I never met a Jew I didn't like

There are newspaper columns for which I have ideas, sometimes good ideas, but for one reason or another don’t get written, not, at least, right away.

This is one of those columns. In fact, I first proposed the idea for it in 2003 to Sarah Rigg, the editor of “The View” back then.

At the time, it would have been my first column, and for that reason, and for the potentially controversial nature of the column itself, Sarah suggested I get my picture taken and published in the newspaper, to accompany my new column.

And the point of this column is: I have learned over the years, in and out of school, about how Jews have sometimes been mistreated by the larger cultures in which they live. You may point to the Spanish Inquisition, or the Pogroms in Russia; but the whole sordid, shameful mess was punctuated by the death of six million Jews in the Holocaust.

And I have asked myself, “Why?” And I continue to ask to this day. I still don’t get it.

Because I never met a Jew I didn’t like. I haven’t known many Jews, to be sure, but the ones I’ve known, and what I’ve learned about how they live their lives, well, I’ve seen nothing to cause my ancestors to single them out for the kinds of persecution that I’ve read about.

Now, Adolf Hitler wrote a whole book about his reasoning why the Jews should be blamed for many things, and I’m reading it now: “Mein Kampf,” or, “My Struggle.”

And I’m reading the Bible, and I can see from that that the Jews, based on what I see in the Old Testament, viewed themselves as a chosen people, with a unique set of cultural practices that often distinguished them from the larger cultures in which they lived.

In fact, last night, on Holy Thursday, we were reminded in the Readings of the first Passover, in which Jewish households in Egypt were spared divine retribution, using blood smeared on the house entrance as a sign that the house was to be spared.

So what? I still don’t get it. I have thought perhaps that it stems from jealousy, using the stereotypes of Jews as successful, no-nonsense businesspeople or bankers or moneylenders, like the character “Shylock” in Shakespeare’s play “The Merchant of Venice.” Or, perhaps some blamed them for Christ’s persecution and crucifixion.

I needed to learn more, I thought, to understand this, so I visited the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills in January, and followed up with a second visit in February.

Frankly, the visits drove home to me the depth and the range of the hatred for Jews, but failed to provide a good understanding of why they were selected for Hitler’s unprecedented mass cruelty.

  

Maybe I’ll find something in “Mein Kampf” that makes sense. But all I’ve seen so far is cockamamie theories on racial purity and the Jews’ supposed support for Marxism. Hitler had no use for Marxism.

The Holocaust Memorial Center is easily reached via I-275 and I-696 at 28123 Orchard Lake Road, just north of 12 Mile Road. At night, the building is illuminated by lights, and it looks as if barbed wire surrounds the building, as if it were a concentration camp. Very chilling.

My daughter Kelly and I visited the center on Martin Luther King Day. A donation to the center is suggested by a small box as you enter, but otherwise admission is free.

There is a daily guided tour at 1 p.m. that lasts for about two hours, followed by a talk with a Holocaust survivor.

Kelly and I took the tour, figuring that would be the best way to get introduced to the place. The guide was very good, peppering us with questions, facts and ideas that better informed us and challenged our assumptions about what we thought we knew.

The talk with the Holocaust survivor was perhaps the best part of the visit. She was a woman in her 80’s, who had lived in Hungary with her family before World War II.

When the war arrived, she explained, Germany used Hungary as a resource, particularly for food for its armies, so Hungary was initially spared the Nazi occupation and the active persecution of Jews experienced by other countries in Europe.

But that ended in 1944, she said, when the Nazi armies arrived to occupy and control the territory, bringing with them the persecution of Jews visited on other countries in Europe.

The woman and her mother hid from the Nazis in the homes of non-Jewish friends, but they couldn’t stay in one place for long, because they were exposing their hosts to being discovered, so they moved around several times to elude the Nazis.

The Holocaust survivor explained that her story was similar to that of Anne Frank in Holland, except that Anne Frank didn’t survive.

Frank wrote a celebrated diary of her experience with her family, having been hidden by friends until they were discovered in August 1944. Anne and her family were separated and sent to concentration camps, where they died before Germany’s surrender in May 1945.

Our survivor at the Holocaust Center was released at the war’s end, and re-united with her husband-to-be. They emigrated to the U.S. in 1946, and brought her mother over in 1951.

 A few weeks after my first visit to the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, I returned to the center for a second look, and it was then, alone with my thoughts as I moved through the history of Judaism and the persecution of Jews culminating in the Holocaust, I experienced a visceral reaction that resides with me to this day.

The design of the building is interesting. The beginning of the self-guided tour is flooded with light, as you move from the lobby entrance to a large, brightly-illuminated room which describes the history of the Jews. On the clear Lucite wall that curves and conforms to the room, events in Jewish history are shown immediately below concurrent major events in World History, as you make your way from right to left through history. It’s very interesting, and it’s chock full of information.

What follows in the next room, a tad darker than the previous rooms, is a closer examination of Judaism itself: how it began, what it believes, including its sacred texts and theologians; its holidays, most of which I’ve heard of, but don’t understand real well, and some famous Jews throughout history.

Because that’s the only thing the word “Jew” represents: a religion, like Catholicism or Protestantism. It’s not an ethnic group, or a race; it’s not a language; it’s not a country. It is a religion.

As you proceed through the tour, one of the pleasant stops is a tiny theater, with seating for maybe 15 people, which shows the history of Jewish theater early in the 20th century. It’s a pleasant entertainment that lasts for a few minutes, as you sit in a comfortably-upholstered chair enjoying the story, the respite and a chance to sit down.

What awaits you, however, is a decidedly uncomfortable descent into Hell.

I knew the layout of the place from my visit in January, but I didn’t feel the previous journey as I did on my own that day.

You come to a narrow hallway, just a few feet wide and 50 feet long. The narrow floor descends slowly, gradually toward darkness. The hallway has a very tall ceiling, made taller still as you descend down the hallway.

There are brief stories that line both walls about how the warning signs of increasing persecution of the Jews in Germany in the 1930’s were largely ignored by the world, including the U.S. and the Catholic Church. You wonder when it ends; you want to move on, as you’re made increasingly uncomfortable by the stories.

As you look for a way out, a way to ease your discomfort, your eye is drawn to the wall at the end of the narrow hallway. This wall, narrow as it is, feels extraordinarily tall because, as the entrance of the hallway descends slowly toward the end of the hallway, the wall at the end is about double the height of the entrance.

 And at the end of the hallway, your eyes are drawn toward it; you are staring at a larger-than-life, 20-foot photo of Adolf Hitler, looking very official in full military regalia. His height, and his power, is accentuated by the narrow width of the photo.

You are foursquare in the presence of evil, and it is at once transfixing, even as it startles you.

You have entered Hell, and the rest of the journey through this Hell is emotionally draining and perplexing. There follows a room that is a replica of a concentration camp, surrounded by barbed wire.

Next, you walk into a room that replicates the railroad cars that transported millions of Jews to camps run by the Nazis. The room vibrates, suggesting a train car moving through the countryside, accompanied by train whistles and flashing yellow lights. There is no escape at this point.

You walk into a cave like room on a narrow ramp. It has a low ceiling with photos that flash on the wall to your left. The photos, several of which are shown at the same time on the screen, appear, disappear, and are replaced by more horrific photos of the grisly results of the Nazis’ treatment of Jews – cadaverous bodies with protruding hipbones and gaunt faces, suffering souls   whose eyes seem enlarged by the thinness of their surrounding features. Some bodies are living; some are dead; some are carelessly piled on each other.

Your senses, your reason, your humanity is now actively being assaulted. You walk into another small theater, but this one does not feature show music and comfortable seats. The seats in this theater are narrow pieces of wood. You cannot sit on the tall seats, because you will fall off, although you may rest on them in a standing position. You are intentionally made to feel uncomfortable.

And the screen in this room features more horrific footage showing how a single madman deluded the entire globe, wiping out over half the Jews then living in Europe. In some countries, like Poland, Hitler and his accomplices exterminated 90 percent of the Jews.

You are ashamed for yourself, for your forebears. Why didn’t someone do something? Why didn’t someone at least say something? Why did six million die at the hands of a mediocrity, who also visited so much suffering on the rest of the world?

Were we all accomplices?

There are no satisfactory answers, as you move again toward the light in a slow, gradual ascent toward the end of the tour. The wall on the left shows the names of people who helped, who risked their lives to help the Jews.

The list includes a man named Varian Fry, a U.S. citizen living in France who helped thousands escape from occupied France to the U.S. You are mildly heartened and encouraged as you read about these personal acts of heroism.

And you’re left with a question, and a resolve.

The question: if I had witnessed and experienced this, what would I have done?

And the resolve, the animating force that guided the Jews as they forged the state of Israel after World War II, and the clarion call that should animate each of us whenever we witness unreasoned hatred, or bigotry, or active persecution of innocents: NEVER AGAIN.   

Mass atrocities: a reflection

I got to thinking the other day about abortion, about the numbers. As background, I'm opposed to it, having struggled with settling on a position for 40 years or so. Here's the link to my original blog on the subject, for a little background:

http://sturmunddrang1.blogspot.com/2012/04/i-stand-with-unborn.html

So I googled a couple items. I wanted to compare abortion statistics, the deaths of the unborn, with two well-known atrocities of the 20th century, perpetrated by ruthless dictators Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.

Many know that Hitler executed six million Jews, but the consensus is that he murdered about 11 million people in total, including gypsies and homosexuals, those who didn't fit the Aryan mold.

Stalin, on the other hand, is said to have killed about 20 million people, primarily his own countrymen.

I also googled abortion statistics. Statistics are reported by the Center for Disease Control, and by Planned Parenthood. CDC's results undercall the carnage, because a few states don't report abortion statistics, like California. And Planned Parenthood has skin in the game, as they say.

But I was able to find that about 1.2 million abortions were performed in 2008. About one percent of those were to abort a fetus after a rape.

And then I got to thinking, in my analytical way about the three separate phenomena of mass murders:

• Hitler's killing, say, occurred between 1935, when he rose to power, and 1945, when he committed suicide shortly before Nazi Germany was defeated in World War II.   11 million victims divided by 10 years = 1 million victims, on average, each year.

• Let's say that Stalin's killing occurred between 1930 and 1950. 21 million victims divided by 20 years = 1 million victims, on average, each year.

• The average death toll resulting from abortions is, using the 2008 results, about 1 million victims per year.

Admittedly, it is a nasty equation, and sounds a bit contrived, even hyperbolic. But the perspective is a bit arresting, don't you think?

What does it say to you?

Economic growth doesn't begin with the middle class

Obama is fond of saying that national economic wellness is the result of a thriving middle class. He points to consumer consumption as the driver.

A healthy middle class is a symptom of a healthy economy, not its driver. Its driver is a healthy environment for private business: small or large, mature or start-up. Young entrepreneurs wish to introduce new products or services, and work long into the night to achieve their goals. They likely are ruthless as they pursue their dreams.

Corporate managers of established companies' desire is to create or maintain a company that satisfies customers and stockholders. It prices its products or services at what the market will bear, and makes a profit. In so doing, they create jobs, and in the last 150 years, those jobs have created a middle class.

But we are killing the goose that laid the golden egg. The wellspring of our great good fortune, lately so anemic, is the success of private enterprise.

We regulate, we create obstacles, we tax, we vilify, we demonize business heroes. And, unwittingly, we seal our own fate, without understanding why.

I read in a recent unemployment report that 500,000 private sector jobs were lost recently, whereas public sector employment grew by the same amount - 500,000 new workers. Government hiring has mushroomed during the last few few years.

But Obama insists that the private sector is fine. It's not. It's troubled, and we won't find a way out of this miasma until we recognize that private enterprise is the driver of prosperity for all who choose to earn a living.

Corporations are people, too.

My son Matthew sent me an email this morning that featured a brief comment from a former coworker at a mortgage banking company, who was pleased to see that Mitt Romney acquitted himself so well in the debate last night.

It reminded me of a brief conversation I had with my wife this morning about how, after working for a business for a while, you begin to absorb its values, including the way a business often views the world.

It was good to see a bona fide businessman onstage last night. And Mitt Romney reminded me that the too-often-conventional meme that businesses include people who are ravenous, ambitious, earth-destroying vultures is dangerously, hurtfully simplistic, and often untrue.

Because I was and am part of one of those businesses, and am proud to be so. It really was cool to see Romney up there last night. At times, he reminded me of highly-effective CEO's in business, men and women who lead large organizations of diverse people, who make a payroll each week, who create, develop and merchandise products which change our world for the better We are fortunate that such an effective and oft- proven leader may just be our next president.

Oh what a night

A few minutes after the Presidential debate began last night, I thought, "Romney landed a punch." And things, generally, continued to go his way over the course of 90 minutes. A little bored, I began to look at the tweets of Fox's Greg Gutfeld, and they got me laughing pretty hard. I began reading them to my wife.

This race isn't over. Far from it. But I've witnessed a few conservative victories over the last couple years, from the 2010 shellacking, to Scott Brown and Scott Walker, and last night's debate. There is reason to hope.

The best moment last night? When Romney referred to the words in the Declaration of Independence behind him. It was stirring to hear him refer to our God-given rights to life and liberty, particularly to religious freedom rights so recently trampled by O and Sebelius.

Why the outcome? Jim Lehrer did it. Obama wasn't prepared. Romney lied. O had an off night. Progressives missed the point, which is that their guy is tired, bereft of ideas and energy. O's sorry record, his lack of leadership, and the paucity of good ideas among progressive folk, absent the the ever-present media filter, told the tale of the tape.

In 2008, O was evanescent - no record other than a resume that was super-thin for him who would become the leader of the free world. The electorate was tired of war, tired of Bush, tired of economic crises, and many rolled the dice on one who promised "hope and change."

Last night, Charles Krauthammer said that Romney won the debate by two touchdowns. I thought it was apt. It ain't over, but the playoffs have at last begun.

National media not doing its job

I am each day disappointed, flummoxed and frustrated by the Obama administration, and the way that most of the national media portrays it is, well, disappointing. So the ongoing nonsense in Washington is of a piece with how and what is being reported. I'd like to think that the nonsense couldn't otherwise exist, absent the compliant media professionals who owe us better.

But maybe I'm biased. I don't pay attention to the mainstream media much anymore, and maybe the content that I do see, read or hear is itself biased.

But the news coverage of the assassinations in Libya, followed by official fudging and - dare I say? - cover-up by government officials has been extraordinary and disheartening to witness, as a journalist and as an American.

Our ambassador to Libya, by all accounts a fine man who worked very hard for the Libyan people, and three of our citizens were killed, in a conscious act of terror.

And why? Could this have been provoked by an Obama foreign policy that acts as if his personal charm, driven by his implacable narcissism, might have failed miserably?

No, the video did it.

I don't know which was worse: the analysis of what happened, which parroted the silly pronouncements by the White House, or the non-reporting that followed. And that I lay at the door of the national media.

A little Mark Steyn to get your motor runnin'

A couple paragraphs from "The President of the Future" (bolded italics mine):

"Two weeks ago in this space, I wrote that, in striking contrast to the official line, the Benghazi slaughter was not a spontaneous movie review that got a little out of hand but a catastrophic security breach and humiliating fiasco for the United States. Even more extraordinary, on September 14, fewer than two-dozen inbred, illiterate goatherds pulled off the biggest single destruction of U.S. airpower since the Tet Offensive in 1968, breaking into Camp Bastion (an unfortunate choice of name) in Afghanistan, killing Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Raible, and blowing up a squadron’s worth of Harriers. And, even though it was the third international humiliation for the United States in as many days, it didn’t even make the papers. Because the court eunuchs at the media are too busy drooling over Obama’s appearance as what he calls “eye candy” on the couch between Barbara and Whoopi."

"Eye candy is in the eye of the beholder. And to the baying mob from Tunis to Jakarta those dead Americans and al-Qaeda flags over U.S. embassies and an entire USMC air squadron reduced to charred ruins are a veritable Willie Wonka production line of eye candy. To the president, they’re just “bumps in the road” to the sunlit uplands of “the future.” Forward! Obama has lived on “the promise of the future” all his life — Most Promising Columbia Grad of 1983, Most Promising Community Organizer of 1988, Most Promising Fake Memoirist of 1995, Most Promising Presidential Candidate of 2008 . . . The rest of us, alas, have to live in the present that he has made, which is noticeably short of promise. The Chinese Politburo get it, Czar Putin in the Kremlin gets it, and even the nutters doing the “Death to the Great Satan!” dance on the streets of Cairo and Lahore get it. On November 6, we will find out whether the American people do."

Sometimes internal domestic politics seems like a game, amusing but the consequences aren't immediately clear. Beyond the United States' borders, however, our world is a dangerous place. O has handled the aftermath, and is accountable for its death and destruction, in a hamhanded, disappointing, stunningly inept manner. We deserve better, especially those who perished.