Hating Jews
mutter, Nathan Perl
HATING JEWS . . . and other forms of modern anti-Semitism NATHAN PERLMUTTER RUTH ANN PERLMUTTER I. Nazis I Have Known In my lifetime I have experienced two Nazis—that I know of. Each introduced...
...This is the way my mind ran, and indeed runs: Why should his age have been his shield...
...After a short, thick silence, I half whispered a question to both my host and the Count...
...An American sergeant, the bureaucrat in charge, routinely asked me if I had ever been a Nazi...
...In short, the beasts are human...
...If they were and were hiding it, I also didn't care...
...For most second and beyond generations of American Jews, emptied of the sentimental memories of our immigrant forebears, acculturation's up side—acceptance and participation in our own homeland—when weighed against its down side—the watering of Jewish identity—has made for a personal net plus...
...We are no longer ghetto-enclosed, are in our integrated life-styles light-years free of its compacting walls, but if my mother wasn't statistically right, she wasn't all wrong either...
...The cognac...
...This place is open," pointing to the candy store...
...For years the authors lived in the South, and the social similarities of Jews and Southerners is to be remarked...
...It's like in poker...
...At one point, following a comparatively patriotic song, the MC quieted the dinning applause and called out, "How many here from Boston University...
...It meant the Gentile with whom you were relating may seem like a decent sort, but Proceed with Caution...
...To avoid hearing the Gentile's siren song...
...About Jews," he continued, "we have a faculty—man, that is—to block out on things we don't want to believe...
...In the small towns of the South, Jews do get along fine...
...I mumbled no, I wasn't...
...It's not that I have now forgotten...
...What if he had still been there, unconscious or dead...
...I remember thinking, "Polite man...
...I still was indifferent, and that was my confession...
...I was laughing too, and for much the same reasons, when suddenly I felt my wife finger-stabbing me...
...I don't know what prompted me to tell the truth...
...The amount not being inconsequential and the two men being old friends as well as mutually admiring fund raisers, Sachar felt free to ask the Cardinal, "Tell me, who gave you so princely a gift and so quickly...
...That's all right too...
...More candidly, less "modestly," I know I would have...
...We have on more than one occasion seen anti-Semitism where it wasn't...
...Ruth Ann Perlmutter, lecturer and consultant, has served as director of, among other groups, the women's division of Bonds for Israel of Florida...
...Why did Egyptians along the Nile, Americans along the Mississippi, dimeless thugs in Berlin and fat cats in posh country clubs, rich, poor and middle classes, Black and white, male and female, children and grandparents, churchgoers and atheists, the lettered and the unlettered, the Left and the Right, not infrequently have in common one thing— their amenability to anti-Semitism...
...He was Jewish...
...Well, the antidiscrimination laws have been passed, anti-Jewish stereotypes, at least those purveyed by non-Jews, have lost fashI ionableness, and we are awash in ecumenical rhetoric, but just as with the hit bottle at the country fair, anti-Semitism is still standing...
...Emotionally programmed, I became John Wayne...
...And when in the closing years of the war, rumors reached us about the extermination camps, rumors we had every reason to believe, we still would not see...
...You uneducated dopes...
...If my mistaken sense of communion was an innocent illusion, misread communion can at times be a miasmic delusion...
...in September, 1982...
...They were merely props, not dramatis personae in the happening...
...Four score years later, following untold studies of Why Anti-Semitism?, the total pages of which, laid end to end, would extend from Nuremberg to Jerusalem and back, several law enforcement officials, sociologists, psychologists and educators met in New York City to study data on school-age culprits responsible for anti-Semitic graffiti, vandalisms, synagogue desecrations and assaults...
...His raised-voice answer Nathan Perlmutter, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League of B'naiB'rith, is the author of A Bias of Reflections: The Confessions of an Incipient Old Jew...
...Our evolving Jewish behavior, indeed our philosophy for survival, was crafted as a weapon of defense, used by us to survive as colonials...
...The Yiddish expressions of our old-country parents...
...Assimilation, the excessive indulgence of acculturation, is spurred by the presence of anti-Semitism and the concurrent absence of Jewish moorings of education and its offshoots of pride and commitment...
...But this...
...Southerners suggest Jews and northerners Gentiles...
...Absent knowing one's self, present that self's calumniation, one can easily step out of one's identity, disrobe the hair shirt...
...B'nai B'rith, Ha-dassah, Mizrachi, National Council of Jewish Women, Jewish War Veterans, American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, National Jewish Community Relations Council—and there are so few Jews...
...Laughter...
...That earlier that day, I afternoon-walked with Father von Sohmer through the town cemetery...
...They have been despised where they have been generations departed...
...To this day I still find the off-key whinings and lamentations of country, its ballads of romantic love unrequited and of requited love in Jesus, soothing, enjoyable...
...Southerners consider themselves as Southerners, and northerners view them that way too, but not the other way around...
...that I wasn't a Nazi, impossible...
...This is my place...
...Joseph the monopolist and his brethren in Egypt, the rich Jews in Twain's Austria, the overachieving Jewish youths in New York schools: their visibility was and is their vulnerability...
...As best I can reconstruct it, I didn't mention it because the experience was in hiding from my consciousness, waiting to sort out its heaving confusions of mugged dignity and brawler's pride, waiting for composure of breath as well as some orderliness of meaning, before reentering my consciousness...
...Cohen eight years ago...
...Had you done anything, said anything...
...Of course, later that day and for days thereafter, my wife and I hashed and rehashed, analyzed and dissected my wild morning minutes...
...Jewish...
...The fear that opts for being anchored in parochialism because it is the known, the prejudice that shuns foreign waters certain that they are contaminating...
...Sometimes to confound {he legendary Evil Eye, but often to hide from the envious Gentile...
...The combustibles, the only combustibles, were a German-accented anti-Semite in Germantown...
...Cohen...
...Cambridge's unwashed, shoeless Street People...
...After all, we told ourselves, our Jewish friends were not the kind that Hitler was talking about...
...The proposition: that large I numbers of less accomplished Gentiles resent smaller numbers of more accomplished Jews...
...But in some instances name changing has been a round-trip ticket...
...I thanked him, he said I was welcome, and repeated the directions...
...The experts' conclusion echoed the musings of Mark Twain...
...No, I had no problem with what I had done and in a satisfied, almost peaceful frame of mind conjectured that I'd have beaten him senseless if he were 70...
...I mean that "the next thing I knew," his hands were up to his face and my right fist was withdrawing from his suddenly red-running nostrils...
...Jews own it...
...And so with Jews...
...But what it added up to was crystal clear...
...you could tell that by the large number of starch-dieted overweights, and when they smiled, by their dental work or their lack of it...
...What's more, I'm sure that he enthusiastically cultivated Jewish friends...
...His answer: "I was an idealist...
...At the end of the war, I went home to the Sudetenland to look for my friend, and as if to confirm what subconsciously I knew all along, but which I'd refused to think about, I went directly from the train to the Jewish cemetery...
...Historically, Jews have Russified themselves, have prided in being Warsawers, preened in being Berliners, not as a Chicago Jew might refer to himself as a Chicagoan and mean nothing more than the statement literally means, but as testimony to hostile jurors that the ways of the mass of Jews were not their ways, and that they were of a preferable, more sophisticated culture, were, in short, really more like their Gentile peers than the offending Jews...
...Or for that matter, were 18-year-old Nazis to be absolved of their crimes because they were "too young to understand...
...Copyright © 1982 by Nathan Perlmutter and Ruth Ann Perlmutter, excerpted from The Real Anti-Semitism in America, to be published by Arbor House Publishing Co...
...Cohen and he said, "My name's Johnson...
...But which Nazi bore the greater responsibility for the Holocaust...
...What followed will read like, and indeed was, pure Street-and-Smith pulp...
...He viewed the price he paid for his acceptance— "minding our own business"—as rent, and when the kids moved and began raising their own families, he left his rental, his club, his Kiwanis, his Chamber, and moved to Atlanta to be near his grandchildren and to die among Jews...
...More...
...And even in Yorkville, had the same man said the same thing in a French or an English accent, it also would never have exploded as it did...
...And we have Jews who seem to need the assurance that anti-Semitism is the motor force propelling world events...
...His first move was to the late Cardinal Cushing...
...And how did you become an ex-Nazi...
...I suspect it's because in Yorkville the enemy was recognizable...
...They've prospered, prided in being "accepted," raised families, sent their children to college and importantly for them, their sons and daughters, by and large, know who they are—Jews...
...Our unremitting consciousness of Gentiles—the very words minority, ghetto...
...But it's my host that I want to tell about...
...It's a case of the old saw about Jews being like everyone else, only more so...
...Jews own it...
...I didn't give a damn...
...To be true to our faith, our bride, by resolutely spurning the lures of liaison with Christendom...
...Alabamans feel closer to Mississippians than do New Yorkers to Pennsylvanians...
...I knew, we all knew, Hitler's views on Jews, but we told ourselves that nothing would happen to the Jews we knew...
...In 1898, Mark Twain explored the causes of anti-Semitism in an essay titled, "Concerning the Jews...
...They have melded, in fact or fancy, into the Gentile world, the distance traveled by them from their escaped, restrictive environment the cushion of their imagined safety...
...So often we have failed to see it where it was...
...In a sense our organizations have served as a sectarian government (albeit not elected by popular Jewish vote) within a secular government, that of the popularly elected legislative and executive branches of the American government...
...In the late 40s I was applying for a visa to the United States where an international conference to which I was a delegate was being held...
...Czechs are for the Czechs and Slavs for the Slavs...
...He's turning people away from you—because you're Jewish...
...And if in the privacy of their real intentions they were opting to merely Dress British, Think Yiddish, we know too that their personal ruse served as a decompression chamber in which their children often became hothouse goyim...
...He had a thick German accent...
...In real life, at least in mine, tense moments have not been distinguished by inspired prose...
...Inside were the two owners and a young man who seemed to be the son of one of them...
...The man, who had already crossed the street, turned and as our eyes met, I felt prompted to explain why I wasn't following his patiently given directions...
...I had a friend there—ready-to-wear clothes—with whom I discussed the then wonder, to me, of a Johnson in a Smalltown calling his place Cohen's, and for business reasons...
...that notwithstanding the boy's age, I felt no compassion, but instead, not without bitterness, found myself thinking, "Who invited him there...
...Still, it does suggest that the long affliction of discrimination, no matter the patient seems well, has left us with a lingering touch of paranoia...
...But there are less academic questions, questions of chilling realism...
...In part because we are raised in the spirit and in the practice of charity...
...I thought about it, but I had no problem with it...
...Well, sometimes...
...But Jewish organizations play a very serious, a very significant role in the lives of their members, to be sure, but in the lives as well of the unaffiliated who notwithstanding are perceived by their Gentile neighbors as Jews, counted by pollsters as Jews, wooed as Jews by political officeholders...
...No one is for Czechoslovakia—except for the Jews...
...that we had paused before a stone that read, "Hans Schmidt, 18 years old, Stalingrad...
...And 35-year-old Nazis, should they have been fought with a turned cheek because they were breadwinners for warm and loving families...
...I told them that I wanted to confess something...
...When a Bay Stater or a Vermonter says Yankee, he is invoking, not experiencing, a memory, and even then it's of another war, the Revolutionary War, book-taught rather than grandfather-taled...
...Jan Masaryk once deplored the low key of patriotism in pre-World War II Czechoslovakia...
...It was so for me: Does it hold for other people...
...Puzzled silence...
...The apprehended culprits came from sections of the country whose school systems are relatively good and from neighborhoods that are middle class...
...We must have talked for ten minutes and I never once mentioned what had happened...
...I followed with a left" and "he started going down...
...The "chorus," some six, maybe eight, early risers, was grouped in front of the store...
...Why was I so measured in Cologne, so primeval in Yorkville...
...Thirteen years earlier, the King Kleagle of the New York Ku Klux Klan, one Daniel Burros, committed suicide.The cause: exposure by The New York Times of his dirty little secret...
...In the book Christians and Jews, psychiatrist Rudolf ?. Loewenstein wrote: "At some point in the course of analytic treatment almost all non-Jewish patients will manifest varying degrees of anti-Semitism...
...Elated, Sachar called his friend back and elated him...
...Facial expressions italicized his maledictions...
...Cohen's gone, lives in Jacksonville, I think...
...And in Cologne too, the conundrum was as Jewish as it was personal...
...Perhaps...
...Where'd you get the paper...
...New Englanders, yes, Midwesterners, yes, but not Northerners...
...My Yorkville microproblem and a Jewish macroproblem is how to nurture our hate as an antibody against the lingering, lethal hatred of us, but to do so without succumbing to toxemia...
...My shock ebbed quickly—as quickly, hate gorged me...
...Uproarious laughter...
...Somehow I wasn't surprised by the Count's having been an enthusiastic young Nazi...
...In the north it's for history buffs and for commercial touristic nostalgia...
...As a kind of rationale in response to their cries moments ago of "Stop him...
...And we know more...
...In 1978 Chicago's Nazi Party was prominently featured in hours of prime-time television and in endless copy in newspapers and magazines...
...The audience in the Boston Symphony Hall was New England "country" and it was poor...
...I enjoy country music...
...What I said was, "What was that...
...He maintained that the Diaspora-rooted Jewish tradition was essentially the product of Jews haying been colonialized...
...I'm looking for Mr...
...was, or incredulously I thought it was, "Don't go in there...
...he handed one to me and looked, I remember imagining, sympathetic...
...Proof that I was a Nazi was simple...
...I had forgotten...
...And now I was speechless...
...Help you...
...Other studies have traced anti-Semitism to the crucifixion story, and while indubitably the crucifixion of Jesus has played a horrific part in the rationalization of anti-Semitism, from John to de Torquemada and from de Torquemada to Father Coughlin and beyond, I wonder...
...We're entitled...
...These are peripheral Americans, but significantly, by their own choice...
...The Nazis' leader...
...The hour was late, the cognac and the naked conversation softened and hushed the room, and in a kind of oral slow motion my host whispered, "We were cowards...
...But why not...
...However, Jewish philanthropy to secular and to Christian causes is also prodigious...
...What if in falling he had hit his head and been killed...
...Like the Southland's plantation and its yas-suh...
...After all, young people tend to knowing, and with certitude...
...I was civil to the Count and to my host, no matter both were Nazis when it mattered, no longer Nazis when it didn't matter...
...The tendency to view the world as responsive to malevolent conspirators is not a Gentile monopoly...
...Or consider the word Yankee...
...He stopped despite it being very cold: "You go down two blocks, and on the corner...
...Be average...
...Now it began happening...
...I mean, the small talk and each of us being charmingly clever, as if it were any one of 50 thousand Saturday-night parties back home, itched me, stirred guilt in me, made me mean, and so I said it...
...During the 30s his closest friend, in appearance more Aryan that he, was Jewish...
...The handful of Nazis roused the impassioned indignation of Jews, the protective instincts of civil libertarians, and soberly concentrated the judiciary's brows...
...The end line of my ruminations, however, was that had I ignored the man, his hating face and hating words, I'd have been shamed longer than I have been ambivalent about my Sunday morning stroll...
...It's been minding their own business, not being like, or seeming to be like, those New York Jews, social critics, political naysayers, "troublemakers...
...I knew that very afternoon that had I been walking a street in Greenwich Village, or in Brooklyn Heights, or anywhere other than in German Yorkville, and the same man said that same thing in the same accent, I'd never have responded as I did...
...Through the unity of organization we have enhanced our group rights and group station, benefiting individually from rewards which, as embattled loners, would have eluded us...
...Would I have reacted as I did...
...His voice choked as he murmured, "I found him there...
...The owner, on my, the customer's, side of the counter, answered in a half whisper, "Shh, lower it...
...He asserted that Jews are filth and also retorted that no Jew would or could lay a hand on him, and if I thought I could, to try it...
...and we have Jews who seem to need the assurance that anti-Semitism is the motor force propelling world events...
...In the unique American democracy it has been our organizations which have converted our individual "colonial" status and made of us a "bloc," a "lobby," no longer the lonely and the powerless, pitied but unheeded...
...What of your idealism then...
...In the South, history is for the masses, for their study and their handing down...
...Southerners have been losers, and what losers share in common knits them tighter together than what winners share in common...
...but no one did...
...Help you...
...Were the candy-store people really not Jewish...
...Religion...
...He shot enthusiastically, played croquet enthusiastically, and was now a enthusiastic member of an organization dedicated to peace...
...But the incredibly long wandering, 40-year march from Egypt was an escape by Jews from the jurisdiction of pharaohs who preceded Jesus by centuries...
...The anti-Semities and their false bills of particulars have not only influenced our personalities, they have conditioned our behavior...
...I had been asail in Haggard's sounds, I had become one with the audience, my Noble Savages, I suppose, and so had forgotten that both as Jew and university vice-president, I was to them twice villainous...
...and also, I remember thinking, to allay the fear of me in their eyes, I boomed, "He's an anti-Semite...
...We did too...
...After all, the German press was full of Crystal Night, of the violence and the humiliation visited upon Jews...
...I suppose the ungracious candor of my remarks, the cognac—to be sure, the cognac—changed the character of the party...
...You sonofabitch...
...He's more Roman than the Romans, more Communist than the Communists...
...He gave the visa...
...Conscious now that I had actually punched him, I became conscious too that my head, my heart, even my arms and legs were one furious furnace of hate and that I would consume him in it...
...Bought it from Mr...
...But they've paid a price for getting along fine...
...Be average...
...Now the Boston audience was catching on to the joke, the ridiculing of, to this audience, cultural aliens...
...As there are anti-Semites who attribute the ills of the world to Jewish conspiracies, or at least to Jewish puppeteers, so are there those amongst us who seem disappointed, politely distrustful, when told, "No, there is no evidence that President X or Senator Y is an anti-Semite...
...me, hands covering his head...
...I said to him, when I was young I had polio...
...I beat him up, severely...
...In the other, nourishing reason disarmed me...
...My own neighborhood, once resonant with the oratory and marching bands of the German-American Bund, a loud Jew hater replete with German accent and me, whose career had been spent in the employ of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith...
...Hit, surely it would topple...
...This, no matter that the reactive individuals are as triflingly numbered as Collins and Burros, or as substantially numbered as those who make do of their marginality by drinking deeply of their heritage, their Jewish identity...
...It was irrelevant...
...But for all that these and dozens of other explanations may each contain seeds for the sowing of anti-Semitism by given people in given places at given times, the question remains: Why is anti-Semitism so ubiquitous . and perennial...
...It is the organizations that Jews have formed, the seemingly myriad organizations to fight anti-Semitism, to raise funds for worthy Jewish causes, or simply, shelteringly, to be together that have impacted on us in our group interests...
...An hour or so later, back in my apartment, I received a long-distance call from my brother...
...He was in his mid-50s, a relatively older man...
...How many here from Brandeis...
...The young culprits, they concluded, resented their Jewish classmates because the Jewish children are patently more accomplished...
...The Cardinal readily agreed and then and there pledged the necessary funds...
...It would be so fitting that the Brandeis-housed copies of ancient Judaica be made possible by benefactors of Catholic causes...
...The difference in outlook, or maybe it's inlook, has more to do with mind than with maps...
...The sign's still'Cohen's' cause I bought the store with Mr...
...Nazi number one is from central casting...
...For all that Jews see gentiles as Gentiles, gentiles are not aware of themselves as Gentiles, but rather as Baptists or Lutherans, Catholics or whatever...
...In Cologne, the enemy was camouflaged in manners and education, the arrived Jew's very own wardrobe...
...Shh, speak softly, Gentiles will hear you" and, descriptive of a self-serving braggart, "He only speaks that way for the goyim" are illustrative examples...
...Why the persistent continuity of anti-Semitism, from ancient and agricultural Egypt to splendorous and militaristic Rome on to classless and scientifically Marxist Moscow...
...Poland and Germany, cases in point...
...It would not have been the discreet or wise thing to do, scratching them...
...It sold papers and I started toward it...
...What if he had been a burly, younger man...
...We have Jews too who insist that anti-Semitism does not exist, just as their attitudinal ancestors have in subsequently bloodied times and bloodied places throughout our history...
...Each introduced me to a stranger in myself...
...But at that point, an inspiration hit me...
...They said nothing, and as in a scene from a Western movie when the bad guy moves toward the barroom's swinging doors, they parted to make way for me as I strode into the candy store...
...Bill Johnson...
...His hits also included "I'm an Okie from Muskogee" and "When You're Runnin' Down My Country, Hoss, You're Walking on the Fightin' Side of Me...
...However, the wounds inflicted by conspiracy-obsessed Jews are self-inflicted...
...The Count revealed that he had been "an enthusiastic Hitler youth leader," and my host, withered arm though he has, offered that he had been a Hitler youth leader too, and later, a member of the Party...
...For me, it was no island summer romance...
...he just differs with us...
...To be sure, indulged by leveraged officials or talented demagogues it has banefully affected Jews...
...During World War II, a GI confessed to me that he had never met a Jew but always imagined we had horns...
...In the one instance, enervating hatred made me strong...
...But his words did not dissipate my indifference to the dead boy...
...It was a Sunday, about 7:30 in the morning, in the Yorkville section of Manhattan, and I was going for a Times...
...I remembered him from long-ago imaginings, or was it from a late-night TV movie...
...For the mass of us European minorities—and and particularly the socially shunned Jews, Italians and not so long ago the Irish—would not have made it here without some measure of acculturation...
...Stinking Jews...
...Also that no matter both the Jewish and the Gentile teenagers were middle class, the former tended to come from the relatively better, or at least more impressive, homes...
...Among them have been Jews...
...In a voice too loud, a voice pitched for hearing by the chorus behind me, he more declared than said, "We're not Jews...
...The oaf, a cog, a classic follower, or my educated friends...
...Whereas assimilation is Jewishly deplored, acculturation is natural...
...I think I would have...
...He said, prove it...
...Our protests, however, have been relatively private communications and in decibel count, whispered protests...
...Elsewhere on the spectrum qf responses, distantly removed from this polar extreme of conditioned self-hate, are those of us who, protesting love of Judasim, will not venture beyond the threshold of our self-circumscribed ghetto...
...It rains on Jews too...
...I continued, telling them of Father von Sohmer's comment while I was thinking my private thoughts—that he knew the family and that they were fine people...
...Inasmuch as the collection was a treasure trove of Judaica and would be housed at his Jesuit institution, the priest allowed as how he felt emboldened to ask Sachar if Brandeis's Jewish patrons might provide the umpty-ump thousand dollars necessary to seize the opportunity...
...But has anyone yet found one organization designed to preserve the Northern Way of Life...
...I said "Times" to the youth...
...I kicked his legs aside, stepped over him and started toward the nearby candy store...
...Voltaire scorned Christianity yet poured his venom on Jews...
...Knowing the priest well by now and liking him, I knew that his estimate, "fine people," was one, had I known them, I'd likely have shared...
...One night in Cologne, my host and hostess invited a Count and Countess "somebody" to a dinner party in my honor...
...These Jews, the rate and velocity of their assimilation related to the levels of prevailing anti-Semitism, are dropouts more than they are turncoats...
...In the early 1960s I spent a month as a consultant on anti-Semitism to the West German government...
...Alas, by now we know how tentative a pass it was in Berlin, in Moscow, in Warsaw...
...Interestingly, the popular wisdom which ascribes anti-Semitism to the educationally and economically wanting, did not—in these instances—-prove out...
...losers say, "Deal...
...I was still controlled, my threat's condition, his immunity...
...Jewish responses to anti-Semitism, palpable anti-Semitism, subtle anti-Semitism, imagined anti-Semitism, nonexistent anti-Semitism, are as varied as Jews themselves, and that's as wide and multinuanced a spectrum as Freud and Max Weber, their disciples and their schools have dreamed...
...I'm Jewish, damn you, and if you weren't older than me, I'd punch you in the nose...
...I said mid-50s but for all that I actually knew, he might have been 60...
...Was it sentimental slobbery...
...In part too, whether the cause is establishment political parties or a Christian charity, because like my aunt, we feel safer being agreeable, grinning...
...With candor as innocent of sociologese as Huck and Jim were of Brotherhood Week, Twain attributed anti-Semitism in significant part to Gentile jealousy and resentment of the Jews' besting Christians in the marketplace...
...And so some Jews have sought invisibility...
...Tell him: 'Don't excel...
...Simple sincerity...
...The sergeant's cigar almost dropped out of his mouth...
...Mr...
...Early Sunday morning in Manhattan is always unreal...
...If they were forthcoming, Brandeis would receive a copy of the microfilms too...
...In the South there are Sons of the Confederacy, Daughters of the Confederacy, Societies for the Preservation of Southern Traditions, Louisiana variations on the themes, Mississippi variations, Florida variations, on and on and on...
...Driving through a Smalltown, Florida, in the 1960s, I saw a drygoods store called Cohen's and thought I'd introduce myself to Cohen, maybe learn something of the town, maybe even make a friend for the ADL, so I stopped in...
...I had an aunt who owned a shoe store in a Gentile neighborhood...
...Abram Sachar, a former president of Brandeis University, once received a call from a colleague, a Jesuit university president, who enthusiastically told him of an opportunity to secure microfilms of rare Hebrew writings in the Vatican Library...
...For their children who have been off to college—virtually all of them—this asking price has been too high and so they aren't returning to "Smalltown, settling instead in the big city, Miami, Atlanta or maybe up North...
...But Jewishly, understanding can also be a soporific...
...that same night I wasn't word-for-word sure...
...In a context concerned with the flow of Jewish history, Albert Memmi held that what really counts for Jews is political sovereignty...
...the area's student demonstrators...
...Like so many folk adages it was more a gut-wisdom than a finding of controlled surveys, more an expression of the apprehensions of insular Jews than the actual experience of integrated Jews...
...In the Nazi's home, as his honored guest, soon to bed down in his guest room, pleasant days spent together, in truth liking him, I was without feeling for his "idealism," was unmoved by his mea culpa, felt neither hate, nor hostility, felt only a vague pity, a warmless pity, not for the victims, not for the survivors, but for my newfound Nazi friend...
...But acculturation, while natural, has not been easy...
...They loved Haggard...
...The age-old conundrum: What's a Jew to do...
...The Stamp of Anti-Semitism Why...
...They have always sought, and seek, personal acceptance, and acceptance they believed would be facilitated by changing their clothes or manners or speech...
...No trouble...
...Several days later the Cardinal redeemed his pledge...
...In separating themselves from those Jews whose social characteristics gave substance to the Gentile's pejorative stereotypes they sought passes into the mainstream...
...My two Nazis and my two selves...
...Authoritarian personalities, it has been suggested, are the carriers of bigotry and anti-Semitism...
...So it is that in the early 70s, during the years of student radicalism, of hippies, of Black-student threats and white-administration capitulations, a time in which I was associated with Brandeis University, my wife and I attended a country music "Shower of Stars...
...On the next block, the man, who in minutes I would be pummeling, was coming toward me, carrying the Sunday Times...
...and heart pounding, I changed course to walk toward him...
...Don't go in there...
...All that they knew was that a younger man was beating up an older man, but this is New York City, where Kitty Genovese lived privately and was murdered publicly...
...All of this, quietly, so quietly we could hear each other's breath...
...I What Mark Twain, writing in Aus-i tria as the 19th century was winding down, and what these New York-area police officers and educators in the i twilight of the 20th century were saying in harmony is a simple proposition encasing a seemingly insoluble conun-j drum...
...It took a moment for me to understand...
...I have long suspected that his observation would be deepened by the recognition that the same is likely true for Jewish patients...
...Cohen's good will...
...The Cardinal's eye-twinkling answer: "Some of my Jewish friends...
...Irving Wallace's successful son is a Wallachinsky...
...Continued on page 51 Still, whatever the anti-Semite's rationalization for his resentment, our propensity for financial success or the squalor of the ghettoes in which we were bred, our cosmopolitanism or our clannishness, our international bankers or our Communists, our religious difference or our indifference to religion, on and on through the ages-old adaptive span of damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't rationalizations for anti-Semitism, the ironic truth is that we have been heedful of our tormentors' charges...
...Do we say this critically...
...But I said yes...
...The evening was progressing pleasantly enough and I suppose that's precisely what prompted me to say what I said...
...One Frank Collins...
...Did 60-year-old Nazis disqualify themselves from acting against Jews...
...What about your idealism (that word in that context had startled me, and now, 20 years later, still intrigues me) in 1938...
...Simplistic songs of patriotism...
...the murderer or murderers of a local policeman attempting to quell a student disorder...
...The degree of their penetration of the Gentile mass, their safety's imagined insurance...
...Winners tell jokes...
...Oh, once in a while you hear something, but if we mind our own business they leave us alone...
...Nazi number two is a complex of hurting idealism, and now rationally programmed, I became Hamlet...
...Romans persecuted Jews before taking note of Christians, and couldn't have cared less about the crucifixion...
...I asked, softly, conscious of and surprised by the casualness of my tone, "What made you a Nazi...
...To be sure, the Christian-professing czars scorned Jews as Christ killers...
...Together, but individually, they dispelled my stereotype of Nazis...
...Nazis, it seems, are not as monolithic as our haunted memory casts them...
...Even for himself, Cohen never intended to stay, or more accurately, to die, in Smalltown...
...By now we had our own families to think about, virtually every German family suffered losses, our own lives to somehow salvage in the bombing wreckage and so we continued to block out on the genocide in our midst...
...Understandable, but today there are still Czechs in Czechoslovakia, and still Slavs in Czechoslovakia, but there aren't many Jews left...
...How many here from Harvard...
...What of the morality of 44-year-old beating up a man nearly eligible for Social Security...
...It's a Yiddish store...
...I asked the man for Mr...
...Perhaps too, for reasons of reciprocated prejudice, and for reasons of fear of "them" rather than of love of "ours...
...My face must have registered my puzzlement because he picked up again...
...Automobiles driven on the Sabbath have been stoned by them, public projects they deem potential Sabbath nuisances have been frustrated, the civic standing of Conservative and Reform branches of Judaism has been diminished by their religious intolerance...
...A popular folk wisdom in the ghettoes of pre-Hitler Eastern Europe was, "Scratch a goy, you'll find an anti-Semite...
...Diaspora, words descriptive of the Jewish condition, resonate with that consciousness—has even influenced our intramural communication...
...Further, that inasmuch as their relative numbers determine their respective raw strength, they deem their right to be in their might...
...Our news dealer was closed, so I continued walking...
...Perhaps my tolerance in Cologne suggests social balance...
...The leverage provided by organizations on the fulcrum that is American democracy has helped Jews all the way from finally-getting-that-office-job-denied-me to the federal government's assistance to harassed Soviet Jews...
...So we threw facts at bigotry, as if our facts were baseballs and prejudice a bottle on a shelf in a tent at a country fair...
...The helplessness of his crumbling fueled rather than appeased me and I pummeled more punches onto his head...
...To avoid, deflect, blunt, escape, hurdle and shield themselves from anti-Semitism, Jews have tried conversion, pretended invisibility, adapted to the cultures of their persecutors, assimilated, deepened their Jewish commitment, hunkered down in self-ghettoization, fought back, passed, championed social and political panaceas, have self-hated and self-loved, made alliances with other discriminated-against groups, with the rich and powerful and the poor and powerless, with radicals and with reactionaries, courted Christians and atheists, have dispatched emissaries to monarchs, tyrants, popes and presidents, have paid bribes, showered philanthropy, have bloc-voted and bullet-voted, contributed to political parties, churches, civil liberties organizations and have supported a plenitude of Jewish defense organizations...
...Younger, I was certain that if only people understood the irrationalism of prejudice, they would enlist with the good guys, vote for fair employment practices laws, be repelled by rather than giggle at anti-Jewish stereotypes, ride off into a benignly red setting sun, ecumenizing all the way...
...As the Amish are drops in the bucket of German immigration to America, so are the Hasidim but a tiny minority of Eastern European Jewish immigrants...
...I also thought about his age...
...One's acculturation to a particular environment, be it real or imagined, can have implications far more ominous to the individual Jew and to the Jewish people than the brush with it at a "Shower of Stars" in the Symphony Hall of, after all, the Athens of America...
...He explained Hitler's platform, its planks, cleanliness of mind and body, honesty in government, purging the nation of social and political decadence...
...Jewish philanthropy to Jewish causes is well known...
...They have even been feared and jeered where they have never been...
...I was in my early 40s, robust...
...All that smiling, all day long, at all those customers she stroked but feared...
...Skokie, Illinois, a heavily Jewish surburb, substantial numbers of whose residents are concentration-camp survivors...
...Furthermore, it can be done without self-debasement, without joining the anti-Semites...
...To be sure, Jews have been persecuted where and when they have not been well off...
...Jews are familiar with the story they tell on themselves of the stammerer who is refused a job as a radio announcer...
...His answer: "I was an idealist...
...Survey after survey suggests that some 30 percent of the American public continues to harbor incipiently unfriendly views of Jews...
...In our time, studies have abounded...
...His explanation for not getting the position is that the interviewer was an anti-Semite...
...Now he lay before I asked, softly, "What made you a Nazi...
...He jaywalked across the street and I continued, but in a moment I saw an open candy store across the street...
...It would have been so easy to simply say no...
...Or more accurately, Collins is the son of a Jewish survivor of the infamous Dachau concentration camp...
...When Southerners use it they are remembering the Civil War, sour-tasting its regurgitations...
...Something else...
...It's the nascent labor movement's one word slogan—"Organize...
...Acculturating Jews used to repeat that quotation boastfully and, I suspect, propagandistically...
...Mark Twain: "I must insist upon the honesty—it is an essential of successful business . . .") Not far from Smalltown there's a sun-drenched town much like it...
...They should have stopped me...
...cottontops, the Diaspora too has produced Jews who please and jest by day, and at night, exhausted from smiling, at long last relax...
...They are our only Czechoslovakians...
...His thoughts on anti-Semitism most recently appeared in these pages in January-February 1982, asapartof "The New Anti-Semitism: A moment Symposium...
...One participant, a non-Jew, likely unfamiliar with, if aware at all, of Mark Twain's essay, wondered aloud, "What's a Jewish mother, packing her kid off to school, to do...
...And in all the way stations in between, in time and space, like some perennial poison flower...
...When he recovered from my answer, he asked me if I was still a Nazi...
...I sometimes think as I visit from organization to organization and as often as not see the same faces that we Jews invented interlocking directorates—how else would there be enough of us to go around...
...I thought about that and about my career and about my family...
...It has changed us in ways undreamed by yesteryear's sociologists, produced surprises to Gentiles as well as to ourselves, has even, where Jews are small minorities, developed Jewish survival commitment stronger than the self-confident New York Jew's...
...I can't have it again...
...Yes, but softly...
...It's Yiddish...
...It serves as an antibody...
...The featured entertainer was Merle Haggard, whose repertoire consisted of songs recalling the poverty and the small satisfactions of hard-time country life...
...I suspect that there's more than one enthusiastic ex-Nazi who today is an enthusiastic good guy while the indif-ferent-to-Nazism Deutschlander, as a consequence of his personal chemistry, is today indifferent about German democracy...
...I recall thinking, not contemptuously, but just thinking, that he didn't want the chorus, now reformed at the door, to know that they were Jews...
...Periodically, ultra-Orthodox religious sects in Israel apply their political influence (greatly inflated by the dependency of Israel's major political parties on splinter parties for a parliamentary majority with which to rule) in order to gain special favor...
...Then as I was paying the owner behind the counter, he spoke...
...I met my first Nazi in a chance encounter...
...When in two minutes I left the candy store, he had already gone...
...Alas, however, I have known too many authoritarian personalities who, politically speaking, wore white hats, their authoritarianism compromising, but nonetheless furthering do-good causes...
...I held up this useless, deformed arm...
...Again my voice, in explanation rather that reportage: "He called you all stinking Jews...
...In the United States the decompression chamber of assimilation has produced scions of notable accomplishment—Senator Barry Goldwater, former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, former Secretary of Commerce W. Michael Blumenthal, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger— all now Christians...
...And I have noticed, too, that when a northerner travels South, he's touristing, but when a Southerner travels north, he enters his diaspora...
...The focal point of it all was the planned Nazi march in We have Jews who insist that anti-Semitism does not exist...
...Sachar, as clever a Jesuit as the priest was a Jewish fund raiser, said he'd look into it and would report back...
...Books, tracts, doctoral theses, sermons, colloquia, workshops, conferences, seminars have attributed anti-Semitism to capitalism and to communism, to political opportunists, to xenophobia, to father-hatred, to Jews for being too passive and to Jews for being too aggressive...
...My friend explained, "We get along fine here...
...When I was a young man, I knew...
...Even today, Jews mute felt criticism of specific Israeli actions for fear that if "overheard" by non-Jews, larger Jewish concerns for Israel's well-being will be forfeit...
...I was a houseguest of the Nazi I liked...
...Whereas at day's end a mailman's feet are sore, an athlete's muscles hard-used, an office worker's back tired, my aunt's lips and facial muscles, I was certain, ached...
...He told the Cardinal of the microfilm, its cost, and ventured that inasmuch as the Boston Jewish community had been so very generous to the Cardinal's Catholic charities, "Perhaps Your Eminence would appeal, in the spirit of Pope John Twenty-Third's ecumenism, to your supporters to underwrite the project...
...I'm not precisely sure what he answered...
...The question begs itself in the writing of this as it did in the thinking of it...
...How does one prove a negative...
...What are you laughing at...
...As I have grown older, I am less certain...
...I've been "into" country music since 1944 when on Guam as a marine the rec hut's record players featured not so much Bing Crosby, not so much Frank Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald as seemingly incessant Roy Acuff renditions...
...The in-tended-to-please nervous chatter of an unpacked guest hoping to stay...
...Consciously, that is...
...Under such circumstances, it somehow wouldn't have mattered, not all that much...
...Particular Jewish responses to anti-Semitism or to being treated hostilely or condescendingly or at arm's length fashion my aunt's, the Jewish chauvinist's, the self-hater's, the Universal-ist's, etc., individual personality...
...Suddenly in the morning quiet, like an off-stage chorus on cue, there sounded shouts of "Stop him...
...Indeed, in the United States some ho-mogenization has served as an insurance against the Balkanization of our land...
...I mean while Southerners consider northerners Northerners, northerners don't think of themselves as Northerners...
...all of those college types were absent presences in Symphony Hall and these unschooled hardworking clerks, laborers and their housewives were laughing at them, and in their laughter congratulating themselves for being gainfully employed and for loving their country...
...We get along fine...
...Laughter again, superior, smug...
...When the priest asked where he got so much money, Sachar enjoyed answering in measure matching the priest's surprise, "Oh, I asked Cardinal Cushing...
...In the ghettoes of Europe, and in their tenement hovels in New York...
...It's nothing new...
...Called me a stinking Jew...
...As remembering losers, we still regulate our audio even on warranted self-criticism, lest we be overheard and Israel's punishment in the court of Gentile opinion exceed its faults...
Vol. 7 • September 1982 • No. 8
