Kanye West’s antisemitism is bad for business. Now how about Henry Ford?
Amid a spike in reports of antisemitic incidents nationwide, two developments in recent weeks were especially conspicuous. One was the anti-Jewish statements made on social media and in interviews by Ye, the musician and fashion designer formerly known as Kanye West. He was promptly dropped by Adidas, Gap and other business partners. Then, on Nov. 3, NBA star Kyrie Irving was suspended by the Brooklyn Nets after promoting an antisemitic film on social media. Nike backed away from its relationship with him. (Irving eventually apologized. He remained suspended as of Monday.)
For the moment, it seems, antisemitism is bad business in the United States. And yet, to drive around my hometown of Detroit is to wonder whether this news has arrived.
Henry Ford, the most prominent, virulent antisemite the nation has ever known, is omnipresent in Detroit. Yes, Ford is famous for implementing the moving assembly line and founding the automaking business that put the Motor City on the map. But Ford was also a powerful driver of anti-Jewish hatred, using his wealth and influence to promote antisemitism in the interwar era, before World War II and the Holocaust.
Ford, a friend wrote in his diary in 1919, “attributes all evil to Jews or to the Jewish capitalists.”
To advance his views, Ford had purchased the Dearborn Independent newspaper in 1918, which soon began publishing a weekly front-page column, “The International Jew: The World’s Problem.” It ran for 91 issues of a paper that, at its peak in the mid-1920s, claimed a circulation of 700,000 to 900,000, distributed
across the country at Ford auto dealerships.
In that period, Ford also paid for the printing and distribution of 500,000 copies of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a stubbornly persistent forgery that purports to describe a Jewish plot for world domination.
For these efforts, Adolf Hitler praised Ford by name in “Mein Kampf” and in 1938 awarded him the highest Nazi honor bestowed upon a non-German. Although Ford had apologized for his antisemitic campaign in 1927 amid mounting public criticism — his remorse was met with much skepticism — he gladly accepted the honor.
Today, how is it that Ford’s malevolence toward Jews is dwarfed in Detroit by the urge to celebrate his automotive achievements?
Drivers leaving the Detroit metropolitan airport encounter a highway sign pointing to Henry Ford College, another to the Ford Expressway. And still another to the Henry Ford, a 250-acre museum campus dedicated, as its website says, to “a vibrant exploration of genius.”
Downtown, the Henry Ford Hospital bills itself as a haven of “science + soul.” It is part of the Henry Ford Health system,
with more than 250 locations in Michigan. At one in suburban Detroit that I visited recently, its marketing campaign posters covered the waiting room walls. One photo showed a smiling African American woman in a white lab coat. Another showed an Asian American doctor. Both beam from behind the slogan “I AM HENRY.”
Jews, so far as I can tell, are nowhere to be found in a campaign that otherwise strains for inclusivity.
Jews are also hard to find on the website of the Henry Ford museum complex. Digging eventually turns up “Henry Ford and Anti-Semitism: A Complex Story.” The article begins, “As with most famous people, Henry Ford was complex and had traits and took actions that were laudatory as well as troublesome.”
“Troublesome”? By the end of the article, it’s hard not to wonder: Troublesome for whom? We’re told that the column “The International Jew: The World’s Problem” in Ford’s newspaper “tarnished his reputation and it has never been completely forgotten.”
One might conclude that, for an institution saddled with his name, it’s almost reasonable to yearn for Ford’s antipathy toward Jews to be forgotten.
Most confounding, Detroit is home to a prosperous Jewish community of about 70,000. And yet, silence on this subject prevails. Where is the local opposition to living under the name of the man who helped inspire the mastermind of the Holocaust? Where is the Jewish campaign to make the name Henry Ford a losing business proposition?
The Ford Motor Co. is one thing; the name Henry Ford is another. Detroit ought to be scrubbed clean of it.
In the Depression’s early days, my grandfather landed a job at a Ford plant in Detroit. He was stunned. If an illiterate refugee of anti-Jewish pogroms in Eastern
Europe could secure paid work with the nation’s leading antisemite, then the promise of America might be possible.
Alas, within a week, the foreman had called him a dirty Jew. As the story went, my grandfather responded with a one-two punch, knocking the foreman flat to the ground. It cost him his job, but his dignity was intact.
For me, as a child, the story of my grandfather was irresistible. He was the Jew who fought back.
It’s time for us all to fight back against the poisonous ubiquity of Henry Ford in Detroit.