“We must always tell what we see. Above all, and this is more difficult, we must always see what we see.”
Charles Péguy:
I admit I’ve done everything I can to delay writing this column. I don’t like writing unwelcome news, and I know that people don’t like reading it. Sometimes I must describe and explain what is there.
The American “Baby Boomer” generation of Jews (can I say ‘Joomers?’) has experienced an extraordinarily generous reception from their gentile neighbors when compared to almost any other time and place in history. Alan Dershowitz discussed the unique period in a YouTube talk.
Because these “Joomers” know nothing else, they struggle to understand the alternative on a visceral level. They believe their experience of other humans is normative. When they hear people shout, “Kill the Jews!” they think it is a political chant and not something to be taken seriously. They don’t understand the depth of human evil.
They saw the end of restrictions on their ability to live in many neighborhoods. Severe quotas or outright bans on their admission to prestigious schools or academic careers were loosened or eliminated. Dershowitz graduated first in his class from Yale Law School in 1962, but at the time, no prestigious law firm was hiring Jewish lawyers.
I “experienced” an antisemitic quota as a child actor sixty-five years ago. Baltimore’s Jewish Community Center did a production of The World of Sholom Aleichem. I played a Jewish boy studying to try to earn a spot in a Russian Gymnasium (high school) around 1900, when there were severe quotas limiting Jewish students. In 1960, I was in a selective admission high school in Baltimore with hundreds of students, one-third of whom were Jewish.
Hard times are coming. When that happens, several vital rules should be kept in mind. The first casualty of any conflict is truth. There are those on both sides who will try to make you hate the other side. This is especially true to hide the following fact.
In each new conflict, make sure your “friends” and enemies haven’t traded places. Your “friends” may have just been allies who shared an enemy. Franklin Roosevelt did not enter the war in Europe to save the Jews. It was always a war for European democracies, even though our major ally was Soviet tyranny. I have written about FDR’s disgraceful action in turning away a ship of Jewish refugees from Germany, and the weak to non-existent coverage of German pogroms by the New York Times.
Speaking of the Times points to the next temptation. We want to be fashionable and be associated with the “best people.” At times, it can be deadly. In a crisis, you need to be decisive and clear-headed when assessing threats and allies.
Herman Wouk’s famous novels The Winds of War and War and Remembrance demonstrate the consequences of refusing to understand the severity of the threat you are facing. Aaron Jastrow is portrayed as someone who believed he possessed sufficient prestige and honor to be untouchable. He never quite understands how the world has turned against him now that Nazi anti‑Semitism is in full force.
Jastrow was a professor. Some think bigotry is a characteristic of the uneducated. Sadly, the history of Germany in the 1930s shows the opposite. Ambition is in play when Jews who hold an academic position can be replaced by a loyal party member who deserves the position and the money.
In the 1920s, Julien Benda wrote The Treason of the Intellectuals. He noted that they had moved from training thinkers to training partisans and believers. He predicted this would lead to another war. British historian Sir Niall Ferguson recently wrote a piece with the same name.
It might be thought extraordinary that the most prestigious universities in the world should have been infected so rapidly with a politics imbued with antisemitism. Yet exactly the same thing has happened before.
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Anyone who has a naive belief in the power of higher education to instill ethical values has not studied the history of German universities in the Third Reich. A university degree, far from inoculating Germans against Nazism, made them more likely to embrace it.
Two of the allies of the past can’t be trusted. Media and academia often function as enemies of the Jews. What about the Democratic Party? There is a significant bloc of Islamic voters in the party in swing states like Michigan and Minnesota. Segments of the Black vote are anti-Semitic. This includes leaders like Al Sharpton, Lewis Farrakhan, and the minister who wed the Obamas.
There also seems to be a matter of supporting the party in a way I don’t understand. Given the Sharia policy on women and Gays, it seems absurd for either of those groups to support Palestinian goals in any way. But they do.
President Trump has a Jewish son-in-law, daughter, and grandchildren. He is working on initiatives such as the Abraham Accords. A large part of his party backs him. There is indeed an isolationist wing (no war anywhere). But support for Israel is strong in the party. Support for court action against anti‑Semitic actions is stronger.
Jews have a choice. They can be fashionable and hang out with and support people who will make life harder for them and their offspring. Or they can get real and start working to fight the resumption of this perpetual evil.