by Rushworth M. Kidder

Last Friday, in the safely historical confines of a Broadway theater, my wife and I heard a potent dialogue about the deliberate killing of Polish Jews in World War II. Two days earlier, that topic had become brutally real with the murder of a Jewish student at Wesleyan University. Can history throw light on that grim reality?

The play we were attending, “Irena’s Vow,” includes a conversation in which a Nazi SS officer explains to a German Army major the reason for killing Jews. The major can’t see it. He needs workers to run the small-town factory he oversees in occupied Poland, and Jews provide useful labor. But the Nazi, pushing the grisly logic of racial purity and genocidal revenge, pushes the reluctant major to accept his “scientific” logic.

By turns melodramatic and comic, the plot is riddled with coincidences that would be incredible but for one thing: It’s the real-life story of Irena Gut Opdyke, a Polish Catholic who managed to save 12 Jews from the Nazi death machine. In the play, as in real life, the major later lets her spirit the Jews away to safety. But when he first discovers that she’s been hiding them in his own basement, he flies into a rage punctuated by the SS officer’s logic.

“They’re Jews!” he storms, holding a gun to her head. “They’re the enemy!”

Fast-forward some 70 years. Last Tuesday night, shortly after the curtain rang down on Tovah Feldshuh and her fellow actors, 29-year-old Stephen P. Morgan left his family home in Massachusetts and drove to Middletown, Connecticut. Sometime on Wednesday morning, after reaching the Wesleyan campus, he jotted a new entry in the journal that police later found in his laptop bag.

“I think it okay to kill Jews,” he wrote. “Kill Johanna. She must die.”

Several hours later, he sought out and gunned down 21-year-old Johanna Justin-Jinich at the campus bookstore café where she worked.

To be sure, there’s a backstory here. Morgan, a troubled loner from a well-to-do family, had graduated from an elite Catholic prep school and gone into the Navy rather than to college. In 2007 he met Justin-Jinich in a class at New York University. When he failed to build a relationship with her, he bombarded her with so many unwanted and harassing emails that she notified university officials, who alerted the police. But Morgan left the city, and Justin-Jinich never pressed charges. Like so many murders, then, this was no random incident among strangers. Unlike the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech, this was a deliberate, targeted act in which victim and perpetrator were known to one another.

Beneath it, however, lies an anti-Semitic strain. Police reports indicate that Morgan’s father had heard his son make anti-Semitic comments. Was the fact that his victim was Jewish just a convenient justification, allowing him to see his vengeance as “okay”? Or was it a driving force in Morgan’s consciousness, finding its outlet in a murderous repayment for some prior slight, perceived or real?

We may never know — nor need to know. The point is a larger one: that vulnerable mentalities, unsure of their own convictions, can be persuaded to adopt the darkest of ideologies through a culture of hatred and self-justification.

How does it happen? On Broadway and in history, that persuasion can come through personal contact. While the major never sought out that discussion with the SS officer, he went along with its conclusions enough to allow his latent anti-Semitism to be fanned into a full conflagration. But in reality and in 2009, such persuasion doesn’t require face-to-face contact. Morgan didn’t need to attend skinhead conclaves, read undercover books, or consort with neo-Nazis to find support for his nascent views. He could find plenty of support through his laptop.

That, at least, is the point of a recent piece in the Jerusalem Post. Published several days before Justin-Jinich’s death, it noted that Facebook now has “more than 150 groups whose names are variations of ‘I hate Israel’ and ‘We hate Israel’” — with the largest having more than 68,000 members. A similar article last year in the Jewish Weekly, a widely respected New York community newspaper, added YouTube and Wikipedia to the list. “This is the new face of anti-Semitism: Anti-Semitism 2.0,” wrote Jewish Weekly staffer Tamar Snyder. “And it’s potentially more hazardous than the relatively straightforward smear campaigns and petitions of yesteryear.”

Whatever snapped in Morgan’s mind, then, found a culture capable of nursing these “more hazardous” seedlings of hate. It found a news and entertainment media reveling in the harsh expression of violently opposing views. It discovered a blogosphere that cultivates and approves of anonymous animosity, allowing hatred to go public in unpunished ways. It encountered an abdication of moral responsibility by the public, the regulators, and the media that never held such hatred in check. And it was abetted by the failure of our education system to teach students any ethical frameworks for navigating the most pervasive personal communication systems ever invented.

No doubt about it: Anti-Semitism, like any racial or ethnic bias, must be vigilantly resisted. But so must a media culture that oxygenates these sparks. The real question is not whether anti-Semitism killed this young woman. It is whether, in the presence of a more ethical media culture that refused to tolerate such debased forms of persuasion, she would still be alive.

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

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