My father's bar mitzvah

After my father died, we sold his apartment in the Promised Land (sometimes known as Florida) but before we put it on the market we found treasures including his parents’ naturalization papers which list him as a one year old, but what struck me most was an invitation to his bar mitzvah. “Mr. and Mrs. Solomon Stein Request the honor of your presence at the Confirmation (and then in Hebrew ‘Bar Mitzvah’) of their son Joseph on Saturday April 10th, 1926 at 9 A.M. at Machzike Talmud Torah of Borough Park 1319-43rd Street, Brooklyn, N.Y. Reception at 8 P.M. at their residence 1847-48th Street, Brooklyn, N.Y.”

I wonder if I’m the only reader of the Voice & Herald ever to receive an invitation to their father’s bar mitzvah. The section from the Torah that morning was Sh’mini which among other things describes the deaths of two of Aaron’s sons and his silence in response. The Haftarah was from the book of II Samuel describing the moving of the recaptured Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem and the death of one of the men escorting it who made the mistake of touching it when it seemed to fall from its cart. Sixty years later his grandson Daniel, our first born, read the same texts. Life can be odd that way.

I’ve tried to get the weather but people who write columns on typewriters don’t readily have access to such information. But what intrigues me more is that I know the future of those there in a way my grandchildren will know my future and the world as it unfolds beyond our time. I’m just visiting this planet; we all are. Some of us try to make it a better place in our limited allotted time; others simply reside as a tenant in someone else’s apartment, making no improvements, others exploit all advantages intended or not. I do not pass judgment as I am as often willing to laugh at the world’s absurdities from the sidelines as I am to roll up my sleeves to resolve them.

But I know that in 1926 Hitler was merely an ex-con heading up an obscure political party considered too radical to succeed; that the Great Depression was still three years into the future; Stalin would have his show trials in 1936; Pearl Harbor was fifteen years away; my parents married eleven months later and I came along seventeen months after that. None of this was known on that bright sunny day (as I picture it in my mind) when my father read from the Torah and haftarah way back then, eighty-four years ago.

What’s in store for us? One of the things I’ve learned as an historian is that attempting to predict the future is a fool’s game. The old cliché about history repeating itself is a canard, not a truth. Economists and political scientists try to anticipate events and trends all the time, and fail. They study their charts and computer print outs and fail to account for this little thing or that and so they are wrong as often as right. If it were otherwise we’d all be millionaires. After all, who in 1926 was predicting the Great Depression or could have foretold that in seven years Hitler would be Chancellor of Germany?

In Berlin there’s currently a showing of Hitler mementos which opened with some trepidation. This is the first time a German museum has had such an exhibit, and the curators say they have taken great care to avoid glorifying the villain who is their subject. The Central Council of Jews in Germany acknowledges that the timing is right, given today’s political climate where Germans are nervous about the economy and immigrants and some in the lower middle class seem to want a leader to extract them form the doldrums—paralleling some of the conditions of 1933. Exhibits are set up in ways to discourage neo-Nazis from taking heroic photos of themselves near images of Hitler. But Hitler though dead is still a living presence, alive to those who fear foreigners, non-Christians, the better educated. In America their ilk is confined, generally, to the wilds of Idaho and Montana (except when they emerge as a Timothy McVey in Oklahoma City).

None of this was known when my father, a young boy of thirteen innocently celebrated becoming a man in 1926, to which event I’ve just been invited.

Liberals as Fascist? Bah, nonsense!

Recently I was told to read Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism so that I would know the truth at last. Well, I’ve looked at it and at the National Review on line and seen the video of Goldberg speaking at the Heritage Foundation and I am convinced. The right wing is in panic mode.

Until recently Carl Rove was predicting a permanent Republican majority. But then George W. Bush happened and most of the people weren’t fooled most of the time anymore. Now Republicans have lost the House, the Senate, the White House and are within a confirmation of losing their majority on the Supreme Court. Republicans now hold only 22 governorships and in Rhode Island no Republican currently seems willing to run.

Rather than asking themselves what went wrong, the radical right now in control of the party that once boasted of Javits and Rockefeller and Eisenhower, Edward Brooke and the two Chafees, is constantly in attack mode. I’m reminded of French general Robert Nivelle before his disastrous assault on unassailable German lines in April 1917. When asked how he intended to break through, he responded with “Violence, brutality, rapidity” to which some had added stupidity. Attack is all they know. Goldberg’s nonsense is just another manifestation of the Nivelle mentality.

In a nutshell, Goldberg argues that as Hitler and Mussolini started out as Socialists, their fascism retained Socialist elements shared by modern Liberals. Nazis and Fascists had some progressive social ideas, it is true, but that is not what defined them. Liberalism comes from the Latin for free; it has a long tradition from at least the writings of John Locke and Roger Williams. Liberals believe that all men are created equal; conservatives of the south, at least, and Nazis and Fascists in Europe, disagree; they believe that there is a superior race; they take Darwin’s concepts and distort them to “prove” the superiority of our race (whoever “our” is) over all others. In America this was justification for segregation disguised as an appeal to states’ rights. In 1980 Ronald Reagan, the paragon of the American conservative movement opened his presidential candidacy by going to Mississippi, to the very neighborhood where Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were brutally murdered because they were black and white trying to register black voters. He chose to announce there, there of all places, that “I believe in states’ rights ... I believe we have distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended to be given in the Constitution to that federal establishment.” And then later as president he went to Bitburg cemetery and paid homage to Nazi soldiers buried there. Liberals were outraged; nevertheless Reagan said of the German war dead, “They were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps,” a visit to which he chose not to make.

Goldberg clouds his case with so many irrelevancies and unsubstantiated innuendos that I cannot cover them all in the 700 words allotted me. But race, race won’t go away. The Nazis were racists and so were the conservatives whose dogs attacked protesters in Mississippi and Alabama; when president Johnson signed the 1964 civil rights act he knew that we was signing away the south for generations, but he did it anyway and in 1968 Nixon’s Southern Strategy brought him to the White House as surely as the Willy Horton advertisement swept in the first president Bush in 1988.

Goldberg tries to separate conservatives from Nazis by suggesting that conservatives don’t send inferior races to their deaths. That’s true; so far. (See how innuendo works? Like that.)

They used to call Liberals commie pinkos; during the recent election they tried to make us congruent with terrorists; that didn’t work, so now they seek the roots of Liberalism in fascism. Hitler tried to end Christianity and substitute Teutonic gods, Goldberg informs. Do any of the Liberals you know worship Thor? But many of my liberal friends attend church or synagogue; Hitler was in favor of euthanasia. Are liberals? None that I know of. Who is against gay rights, Nazis, yes; conservatives, yes; liberals, no.

It’s not only the Nazis use the big lie technique.