(Image source/creator: Justine Goode / NBC News; Getty Images)

Back in 2019 during the first Trump administration, some Wikipedia user briefly replaced the illustration for the article “kapo” with a picture of deputy White House Chief of Staff and rabid anti-immigrant bigot Stephen Miller.

Kapos were (per Wikipedia) “a type of prisoner functionary at a Nazi concentration or extermination camp.” They were generally (though not always) Jews who were given a position of authority over other Jews. Kapos received better food than their fellow prisoners; and they often had the impunity to beat, starve, and punish others in the camp.

“Kapo” today is used within Jewish circles as a vicious insult, reserved for those who have betrayed the community and allied with enemies. Trump’s ambassador to Israel during his first term, David Friedman, controversially (and disgustingly) said that members of J-Street, an organization that advocates for a two-state solution and Palestinian rights, were “far worse than kapos.” Laura Loomer, a conspiracy theorist and Islamophobe who is close to Trump, has (again disgustingly) called Jewish people who vote for Democrats “kapo Jews.”

Liberal and left Jews—with, I’d argue, a stronger moral case— regularly refer to Miller as a kapo on social media. For example, Nancy Levine Stearns, journalist and founder of impactivize.org referred to Miller as “Captain Kapo.” Noah Smith, an influential center-right writer on economics and policy, referred to Miller as “the Kapo di Tutti Kapi” (mangled Italian for the kapo “boss of all bosses”).

(Image source: Wikipedia. A kapo at Salaspils concentration camp in Latvia, 1941.)

It’s easy to understand why progressive and centrist Jews have called Miller a kapo. He has been linked to white nationalist networks that crossover with neo-Nazis. Though he comes from a family of Jewish immigrants, he has devoted his life to targeting immigrant communities. Many Jews see him as betraying his Jewish identity and Jewish history.

But while the term “kapo” has great evocative force, the term doesn’t adequately describe or explain Miller’s particular brand of evil. That’s because the position of American Jews is not analogous to the position of Jewish people in Nazi-occupied territories during World War II. The term “kapo” downplays Miller’s freedom and his power since kapos themselves were trying to survive genocide, whereas Miller faces no such threat. It also suggests, erroneously, that Jewish people are his primary victims.

Miller and Hate

Whether you want to call him a “kapo” or not, Miller’s history of violent hatred and racism is well documented.

Miller’s own family came to the United States fleeing pogroms in Belarus at the beginning of the 20^th century. His uncle, David S. Glosser, says he “shudder[s] at the thought” of what would have become of Miller’s ancestors if they had been subjected to the “policies Stephen so cooly espouses—the travel ban, the radical decrease in refugees, the separation of children from their parents, and even talk of limiting citizenship for legal immigrants.”

Miller himself has no such qualms though. On the contrary, Miller is, as former ABC anchor Terry Moran put it, “a world-class hater.” Jean Guerrero, who wrote the book Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, And The White Nationalist Agenda, points out that Miller grew up in California in the 1990s at a time of increasing anti-immigrant sentiment. This was a period of escalating attacks on bilingual education and on social services for immigrants.

Most Jewish people—around 70% according to polls over the years—tend to lean left and vote for Democrats. There are exceptions though, and Miller is one. He gobbled up racist and xenophobic narratives in high school, listening to right-wing radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Larry Elder. He called into the latter’s show, impressed him, and began to be featured as a regular guest. That got Miller into right-wing networks, and introduced him to David Horowitz—an influential far right and racist Jewish conservative.

Miller went on to be a tireless advocate for white nationalism and immigrant hatred. The Southern Poverty Law Center investigated leaked emails between Miller and the far right website Breitbart in which Miller encouraged Breitbart to run pieces from white nationalist websites like VDare and American Renaissance. The Southern Poverty Law Center “was unable to find any examples of Miller writing sympathetically or even in neutral tones about any person who is nonwhite or foreign-born.”

Miller was (and still is) especially obsessed with Jean Raspail’s paranoid anti-immigrant hate novel The Camp of the Saints. Raspail is one of the most influential advocates of the Great Replacement theory—the idea that shadowy forces are encouraging immigration so that immigrants can outvote, overwhelm, and conquer the U.S. and Western countries.

In a recent White House briefing, Miller shouted that mainstream media’s (supposed) sympathy for immigrants is an example of the “cancerous, communist, woke culture that is destroying this country.” In his obsessive effort to deport immigrants—especially brown and Black immigrants—he’s put in place impossible quotas for ICE enforcement and is pushing agents to arrest people seeking work in Home Depot parking lots and on farms. To bolster Miller’s campaign of terror, Trump has illegally seized control of the California National Guard and is threatening more raids in other blue states that he claims are insufficiently anti-immigrant.

Kapos, Unlike Miller, Were also Victims

From a young age, Miller identified with a white majority, and with a community that defined itself by hatred of marginalized people. It may seem strange that a Jewish person would feel comfortable in white nationalist networks that are often antisemitic. But remember that Kanye West has hobnobbed with neo-Nazis, and that the leader of the fascist Proud Boys is Latino. True believers of various identities are often accepted in far-right networks out of a mix of pragmatism and genuine bonding over bigotry towards others. For Miller, his identity and his hatred have elevated him to a position in the White House as one of the most influential people in the country. He has vast power to pursue his personal grudges and animosities, and to harm immigrants and non-white people.

(Illustration: Ren Velez/POGO. Photo: Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

The situation of kapos was very different, to put it mildly. Kapos were, first and foremost, prisoners in concentration camps. They did not direct policy; they were not even free to leave, and they often themselves suffered hunger, degradation, and violence.

The recognition that kapos were also victims was slow in coming, as scholar Dan Porat explains in his groundbreaking 2019 monograph Bitter Reckoning: Israel Tries Holocaust Survivors as Nazi Collaborators. In the days and years after the liberation of the camps, there was an overwhelming anger against kapos, who were often seen as worse than the Nazis themselves. Nazi officials rarely lowered themselves to enter the camps, which meant that kapos were the ones who inmates saw enforcing the vicious rules. Immediately after liberation, freed Jews beat and even lynched kapos.

Some kapos could be brutally cruel. In his memoir Night, survivor Elie Wiesel describes a kapo named Idek who “threw himself on me like a wild beast, beating me in the chest, on my head, throwing me to the ground and picking me up again, crushing me with ever more violent blows, until I was covered in blood.” Raya Hanes, a kapo in Auschwitz who was tried in Israel for war crimes in 1952, was accused by inmates of exceptional cruelty: beating prisoners, ordering acts of collective punishment for infractions, torturing women by forcing them to hold bricks in the air for hours.

Hanes’ assistant in the camp, Sarah Gross, however, painted a more complicated picture of Hanes’ life as a kapo. Gross explained that Hanes deliberately cultivated a reputation for being cruel in order to avoid the Nazi’s scrutiny.

Because the Germans thought Hanes hated her co-prisoners, she was sometimes able to help them; for example, she obtained medicine for one of Gross’ friends who was very ill, and probably saved her life. She swore Gross to secrecy, though, “because she did not want it to become known that she was helping, because it was dangerous for her if the Germans heard that she has a [good] character.” In the upside down nightmare of the camps, to do good you had to appear evil.

Hanes was ultimately acquitted. The judge believed that if she had rescued people in the camps—including smuggling out six teenage girls—she must not have committed the tortures attributed to her. “Why would the same person who risks herself for the benefit of the other, [put] herself at not a negligible risk, the risk of death, and not in the everyday world but in the circumstances of a concentration camp—why should this person behave at exactly the same time like a sadistic murderer?”

The judge’s reasoning seems logical. But logic and reason had little to do with life in a concentration camp. Hanes had to pretend to be cruel; at what point does pretending to be cruel cross over into actual cruelty? Out of fear, frustration, desperation, and rage, perhaps Hanes used what little power she had to abuse people in some cases, and then in other calmer moments, used the little power she had to help them. Kapos, survivor Primo Levi wrote, exist “in a grey zone, with ill-defined outlines which both separate and join the two camps of masters and servants.” They were victims; they were also often abusers and sadists; also sometimes they were heroes. All of those things can be true at once.

Kapos had the authority to commit atrocities, and some did. But no kapo devoted their lives to seeking a position as a kapo, as Miller has devoted his life to climbing to power and to virulent hate. For the most part, they took positions as kapos in the hopes of receiving slightly better food, or because they thought doing so might protect their families from death. No kapo was in control of the Nazi murder machine, as Stephen Miller is in charge of the mechanisms of detention, incarceration, and violence that are currently being used to terrorize immigrants and their families in the United States.

Stephen Miller and Betrayal

Kapos were despised for the cruelty some of them exhibited, but they were also loathed because they were seen as having committed an unforgivable betrayal of their own people. As Porat explains, after the Holocaust, “many believed that the Germans could not have created such horror without the collaboration of some within the leadership of the Jewish community.”

Writers like Hannah Arendt argued that Jewish leaders and Jewish functionaries in the camps had aided the genocide by not resisting or by collaborating. Similarly, Zionists in Israel saw kapos as, in Porat’s words, “the embodiment of the worst type of diaspora Jew: submissive, frightened, selfish, and corrupt.” Kapos were despised not just because they harmed individual Jews, but because they were a rebuke to the honor of the Jewish people as a whole. It’s in this sense that Zionist Jews sometimes accuse those they see as insufficiently Zionist of being “kapos.”

There is a parallel logic when people accuse Stephen Miller of being a kapo. Miller is betraying his immigrant past. He’s joining with white nationalists and spreading conspiracy theories, which endanger Jewish people. For example, the far right often claims that Jews are secretly behind Great Replacement efforts. Those conspiracy theories (which, again Miller pushes in various forms), led directly to a mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. Eleven people were killed; it’s the largest antisemitic massacre in U.S. history.

The Tree of Life shooting was horrific, and Miller and all his ilk have blood on their hands. But even with this atrocity, it’s pretty clear that Miller’s main targets are not white Jewish people. Even if you’re just looking at shootings inspired by Great Replacement conspiracies, the worst incident is the Islamophobic mass shooting at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019, in which 51 people died.

Miller’s hatred, throughout his life and today, has mostly been directed not at other Jews but at Black and brown immigrants. He is obsessed with the idea that non-white people will overwhelm and replace white people. And he sees himself in this equation, not primarily as a Jew, but as a white man.

Calling Miller a kapo, or arguing that he has betrayed Jewish people or Judaism, frames Miller’s actions in the context of the Holocaust and of the Jewish community. It suggests that Miller’s crime, or evil, consists primarily in targeting other Jews; it presents Miller as a victim who has forgotten his status, and has turned on his own people.

But this is not an accurate description of Miller’s position or of his actions. Miller is not a European Jew who has been thrown into the camps by the Nazis because of his identity. He’s a white man in the U.S. whose identity has allowed him to reach a position where he can torment those he hates—not white Jews, primarily, but Black and brown people.

Miller’s story is not an exemplar of Jewish victimization and self-betrayal. Instead, it’s a story about how, even though antisemitism persists, white Jews in America are often seen primarily as white, and can, if they choose, use their whiteness as a route to power and cruelty.

This is not, obviously, how white Jewish people in the U.S. necessarily want to see themselves or their relationship to power. But I think that makes it all the more important to be clear-eyed in confronting it. At a time when bad faith accusations of antisemitism are being used by Trump and Miller to target and deport pro-Palestinian immigrants, it’s vital to make a distinction between kapos—complicated victims and abusers with little real power—and Stephen Miller—a fascist ruler directing a vicious program of ethnic cleansing against people who are overwhelmingly not Jewish.

Stephen Miller is more like Nazis Joseph Goebbels or Adolf Eichmann than he is like Raya Hanes or even Idek. Calling him a “kapo” fails to grapple with the extent to which white Jews have power and agency to do evil. In doing so, it also fails to acknowledge the power we have to do good, if we choose to use it.

Noah Berlatsky (he/him) is a freelance writer in Chicago. His poetry collection Not Akhmatova (Ben Yehuda Press) examines diaspora Jewish identity.