I Have Stood in the Room Where the Air Changed

In the winter of 1985, a bus carried twenty-five Iranian Jewish teenagers through the Austrian countryside to a place called Mauthausen. We were refugees: stateless, waiting for visas, sleeping in cramped apartments in Vienna while the bureaucracies of survival processed our paperwork. The American Joint Distribution Committee had arranged the trip. I was eighteen.

Mauthausen was a Nazi concentration camp built into a granite quarry above the Danube. The stone buildings stood like witnesses refusing to speak. We walked the grounds in silence, past memorials in Russian, Hungarian, Hebrew, and a dozen other languages, all saying the same thing. We stood at the edge of the 186 steps of the “Stairs of Death,” where prisoners had carried stones heavier than their starving bodies, and where guards shoved the slowest over the edge in what they called “parachute jumping.” Inside the gas chamber, the air felt heavier. It was psychological, I knew. Zyklon B leaves no trace after forty years. But my lungs tightened anyway.

That evening, we returned to being teenagers. We played music too loudly. We argued over nothing. But Mauthausen had marked us. In quiet moments, washing dishes or waiting for sleep, the images returned.

Later that winter, the Joint Distribution Committee arranged Sabbath dinners with Austrian Jewish families who had survived the camps. One host, Jacob, had been fourteen when the Nazis took him. He survived because his hands were steady enough to cut officers’ hair. He served us challah with those hands. He never spoke about the camps. None of the survivors did. Their silence was not empty; it was full, dense with everything language could not carry.

I have carried that silence for forty years.

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I carry it now as a professor at a public university in Oregon, where I recently listened to a colleague’s recording on community radio describing a Jewish communal organization as having “unbelievable” power and influence over the university’s administration. The speaker argued that this organization had been recruiting students and families to file lawsuits, that it had leveraged board members to suppress political speech, and that the real story of campus repression was the outsized control this Jewish institution exercised behind the scenes.

The speaker did not use slurs. The speaker invoked academic freedom. The speaker positioned the argument as a defense of Palestinian rights and a critique of institutional power. I do not doubt the sincerity of those commitments.

But language has a history, and some rhetorical structures carry weight their speakers may not intend.

The claim that a Jewish organization wields covert, disproportionate influence over a public institution, that it operates through proxies, manipulates governance, and manufactures crises of antisemitism to silence dissent, is not a novel critique of donor politics. It is one of the oldest and most durable antisemitic narratives in Western history. It appears in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It appears in Father Coughlin’s radio broadcasts. It appeared in the rhetoric that made Mauthausen necessary.

Trope analysis, as a method, attends to structure and historical resonance rather than authorial intent. One can hold legitimate criticisms of Israeli state policy, of donor influence in higher education, of institutional failures to protect free expression, and simultaneously recognize when the language chosen to voice those criticisms reproduces a discursive pattern that has historically preceded violence against Jews. These commitments are not mutually exclusive.

What troubles me is not that a colleague criticized a Jewish organization. It is that the criticism was framed in the specific idiom of conspiratorial Jewish power—the “unbelievable” influence, the hidden leverage, the manufactured victimhood—without any apparent awareness that this idiom has a body count.

I know what that body count looks like. I have stood on the stairs where it was measured in stone. I have sat across from a man who survived it because he could cut hair. I fled a country where a version of it executed Habib Elghanian in 1979—Iran’s most prominent Jewish businessman, shot for “corruption on earth”—and sent 60,000 Jews into exile.

The Holocaust did not begin in the camps. It began in the language, in lectures, newspapers, and radio broadcasts where Jewish influence was described as unbelievable, hidden, and dangerous. No one interrupted it. The camps followed.

I am not calling for censorship. The First Amendment protects speech, and I would defend that protection. But legal protection does not place rhetoric beyond critique. We can defend free expression and still be honest about when speech, however well-intentioned, echoes patterns that have cost lives.

Forty years ago, a teenage refugee stood at the top of the Stairs of Death and did not yet have the language to name what he felt. He has it now.