To the Editor:
Alex Fisch did NOT compare the homeless to Jewish Holocaust victims
Culver City politics have reached a lamentable low with the recent distribution of a 4 page hit piece paid for by the Alliance for Culver City to Support the Election of Denice Renteria and Dan O’Brien for City Council 2022. This is the PAC to which Hackman Capital has contributed nearly $500,000 through The Culver Studios.
The source of this allegation is a statement made by Mr. Fisch during an online forum for Democratic City Council candidates, sponsored by the Culver City Democratic Club on June 29, 2022. Each of the four candidates participating was asked “How will you address the housing and homelessness crisis?”
Mr. Fisch answered as follows:
“… the only thing that’s proven to work with chronically homeless people, which is permanent supportive housing; transitional shelter to get people off the streets and into care somewhere safe, and to relearn how to be indoors, and then permanent supportive housing so that they’re secure. That is, far and away, study after study after study, the only thing that works. Marching people off to concentration camps in Palmdale is not a solution. It’s not moral. It’s not the Democratic Party way of doing things…”
This was four months ago, well before Kanye West’s highly publicized rant or the hanging of anti-Semitic banners over the 405 last week. My first thought when I heard this was that Mr. Fisch was making an analogy to Manzanar, the concentration camp in the California desert where people of Japanese origin were imprisoned by the U.S. government during WW II. And why would Mr. Fisch make such an analogy? Because local social media have been rife with comments to the effect that unhoused people should be rounded up and shipped off to the desert. A sampling of NextDoor comments includes:
“Round them up and bus them out to the far desert, is my opinion!”
“Where will they go if the unhoused are moved from encampments?“ Response: “We could start on all that empty LA land near Palmdale…acres and acres and acres…”
“the approach needed is to pick them up and ship them out… We pay a lot of money to live here & we the tax paying citizens should be the priority… Enforce laws with a heavy hand! If you can’t be a functioning member of society, then be banished from Society. I want my neighborhood back!”
And on Quora: “Is forcing the homeless into camps where they can perform valuable labor to earn their keep a valid solution to the terrible homeless problem in our cities?”
Mr. Fisch could not have been more clear that such an approach is repugnant and immoral. Furthermore, he is Jewish (as am I). His family has direct experience of anti-Semitism. During the 1930s, his grandfather’s downtown LA department store was threatened with a boycott by a pro-Nazi organization.
Common Sense Culver City, a local PAC that features prominently in the mailer, chose to take this one statement out of context and weaponize it. The Culver City Democratic Club event was not widely publicized. It seems extremely likely that Common Sense Culver City shopped this sentence around to Jewish organizations in order to collect opinions condemning it, for the sole purpose of smearing Mr. Fisch.
Common Sense Culver City’s real issues with Alex Fisch are his efforts to replace single family zoning with incremental infill in order to remove barriers to additional housing construction, his support for a Housing First approach to homelessness and opposition to arresting unhoused people for camping on public property, and the perceived inconvenience to car drivers caused by MOVE Culver City’s focus on other modes of transportation. And who funds Common Sense Culver City? Its biggest contributor is the Hackman-funded Alliance for Culver City to Support the Election of Denice Renteria and Dan O’Brien for City Council 2022.
The supporters of Common Sense Culver City have no substantive proposals to address our local imperatives to address housing, homelessness, or climate change, so they have resorted to unfounded character assassination. Alex Fisch has shown that he cares about the future of the earth and the future of Culver City. His commitment to the thankless role of city council member embodies tikkun olam, which modern Judaism interprets as our obligation for “healing the world” by seeking social justice, alleviating suffering, and caring for the earth. Culver City neighbors, please vote on the issues, not gossip and inuendo.
Jeanne Black
Culver City
The honorable Mr Fisch has doubled down on his remarks instead of softening his language. He issued no apology for flippantly using the term “consentration camps,” which inflames and diminishes the memory of horrific events. The letter writer’s use of the phrase “consentration camps” to describe the horrible Japanese relocation centers is equally disturbing.
It is not unusual for a Jewish publication to criticize another person of Jewish heritage, but for a Jewish person to diminish the memory of Nazi concentration camps is highly unusual and worth of vigorous public outcry.
Spelling corrected; Please reject earlier sumbittal:
The honorable Mr Fisch has doubled down on his remarks instead of softening his language. He issued no apology for flippantly using the term “consentration camps,” which inflames and diminishes the memory of horrific events. The letter writer’s use of the phrase “consentration camps” to describe the horrible Japanese relocation centers is equally disturbing.
It is not unusual for a Jewish publication to criticize another person of Jewish heritage, but for a Jewish person to diminish the memory of Nazi concentration camps is highly unusual and worth of vigorous public outcry.
In his recent campaign Facebook ad Mr Fisch again proudly admitted that he used those words”marching people off to concentration camps in Palmdale” deliberately. He says it was a deliberate attempt to draw attention to the issue.
What he did was an inherently and purposeful false equivalency. He equated bad homeless policies to the deliberate and horrifying directed genocide of European Jews as well as 7 million other people.
When you use a horrific deliberately homicidal plan as an analogy to homelessness programs then go on to quote the anti human language on Next Door and Quora as evidence to defend Mr. Fisch’s analogy you are effectively trivializing the Holocaust and the rampant evil of the Nazi regime.
We must figure out how to help the unhoused, leaving them on the streets to die, become sick, or be assaulted is not any kind of solution.
For years the council majority has refused to agendize building pallet housing which would have helped take 20 people off the streets. Redondo Beach has done this successfully.
Denice Renteria supports investigating whether our current homeless outreach contractors are as effective as they could be. If they aren’t then they should be replaced.
Dan O’Brien has had experience on the homelessness council and understands the obligation to provide housing and care.
I have no knowledge of Mr. Fisch’s personal beliefs, but his use of the marching to concentration camps in Palmdale plays into an increasingly nation and worldwide effect of trivializing the horrors of those camps.
I know the people in Palmdale are upset too. There is no reason for him to have used that analogy and to continue to deflect and not apologize for the intense pain and discomfort his language causes.
If he had simply apologized and agreed that the language was an incendiary false equivalency, then the continued poison of his comment persists.
Here we go with the pile on by predictable provocateurs. As the authors letter explains, Alex Fisch was referencing others calls for marching unhoused folx off to the Palmdale deserts, the unfortunate reference to concentration camps included. He did not originate these comments, he was referencing them to highlight their offensive and inhumane nature. This is clear, and his opponents constant and repeated attempts to try tie this one single comment to him, show the lengths to which one must go to find issue with Alex and his record as a Culver City public servant. It’s very disappointing how cynical and infused with outside money this election cycle is, it is terrible for Culver City and only continues the efforts by a very vocal, and increasingly disconnected minority in this city to try to control the direction of City wether they can run effective candidates or win elections or not. Dirty politics indeed… Shame on you all for continuing with this charade.
Alex Fisch made those horrific comments at a forum which was then posted on YouTube. I found it disturbing. So did many other people. And importantly, so did Jewish leaders. But don’t take my word for it. You can read about it here: https://jewishjournal.com/news/united-states/350114/culver-city-councilmember-on-homelessness-marching-people-off-to-concentration-camps-in-palmdale-is-not-a-solution/
Alex Fisch was asked to apologize. He didn’t. He’s had four months to do so. I find it shocking that there are some folks who are more upset that a flyer reprinted quotes from Jewish leaders denouncing Fisch’s comments than are upset that he said what he said in the first place.
The city council of Palmdale was upset too and asked for an apology. They didn’t get it.
And now, I see some people trying to justify what he said in an attempt to reinvent his intention. He said it. He owns it. The outrage should purely be directed at him, and not the people who were hurt, angry, or mortified by what he said.
Jeanne…you seem to be missing the point entirely. Relocating people who need a home to a shelter in Palmdale in no way equates to loading Jews, gypsies and homosexuals onto train cars and taking them to their deaths in a gas chamber. Are you kidding? Very inappropriate and disturbing comment by Alex Fisch. Also, is Alex Jewish..he just seems to say his family is Jewish…either way…being Jewish doesn’t justify the comments…if you want an example of a horrible antisemitic Jew…check out Stephen Miller. NO to ALEX FISCH!
As if Mr. Fisch’s comments minimizing the Holocaust and his subsequent doubling down on it at the Culver City Democratic Club meeting, which I attended, wasn’t bad enough, now we have this abhorrent justification for Mr. Fisch’s comments in a letter to the editor. The above letter merely demonstrates how far Mr. Fisch’s supporters are willing to go to defend the indefensible and also demonstrates how much cover Mr. Fisch has the ability to give to antisemitism. He has basically given his seal of approval to minimizing the Holocaust.
Regarding homelessness, I believe we need to house the homeless and provide social services. I don’t believe in tent cities. I don’t see how that makes me and so many others who share the same ideals right-wing or conservative. It would seem to be a liberal stance to me, but time will tell.
Going back to antisemitism, sadly, it is real, dangerous, and it comes from both the right and left sides of the political aisles in today’s society. There is a reason so many major Jewish organizations responded to Mr. Fisch’s disgusting remarks. When I spoke out against Mr. Fisch’s comments during the aforementioned Culver City Democratic Club meeting, I was met with several fellow CCDC members expressing their disgust with my commentary via the zoom message board in the meeting. I posted a message asking one of the message posters if he/she/they were Jewish and/or had any wings of their family tree lopped off by the Holocaust like mine. Mr. Fisch responded, “I am, Eric,” to which I responded that I knew he was Jewish and that is why he should know better.
Antisemitism is bad enough. We don’t need fellow Jews giving people an excuse to be antisemitic and minimize the Holocaust. In sum, upon reading this letter and giving it some thought, I came to one conclusion: I feel like Mr. Fisch could walk down Overland Avenue [fill in the blank from Trump’s infamous speech] and not lose a vote from his supporters.