Jews Should Stop Calling LA Protest a Pogrom (and Trump the Next Hitler)

In June 1941, a terrible pogrom targeted the large Jewish community of Baghdad during the holiday of Shavuot, resulting in hundreds of murders, rapes, and the mass destruction and looting of Jewish homes, synagogues, and businesses. It irreversibly traumatized a once-thriving Jewish community that had lived in Mesopotamia since the sixth century B.C. By the late 1940s, a mass exodus of more than 130,000 Jews had fled Iraq and resettled mainly in the nascent Jewish state.

Fueled by centuries-old anti-Semitism and newly emerged Nazi propaganda, Iraqi Muslims savagely targeted Jewish citizens. The bloodthirsty mobs were so ruthless that some men even cut off the breasts of young Jewish women they had mass-raped and waved them in the air in savage triumph.

The “Farhud,” or “violent dispossession,” marked the end of 1,300 years of Jewish life and culture in Iraq. It traumatized an entire generation and its children. The Farhud of 1941 was a pogrom against the Jews.

On June 23, virulent anti-Semitic protesters blocked the entrance to a West Los Angeles synagogue and violently clashed with Jewish counterprotesters. It was the perfect storm, with angry protesters who seemed to enjoy sowing fear, violence, and chaos in a local Jewish community; concerned Jews fed up with anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism; and an LAPD presence that, by all accounts, was surprisingly ill-prepared.

The anti-Semitic demonstration of June 23 was unprecedented in Los Angeles. It was terrifying and traumatic. But it was not a pogrom.

My friend Sam Yebri disagrees with me. Yebri is a community and nonprofit leader, attorney, staunch Democrat, and passionate American Jewish voice who serves on the boards of numerous organizations. Yebri’s family fled Iran when he was a year old, and I have always found his views to be wise and nuanced. Yebri ran for Los Angeles City Council in 2022 and was defeated by Katy Young Yaroslavsky.

I have worked alongside Yebri for nearly two decades (we co-founded 30 Years After with other young Iranian-American Jews in 2007) and have seen firsthand how his deep passion is often tempered by a more sober rationality. Which is why I was so surprised that Yebri continued to call the Pico protest debacle a pogrom.

“Two weeks have passed since the Pico pogrom in Los Angeles,” he wrote in a July 7 post on X. “Not a single criminal who bludgeoned Jews has been arrested. Despite promises from politicians, no new laws (banning masks at protests, requiring permits, creating buffer zones near places of worship, increasing funding for security) have been passed.”

I think Yebri is right about everything. Everything except the use of the word “pogrom.” I worry that such practices, however well-intentioned, devalue the word and belittle the suffering of Jews across the millennia. So I asked Yebri, who was at the protest (I wasn’t), why he thinks the word “pogrom” is appropriate to describe what happened in Los Angeles last month.

I fear that such practices, however well-intentioned, devalue the word “pogrom” and belittle the suffering of Jews across the millennia.

“Words like ‘violence,’ ‘attack,’ or ‘hate crime’ don’t begin to describe the magnitude of what happened,” he told me. “In the past, Jews in Los Angeles have been randomly shot in Pico and synagogues in Pico have been vandalized. On Thanksgiving Day, the home of a prominent Jewish leader in Los Angeles was even attacked, but the perpetrators fled when police arrived.”

“This time,” he continued, “the violence was not random, and the criminals did not turn away when they saw the police. Instead, a menacing mob that celebrates both Hamas by wearing green headbands and Hitler by imitating the Nazi salute marched into Pico-Robertson, one of the most Jewish neighborhoods in America, in full view of the police, with the sole purpose of harming and terrorizing Jews. No other words can describe what happened; no other words can remind us of what is worse to come if people of good conscience do not speak out now.”

In wondering whether non-Jews might soon stop believing problematic Jewish claims about pogroms, I was humbled by my own skepticism about whether most non-Jews around the world even know the definition of “pogrom.”

Let that sink in for a moment.

My firm belief that the protest was not a pogrom was confirmed on July 7, when a lawyer for Ronen Helmann filed a lawsuit against Code Pink and the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) for preventing him from entering a house of worship on June 23. I can’t remember the last anti-Jewish pogrom in which Jews were allowed to sue their persecutors two weeks later, claiming that their First Amendment rights had been violated because they couldn’t enter a synagogue. (Only in America, it seems.)

Many angry Jews counter-demonstrated and later told me they had no qualms about calling the incident a pogrom. But unlike Yebri, some of them are not pro-Israel Democrats; many describe themselves as pro-Israel Jews with deeply right-wing values.

And ironically, one of the biggest thorns in their side right now – at least for those who like Donald Trump – is the multitude of Jews who now endlessly compare Trump to Adolf Hitler, and the Trump movement to Nazism.

Just when I thought Jews should be more careful not to stir up fearmongering, a whole other contingent of Jews is now insisting that the candidate running (again) for the American presidency is none other than the orange-haired – and moustache-less – Führer.

Of course, this isn’t the first comparison between Trump and Hitler. It started in 2016, when everyone from the cast of “Saturday Night Live” to the ADL’s Abe Foxman to former Mexican president Vicente Fox claimed there were similarities between Trump and the Nazis. Even former Fox News anchor Glenn Beck told George Stephanopoulos, “You know, we all look at Adolf Hitler in 1940. We should look at Adolf Hitler in 1929. He was a funny character who said the things that people were thinking.”

More recently, a December 2023 op-ed in the Washington Post was titled, “Yes, It’s OK to Compare Trump to Hitler. Don’t Let Me Stop You.” A Jewish friend named Michael recently posted a meme on Facebook of a screaming Trump with fire behind him, which read, “Don’t worry about the bloodshed if he loses. Worry about the death camps if he wins.”

Really? Death camps?

I asked my friend to clarify whether he really believed what he had posted. “To Jewish people, Trump is nothing like Hitler. However, he is using Hitler’s playbook by denigrating groups that do not fit the white American ideal – Mexicans, Muslims, the disabled and targets of the gay community,” Michael said. “In Nazi Germany, they went after the Jews first, then the Gypsies and the disabled… If we don’t stand up to this now, Project 2025 is likely to be implemented and our democracy will collapse.”

If you’re not familiar with Project 2025, it’s a presidential transition manual offered by the Heritage Foundation, though it reads more like a 1950s sci-fi movie about self-driving mutant cars in the year 2025.

I understand some of my friend’s concerns, and Trump’s most ardent supporters, especially those who zealously greet him with the raised right hand, are undoubtedly disturbing.

But one of the greatest dangers of the Trump-Hitler comparison is often overlooked: in such hysterical, binary inflation of language and imagery, it now seems almost guaranteed that anyone who argues that Trump is not a new Hitler will do so at their peril.

In the old days, you would cancel someone by calling them a Nazi. Now, you cancel someone if they refuse to call other people Nazis.

It is sad that it took an assassination attempt on Trump for many of my friends to stop comparing Hitler and rightly declare that political violence has no place in America, even if the target of such violence was a man they sincerely deplore.

I thought about asking Holocaust survivors what they think about the Nazi comparisons. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. They will read this nonsense for themselves, if they haven’t already. I have an idea what they would say, even those who don’t like Trump, but I will spare readers the use of colorful Yiddish expletives.

Of all the references to Trump and Hitler, the one about the death camps bothers me the most. Consider this: If the average non-Jewish student sees image after image of Trump as Hitler, a certain insensitivity will eventually set in, if it hasn’t already. And that kind of insensitivity will do little to tarnish Trump; it will only dilute Hitler. And at a time when most students don’t even know what Auschwitz means, it’s unforgivable. masugas.

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Tabby Refael is an award-winning writer, speaker, and weekly columnist for the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. Follow her on X and Instagram @TabbyRefael.