American Jews, The Abortion Controversy, and the Appropriation of the Holocaust

• In Event: Relational Identity: The Formation and Expression of Raced and Gendered Modern North American Jewish Identity

Abstract

Beginning in the late 1970s, it became a common trope among anti-abortion activists to equate the state-sponsored murder of Jews during the Holocaust with a woman’s legal right to terminate her pregnancy. American Jewish leaders, for their part, objected vociferously to such comparisons. Certainly, American Jewish leaders have long protested those who would wield Holocaust imagery to express unrelated political viewpoints, on the grounds that such appropriations trivialized the enormity and uniqueness of the Nazi genocide. But this criticism took on a new valence when non-Jewish activists began to use the Holocaust to make their case against legal abortion, a right that the significant liberal majority of American Jews have historically supported, and which many Jewish women have valued as a fundamental component of their reproductive and religious freedom.
This paper will analyze a number of highly publicized incidents in which American Jewish leaders publicly denounced anti-abortion activists for their adoption of Holocaust imagery. These confrontations usefully complicate the historiography of reproductive politics in the United States, a field that tends to only examine the religious identities of those who oppose abortion access, and rarely considers the engagements of non-Christians in the debates over abortion. The story of American Jewish outrage against those who likened legal abortion to the Holocaust highlights just one of the significant interventions that American Jews made in the national debates over reproductive rights.

Author

• Rachel Kranson, University of Pittsburgh