America Is Not Nazi Germany — Let’s Stop the Dangerous Comparison

America remains the freest nation on earth, and its Jewish citizens are here to stay.

In 2017, Bal Harbour, Florida, once a town that barred Jews and Black Americans from owning property or joining its beach club, became one of the first municipalities in the country to adopt an antisemitism ordinance based on the U.S. State Department’s definition of hate. A place that once excluded Jews now protects them by law. That transformation captures something essential about America: its moral capacity to correct itself. America’s record is imperfect, but its moral foundation remains intact, and that is what keeps it worth believing in.

This is not a personal attack on Hillel Fuld. His devotion to Israel and the Jewish people is sincere. But the idea he recently shared, a slide comparing the situation of Jews in “Western nations” today with that of Jews in Nazi Germany, must be rejected for what it is: a distortion of history and a failure of proportion. It may be born of concern, but it breeds confusion. It mistakes unease for catastrophe. To claim that Jews in America today live as Jews did in 1938 Germany is false and morally unserious.

Antisemitism in America has never vanished. Anyone who has studied the last century knows that. In the 1960s, synagogues were bombed in the South. In the 1970s, universities and country clubs quietly barred Jews. In the 1980s, neo-Nazis marched through Skokie, Illinois, their hate protected by the same Constitution that guarantees Jewish freedom. And in the 1990s, even respected political figures flirted with bigotry. Pat Buchanan, once a serious presidential contender, accused Jews of pushing America into the Gulf War and called Congress “Israeli-occupied territory.” He questioned the Holocaust’s scale and defended Nazi war criminals. Charles Krauthammer described him accurately as having “a problem with Jews. And he makes no effort to hide it.”

The lesson is not that America was pure and has now fallen, but that antisemitism has always existed here—and that America, through law and moral conviction, has always found ways to overcome it. The internet didn’t invent hatred. It only gave it a microphone.

That is troubling, but it is not 1938. The difference between Europe and America remains the difference between tyranny and liberty. Europe’s treatment of the Jews is the longest moral failure in Western history. It produced Mendelssohn and Mahler—and it produced the Crusades, the pogrom, and the gas chamber. Historian Paul Johnson wrote in A History of the Jews: “The Jews gave to Europe their talent, their learning, their industry, their genius for law and abstraction. Europe repaid them with persecution, confiscation, expulsion, and death.” Civilization without conscience—that was Europe’s curse.

America is a different kind of nation. It wasn’t built on bloodlines or ancestry but on ideas, on the belief that liberty flows from God, not from governments. The Founders saw in the Jewish story something familiar and inspiring: perseverance, faith, and moral discipline. John Adams wrote that the Jews had “done more to civilize man than any other nation.” George Washington, in his 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, promised that the new republic “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” Jefferson admired the laws of Moses because they joined moral law to human freedom. For the first time in two thousand years, Jews entered a society not as guests asking permission but as citizens with equal standing.

That wasn’t a symbolic difference. It was a moral one. Nazi Germany was not a democracy that drifted off course; it was a machine built for destruction. Its hatred of Jews wasn’t an aberration. It was the system itself—the purpose, not the flaw. The Holocaust didn’t come from prejudice that ran wild. It came from evil that took power and used the tools of modern civilization to annihilate a people. To confuse that with today’s America is to flatten the moral landscape and lose sight of what real evil looks like.

Freedom always carries a cost. The same First Amendment that allows Jews to live and worship freely also protects the ranting of bigots like Max Blumenthal and Nick Fuentes. That is the American bargain. Freedom doesn’t silence hatred; it exposes it, so it can be answered. The solution is not censorship but courage. The Founders trusted that truth and moral conviction would outlast lies and malice. Two and a half centuries later, they still are.

Paul Johnson wrote that the Jews survived because they made survival a “moral purpose.” The same must be true of nations. America’s endurance depends on citizens who treat liberty as a responsibility, not an inheritance.

The Holocaust was not a metaphor. It was the most deliberate kind of evil—planned, engineered, and carried out by a modern state using every tool of progress to destroy life. To invoke it casually is to dull the horror and forget what it really was. History’s real lesson is vigilance joined to gratitude. America was built differently. It was designed to keep power in check because the founders understood human weakness and trusted that moral law, not men, must stand guard over freedom.

We are not leaving. American Jews are not going anywhere. This country is our home, and we claim it without hesitation. We are proud Americans—grateful, imperfect, and unafraid. Our families built lives here, served here, bled here, and helped shape the moral fabric of the nation. The work of preserving that experiment in liberty is not someone else’s burden. It is ours too. And we will meet it, not as guests in a borrowed land, but as Americans—confident, free, and determined to ensure this country continues to live up to the promise it made to all of us.