#there were (smaller scale) massacres of Hutus

[suswous]

Looking both at current events and historical conflicts, it really seems like it’s human instinct to collectively blame an entire group of people from wrongs committed on their behalf or by other people from that group.

[aparrotandaqrow]

A lot of folks, especially in the Jewish community, have mixed feelings about Harris picking Walz as her VP over Shapiro. Some wanted Shapiro for the Jewish representation, especially a Jew who is Zionist and yet decries Netanyahu and expresses the desire for peace that so many of us have. Some worried that having two Jews in the White House would provoke yet more antisemitism and possibly even sink the ticket, given the massive surge in leftist antisemitism recently.

Many of us were frustrated and angered by seeing leftists campaign for Walz being the pick over Shapiro more or less entirely because Shapiro is Jewish—and felt a sense of dismay that perhaps Harris had caved to the antisemites.

I'm a Jew but I'm also a Minnesotan. I was glad to see the Walz pick for many reasons unrelated to my Jewish identity or Israel. But I want to also submit that Walz, uniquely among the politicians Harris could have picked, brings something to the table that is desperately important both to the nation more broadly and our community more specifically.

I present as Exhibit A, this archived NYT profile of Walz from back in 2008:

The teacher, Tim Walz, was determined that even in this isolated place, perhaps especially in this isolated place, this county seat of 9,000 that was hours away from any city in any direction, the students should learn how and why a society can descend into mass murder.

...

“The Holocaust is taught too often purely as a historical event, an anomaly, a moment in time,” Mr. Walz said in a recent interview, recalling his approach. “Students understood what had happened and that it was terrible and that the people who did this were monsters. “The problem is,” he continued, “that relieves us of responsibility. Obviously, the mastermind was sociopathic, but on the scale for it to happen, there had to be a lot of people in the country who chose to go down that path. You have to make the intellectual leap to figure out the reasons why.”

My ancestors immigrated to the US around the turn of the century from Mariampol, Lithuania and Luboml, Ukraine. When the Nazis arrived in those towns some 40 years later, the Jews there (many of whom would have been my ancestors' relatives) were massacred not by Nazi soldiers, but by their neighbors, who welcomed the Nazis with open arms. You cannot truly help protect the Jewish community from antisemitism if you don't understand this crucial detail about how the Holocaust happened.

So Mr. Walz took his students [...] and assigned them to study the conditions associated with mass murder. What factors, he asked them to determine, had been present when Germans slaughtered Jews, Turks murdered Armenians, the Khmer Rouge ravaged their Cambodian countrymen?

...

They read about civil war, colonialism and totalitarian ideology. They worked with reference books and scholarly reports, long before conducting research took place instantly online.

...

When the students finished with the past, Mr. Walz gave a final exam of sorts. He listed about a dozen current nations — Yugoslavia, Congo, some former Soviet republics among them — and asked the class as a whole to decide which was at the greatest risk of sliding into genocide. Their answer was: Rwanda. The evidence was the ethnic divide between Hutus and Tutsis, the favoritism toward Tutsis shown by the Belgian colonial regime, and the previous outbreaks of tribal violence. Mr. Walz awarded high marks. The next April, in 1994, Mr. Walz heard news reports of a plane carrying the Rwandan president, Juvenal Habyarimana, being shot down. [...] Mr. Walz’s students, now juniors, saw their prophecy made into flesh and blood.

...

“You have to understand what caused genocide to happen,” Mr. Walz said, with those grim anniversaries in mind. “Or it will happen again.”

Y'all, Tim Walz is not Jewish. He's a white guy who grew up in Nebraska and then lived in one of Minnesota's smaller cities, up until going to Congress and then the Governor's mansion. No, he does not provide us with representation, nor will he ever truly understand what it feels like to be Jewish in America in 2024.

But he gets it. He understands not just academic history but people, and understands that "Never Again" is only feasible if we look at root causes, and strive to nip the factors that lead to genocide in the bud. We have all understood that allyship for Jews is only meaningful if you're here defending us before it gets violent.

Governor Walz represents an opportunity to have someone in the White House, on the national stage, who understands the big picture and the history well enough to actually be able to navigate incredibly complex and painful issues like the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, like the regional conflicts within the Arab world, like the experience of progressive Jews in the US who would have found ourselves ostracized and alienated from increasingly hostile leftist movements. I cannot begin to explain how rare it is to have a politician at this level who also carries an experienced teacher's grasp of both history and empathy.

Maybe Josh Shapiro would have also brought that. But honestly, I'm not so sure. Walz may not be Jewish. But I think we're going to find that he'll be an ally, and a deeply learned and wise one at that. And I think we really need that right now.