Nazi Caricatures Are Returning to Ohio
On Tuesday, a sticker of a hook-nosed caricature, a relic of Der Stürmer, pointing at the rising price of unleaded at an Ohio gas station. Underneath, in dripping red letters, is a blunt, ancient accusation: “THE JEWS DID THIS!” This is not Nazi Germany. It is Ohio in 2026.
You are looking at a breach in the American moral consensus. For decades, we operated under a set of “guardrails.” We believed that certain doors were locked, that certain hatreds were too radioactive for the public square. That consensus once secured that Jews have a place in this country. Today, that door is standing wide open.
But those guardrails didn’t just fail; they were dismantled. And they were dismantled by a pincer movement of two competing, yet oddly symbiotic, radicalisms.
The first half of the pincer began in Ohio’s ivory towers. In the wake of October 7th, the ‘progressive’ vanguard stood by as radicals rebranded Jews—now conveniently labeled ‘Zionists’—as the world’s quintessential ‘genocidal settlers’ and ‘hyperwhite oppressors.’ This wasn’t just a shift in campus vocabulary; it was a tactical dismantling of our moral defenses. By transforming the ‘Zionist’ into a singular symbol of Western sin, the radicals effectively lowered the social cost of dehumanization. They provided the ‘enlightened’ classes with a moral pretext to revoke the Jewish community’s standing in our most elite spaces. This was the first deep crack in Ohio’s moral foundation.
The radical right was paying attention. They didn’t need to invent a new villain; they simply picked up the caricature the left had validated and stripped away the academic euphemisms. If one side of the political aisle says Jews are a “ruling class” manipulating the world’s misery, the other side feels perfectly comfortable pointing at the gas pump and saying, “The Jews did this.”
What we are witnessing in Ohio—from swastikas on dorm doors in Oxford to the “Happy Merchant” on a gas pump in Glen Echo—is a race to the bottom. We are watching two “competitive revolutions” vying for the collapse of the Ohio’s moral center. Both sides view the Jew as the ultimate symbol of the system they wish to destroy. Both sides are “accelerationists,” betting that in the ensuing chaos, their specific brand of illiberalism will inherit the ruins of Ohio.
As a Jewish reporter in the heartland, I am telling you: the ghosts of the 1930s are back because we opened the door for them. We traded a shared moral standard for ideological convenience. We allowed our “moral immune system” to rot, thinking we were only targeting our political enemies.
But the sticker on the pump doesn’t care about your politics. It is a reminder that when you destroy the guardrails that protect one group, you destroy the peace that protects us all. The breach is open. The question is whether we still have the courage to close it.
