The Anti-Vax Adoption of the Jewish Badge
By Kurt Kazan | International | February 10, 2022
Cover Illustration: NOT Vaccinated equal Jude. Anabella Villanueva / The Amsterdammer
Kurt Kazan, metro international reporter, discusses how the badge Jews were forced to wear during the Holocaust as a marker of their identity is being used by opponents of COVID-19 mandates.
In 2021, people against COVID-19 mandates in the United States of America began wearing yellow stars on their clothing. This badge they chose to don strongly resembles the Jewish badge (also called the gold or yellow badge), which is shaped like the Star of David and has a history of being used to discriminate against Jews. They have since been condemned by Jewish advocacy groups and Holocaust survivors alike.
COVID-19 measures in the US (and other countries worldwide) that restrict those who remain unvaccinated more than the fully vaccinated have caused a major uproar among members of the anti-vax community. According to the Independent, some of its members in Kansas City felt oppressed by these mandates and chose to publicly wear the Jewish badge with the label ”not vaccinated.”
According to a reader of the Jerusalem Post, ”what they did was not offensive, but a wake-up call.”
”What they did was not offensive, but a wake-up call.” – A reader of the Jerusalem Post
By wearing the Jewish badge and displaying other symbols like the swastika provocatively, anti-vaccine protesters compare COVID-19 rules to the Holocaust, and themselves to victims of this genocide, which took the lives of approximately six million Jews during the Second World War.
This analogy has spread like wildfire around the world thanks to the affordances of social media services. In these digital landscapes, anti-vaxxers share their beliefs, experiences, and opinions of COVID-19 mandates.
One social media influencer, for example, told her followers on YouTube how she and her friend were escorted out of a nightclub by a security guard because they are not “injected” and thus cannot provide proof of vaccination. She argued that this is the same as what happened in Nazi Germany during the systematic massacre of Jews; and she insists that those enacting the genocide were just people doing their jobs, even though they most likely knew that it was unjust to categorize people into two groups. She says, ”the people who were a part of gassing Jews were also just doing their jobs.” Now, instead of classifying people as Jews and non-Jews, the influencer states that people are categorized into two groups: those with and without an “experimental injection”.
Over the course of ten centuries, the Jewish badge has been used by various groups, including Muslim caliphs, medieval bishops, and perhaps most notably, the Nazi Party, to distinguish Jewish people from the general population.
As an anti-Semitic group, the Nazi party used this identification method to segregate Jews from the rest of the population during the latter stage of the Nazi era (1939 – 1945) in various countries, including Belgium, Croatia, Germany, France, Hungary, and the Netherlands. During this period, most Jews were either sent to ghettos or, in the worst-case scenario, to concentration camps. This was a part of the Nazi Party’s plan to annihilate Europe’s Jewish population – a plan that ultimately failed with the defeat and abolition of the far-right Nazi party.
Regardless of the atrocities that took place in Nazi Germany, and despite condemnation of their choice to wear the badge in this manner, many anti-vaccine protesters continue to liken COVID-19 mandates to the Holocaust.
Kurt Kazan is a student at the University of Amsterdam. The views expressed here are not necessarily those of The Amsterdammer.
