“ When it comes to an existential threat, analogies have been made in contemporary situations,” he says, “For example, the Jewish Defense League used the yellow star with a raised black fist beginning in the late 1960s. According to Shaul Kelner, Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University, both Jews and non-Jews have made Holocaust analogies. But appropriating the imagery surrounding it has a complex history. ”Īs the Pew Study found, Holocaust memories continue to be a hard line in the sand for most American Jews. “I take responsibility for getting the patches made, although I never sold a single one, ” she says, “ And o f course I’m sympathetic to the Holocaust. “I think she knows what she’s doing,” says Hahn, “ She is trivializing the memory of the Holocaust.” When asked to comment on Gaskins’ statement about showing solidarity for th ose who wore the yellow star, Hahn says, “ She’s comparing her outrage about vaccines to, ‘The Final Solution,’ the total annihilation of the Jewish people in the most brutal way.” Gaskins insists she knows she made a mistake in using the st ar. She says based on Gaskins ’ social media posts she does not believe Gaskins is sincere. She now lives in Nashville near her adult daughter. Her mother perished in Auschwitz and her father, who was in the French Resistance, died from combat wounds. They placed her in a Catholic children’s home to protect her from the Nazis. Frances Cutler Hahn, 83, was born in Paris, France to Polish parents. Still there are those for whom the use of the yellow star, in the fashion used by Gaskins, is both painful and traumatizing. So I proved the point I was trying to make.” People pick a side and hate th ose on the other side. She acknowledges the biggest outcry did not come from the Jewish community, but rather it is the result of cancel culture. I felt like they wanted a sacrificial apology that I was ignorant and wrong and nothing short of that was going to be satisfactory.” She says she was even called a liar by one of her vendors. “One rabbi I spoke with said she disagreed with almost everything I laid out, from my perspective. Gaskins says the rush to judgement and protest was unwarranted and unfair. Many who read it say it was not sincere and missed the point of what she did. (Stetson could not be reached for comment.) Within a couple of days, Gaskins issued an apology through the same social media platform. Many of her vendors immediately ended their relationship with her business, most notably high profile Stetson Hats. A grass-roots protest was quickly planned and fell on Shabbat, meaning it was not organized by any local Jewish organization, and attracted a wide range of people from the greater Nashville community. The post, which Gaskins removed within a few hours, nonetheless sparked outrage both within Nashville’s Jewish community and outside of it. I am on the side of those who experienced the atrocities.” “I did not make it up,” she says, “I saw videos of protests in Israel and other countries using the star to protest the vaccines, so there is precedent there. The incident centers around a social media post by Hat WRKS shop owner Gigi Gaskins who says she was selling the patches as a means of expressing solidarity with the Jewish victims in Nazi Germany who were marked for deportation to concentration camps and forced to wear the yellow star. It is the intersection of those two experiences that sparked an outpouring of shock and anger after a Nashville hat vendor used a yellow Star of David with the words, “Not Vaccinated,” in the middle to protest what she believes is government overreach in fighting the COVID19 pandemic. Additionally, more than half of those surveyed report experiencing antisemitism in the last year, either by seeing some sort of anti-Jewish graffiti, being harassed online, being personally attacked or some other sort of discrimination. The most recent Pew Study of American Jews reports that the vast majority, more than 75%, believe that remembering the Holocaust is essential to being Jewish.
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