Keep A Bag Packed

Noticing my anxiety over the events of October 7th and subsequent worldwide antisemitic demonstrations a non-Jewish friend inquired: “Why are you concerned, this is America, have you been the victim of antisemitism?” I realized that as a baby boomer raised in New York City the answer was no. My neighborhoods, Bedford Stuyvesant, and Jamaica were racially and ethnically diverse. NYC public schools were even closed on Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah. I subsequently moved to Atlanta, married, established a medical practice and we raised our four children. Antisemitism was never an issue. The practice I built of 100 physicians was diverse, mirroring our community. Our children attended private, non-Jewish, faith-based schools, had bar and bat mitzvahs, and later were accepted at the universities of their choosing.

I identified with Israel, worked on a kibbutz near Safed and a hospital in Nahariyya, but for my generation America was the secure location Jewish people had sought for 2,500 years in exile. George Washington made a promise to the leaders of Touro Synagogue, Rhode Island in 1790 when he wrote: “The new government would not sanction bigotry.” Adding: “May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants.” A year later the First Amendment was passed. Hasn’t that promise been fulfilled?

Although Jewish settlers arrived in America 300 years ago in 1850, they numbered fewer than 50,000. Unfortunately, the antisemitic tropes from Europe followed. On Dec. 17, 1862, General Ulysses S. Grant issued General Orders No. 11 to evict Jews from the vast war zone under his command. His edict was described as “the most sweeping anti-Jewish regulation in all American history.” Fortunately, President Lincoln rescinded the order a month later.

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Jewish immigrants began coming in large numbers from Central and Eastern Europe, between 1880 and 1920, over 2.5 million. By the early 20th century and lasting until the end of World War II a strain of virulent antisemitism emerged in American with the culprits wide reaching. In 1915, a Jewish man, Leo Frank, was abducted from jail in Atlanta and hung by a mob. Henry Ford, a lifelong antisemite bought his own newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, and in 1920 it began publishing a weekly series: “The International Jew: The World’s Problem.” In 1925 Hitler referred to Ford as a ‘great man’ in Mein Kampf.

America also maintained highly restrictive immigration laws, denying millions of immigrants, who would later die in the Holocaust, safe haven. Father Charles Coughlin mastered the social media of his time with a popular radio show. Known for his vicious antisemitic rants he responded to the November 10, 1938, “Kristallnacht” attack on Jews in Germany by asking, “Why is there persecution in Germany today?” He went on to explain: “Jewish persecution only followed after Christians first were persecuted.”

Dara Horn, in her eerily prescient book: “People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Presence” (September 2021) relates that for generations Jews told their children their names were changed on Ellis Island because someone wrote it incorrectly or it was hard to pronounce. In reality, most changes were after arrival in America by legal petition. The reasons proffered were: discrimination in finding employment, inability to buy a house or live in certain neighborhoods, their children were denied entrance to schools, prohibition from trades; basically all the antisemitic behavior they thought they were escaping when passing Liberty Island.

In the middle of the 20th century, after 550,000 Jews fought for America in World War II (my father and two uncles included) and the horror of the Shoah was revealed, there was a noticeable decline in antisemitism. My generation has experienced decades where overt antisemitism has not been tolerated. However, as Mark Twain famously penned: “History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes”. When it comes to Jews and persecution/pogroms/exile he may have been wrong. History repeats itself, over and over.

The Jews in England before the Edict of Expulsion probably felt at home as did the Sephardic Jews in Spain during “the Golden Age’ but before the Inquisition.  After 100,000 German Jews served the Kaiser faithfully in WWI could they have imagined the fate of not the next generation but their very own? How about Jews in France, the land of Liberte, Egalite and Fraternite, until they were rounded up on July1942, and taken to the Val D’Hiv (Velodrome) by French Gendarmes.  The Nazis requested Jews over the age of 16 but French Prime Minister Pierre Laval decided it would be ‘humanitarian’ to take children also. So, 4000 of them were arrested and later died, mostly in Auschwitz (Laval was tried and executed in 1945.)

This is America we say — it can’t happen here. The greatest Democracy ever, the place that has proven the exception to thousands of years of Jewish discrimination. Have we been lulled into a false sense of security and contentment? Is this why the vitriolic, irrational, frenzied, antisemitic scenes on our streets and campuses are so frightening. Thousands marching to support murderous terrorists, Jihadists, committed to genocide, who intentionally torture and behead babies and children, burn them alive, rape, kill the elderly, torment civilian prisoners, and record it on their GoPro before calling their parents to brag and receive affirmation.

Those who say the demonstrations and protests are just anti-Zionism and not hatred of Jews play a fool’s game. As Michal Cottler-Wunsch, Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, pointed out so eloquently at the UN in November: This is the same virus; just a modern, social media infused, mutation. Bret Stephens, in his NYT Column on November 7, 2023 “For American Jews, Every Day Must Be Oct. 8” wrote: “We can call out anti-Zionism for what is: a rebranded version of antisemitism, based on the same set of libels and conspiracy theories.”  This week in testimony before Congress the President of Harvard could not even agree that calling for “Genocide of Jews” violated the Harvard ‘Code of Conduct’.  How low is that bar? Pundits keep referring to ‘better education’ as the solution; oblivious to the fact that huge number of protesters are teachers, professors and have doctor of something before their names. A congresswoman, Pramila Jayapal, head of the Democratic Progressive caucus, when asked about the horrendous rapes and crimes against innocent Israeli women, wanted to “be balanced about bringing in the outrages against Palestinian.” Remember she is an elected official of the US government and very powerful member of the Democratic party.

What are the reasons for this?  Short memories as we are 80 years from the Holocaust? More and more people entering our society with inbred and deep-seated antisemitic indoctrination? The teaching in high school and college campuses of an agenda that is anti-White, anti-Western and anti-American? Today’s protesters see Jews as White colonizers and oppressors; the embodiment of all that is wrong in Western Society. But Hitler saw us as non-Aryan mongrels: A German pamphlet stated: “Jewry represents not a uniform race but a race mixture. It consists of Near Eastern and Oriental race ingredients, intermingled with Negro strains.” Jew haters will see what they want to fit their agenda.

We are forced to ask: Are Jewish people safe in America or was this barely a generational respite from the ‘world’s oldest hate’? Are we complacent because Jews have marched lockstep with BLM, LBGTQ+, Pro-Choice, Feminists, Climate activists, MeToo movement? But where are these groups now as we see events unfolding in real time. Jewish students barricaded into a library at Cooper Union for their safety. MIT students barred from classes on campus. A 69-year-old man at a Pro-Israel rally in LA dead; manslaughter charges pending against a college professor. A high school teacher in Jamaica, Queens under threat of harm by marauding students for the crime of attending a Pro-Israel rally. Jews in NYC afraid to wear yarmulkes. A Jewish owned falafel restaurant vandalized in Philadelphia. How many public Menorah lightings were cancelled in ‘our’ country this week?

What does the future hold for my grandchildren? Is this the America that George Washington promised? But wait — aren’t they tearing down his statues? So why should Jews feel special? There is an old Jewish custom that required people to keep a bag packed awaiting the Messiah’s arrival. Later that morphed into ‘just in case’ you had to leave your home suddenly. When Jeff Goldberg asked this question of a French Holocaust survivor in an Atlantic article in March 2015 it was intertwined with “but where would you go?” When and where will Jews ever feel safe as a small minority and what allies will be there.  America is my home. I love this country and appreciate all it has given me. But if Western self-loathing endangers the values of democracy, justice, family, literacy, humanity, opportunity, and morality that Jews cherish then we will continue to be further marginalized, hated, and victimized as our society and civilization crumbles. In Israel much of the Jewish population came from nations where the choice was binary: leave or die. They have nowhere else to go if Hamas, Hezbollah, or Iran are successful. This is why the survival of Israel is existential to them as it is to us. It is our indigenous, ancestral homeland and possibly our only remaining home if, God Forbid, we shall face that same binary choice.

Keep a Bag Packed.

Steven Morris recently retired from the practice of medicine after 45 years establishing and running Atlanta Gastroenterology Associates.