The Freedom to Hate
SOLLISCH, JIM
The Freedom to Hate JIM SOLLISCH The First Amendment is America's moral firewall, shielding us from our darkest impulses. We need it today more than ever. mv COUSIN'S FIANCE was a self-made...
...Moneysmith's father...
...They wanted a rule of law that would allow hate to be expressed but not acted upon...
...I did find the obituary for his murder, chiseled into a huge black wall across from a table where gold teeth were extracted...
...I left the museum feeling closer to my ancestors but farther from God...
...My best guess is that for the first rime in my life I had something to lose...
...The city council was trying to deny them a permit...
...Mr...
...Moneysmith took over for the prosecution...
...Locked up is too humane for those scum...
...I found out later that the room of pictures I mistook for a tower of light was really designed as a chimney...
...In 1941, the Nazi killing squads shot almost all of the 3,500 Jews living there...
...In some small way, their horrors became mine...
...In 1994 I was asked to accompany a group of non-Jewish clergy to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and write about it for a local paper...
...The ACLU was threatening to get involved...
...To which my mother would reply under her breath, "Making a killing...
...The museum is a fourhour journey through hell, which you enter through a steel black elevator that closes like the door to a gas chamber...
...I asked: How could I be attacked so harshly for standing up for a principle...
...You're a self-hating Jew...
...Do you have to hate the Nazis with all your heart to be a good Jew...
...But you have already seen these pictures...
...I could fill pages with more detailed descriptions...
...Like a lot of entrepreneurs, there was a certain crudeness to Mr...
...Some time in the week after my first son was born, I dreamed that the mohel was a Nazi, and the guards held me back while he butchered my son...
...It worked during the 1978 Nazi march...
...Did the First Amendment really protect speech that could be taken as violence...
...Before I could respond, Mr...
...The First Amendment protects you even if you don't believe in it," I argued...
...I remember being at a party where the issue was being discussed...
...Moneysmith's father, made its opening argument: "Those crazy Nazis shouldn't just be denied the right to march, they should be locked up...
...They don't have beliefs—they have hatred...
...I began to understand the horrors my ancestors lived through...
...Before we even sat down, the prosecution, led by Mr...
...I accepted the rule of law too easily, subjugating myself and my history...
...I was no longer sure, as I was at age 19, that the First Amendment gave the Nazis the right to a freedom they were committed to obliterating...
...He owned his own small business and was "making a living," as he liked to say...
...You are out of control...
...If you look closely at these photos, as I did, you would see the faces of your relatives...
...Teenagers horsing around in a cafe...
...I agree with you that they're scum," I said...
...My mother looked at me hopefully, as if I were still a toddler she could whisk out of the room before the temper tantrum was in full swing...
...Was I really a selfhating Jew...
...They want another Holocaust...
...And finally you come to a tower of light, which rises 30 feet, a tower of faces, a sanctuary of photographs so ordinary they break your heart: Kids posing with sleds...
...I was able to view the situation theoretically in a way other Jews living in the world of Us and Them could never do...
...I was willing to consider the possibility that speech could equal violence...
...The Nazis' proposed march in Skokie, 111., a Jewish neighborhood with a high concentration of Holocaust survivors, was the topic in every Jewish home...
...The Nazis—who ended up marching elsewhere in the Chicago area—expressed themselves through their right to assemble instead of through violence, while Jews like me learned that in America our freedoms include the right to hate back...
...I had been sentenced to live in exile from the land of Us...
...Moneysmith's father exploded...
...The words are Elie Wiesel's: "Never shall I forget that first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed...
...You have taken them...
...We need this firewall today more than ever as Jews and Arabs move further away from tolerance and closer to hate, not just in the Middle East, but here in America...
...They knew their enemies well...
...The Freedom to Hate JIM SOLLISCH The First Amendment is America's moral firewall, shielding us from our darkest impulses...
...And maybe you'd cry, as I did, standing in a room filled with 1,032 perfectly ordinary photographs, all taken in the small town of Eishishok near Vilnius in Lithuania, a town with a Jewish community stretching back almost a thousand years...
...I remember listening mostly, keeping my distance from the First Amendment, which I believe are the 46 most important words ever written in English...
...I woke shaking with hate...
...a These aren't people—they're " Nazis...
...It was two miles to home...
...Their enemies were necessary and inexpendable...
...Never shall I forget these moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust...
...Let's hope the First Amendment remains strong enough to contain the hatred of some Arab-Americans and Muslims who seem to want to use speech to incite violence...
...And I was about to become one of those enemies as my family entered the Moneysmiths' home for the firstnight seder...
...Why the hell not, you little bleeding-heart college boy...
...It was April 1978, and I was a 19-year-old college sophomore...
...In the abstract, the First Amendment makes perfect sense...
...Then a few years ago, a group of Nazis planned to hold a rally in my town...
...I started to attend classes on Sundays at the temple with my children...
...His father was just as smug...
...The founding fathers knew about hate, though, the way tyranny and injustice breed it...
...mv COUSIN'S FIANCE was a self-made man, if at 24 one can really be considered a man...
...We should let them march and then stone them, attack them like we never did in Europe...
...Something worth the powerful currency of hate...
...You let yourself be defined by the enemy rather than defining yourself by a common set of values...
...I did ask four questions that night but not the Four Questions...
...I felt sorry for her...
...I wondered why parenthood had sparked these dreams...
...Inside there are no buttons...
...He was a man of the world while I was hanging onto my boyhood with a vengeance...
...Men holding fishing poles...
...You're worse than a Nazi...
...Moneysmith...
...I stood helpless...
...That's the problem with victimization: It's a negative lesson in identity...
...The First Amendment is a bunch of crap if it applies to Nazis...
...What'd you call me, you little punk...
...You are trapped...
...Moneysmith's father had taken on the look of an overinflated red balloon...
...I made a commitment to learn more about Judaism...
...He was opinionated, loud and used to getting his way...
...In the museum, I found no sign of God...
...Jews like you, we don't need...
...Extreme...
...They should get out of this damn country if they don't believe in it," said Mr...
...He was sure of himself in a way I would never be...
...He came by it naturally...
...Moneysmith...
...I started to read the Torah and to celebrate Shabbos every Friday night...
...he had the kind of self-confidence that comes from not examining your convictions...
...The people I loved were taken from me, shot in front of me, tortured in front of me...
...So they constructed the First Amendment as a sort of firewall...
...Every night I was in the camps...
...You're the reason there was a Holocaust...
...They wanted to take over the goddamned world...
...You can't take away people's freedoms because of what they believe," I said...
...They were citizens of Us, a place located in the middle of Them...
...In the last five or six years, I have started to understand what it really means to be chosen—targeted for hatred like the painted birds the others tore to shreds in Kosinski's novel The Painted Bird, but also different in ways I could embrace...
...When I thought I had them answered, the dreams started...
...Closer to the culture of Judaism—the matzah ball soup, the inflections of voice—but farther from the religious practices...
...I had not yet learned to hate because I had not yet grasped the concept of pure evil...
...His lips kept forming curses that never came out...
...It would take me years to answer those questions...
...They had wrought their world small and knew every inch of it...
...I took my wavering as a sign of progress...
...I found myself on the defense team...
...It was my first real taste of life's most powerful emotion...
...You're the one who sounds like a Nazi...
...Moneysmith, as I'll call him, seemed 25 years older than I did, although he was only five years my senior...
...And I was about to ruin it...
...said Mr...
...That's how I thought of it at age 19...
...All the Holocaust documentaries I had seen growing up, the first-hand accounts told to me by survivors visiting my classes at temple, books I read by Elie TOesel and Jerzy Kosinski— all their incomprehensible details came back to me that first year of my son's life...
...After all, this was the first night of Passover, my mother's favorite night of the year, a celebration of freedom in which every food tells a story...
...But the First Amendment gives them the right to march...
...That seems a little extreme," I countered...
...I started walking, wandering away from the Promised Land...
...And so I go back and forth still, dancing between the abstract and the real...
...The elevator opens when it opens, and you proceed like an animal on its way to slaughter past every horror imaginable...
Vol. 27 • August 2002 • No. 4
