“We commemorate Kristallnacht, rather, for what it presaged and for what it symbolized. What it presaged was the impending destruction of European Jewry. What it symbolized was the shattering of a moral order that might have prevented their destruction. Kristallnacht was more than a pogrom in the heart of supposedly civilized Europe. It was the signal that all the old categories — decency, order, fairness, justice, reason — no longer applied. Broken glass was a reminder of how brittle the barrier between civilization and barbarism could be. This moral shattering did not happen overnight. It was years in the making. It first required the preparation of the public mind to accept that anything was permissible when it came to the Jews. And anything was permissible because, as Joseph Goebbels insisted, “the Jews are guilty.” Guilt first, crime second — like the Queen of Hearts’s “sentence first, verdict afterwards” in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland — is the essence of the inverted logic on which all antisemitism rests. We are now witnessing, on a daily and even hourly basis, and on a scale only a few of us thought possible just a few years ago, the same kind of moral and logical inversions; the same “heads-I-win, tails-you-lose” sleight-of-hand reasoning; the same denying to Jews the feelings and rights granted to everyone else; the same preparing of the public mind for another open season on the Jews.” sapirjournal.org/war-in-isra…