On the night of November 9, 1938, the eerie sound of breaking glass carried through the streets of Germany and Austria. Storefronts, homes, and houses of worship were destroyed as mobs moved from block to block. Fires consumed synagogues while crowds gathered to watch. By morning, the city streets glittered with shattered glass, and the men responsible had given the night an almost beautiful-sounding name—Kristallnacht, the night of crystal. The name has always carried a bitter irony because crystal suggests something delicate and precious, but what lay in the streets was the wreckage of ordinary lives.

Across those two nations, more than 7,000 Jewish businesses were destroyed, over 900 synagogues were burned, 91 people were killed, and some 30,000 Jewish men were seized and sent to concentration camps.^[1] An American consular official in Leipzig, reporting to Washington days later, wrote, “At 3 a.m. November 10, 1938 was unleashed a barrage of Nazi ferocity as had had no equal hitherto in Germany, or very likely anywhere else in the world. . . . Jewish dwellings were smashed into and contents demolished or looted. In one of the Jewish sections an eighteen-year-old boy was hurled from a three story window to land with both legs broken on a street littered with burning beds and other household furniture and effects from his family’s and other apartments.”^[2] These details, horrifying as they are, still fail to capture the terror of families dragged from their homes while neighbors silently watched. But the night of broken glass did not arrive without warning.

For years, the German state had been narrowing the space in which Jewish life could exist. A boycott of Jewish businesses came in 1933, the same year the first concentration camp opened at Dachau. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped Jewish citizens of legal standing and forbade marriage between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans. One profession after another—law, medicine, teaching, the arts—was closed to Jewish workers. By the autumn of 1938, Jewish passports were being stamped with a red “J” to identify the holders as Jewish at foreign borders, and Jewish children were being expelled from public schools. But the immediate spark came from Paris.

On November 7, 1938, a seventeen-year-old Jewish refugee named Herschel Grynszpan walked into the German embassy and shot a German diplomat, Ernst vom Rath. Grynszpan had just learned that his parents, along with thousands of other Polish Jewish men and women, had been expelled from Germany in cattle cars and stranded at the border. When vom Rath died of his wounds two days later, the regime seized the pretext it had been waiting for. What followed was not the spontaneous public outrage the Nazi leadership described, but violence coordinated by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who used the act of one desperate young man as the excuse for a night of violence that had already been planned.^[3]

Kristallnacht was not the beginning of something new; it belonged to a tradition old enough to have a name—pogrom. Historically, the word “pogrom” refers to violent antisemitic attacks committed against the Jewish community by local non-Jewish communities, especially in the nineteenth-century Russian empire; in Russian, pogrom means “to wreak havoc, to demolish violently.”^[4] What set the night of broken glass apart was not novelty, but efficiency. It was an assault carried out across a whole country with the endorsement of the state, yet beneath every version of this violence runs a pattern that barely changes.

It begins with this lie: the claim that Jewish people are at fault for whatever has gone wrong, whether economic hardship, military defeat, or social upheaval. The lie then hardens into contempt, and contempt trains a community to regard their Jewish neighbors as less than human. Once that happens, cruelty toward Jewish people first becomes thinkable, then permissible, and at last, for the watching crowd, unremarkable. Every stage of that descent depends on ordinary people agreeing that Jewish lives matter less than others. It would be a comfort to close the book on all of this as an ugly history buried in the past. But sadly, that comfort does not hold.

On March 23, 2026, four young men committed an arson attack against four Jewish charity ambulances in a majority-Jewish neighborhood of London. These ambulances served the whole community but were set on fire and blown up, evidently for the simple fact that they belonged to a Jewish charity.^[5] This violence occurred in a different century, but it was the same ancient lie. Around the world, cemeteries are defaced, old conspiracies find new audiences, and Jewish communities still bury their dead after attacks on synagogues, schools, and gatherings, targeted for no reason beyond being Jewish.

The particulars may shift, but the pattern does not, and the only variable that has ever mattered is how many people are willing to recognize the sound of breaking glass for what it is. The evil behind antisemitism has never been merely social or political, but also spiritual; it reaches back to the opening pages of Scripture. When God set in motion His plan to rescue the whole world, He bound that plan to one family. He called Abram out of his country with a promise that would shape all of history: “I will make you a great nation, and I will bless you . . . and so you shall be a blessing” (Genesis 12:2). Then He added words history has never been free to ignore: “And I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse. And in you all the families of the earth will be blessed” (Genesis 12:3).

That promise carries more weight than a casual reading reveals. To belittle God’s chosen people is to summon upon oneself the very judgment once reserved for covenant disobedience. Hatred of the Jewish people is never only a social evil or a political grievance. It is an assault on the redemptive plan of God Himself, aimed at the people through whom He promised to bless the earth. The prophets gave this truth its sharpest edge. Through Zechariah, God said of His people, “he who touches you, touches the apple of His eye” (Zechariah 2:8)—meaning to strike God’s beloved is to strike at what He holds most precious. The prophet Micah said: “He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8). God’s justice confronts hatred, and His kindness bends toward the one who is hated.

The sound of breaking glass that echoed through the streets on the night of Kristallnacht in 1938 continues to echo through every generation. Today we face the same choice the watching crowds once faced: to recognize the pattern early, or to look away. Silence is not neutrality; it is a decision, and there is only one faithful response. Learn the history of antisemitism until the pattern is unmistakable, refuse to be silent the way others were throughout history, and stand with the Jewish people—not from a safe distance, but close enough to make a difference. The Coalition Against Antisemitism has traced the history of this hatred from its earliest forms to the present hour so that you will be prepared to take a stand . . . before the glass breaks again.^[6]