john brown’s body lies a-mould’ring in the grave

I think that, instinctively, where my head goes in terms of what I study and what I teach, you know, the most kind of obvious and surface-level comparison that I would make immediately is to the actions of Herschel Grynszpan, when he assassinated a Nazi diplomat in Paris in November of 1938 — he was seventeen years old — and that act served as a pretext for the subsequent violence across Germany that has come to be known as Kristallnacht. Now I don’t want to suggest that that’s a perfect historical comparison, but it’s sort of just where my head goes to when I think about political violence against diplomats. . . . And then of course, interestingly, after, there was a whole kind of campaign led by, I think, Dorothy Thompson, a U.S. journalist, to sort of defend him. But I think in that case — again, I don’t think it’s a perfect comparison for many, many reasons, but I think what you do see is how there is a kind of act of almost spontaneous, individualized political violence, right, on the one hand, and then there is a whole kind of apparatus of retaliation that is using that as a pretext.

For my part, I’d say that a far more potent demonstrative act, if Elias Rodriguez felt some mark must be made through targeting of politicians’ subordinates, would’ve been to take down a congressional staffer or something at last summer’s Democratic National Convention, showcase of the U.S. party in power — power at the heart of everything where Israel / Palestine is concerned — during most of the last two years’ obliteration of Gaza, while American advocates for Palestinian lives in attendance were being barred from participation in the proceedings. He need never have left Chicago — though if there’s any significance in what Rodriguez did do, it was that it brought violence in the name of the Palestinian cause home to Washington.

I condemn Rodriguez’s act — not narrowly for the antisemitism in it (which to my mind is neither greatly in doubt nor immaterial) — and don’t otherwise wish to dwell on it. But I think the kind of discussion people ought to be having about it, the Jewish Currents podcast roundtable excerpted with comments by Ben Ratskoff above, playable in full below, is a helpful instance of.

By coincidence, I’ve been giving thought to Dorothy Thompson antecedent Henry David Thoreau recently. The meaning of John Brown’s 1859 Harpers Ferry raid, infinitely better backed and planned but possibly no less ill-conceived as a matter of express aim than whatever Rodriguez imagines he was doing at the Capital Jewish Museum last week, lay afterward, and lies today, in how the thing done came to be received — initially very uncertain in issue even among many of the day’s opponents of our founding national slavery regime. The moment, as we look back on it, is as much Thoreau’s as Brown’s in a way.

Israel is at an apex of global disfavor. A new Trump administration, unprincipled and all too accommodating toward more open forms of antisemitism on the right, is adjusting the U.S.’s approach to ‘special relationship’ with Israel and to relationships with Israel’s regional neighbor-rivals. Understanding well the part the political murder Rodriguez has introduced may play amid all this could take a while, it seems fair to say.