Sunday, October 28, 2018

Thoughts on the past week.

It's impossible to know what to say about the events of the last week in America.

The attempted assassination of 14 opposition voices. And the murder of 11 people because they were Jewish. 

Then, the noise around these events. The radical right and president Trump making allegations that both these events were concoctions of the left in order to sway the up-coming midterm elections.

It's all almost too Kristallnacht to be believed. Eighty years ago, when after a state-sponsored pogrom in which 7,500 of Jewish businesses and houses of worship were destroyed and hundreds of people beaten and killed and 30,000 sent to concentration camps, the Jewish community was stuck with a 10-million Reichsmark bill for damages inflicted against the German state.

Blame the victims. 

The new American way.

Of course in our country, while eleven innocents are shot, anti-Semitism echoes throughout our nation--radical haters attacking HIAS, globalism, and George Soros.

Where will it stop? 

How will it end?




I know it's dark but I think of Primo Levi's poem at the start of his great book "If This is a Man."


“You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find warm food
And friendly faces when you return home.
Consider if this is a man
Who works in mud,
Who knows no peace,
Who fights for a crust of bread,
Who dies by a yes or no.
Consider if this is a woman
Without hair, without name,
Without the strength to remember,
Empty are her eyes, cold her womb,
Like a frog in winter.
Never forget that this has happened.
Remember these words.
Engrave them in your hearts,
When at home or in the street,
When lying down, when getting up.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your houses be destroyed,
May illness strike you down,
May your offspring turn their faces from you.”


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