In 1965, the New York Times profiled Daniel Burros, “a stocky blue-eyed, blond man” and “knowledgeable and virulent Nazi,” as the head of the struggling New York chapter of the Klu Klux Klan. An Air Force veteran, Burros had a long history of racist agitation, and violence. The Anti-Defamation League already had a file on Burros. The House Committee on Un-American Activities included him on a list of prominent Klansmen. For a few years, he lived in neo-Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell’s “barracks” in Arlington, Va., while working for the Chamber of Commerce in Washington.
What makes Burros’s story interesting is that he hid a secret: He grew up in a religious Jewish family. When someone tipped off the Times‘ A. M. Rosenthal about Burros’s background, the editor sent three reporters to write the story. They soon confirmed the specifics and tracked down Burros, who had been living in Queens with his parents. Burros begged the reporters not to out him, as he would lose his friends and career. When that didn’t dissuade the Times, he threatened to murder one of the reporters. When the story was finally published, Burros, staying with allies in preparation for a Klan protest in Reading, Pa., shot himself first in the chest and finally in the head. (I first read about Burros in Gay Talese’s classic, The Kingdom and the Power.)
Burros’s story isn’t as weird as you’d think. There have been books written on the phenomenon of the self-hating Jew. The most famous is by Theodor Lessing in 1930, who grappled with the Jewish intellectual’s inclination toward self-loathing and the use of Zionism to incite antisemitism. In The Jewish State, published in 1896, Theodor Herzl already had warned that those who opposed a Jewish homeland were often “disguised anti-Semites of Jewish origin.”
It should be noted that “self-hating Jew” is also used as an antisemitic trope that frames Jews as the authors of their own horrible predicaments. For that we turn to Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, who, when asked by an Italian news station recently how Russia could claim to “denazify” Ukraine when the nation already had a Jewish president, answered: “In my opinion, Hitler also had Jewish origins, so it doesn’t mean absolutely anything. For some time we have heard from the Jewish people that the biggest antisemites were Jewish.”
This is ugly, ahistorical gibberish. There is no evidence that Hitler had Jewish blood, and even if there had been one Jewish grandfather, Hitler didn’t grow up in a Jewish household, and his venom didn’t spawn from self-loathing. It was based in the European pseudoscientific and ideological antisemitism of his day. The claim that Putin invaded Ukraine to “denazify” is so transparently ridiculous that it necessitates idiotic answers. Needless to say, there is no evidence that Volodymyr Zelensky is creating a Nazi state.
But that doesn’t mean that Jews never engage in antisemitism or ally themselves with their enemies. It happens today, still. In the United States, it happens when partisans feel some warped loyalty toward Rashida Tlaib or Paul Gosar. It happens when the editorial chair of the Harvard Crimson, Orlee Marini-Rapoport, brags about the paper’s support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement — and then adds, “I am also Jewish,” as if this makes it kosher.
BDS is functionally the most antisemitic movement in the West. It targets the only Jewish state, not Russia, or the world’s many theocracies, or the slave-labor state of China, for delegitimization and economic ruin. BDS targets Israelis, no matter what they believe or which government they elect or how many concessions they support. “We oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine,” maintains BDS leader Omar Barghouti. Destroying Israel would leave Jews of the Middle East to the mercy of Hamas and the PLO. And if history tells us anything, a world without Israel is an assurance of genocide in the future.
While Burros’s hatred manifested in cartoonish stereotypes, he was rejected by most of the country. Marini-Rapoport’s loathing is wrapped in increasingly acceptable progressive idealism and the approval of one of the country’s most venerable institutions. Shameful.