There is a rule in journalism that it takes three of a kind to make a trend. In the past two weeks there have been four anti-Semitic incidents in Chicago: the smashing of windows and the scrawling of swastikas on the front of the Chicago Loop Synagogue, the carving of a swastika on a bench inside the Illinois Holocaust Museum, anti-Semitic and racist graffiti painted inside Saint Cornelius School in Jefferson Park, and a bomb threat to a suburban Jewish community center. This does not include the tale of a New York City subway car vandalized with more swastikas that quickly went viral because of its heartwarming ending: all the passengers combined their resources of tissue and hand sanitizer to scrub it clean.
As the Jewish immigrants assimilated, the anti-Semitism took another turn in the 1920s and 30s. Henry Ford’s newspaper the Dearborn Independent and Father Charles Coughlin’s radio broadcasts spread anti-Semitism through the media, and Nazi groups began to appear in Chicago. “In one case that I know of, the German-American Bund in the 1930s,” says Cutler, “they were holding rallies and dressed up like the Nazis.”
“Their organization was in Marquette Park, on the south side, and they were going to march into Skokie,” says Cutler. “They made it up to where they got off the expressway, and they were met by thousands of Holocaust survivors and their supporters and the police. So they just turned and went away. They knew what was going to happen to them. So they never did march in Skokie. But they tried to.”
