing traditional cultural and so-called “family values” while opposing immigration.
Though it never accumulated great numbers, the group was very active and found support from some wealthy and established German Jews. Eligible for membership were “Germans of Jewish descent,” who, while openly acknowledging their roots, nevertheless felt so completely rooted in German culture andWesen(essence, character) that they could not help but think and feel as Germans.
The organization’s chief goal was to achieve the total assimilation of Jews into the German national community through the self-extinction of Jewish identity. In other words, they believed they needed to relinquish their Jewish identities to conquer antisemitism.
The group also rallied against allowing Eastern European Jews to immigrate to Germany, believing it threatened Jewish integration into German society because these immigrants brought with them “racist” ideas that served the interests of British imperialism. They saw Eastern European Jews as racially and spiritually inferior. Paradoxically, Naumann was born into an assimilated Eastern European Jewish immigrant family.
After the rise of Hitler and his Nazi party, the Association fought against an ongoing Jewish boycott of German products spurred by increasing antisemitic harassment and violence.
Hermann Göring, Nazi Reich Marshall and Air Force Commander, summoned prominent Jewish leaders to his office on March 25, 1933, to convince them to help call off the international Jewish boycott of German goods. Naumann attended the meeting, along with German-born Zionist and former secretary-general of the World Zionist Organization, Kurt Blumenfeld. He opposed the anti-Nazi boycott, claiming it “harms German Jews first and foremost” and “has no favorable results for us.”
At the gathering, Göring made the charge that Jews inside Germany were lying about being attacked by Nazi forces. Naumann responded to Göring by showing him a long list of abuses and pulling out a newspaper article depicting Nazis forcing Jews to scrub streets with brushes. Naumann and the other Jewish leaders told Göring there was very little they could do to halt the international protest actions.
In an attempt to convince Jews who were taking part in the boycott, however, the Association issued a manifesto stating that Jews were being treated fairly in Germany. Association members opposed the boycott, believing it would jeopardize its standing in the country and its goal of total assimilation.
In 1934, the Association released a statement regarding Hitler’s ascension as German Chancellor. “We have always held the well-being of the German people and the fatherland, to which we feel inextricably linked, above our own well-being. Thus, we greeted the results of January 1933, even though it has brought hardship for us personally.”
Some Association members believed that Hitler provoked German antisemitism as a strategy before taking power for the purpose of “stirring up the masses,” but once in office, they hoped he would soften his stance on the Jews. For all of Naumann and the Association’s efforts, Hitler and his Nazi regime never assented to Jewish assimilation. The administration declared the Association illegal and forcefully dissolved it on November 18, 1935.
Naumann and his colleagues must have read Hitler’s book,Mein Kampf.Did they believe he meant it as a work of fiction or a mere joke? In the book, in public speeches, and in the official daily Nazi newspaper, Hitler resurrected ancient and long-standing antisemitic tropes for a modern audience.The Gestapo arrested and detained Naumann at the Columbia concentration camp. He was released a few weeks later. Naumann died of cancer in May 1939.
Members of the Association of German National Jews never fully allowed themselves to accept that the Nazis hated Jews to their core because of their supposed “racial” defectiveness, their “non-Aryanness,” and their supposed desire for national and world domination. This Nazi ideology made it impossible for Jews to ever be considered authentic Germans regardless of whether they relinquished their religious and cultural adherence to Judaism and the Jewish people.
In the end, though the Association supported some of the initiatives of the Nazi Party (for example, its closed immigration policies), by supporting Hitler’s administration, Association members worked against their own self-interests.
Internalized oppression
When it comes to internalized oppression for Jews and other oppressed people, two important questions must be addressed:
1.Have some of us taken on the characteristics of our abusers by perpetuating the same abuse?
2.What role does internalized oppression play in our beliefs and actions?
Referring to racism, Suzanne Lipsky discusses the “distress patterns” of internalized oppression: “The result has been that these distress patterns, created by oppression and racism from the outside, have been played out in the only two places it has seemed ‘safe’ to do so. First, upon members of our own group – particularly upon those over whom we have some degree of power or control… Second, upon ourselves through all manner of self-invalidation, self-doubt, isolation, fear, feelings of powerlessness, and despair.”
Internalizing these external societal messages is not our fault, for we too have been socialized within the systemic framework of multiple forms of oppression.
To what extent did internalized antisemitism affect members of the Association of German National Jews? And what amount of internalized antisemitism has affected the statements, behaviors, and politics of Stephen Miller?
The very existence of groups like the Association of German National Jews challenges progressive social activists to answer the question: What are the limits of identity-based politics, or more importantly, have we come to the end of identity-based politics?
We cannot begin the process of unlearning internalized oppression until we work to become aware of our own distress patterns, for it is much easier to direct our anger and blame outward onto others than to look within ourselves to our own injuries.
Stephen Miller’s stances, along with those of the Association members who supported the far-right authoritarian and fascist agendas, are beyond comprehension. As history has clearly shown, this is a one-way path to self-destruction.
Subscribe to theLGBTQ Nation newsletterand be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.