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In November 1938, a seventeen year old refugee without papers named Herschel Grynzspan from Poland walked into the Nazi Embassy in Paris, France, asked to see a member of the diplomatic staff, and when Nazi diplomat Ernst von Rath appeared, shot him. Von Rath died not long afterwards, despite the efforts of Hitler’s doctors who were sent to Paris by Hitler. According to most sources, Grynzspan was angry at the Nazi regime for taking away his parents German citizenship and employment. They were then sent to a concentration camp in Poland not long before his action. Some historians have hinted that Grynzspan was gay, that von Rath was one of his associates and that Grynzspan was blackmailing him. Grynzspan was arrested in France, where he was imprisoned until the collaborator Vichy regime came to power; the Gestapo then transferred him to a concentration camp in Germany. No matter what the rationale was, the essential fact is that a few days later, the Nazi regime used the assassination as an excuse to attack Jewish people, their shops and their homes in what became known as Kristallnacht. While the Kristallnacht pogroms were not officially carried out by uniformed Nazis in the government or the Party, they were encouraged and supported by officials in the party including Joseph Goebbels, who made a speech essentially giving the Nazi rank and file the go ahead.

On May 22, 2025, most US residents woke up to the news that a thirty-year-old man named Elias Rodriguez had been arrested for killing two employees of the Israeli Embassy outside a benefit at the Jewish museum. Within hours of the shooting, members of the Trump administration, including Attorney General Pam Bondi and Trump himself, linked the accused gunman to the movement against the US-Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza—a movement........

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