Why ‘kapo’ should never be used as a political insult against other Jews

(RNS) — I knew it would happen, and it finally did. Someone called me a name no Jew should ever be called.

I somehow wound up in a political conversation on Facebook about anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protests happening around the country. I made the apparent mistake of suggesting that speaking out in favor of immigrants was, in fact, a Jewish value as old as the Torah itself.

That was too liberal for one person. So, he reached back into the darkest corners of Jewish history and hurled the ugliest epithet in the Jewish lexicon directly at me. He called me a kapo.

Let us be precise about what that word actually means.

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia , kapos were concentration camp prisoners whom the Nazi SS units selected to oversee other prisoners on forced labor details. They often whipped, beat and even killed the prisoners under their command.

The moral situation of the kapos was complex. In his essay “The Grey Zone,” from his book “The Drowned and the Saved,” the late Primo Levi, drawing on his experience surviving the Holocaust, wrote that the Nazis turned victims into accomplices. The kapos were…