The vast majority of Jews in Weimar-era Germany were middle-class clerical types or tradesmen; however, Nazi and other right-wing propaganda grossly inflated th

The vast majority of Jews in Weimar-era Germany were middle-class clerical types or tradesmen; however, Nazi and other right-wing propaganda grossly inflated the economic power of the Jewish community in order to whip up public anger. Of course, the persecution of Jews in Europe was because they were Jews, not because some of them were wealthy; the shoah was basically the extreme culmination of hundreds of years of persecution, segregation, and pogroms. Perkins' analogy is really, really ugly, because it both trades, perhaps inadvertently, in anti-Semitic stereotypes of "rich Jews," and because it dismisses the centuries of brutal persecution the Jewish community faced as simply the resentment of the disenfranchised.