Anti-Semitism Since World War I
...differences among prejudice, discrimination, and scapegoating.
According to the booklet, 101 ways to combat prejudice (Barnes & Noble, n.d.), prejudice is "pre-judging, making a decision about a person or group of people without sufficient knowledge." Discrimination, on the other hand, is "the denial of justice and fair treatment by both individuals and institutions in many arenas, including employment, education, housing, banking, and political rights. Discrimination is an action that can follow prejudiced thinking." Finally, scapegoating is "the action of blaming an individual or group for something when, in reality, there is no one person or group responsible for the problem. It targets another person or group as responsible for problems in society because of that person's group identity."
An example of how people have shown prejudice, discrimination, and scapegoating against a particular group of people can be found in Hitler's persecution of the Jews in Germany during World War II. The Jews people of both a minority religion (Judaism) and a minority race (descendents of Jacob and the Israelites) within Germany.
Hitler was prejudiced against the Jews because he saw the Jewish people as a single body of people that posed a threat to Germany's national security and economic well-being. Instead of seeing each Jewish person as a "German," capable of the same nationalism, loyalty, and German pride as any other German, Hitler grouped Jews together based on their non-Christian religion and their non-German/non-European heritage and race. Because Jewish people were easily identified by birth records and/or religious practices, it was easy to "make a decision about" the Jewish people as a group based on facts that applied specifically only to some Jewish individuals alone. For example, if one "Jewish" man became a banker or another "Jewish" man was hired for...
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