How to Tell If You're a Left Anti-Semite: A Checklist by Ben Wittes of Lawfare

The last few weeks have been rough. Your Jewish friends have been extra needy. It’s not enough that you support their right to own land and enter the professions, that you don’t keep them out of clubs and universities, that you accept their citizenship, and that you don’t describe them as “rootless cosmopolitans” or “international banking conspirators.” 

Now it feels like you’re walking on eggshells around them every time you comment on the news. They have you suddenly wondering: Am I actually an anti-Semite? It’s a painful question. You want to be a good person. You believe in diversity, equity, and inclusion—including of Jews. 

And we all know that antisemitism is not a thing that good people do. And it’s not inclusive. And yet you keep saying things that create what seems to be a stricken look on the faces of Jews of your acquaintance. But then when you ask them whether it was okay to say that thing you just said, they all sound reassuring. But you’re not sure. Is that because it was innocuous? Or is it because they are just being polite and are secretly judging you? It can be hard to tell. 

So as a public service, I thought I would create an “Am I a Left Anti-Semite?” checklist. The checklist consists of ten probing yes-or-no questions, each with an assigned point value of associated with the anti-Semitism of the left. Go through the checklist, add up your score, and see where you rank on the scale of 0 to Pogrom. I have added explanatory notes as needed to each question. By the way, this is an official publication of the entire Jewish community, for which I speak. 

Question #1: Have you ever referred to Hamas fighters as “our martyrs”? If so, give yourself ten points. If not, have you ever referred to Palestinians killed in the Israeli fight against Hamas as “our martyrs” in a context in which a reasonable person might understand you as referring to Hamas fighters as martyrs? If so, give yourself two points. 

Question #2: Have you ever expressed the sentiment that Palestine must be free “from the river to the sea” or any similar slogan that calls for the destruction of any Jewish sovereign presence in Israel proper and that might reasonably be construed as a call to remove or kill Jews from that region? If so, give yourself ten points. Deduct two points if you cannot identify the river in the slogan. Deduct another three if you can’t identify the sea in question. If either or both of these two conditions are met, you might be less of an anti-Semite than an ignorant idiot who has no idea what you’re saying. 

Question #3: Do you find yourself radically more engaged by the plight of Palestinians displaced, injured, or killed in Gaza in response to a massacre of Israeli civilians than by the millions of Syrians displaced, wounded or killed in the murderous war by the Syrian government against its own people; by the millions of Ukrainians who have been killed or made refugees by Russia; or by the brutality of the Taliban? If so, give yourself ten points. 

Question #4: Do you have an urge to shout at or harass Orthodox Jews or others who are visibly Jewish—or to protest at Jewish or kosher institutions—because of your objections to Israeli policy? Give yourself ten points if you have this urge. Give yourself 50 points if you have ever acted on it. 

Question #5: More generally, do you believe the rise in antisemitic incidents, on college campuses and elsewhere, around the country is understandable under the circumstances? Give yourself five to fifteen points depending on how understandable you think it is. 

Question #6: When 1,400 Israeli civilians were massacred, did you have a strong urge to add a “but” to any statement of condemnation you may have issued on social media or elsewhere? Give yourself three points if you had the instinct. Give yourself five points if you, in fact, qualified whatever public statement you made. 

Question #7: Have you ever secretly wondered whether there is such a thing as an Israeli civilian? If so, give yourself ten points; that’s some dark shit. Give yourself an extra ten points if you’ve had this thought about Israelis but never had a similar thought about the nationals of any other country. 

Questions #8: Was any part of you secretly relieved by the speed and ferocity of the Israeli response to the October 7 massacre, as it allowed you to stop talking about the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and instead talk about Israeli policies and actions you could condemn? If so, give yourself five points. Give yourself an extra five if you never seriously contemplated what realistic alternative options Israel might have to protect its people than the course it is taking. Give yourself an extra five still if the first statement you made or protest you attended took place in response to Israeli action, rather than the Hamas action. 

Question #9: When you heard about the riot that broke out in an airport in Dagestan the other day, in which rioters looked to attack passengers on a flight from Tel Aviv, did you instinctively want more “context” or to understand the rioters’ point of view? If so, give yourself five points. 

Question #10: Do you interpret the Biden administration’s support for Israel principally as evidence of Jewish political power in the United States? Give yourself five points for a soft yes, ten points for a more emphatic yes. 

Scorecard 

0-to-10 points: Not an anti-semite. I absolve you of sin. 

11-to-30 points: You have been infected with left antisemitism, but it’s nothing a little reading on the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the history of the left won’t cure. 

31-to-50 points: You’re dabbling in some serious antisemitic ideation. You clearly don’t mind violence against Jews very much. 

51-to-75 points: You’ve got a serious problem. 

76-and above: You’re a member of the Raging Bigot Club.

Here is the original post.

The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henri Levy Book 42 of 2022

 

When I began my Jewish journey after torch-carrying Nazis marched in Charlottesville. In my search after that horrible night, Bernard-Henri Levy in his book The Genius of Judaism was one of the first writers to show me I really am a Jew.  

Jews themselves fight over who is a Jew. My family and Jews I knew growing up said I was not a Jew.  I do not have a Jewish mother. When I joined a Synagogue, it had to be a Reform Synagogue. To be Conservative, especially to be Orthodox, I would have to convert.  

For non-Jews, my Jewish Dad means I am a Jew, the same way that having an Italian Dad would make me Italian.  Of course, every white supremacist and Nazi in America hates me even if my mother is not Jewish.  

Levy went showed me what an amazing tribe I am a part of.  To be a Jew is to have a unique place in the world in so many ways. Who loses their country and gets it back after two millennia? And keeps its culture together during that entire two thousand years.

I wrote this about my first reading of the book in 2018:  

The book explicitly on faith that moved me the most was The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henri Levy. This book looks at the history of the Jewish people and Israel through the lens of the Book of Jonah.  Levy shows us Judaism and his view of the Jewish world by his interactions with “Nineveh” in the form of modern-day enemies of Jews and Israel.  One modern Nineveh he visits is Lviv, Ukraine.   

I knew my trip last summer was to visit Holocaust sites would center on Auschwitz, But this book led me to pair Lviv with Auschwitz as two sad extremes of the Holocaust.  Auschwitz is the most industrial site of slaughter, Lviv is the most personal.  At Auschwitz, the Nazis built a place of extermination. In Lviv they simply allowed the local population to act out their own anti-Semitism.   

Lviv was the most personal of the sites of Holocaust slaughter.  Neighbors killed neighbors and dumped their bodies in ditches.  Levy went to Lviv to make peace with this site of unbridled hate.  He seems to have succeeded.  I did not.  Ukraine tried to kill my grandparents. Ukraine remains a cauldron of anti-Semitism. 

Which brings up another aspect of Judaism which Levy makes so simple and beautiful. We Jews, at our best, are committed to Justice, to repairing the world.

Until this year, I was ambivalent about Ukraine as was Levy.  From the beginning of the war, I have volunteered for Ukraine, sometimes three or four days a week making combat medical kits.  Levy made a documentary backing the fight to keep Ukraine free.   

When the Russians invaded, Ukraine needed all free people to rally to her defense.  Whatever problems I had with Ukraine before February 24 are insignificant compared to the unjust attack on an innocent country.

Glory to Ukraine.

The book is a celebration of Jewish history and life and is beautifully written.

First 41 Books of 2022:

C.S.Lewis: A Very Short Introduction by James Como

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama by C.S. Lewis

Le veritable histoire des petits cochons by Erik Belgard

The Iliad or the Poem of Force by Simone Weil

Game of Thrones, Book 5 by George R.R. Martin

Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreutz

Essential Elements by Matt Tweed

Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud 

The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Cochrane by David Cordingly 

QED by Richard Feynman

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by  C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

"Jewish Politics" by Hannah Arendt. Published in 1942. So Relevant Now.

 

Hannah Arendt

In 1942 Hannah Arendt, philosopher, historian and refugee of Nazi Germany wrote the following essay.  As I read it, I felt myself sitting up straighter to pay better attention to what Arendt was saying about the Jewish people in the midst of World War II and why we need democracy and now always.  

I love Hannah Arendt's writing and thought.  This essay is among the best 900 words in all the millions of words she wrote.

Jewish Politics 

If the horrible catastrophe of European Jewry and the difficult, sad struggle to form a Jewish army and to gain recognition of the Jews as an ally of the United Nations result in our finally realizing that despite our millionaires and philanthropists we Jews are among the oppressed peoples of this earth, and that our Rothschilds have a better chance of becoming beggars or peddlers than our beggars and peddlers of becoming Rothschilds-if in other words this war politicizes us and pounds it into our heads that the struggle for freedom is tantamount to the struggle for existence, then and only then will our grandchildren be able to remember and mourn the dead and to live without shame. 

Those peoples who do not make history, but simply suffer it, tend to see themselves as the victims of meaningless, overpowering, inhuman events, tend to lay their hands in their laps and wait for miracles that never happen. If in the course of this war we do not awaken from this apathy, there will be no place for us in tomorrow's world-perhaps our enemies will not have succeeded in annihilating us totally, but those of us who are left will be little more than living corpses. 

The only political ideals an oppressed people can have are freedom and justice. Democracy can be their only form of organization. One of the most serious impediments to Jewish-and not just Jewish-politics is the fact that in our current intellectual world those ideals and that form of organization have been corrupted and dragged through the mud by an uprooted bohemianism. For almost fifty years now one generation after the next has declared their disdain for "abstract" ideas and their admiration for bestiality. Freedom and justice are considered concepts for feeble old men. The French Revolution's egalite, liberte, and fraternite are taken as signs of impotence, of an anemic will to power, and at best a pretext for better deals to be made. The so-called young generation--which ranges in age from twenty to seventy--demands cunning of their politicians but not character, opportunism but not principles, propaganda but not policies. It is a generation that has fallen into the habit of constructing its weltanschauung out of a vague trust in great men, out of blood and soil and horoscopes. The politics that grows out of this mentality is called realpolitik. Its central figures are the businessman who winds up being a politician convinced that politics is just a huge, oversized business deal with huge, oversized wins and losses, and the gangster who declares, "When I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver." Once "abstract" ideas had been replaced by "concrete" stock market speculation, it was easy for abstract justice to give way before concrete revolvers. What looked like a rebellion against all moral values has led to a kind of collective idiocy: anyone who can see farther than the tip of his own nose is said to live in a fantasy world. What looked like a rebellion against intellect has led to organized turpitude-might makes right. 

Disdain for democracy and the worship of dictatorial forms of organization are especially fatal for small, oppressed peoples, who depend on the firm commitment of each individual. They least of all can forgo a democratic frame of mind, by which, as Clemenceau put it during the Dreyfus affair, the affairs of each individual are the affairs of all. In a dictatorship the individual has no political meaning-no matter how many of them wear uniforms because the individual no longer has any sense of responsibility for anything beyond staying alive himself. Once the order from "higher up" is given, any number of SA men marching in ranks can be shot on the spot without bringing the parade to a halt. Each man is ready and willing to step over the corpse of his neighbor and march on. And once the businessman's opportunism has suffocated peoples and nations by atomizing them in a politics of cliques and clans, despotism takes this atomization to its logical conclusion, until finally sons denounce their own fathers, neighbors and friends denounce one another, for the sake of their careers or personal security. 

Almost across the board, Jewish politics, to the extent that it exists at all, is run by people who have likewise grown up-without ever growing powerful!-worshipping power and opportunistic success. Their abhorrence for principles, their fear of betting on the wrong horse, their admiration of those who hold power on this earth, and their reluctance to mobilize the energies of their own people have cost us the deployment of a Jewish army. In the midst of the monstrous turmoil the world now finds itself in, those who are unwilling to take any risks are certain to lose everything. The time for compromises is past. Those who think they can live on their knees will learn that it is better to live and die standing up. We do not need any opportunistic practitioners of realpolitik, but we certainly do not need any "Fuhrers" either. The trouble is, first, that a great many organizations and bureaucracies are working to prevent radical democrats from speaking to our people; and second, that our people-those who are not yet behind barbed wire-are so demoralized by having been ruled by philanthropists for 150 years that they find it very difficult to begin to relearn the language of freedom and justice.

From the book The Jewish Writings, pp 241-3

Ukraine is My Country--Zelenskyy Showed Me Why

 

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the 

Bad Ass Ukrainian Army 

In 1787, Benjamin Franklin urged his colleagues at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia to rally behind the new plan of government they had written. 

“I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them,” he said, “For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise.”

It is time for me to admit my ambivalence toward Ukraine. Hostility would be more accurate.  My grandparents escaped what is now Ukraine in 1900. Then it was part of Tsarist Russia. They were born in Odessa. The pogroms that killed a million Jews before and after their escape were carried out by the Tsar's army with willing help from local people.  

Neither my father, nor my grandmother (who lived to be 100) nor any of the my father's extended family of five brothers and their wives and families ever mentioned Ukraine or Russia. That was the "Old Country" if mentioned at all.  The one time my grandfather returned to Odessa led to the worst year of his life. The story is here.

In my barely Jewish childhood, I knew the Holocaust happened, but knew almost nothing about it.  I lived in Germany for three years in the 1970s and never visited a death camp or memorial or museum. In fact, it was 2017 before I visited my first Holocaust site: Auschwitz.  

After Trump was elected and made a Nazi-website host his chief of staff, I suddenly became interested in the Holocaust and where my grandparents escaped from.  The following year, 2017, I rode from Belgrade to Lviv, Ukraine. I had read a lot about the Holocaust in the previous year.  The ride began in Belgrade, where a century of Jew hating by Nazis, Soviets and the disintegration of Yugoslavia had wiped out a Jewish community that had been vibrant in the 19th Century.  

Then I rode to Auschwitz, the worst single site of the Holocaust. I continued to Lviv where the Jews were dispossessed, raped, and murdered by their neighbors.  Auschwitz and Lviv were the worst sites of the Holocaust in their own tragic ways.  

But in March of 2019, Volodymyr Zelenskyy was elected President of Ukraine in a landslide repudiation of Victor Poroshenko.  The country I had looked at only through the lens of its bad history, looked very different.  Zelenskyy, a Jew, won with 73% of the vote.  He was asking for weapons to fight the Russian invasion of 2014 that continued in the eastern regions of Ukraine.  

Then the Jewish President of Ukraine stood up to Putin's Puppet in the White House!  Our mobster President tried to trade missiles for help with his own re-election and Zelenskyy wouldn't play.  Trump was impeached, but not convicted--that would have required Republican senators with spines.  

Then on February 24 Putin invaded Ukraine.  The experts gave Ukraine a week.  They offered Zelenskyy a way out.  Zelenskyy said, "I don't need a ride, I need ammo." Ukrainian Marines were told to surrender or die by the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet.  They answered, "Russian Warship! Go Fuck Yourself!" 

In March I started volunteering with Ukrainians making medical kits for Ukrainian soldiers. Ukraine is now the center of the fight to maintain democracy in the world.  Russia and China are ruled dictators. Turkey and Hungary, both members of NATO are ruled by authoritarians who will be full on dictators soon. 

In the case of Hungary, Republicans cheer President Viktor Orban to the rafters when he talks about the Great Replacement Theory to justify his racism, and their racism.  The most vile Christian-labelled tyrant worshippers like Tucker Carlson, Eric Metaxas and Rod Dreher see Hungary and Russia as the real Christian west.  Which is true if the Crusades, the Inquisition and the wars of religion are your idea of true Christianity.

Ukraine suffered nearly a century of Soviet oppression. In the middle of Soviet horror, Ukraine was conquered by the Nazis.  After the Soviet Union collapsed,  Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom guaranteed the borders of Ukraine.  

With all of that, Ukraine is now the front line of democracy. Ukraine is fighting for all of the free world right now.  In every government and every organization Personnel is Policy.  Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a brave man leading a free nation in a fight against tyranny.  

My previous view of Ukraine was of a nation oppressed and conquered. As a free nation, Ukraine is a light to the world.  

And of all nations in the world, Israel should be offering whole-hearted support to Ukraine, and yet they are not. A Jewish state could and should do a lot more to help a Jewish head of state under attack by one of the worst tyrants in the world.

Today is Ukraine Independence Day, and Six Months Since the Start of the Russian Invasion

 

Today is the 31st anniversary of Ukraine's Independence, the day it broke free of the Soviet Union and became an independent nation.  

Sadly, it is also the 6-month anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine--a vile and illegal and unprovoked attack.  Russia was one of the countries, along with the U.S. and the U.K. who guaranteed Ukraine's national borders and security in exchange for giving up its nuclear arsenal. The agreement was the Budapest Memorandum, singed in 1994.

Since 2014, Russia has broken its word, broken the agreement, and should not just be sanctioned but be defeated by the U.S., the U.K. and the United Nations.  The U.N. charter provides for taking action against member countries who invade other countries.  

I know the dangers of escalation, but I also know the dangers of allowing a ruthless bully like Vladimir Putin to act with impunity.  

The countries who guaranteed Ukraine's borders should join the fight and smash Russian forces in Ukraine and sink Russia's Black Sea fleet: all of it.  

I will continue to do what I can as a volunteer, but my hope for Ukraine is full restoration of its territory along with utter and ignominious defeat for Russia.  

Jews by Choice: Those who choose to be part of a long-persecuted faith/community

 

This week Jews around the world mark the Holocaust Remembrance Day. For me, this day is a swirl of sadness and disbelief that such an atrocity could ever occur.

There are roughly 20 million Jews in the world, about one in 3,500 of the people living today. And that relatively small number of Jews is radically divided into groups from Ultra Orthodox to atheists and a thousand variations in between.

One group that stands out for me among all of them, especially this week, is Jews by Choice: the people who decide to become Jews, to become part of a community that is, has been, and will be hated, despised and slandered everywhere.

As I write this Jews are fleeing Ukraine knowing how Russia has dealt with Jews for the past millennia. The Jewish homeland of Israel is getting hit by rockets by terrorists. The past five years has seen more violence against Jews in America than at any time in our nation's history. The treasonous cult of Qanon is digging up the worst anti-Semitic stereotypes of the past centuries and dreaming up news ones: Jewish Space Lasers start California wild fires!

Jews by Choice join a community that will always be the target of hate. They join willingly knowing the dangers: the Rabbi who leads them into their new faith commitment makes clear what they will face.

And they become Jews anyway.

On this very sad week, I salute the courage and love of everyone who became a Jew by Choice.

Book 5 of 2022: How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

 

Bari Weiss wrote this book soon after the slaughter of Jews at prayer at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. Weiss grew up in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood. She and her family were members of Tree of Life.  

The book was published in 2019 before COVID-19 and before Weiss resigned from the New York Times in 2020. An article in Politico talked about the reason for her resignation:

Weiss described the Times as an institution where "intellectual curiosity—let alone risk-taking—is now a liability" and where the opinions of Twitter users have become the paper's "ultimate editor." She complained that she felt bullied by colleagues who "called me a Nazi and a racist" and who posted an ax emoji next to her name. 

“Showing up for work as a centrist at an American newspaper should not require bravery,” Weiss wrote.   

I listened to the almost every episode of the "Honestly by Bari Weiss" podcast before I read the book.  So I knew her positions on the anti-Semitism of both the Left and the Right before I started reading.  

In the first chapter she takes on the long history of Christian anti-Semitism, "the mere fact that Jews continue to exist in the world was an affront to the most foundational Christian idea, that the Messiah had indeed come. 

She says her intent is not to blame Christian doctrine, "It is simply to point out the historical and intellectual depth of the anti-Jewish conspiracy."

She then talks about the Unite The Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017.  She says, "That event was a shattering awakening for those of us who believed that the poisonous ideology of white supremacy was mostly confined to the lunatic online fringe."  

On Friday evening, August 11, 2017, I watched news footage of men with torches marching across the University of Virginia campus chanting "Jews will not replace us" and "Blood and soil."  Between then and now Great Replacement Theory has become the truth for Fox News viewers.  The most popular Fox shows promote Great Replacement Theory.    

My response to Charlottesville was to join a synagogue. In a country with a President who says there are "fine people on both sides" I knew I had to take sides.  

The next two chapters in the book explain the anti-Semitism of the woke left and radical Islam. The last chapter is titled "How to Fight."  Weiss says, "ethnic nationalism always puts us in grave danger."

The last chapter has a different category of advice every page or two. Under the heading: Trust your discomfort. she says, "If a politician you thought represented your values claims that Israel is among the worst abusers of human rights in the world, you know the truth about that politician."

Next she advises Call it out. Especially when it's hard.  She says it is easy to call out white racists, but when a Democrat is anti-Semitic, we have to call it out: "Ilhan Omar can espouse bigoted ideas [about Jews]. And Ilhan Omar can herself be the hate object of bigots, including the (45th) president of the United States." 

Weiss says we should maintain liberalism. Worship of the state, Christian nationalism expressed in America First, is bad for democracy. Since the writing of the book three years ago, the right in America has become openly hostile to democracy and praising Putin, Orban of Turkey and other right-wing dictators.  

We should also support Israel: ready to criticize its flaws, but in support of a political and historical miracle.  She later quotes Walker Percy on the extent of that miracle:

Why does no one find it remarkable that in most world cities today there are Jews but not one single Hittite, even though Hittites had a flourishing civilization while the Jews nearby were a weak and obscure people. When one meets a Jew in New York or New Orleans or Paris or Melbourne, it is remarkable that no one considers the event remarkable. What are they doing here? But it is even more remarkable to wonder, if there are Jews here, why are there not Hittites? Where are the Hittites? Show me one Hittites in New York City.

Percy is right. I have never met a Hittite, but Jews are everywhere I go. The book inspired me to do what I can to keep it that way.  

 -----

First four books of 2022:

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

Book 4 of 2022: Biography of Fritz Haber, a French Graphic Novel

Fritz Haber 1. The Spirit of the Times.

I just finished the first of three volumes of a graphic novel biography of the German Jewish chemist Fritz Haber.  He is a Nobel laureate and a German patriot who died in exile just after Hitler took power.  

He invented the process for taking nitrogen from the air and making fertilizer. We would not have a world population of seven billion now without Haber.  Not a quarter of that.  But that invention also meant Germany could fight for four years in World War I instead of running out of gunpowder in the first six months.

Billions fed, millions dead.

This first volume traces Haber's life until the first decade of the 20th Century. The great and the terrible years are in the next two volumes.  

A short biography of Haber is below in an article I wrote for Chemical Engineering Progress  magazine in 2004.

------

First three books of 2022:

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

A Holocaust Memorial in Darmstadt Attacked Twice and Still Standing

Near the central station of Darmstadt, Germany, there is a memorial to the deportation of Jews and Gypsys (Roma) during 1942 and 1943. This memorial is located on the corner of Bismarckstrasse and Kirschenallee. 

The monument was designed in 2004 by the artist couple Ritula Fränkel and Nicholas Morris. It represents a glass cube filled with shards of glass, on which 450 names are engraved. These names represent 3400 persons from Darmstadt and the surrounding area who were deported to various concentration camps.

Three sides of the glass cube were destroyed by vandals on the night of July 9-10, 2006. In 2014 the damage was repaired but six weeks later it was destroyed again. The monument will not be removed but will remain in this historic place.

This memorial was the last place I visited before boarding a train to return to Paris and then home.  My friend Cliff said this memorial was the other end of the tracks that lead to the rail sidings in Auschwitz we visited in July.  Darmstadt was a well-known as being very Nazi as soon as Hitler rose to power.  

A Cathedral and a Holocaust Memorial Share the East End of an Island in Paris

The most famous Cathedral in Paris, Notre Dame, sits the east end of the most famous island in the Seine River, il de la cite. 

The grand cathedral is currently in the midst of a many millions of Euros makeover. It will be closed for years.  

Behind the soaring cathedral on the very eastern tip of the island is the Holocaust Deportation Memorial. The entire memorial to the 200,000 Jews deported to death camps is underground. 

The entrance is a steep stone staircase down to an open area with a barred opening looking east along the Seine.  East is, of course, the direction of transport the victims took to their death.

For me, the beautiful view of the Seine through iron bars is what deportation would look like--passing through a beautiful countryside in a cage.

In the summer when the setting sun is north of west the shadow of the cathedral falls on the Holocaust memorial, not for long, just minutes.  I was overcome with sadness the first time I visited this memorial in 2017. I was in Paris in late June and early July and saw the shadow fall on the memorial after 9pm near sunset. During the Nazi era, 400 million Christian labeled people were either participants, complicit in or ignored the Holocaust. 

Inside the memorial is a map with the number of  Jews from each department deported to death camps.

The death camps are listed in blood red.

The barred opening seen from the north bank of the river is just a dark rectangle on a gray wall.

Another map shows all the Nazi camps to which people were sent to die.

IN the midst of the memorial is a flame of remembrance.

The view to the east up the Seine River is lovely.

The open courtyard of the memorial feels very vertical and forbidding.

Inside is a long tunnel with names of the victims.

Each time I visit Paris I visit the memorial to those deported. Usually there are just a few people inside.  

A few hundred meters away thousands are usually visiting Notre Dame.  Even now dozens of people were looking at the posters on the walls enclosing the cathedral during its restoration.  

 

Everybody Hates Jews

Honestly by Bari Weiss, a new podcast

 One of my favorite new podcasts is Honestly by Bari Weiss.  She was a columnist at the New York Times  until she resigned last year saying woke culture had taken over the Times and created a hostile work environment. She is a conservative, but against Trump populism.

She was Bat Mitzvah at the synagogue in Pittsburgh where eleven Jews were murdered by a gunman shouting that he wanted all Jews to die. 

On her podcast, she interviews guests covering a gamut of American culture and its dysfunction.  

Her second episode was interview with Mark Cuban on money and hard questions on the ill effects of billionaires on society.

In her most recent episode, Weiss interviewed Dr. Vinay Prasad about strategies to overcome vaccine hesitancy. She ended the interview by asking Prasad how he lives his life in and out of the hospital where he works in San Francisco.  Prasad said a vaccinated person wearing a mask outside is completely unnecessary, but he lives in a very blue city so he sometimes wears a mask outside just to be part of his community.

She interviewed Professor Peter Boghossian about why he left Portland State over an oppressive woke culture dominating the campus.

Lt. Gen. HR McMaster discussed his career and tenure in the Trump administration in an interview I found fascinating. 

She interviewed the head of Apple News in Hong Kong about the formerly independent city state falling under direct control of China.

And for something completely different, listen to the episode on America's Sex Recession.  

Weiss also has a substack. The latest article titled Everybody Hates Jews is brilliant in showing the danger of Jew hatred from the left and the right:  

In an era in which the past is mined by offense-archaeologists for the most minor of microaggressions, the very real macroaggressions taking place right now against Jews go ignored. Assaults on Hasidic Jews on the streets of Brooklyn, which have become a regular feature of life there, are overlooked or, sometimes, justified by the very activists who go to the mat over the “cultural appropriation” of a taco. It is why corporations issue passionate press releases and pledge tens of millions of dollars to other minorities when they are under siege, but almost never do the same for Jews. 

Here is the full article.

I listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts. 

Every Day, All Day Humiliation at Auschwitz

 

Auschwitz-Birkenau latrine

On my return visit Auschwitz in July of this year, I saw things I missed or forgot I saw on my first visit in 2017.  

In 2017 I was overwhelmed by the scale of the camp--so many people murdered, so many German soldiers and civilians running the camp.  

One of the horrible sights was the latrine in a barracks at Birkenau.  The guards herded the inmates to the latrine. They used the latrine together, dozens at a time. The guards used a stopwatch.  When time was up, the inmate had to get up or be beaten.  

When I try to imagine how horrible life truly was I think of times when I lived and worked in close quarters large groups of men--the Army and Teamsters loading docks.  One lament common to both places was, "Can't I take a shit in peace?"  

No one wants to be rushed in a latrine.  

And even men I have known who care little for privacy would occasionally want "to shit in a latrine with a door."

When I was on German gunnery ranges in the 1970s, some of the ranges had a place we called a "Make A Buddy" Shitter.  It was an outhouse with two boards with three holes connected by a narrow floor space.  When it was full, three men sat on each side facing each other with interlaced knees.  The inside guys had to wait until the outside guys were done to get out.  Sometimes men would wear their gas masks to use that latrine.  

And yet, these laments of dock workers and soldiers hardly touch the deep humiliation of prisoners in Auschwitz and other concentration camps forced to use latrines on a stop watch.  

The Nazis who marched in Charlottesville represent the very same things as the guards at Auschwitz. They see me and everyone who is not in their tribe as less than human. Nazis are never "fine people." We can never have peace with a government that tolerates Nazis. We are fortunate to be delivered from a government that numbers all American Nazis among its voters.

Nazi and rebel flags together at Charlottesville, 

both flags represent the losers in racist wars.

 

August 11, 2017, When Nazis Marched in America

 

Nazi flags and Rebel flags together in a racist medley at Charlottesville

Four years ago today Nazis with Tiki torches marched across the campus of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.  The chanted "Blood and Soil" and "Jews will not replace us."  I was riveted to TV coverage of the march and worried about my daughter who lived 60 miles away in Richmond.  Hundreds of armed racists were in Charlottesville for a "Unite the Right" Rally.  Would the rally spill over into other parts of Virginia? I didn't know.  

The next day one avowed Nazi would murder Heather Heyer and maim several more people.  The coward-bully President we had at the time would waffle for days applauding then reluctantly condemning his fervent supporters waving Nazi and Rebel flags.  He finally said there were "good people on both sides."  

For more than fifteen years, my family and I had been members of Presbyterian Church that was part of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) denomination.  It was the conservative side of the denominational split in the 1970s.  

In the wake of Charlottesville, the liberal side of the split, the Presbyterian Church USA condemned the violence and the President for not speaking forcefully against Nazis.  The PCA did nothing. I already was bewildered by people at the Church who  supported Trump, some fervently.  I left the Church.  

By the end of the year I was attending a local synagogue.  I had learned a lot about the Holocaust since Trump won the election. Two months before Charlottesville, I visited Auschwitz and Yad Vashem.  At both places I learned about decorated Jewish veterans of World War I who were murdered in the Holocaust. I knew that my service to America means nothing to Nazis, or to the fascists who flocked to Trump. 

I also read about German Jews who became Christians, sometimes going back three generations.  In 1935, Jewish converts were expelled from all Churches in Nazi Germany.  By the end of the war, nearly all were murdered.  The Churches who expelled their ethnically Jewish members still called themselves Churches, but they were dead. Their god was Hitler.  

The Churches that openly worship Trump now and call him God's Chosen or a modern-day King Cyrus are no better.  There is not a word of the Sermon on the Mount that Trump has not spit on by his actions and life. So much of conservative America has shown itself to be shallow and shameless in following Trump.  The Churches that worship him, or simply allow worship of him, are as spiritually broken as Nazi Churches.  

Terezin: "Model" Concentration Camp and Death Camp for "Mosaic" Christians

The ironic lie at the gate of many concentration camps, including Terezin

Two weeks ago I visited the Terezin concentration camp west of Prague in the Czech Republic. Terezin is variously classed as a ghetto or a concentration camp.  Tens of thousands died in the camp both from execution and disease, but it was not an extermination camp with gas chambers.  

Dozens of people slept in these bunks

Terezin was used a "model" camp. It was the camp the Red Cross was allowed to visit in February 1944 to show that the camps were not as bad as the reports coming out as the Nazi Army retreated.  The Nazis gave the Jews in the camp some autonomy. Many Jewish children were sent to Terezin and not made into slave laborers or murdered, at least for a while.  

A memorial to Jews tortured and murdered in the small fortress at Terezin

Another group sent to Terzin was professing German Christians who had even one Jewish great-grandparent.  Christians with Jewish backgrounds were removed from Church leadership in 1933. All Jewish or "Mosaic" Christians were expelled from Churches in 1935. Many were sent there to be enslaved and eventually murdered at Terezin or sent to Auschwitz to be enslaved or murdered.

A memorial near the fortress wall that served as an execution site

After my first visit to Auschwitz in 2017, I began to see the area controlled by the Nazis, between the Pyrenees and the Ural mountains, as a place where 400 million people with a Christian identity lived and possibly one in a thousand acted like Jesus. All those Christians were living normal lives until the Nazis took over, then the trial came and 999 of 1,000 murdered and dispossessed their Jewish neighbors or averted their eyes.

The history of Terezin and the attempt to make it a "model" camp makes clear that even the worst of the Nazis knew that their actions were evil.