Story highlights Lev Golinkin: Ivanka Trumps' two tweets about the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville were like saying nothing at all

Among other things, Jared Kushner's family history of Holocaust survival should have prompted a stronger reaction, Golinkin writes

Lev Golinkin came to the US as a child refugee from the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkov (now called Kharkiv) in 1990. He is the author of the memoir "A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka." The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own.

(CNN) I first heard the silence late Tuesday night, while pecking at my phone, waiting for Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump to denounce President Donald Trump's latest comments on neo-Nazis after the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the death and mayhem that resulted.

After the President tried to compare neo-Nazis to what he described as the "alt-left," saying "I think there is blame on both sides," there was still no outcry from Jared or Ivanka.

Slowly, as the hours ticked away, the silence descended.

Lev Golinkin

Many think of silence as the absence of noise, but that's only one type of silence. There is a different, darker variety, one Jews and African-Americans have gotten to know well over the centuries. This silence doesn't suppress sound -- it amplifies it. It is the boom of the MS St. Louis departing for Nazi-threatened Europe after being denied entry by port after port. It's the whisk-whisk of Southern belles fanning themselves at the slave auction. It's the presence of apathy amid injustice and horror.

I'd heard this kind of silence, long ago. I heard it in the Soviet Union, in the footfalls of teachers and classmates calmly walking around me and the other Jew in my class as we received our daily beatings. I'd heard it in the Doppler effect of cars passing my family and other refugees when we were hitchhiking along frigid Austrian roads.