December 9, 2021
Canaries in the Coal Mine: Dara Horn and Bari Weiss
By Dr. Ruth WisseJews can do their fellow citizens a favor by identifying the sources of cultural poison before the toxicity turns fatal. Hardly anybody is doing it better than these two.
About that cliché of Jews being the canary in the coal mine—what exactly does it mean for us today?
Canaries, because they are more sensitive than humans to carbon monoxide, began at some point to be used as danger-indicators, alerting miners that their working conditions were becoming ominously toxic. Metaphorically, when applied to Jews, the phrase “canary in the coal mine” can thus be taken to signify that threats to Jewish life represent simultaneously a warning signal to society at large: “Caution, Toxic Danger Ahead.”
How do we tell when the point of no return has been reached—the point, that is, after the canaries have died? In this respect, I have always loved the ending of the 1961 film Judgment at Nuremberg where the American chief judge, played by Spencer Tracy, visits one of the movie’s four convicted Nazi defendants in his prison cell. Ernst Janning, a German jurist (played by Burt Lancaster) who is the most impressive of the four, has confessed to condemning a Jew to death for a mere misdemeanor. Attempting to justify himself, he tells his American interlocutor: “Those millions of people . . . I never knew it would come to that. You must believe it.” Tracy replies: “Herr Janning, it came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death whom you knew to be innocent.”