“The Jews are a base, whoring people, they are not a people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth. The Jews are full of the devil’s feces, which they wallow in like swine, their synagogue is an incorrigible whore and an evil slut.”
—Martin Luther, 1543
I know what you are.
He smiled at me, the boy in the brown cargo pants, so sweetly that I was sure I had misheard him. But no. He knew what I was, even before I did, and he wanted me to know. The year was 1994, I was in middle school in a small Swedish town, and my country was experiencing yet another surge in Neo-Nazi activity. Maybe it was the economic crisis, maybe it was the weather. Or maybe it was the same forces that had conspired four decades earlier to bring my mother to the front of her middle school class so that she could be drawn in profile next to the neighbor boy in order to show her peers how to tell a Jew from an Arian. […]