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.

Rabbi Ratifies Replacement-Theory Racism

Since August 2017, I have been trying to make sense of a world in which torch-carrying Nazis marched on the campus of the University of Virginia chanting "Jews will not replace us" and "Blood and Soil." A world in which three days later, the American President said there were "fine people on both sides" of the clash in Charlottesville between murderous Nazis and counter protesters.

Soon after the protest, my friend Cliff told me about a series of podcasts called "The Land of Israel Network."  He particularly wanted me to listen to a debate between two rabbis about Charlottesville.  The rabbis, Ari Abramowitz and Jeremy Gimpel, were veterans, comrades in the Israeli army, and neighbors building a worship retreat house in the desert. 

Abramowitz was alarmed by Charlottesville, Gimpel was already deep in Trump religion world even endorsing the idea that Trump was the modern day King Cyrus of Persia--the gentile king who allowed the exiled Jews to rebuild Jerusalem. The Trumpist evangelical world widely believes the King Cyrus story. 

Abramowitz and Gimpel argued. That in itself was a vast improvement over American evangelicals who simply worshipped Trump.  

The Land of Israel Network is politically conservative. I listened to all of the hosts and found them to be bright and interesting even if I disagreed with them on American politics.  

The exception was Rav Mike Feuer and his weekly "The Jewish Story" podcast.  I have listened to every episode of "The Jewish Story" and met with Rav Mike in Israel twice.  He sees contemporary politics both in America and Israel differently than the other hosts.  

By 2020, all of the hosts except Rav Mike had gone further into Trumpism.  Eve Harow had leading election deniers on her podcast. By this year she had Gil Hoffman on her show. Hoffman was reporting from the Ukraine border for the Jerusalem Post. Harow voiced the "both sides" opinion of Tucker Carlson et al and Hoffman shut that down. "Ukraine was attacked. Putin is evil." he said.

Yishai Fleisher also moved further into the American far right.  Last month he said Ben Shapiro should be the spokesperson for diaspora Jews.  Wow! So Ben Shapiro would fill the space held by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks.  This is something akin to the descent from William F. Buckley to Rush Limbaugh.  

And then in his most recent episode, Fleisher aired a recording of him praying at CPAC in Dallas and participating in a panel.  CPAC 2022 began with a keynote address by Victor Orban.  A few days before speaking at CPAC Orban addressed a gathering in Hungary and endorsed "Great Replacement Theory." Short of full-blown Naziism, you can't get much more anti-Semitic than Great Replacement Theory.  

The week-long celebration of White Christian Nationalism that is CPAC began with Orban and ended with Trump--King Cyrus reborn.

So I wrote to Yishai asking how he could participate in CPAC. Here is what I wrote:

Yishai,

Happy 20th Anniversary to you and Malkah. 

I am writing after listening to your prayer and panel at CPAC.

Just a week ago, August 10, was the fifth anniversary of the worst night of my life.

Nazis with torches marches in Charlottesville on the UVA campus chanting "You will not replace us" and it's variant "Jews will not replace us."  "Blood and soil" was another chant echoing across the campus. 

The French Fascist Great Replacement Theory was fringe five years ago. It's now accepted orthodoxy with the CPAC crowd and most Republicans, particularly followers of Tucker Carlson.

And it is government policy in Hungary under Victor Orban, the CPAC keynote.

Does any of this worry you?

Neil

His answer:  Does Ukrainian Nazism worry you? 

(This is the equivalent of blaming Antifa for January 6)

My response:

Yishai,

Not even a little.  They are defending Ukraine since the invasion.  They are like American Nazis on December 8, 1941. Lindbergh tried to join the AAF. 

The fascist Great Replacement Theory in America and Hungary worries me.  It is real and hateful and bad and finds drooling acceptance at CPAC.

We Jews will not replace them, but they will eventually say we did and kill us if not stopped.  

There are never fine people on both sides. 

Neil

His response:  [crickets]

Apparently, two Jews three opinions applies even to Great Replacement Theory. 

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.  

The Netanyahus: A Funny Novel About A Job Interview Gone Very Wrong. Book 18 of 2022

 A couple of weeks ago, I listened to an interview of American novelist  Joshua Cohen on the Ha'aretz Weekly podcast. Host Allison Kaplan Sommer talked to Cohen about receiving the Pulitzer Prize for Ficton for his novel, and learning about the award while he was in Israel.  

Of that coincidence, Cohen said, “If I thought that I was going to win the Pulitzer for a book called ‘The Netanyahus’ I would have to be crazy to want to be in Israel when that happened.” The interview occurred shortly after Cohen arrived in Israel for the Jerusalem International Book Forum and Writers Festival. 

Cohen said he was still in shock that he had won the biggest literary prize in the United States for a novel “that has characters in it that most Americans can't pronounce their names.”  

Its main character is the brilliant but embittered Professor Benzion Netanyahu, best-known today as the father of Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Benzion Netanyahu in the book (and in life) was a demanding, pushy, malcontent.  Cohen said that as he was writing he “kept on thinking of the line in ‘The Big Lebowski’ where the Dude says to Walter: ‘You’re not wrong, you’re just an asshole.’ And that was Benzion Netanyahu."

The other main character, Bezion's opposite and foil, is Ruben Blum, the only Jewish faculty member in the fictional college in upstate New York where Netanyahu comes for a job talk.  Blum is a too-willing-to-please stereotype of a Jewish professor. Cohen insists Blum is in no way based on the brilliant Harold Bloom whom Cohen was able to spend a lot of time with before he died in 2019. But it was Bloom's meeting Benzion and his family in the late 1950s that inspired the book.

Two of my favorite chapters are the letters Blum receives about Benzion Netanyahu.  One is glowing to the point of radiance. The other is from an Israeli colleague and is the scathing letter we have all fantasized writing about a thoroughly terrible colleague.

The ending is lovely--the comedy reaches its slapstick peak, then the novel ends. The afterword explains the genesis of the novel and talks about the lives of all of the Netanyahus.  

I read the novel in a few days. It is so much fun.

----------

By the way, the long title of the novel has an 18th Century length and feel:

The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family. (20 words) 

An actual title of an18th Century novel:  

Love And Madness. A Story Too True. In A Series Of Letters Between Parties Whose Names Would Perhaps Be Mentioned Were They Less Well Known Or Less Lamented. (27 words)

First seventeen books of 2022:

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

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

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. 

Christian Nationalism and the Church at the Flossenburg Concentration Camp

 

A Church built onto a guard tower at the Flossenburg Concentration Camp

When I visit concentration camps, along with learning about the horror, I pay attention to how the survivors, both victims and those who live nearby, deal with the evil happened in their midst.  

At Flossenburg, one response was to build a memorial chapel just two years after the end of the war in 1947. The stone building of the chapel is attached to a former guard tower.  The chapel honors the victims from 22 countries who were murdered in the camp.  Its design stands against every form of Christian Nationalism--the arrogant and hateful belief that God picks specific nations to be His representative here on earth.  

Christian Nationalism has been the justification for slaughter in the name of God since the Church melded with the government after the fall of the Roman Empire.  I recently read Karl Jaspers "Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus." Jaspers makes clear that Jesus pointed to the Kingdom of God and had no program for any kind of kingdom here on earth.  In the Gospels, there is nothing to support taking any kind of political power in the name of God.  A vegan butcher is less of a contradiction than conquest in the name of Jesus. 

The Beatitudes, or the Sermon on the Mount, one of the central documents of Christianity, says God is with the victims in this world.  "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth." That is not the marching orders for "Christian" army to slaughter its neighbors.

But Christian Nationalism has fully infected the Evangelical Church in America.  In 2016 nearly 80% of Evangelicals voted for the "America First" immigrant-hating candidate who expressed their beliefs.  The percentage went up in 2020.  Four years of lies and hate made the Christian Nationalist candidate more attractive. White supremacists like Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka just made fake Christians more excited.   

So in the midst of all the sadness of the remains of the Flossenburg concentration camp, I was glad to see a flat rejection of Christian Nationalism and all of the simmering hate behind it.  

No one can love the whole world. Abstract love is not love at all. The commandment of God to love our neighbor whether in the Hebrew Scriptures of the New Testament can only be brought into being by loving those with us and near us.  

The Holocaust, among its many horrors is a record of people who ignored, betrayed and murdered their Jewish neighbor.  From the Pyrenees to the Ural mountains, the Jew next door was beaten, robbed and dragged away in the night to be murdered. 

Every form of Christian Nationalism is wrong and hateful. Flag waving America First Evangelicals make the Jesus they claim to worship into a symbol of hate.  

Returning from Ukraine with Canadian Cyclists Going to Auschwitz

Ride for the Living, Auschwitz 

In June of 2017, I rode from Belgrade, Serbia, to Lviv, Ukraine. Along the way, I rode in Bosnia, Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia, The Czech Republic and Poland. I rode through beautiful country, up and down long hills and through the home country of my favorite pro cyclist Peter Sagan.

Peter Sagan, World Champion

After crossing into Poland, I rode to Auschwitz and spent a day there wandering through a place of terror I cannot fathom. I wrote about the visit here. 

After leaving Auschwitz, I was glad to be riding alone to think and to process what I saw. I had no problems until the border crossing into Ukraine from Poland. Usually at the borders, I rode past the long lines of cars and trucks waiting to cross and up to a checkpoint with a guard outside the booth. Once there, I point at the bike and ask where I should go. At most border crossings the guard sends me through the next open lane. They don’t get a lot of bikes.

Ukraine-Poland border crossing The Polish guards stopped me and sent me to the pedestrian line. It took more than three hours to get through the long line of people walking from Poland back home with all kinds of consumer electronics and other goods. When I left Lviv, I decided to take a train to the other side of the border rather than struggle with customs on foot pushing a bike. 

In the station I met a group of Canadian cyclists who were in Ukraine for the same reason I was: to visit Holocaust sites. They were on the way to the annual Ride for the Living at Auschwitz. They had done the 100 km ride before, but this was the first time they had visited Ukraine. I had ridden from Auschwitz a few days before. 

We talked about how the Lviv and Auschwitz were among the worst site of the Holocaust, but very different. About half the Jews murdered by the Nazis were already dead when Auschwitz went into full operation in 1942. Most had been murdered by shooting over pits as in Lviv and Kiev. German police were sent to conquered lands to murder Jews with rifles and pistols. In Auschwitz Jews were gassed and the burnt in ovens. 

Then we talked about bicycles, riding in Europe and even about motorcycles. One of the Canadian riders had ridden sport bikes in the 1980s. We both had ridden Honda 500 Interceptors and talked for half the train ride about our former bikes. The rest of the group left us alone.

Honda 500 Interceptor 

At the border station, the Canadians stayed on the train and continued to Krakow. I left the train and started riding. The customs check on the train took an hour, but it was a comfortable hour in a train seat instead of in a pedestrian line. I was happy.

My New Breakfast Club--Jewish Draft-Era Veterans

In November of last year, I started going to the Wednesday morning Minyan prayer group at a synagogue in Lancaster City--Congregation Shaarai Shomayim. After Minyan, several of the men in the group meet at a local restaurant north of the city, Olde Hickory Grille. I joined them.

The month before, I met with the Rabbi of the Synagogue, Jack Paskoff. In the wake of the White Supremacist and Nazi rally that ended in murder, I feared anti-Semitism getting worse, especially after the President said these racists were "fine people."

One friend said, "You should see a Rabbi."

Another said, "You should see my Rabbi."

I met with Rabbi Paskoff. He invited me to come to services and hoped it would help me find peace.

The next week I went to Friday evening Sabbath service. When I got up to leave a man named Rick walked up to me and introduced himself. He asked, "Are you a cop or a soldier?" I said soldier. He was both. A retired police officer and a retired Army Command Sergeant's Major. His wife Kathy is also former military, serving as a Medic in the 80s and 90s.

Rick invited me to Minyan the following Wednesday.  At the breakfast, Rick introduced me to the other four men at the table. During breakfast, I realized that four of us served during the draft.  Rick was too young for the draft but was a Gulf War veteran and had served in many conflicts from the early 80s to the Iraq War.  The only guy who did not serve was in ROTC after the draft and decided he did not want to complete the program. Five of the six of us are veterans. I did not expect that.

The oldest veteran, Herb, had served before the Vietnam War as a cook, roughly the same time that Elvis Pressley was in the Army.  The other two were reservists who served during the Vietnam War, but were not sent to the war.

Over the last several months of going to the breakfast every other week or so, I have met a few more veterans who are members of the congregation.

I did not go to the prayer group expecting to find a veteran's group.  All of my work experience after the Vietnam War said that middle class men from the northeast did not serve.  I met one veteran in fifty in the white collar jobs I held from the mid-80s to my retirement three years ago.

Each of the men in the Breakfast Club told a funny story about how strange the Army was for them and how glad they were to be discharged.  Which is how most people feel about the Army. Rick and I are the only members of the group who ever wear an Army t-shirt.

This week three of the veterans--Rick, David and Harvey--were at one end of the table talking intensely about congregational business. Jim and I at the other end of the table talked about documentaries and podcasts. Jim said he was nearly out of memory on his phone.  I showed him how to free up some storage on his 5-year-old iPhone so he would have room for podcasts.

At this weekly breakfast, I almost felt as if I entered a time machine.  I was sitting with a group who meets every week because they have faith in common and they are nearly all veterans.  My Dad's generation had that experience. If a dozen men got together to go bowling or to coach football, the majority would be veterans. And like the men who served during World War II, we seldom talk about the Army, except to make jokes.

The German Evangelical Church Backed the Nazis in 1932 Then Turned on Their Jewish Members

In Charlottesville in 2017 Nazi flags and Rebel flags

flew together. Jim Crow laws in the American South 

inspired the German race laws that led to the Holocaust.

In 2016, the Evangelical Church in America voted overwhelmingly for a President who is openly racist and has bragged about breaking all the Commandments.  Depending on how you count Evangelicals they are one quarter of the U.S. population. The same people who, less than 50 years ago, did not smoke, drink, dance or watch movies and called on their followers to separate themselves from the world, now grasp for money and power as ruthlessly as the worst Medieval Popes and Cardinals. 

By backing Trump, the Evangelical Church in America abandoned faith for political power. The Evangelical Church in Germany did the same thing in the 1930s.

In 1932 Germany’s state church—the German Evangelical Church—was by far the largest Church in Germany with 40 million members. Another 22 million Germans were Catholic. Jews numbered fewer than a million and about ten percent of them were converts who were members of German Churches. 

Throughout the 1920s, the Evangelical Church was increasingly influenced by German nationalist ideologies. German Evangelicals voted for the openly racist Hitler because they feared communism more than Hitler's rabid racism. Nazis stoked fears of communism and said Hitler would Make Germany Great Again.

With Hitler’s rise to power 1933, most Protestant clergy willingly accepted Hitler’s racist views. The Nazi regime issued the Edict of April 1933 called the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service.” Many Protestant clergy consequently agreed with the Nazi policy and chose to eject all pastors who had Jewish parents, grandparents or great-grandparents. The Church voluntarily “Aryanized” itself, immediately firing all pastors of Jewish descent in 1933; by 1935, all congregants of Jewish descent were expelled.

Nazis used Luther’s anti-Semitic writings “with scarcely a word of protest or contradiction" from the leaders of the Protestant Church.

Theologically and politically, the fates of Christians and Jews should have been bound together. But most Germans, including those within the church, put an even greater distance between themselves and the Jews. The Church turned its back on its own Jewish believers, which made it easy for Nazi leaders to segregate them, and then kill them.

Theresienstadt, a small city in the German-occupied part of the Czech Republic, was a Jewish ghetto and concentration camp during World War II.

One witness said:

From the end of 1941 to the beginning of 1945, more than 140,000 Jews were sent to this ghetto, which for many, about 88,000, became a transit camp to the death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. Approximately 33,000 died in this ghetto. When it was all over and the ghetto had been liberated on May 8, 1945, there were about 19,000 survivors.

Among those who died in Theresienstadt, or were deported from Theresienstadt to the death camp Auschwitz or survived the horrors in Theresienstadt, were individuals who were Christians of Jewish descent. It is tempting today to call them “Messianic Jews”, but this would not correspond with their self-perception. Like most other Jews in Germany they saw themselves as Germans; unlike most other German Jews they were Jews who had embraced the Christian faith, some by conviction, others for pragmatic reasons. But in Theresienstadt they shared the fate of “Mosaic” Jews. In the eyes of the Nazis, their Christian faith did not obliterate their Jewishness.

Theresienstadt is a window into what happened to Christians of Jewish descent during the Holocaust. It is estimated that as many as ten percent of the half million Jews in Nazi Germany were Christians. They suffered and died along with their fellow Jews. For Nazis, blood not belief defines a person, or a non-person.

The path Germany followed from civilized nation to Nazi domination went from prosperity, to defeat in war, to racism and slaughter.

In 1913, Germany was by many measures the most powerful and civilized nation on earth, the world leader in education and manufacturing. It was the country where Jews were most integrated into the life of the nation, many of whom considered themselves German citizens who were Jewish.

By 1923, Germany was defeated in war and crushed by the terms of peace.  Anti-Semitism was on the rise and Germany turned inward.  In 1933, Hitler was in power and German Jews would suffer increasing attacks.  By 1943 nearly all German Jews were dead or enslaved and soon would die.  Thirty years and an immoral leader completely changed the fate of Jews in Germany and every nation the German Army conquered.  

The Evangelical Church in Germany backed Hitler early and strongly, blessing his war machines and abandoning Jews in their own congregations and their Jewish neighbors to be tormented, deported and murdered.  The Church sold out for power.

Beginning in 2015, the Evangelical Church in America has backed the vilest human being ever to be elected President and backs him more enthusiastically than any other group of his followers.  I know many Evangelicals who say that naming conservative judges to the court and defunding Planned Parenthood prove he is a Pro-Life champion.  I could understand their position before Charlottesville, but after Trump called Nazis “fine people” there is no way to label him Pro-Life. Nazis, White Supremacists and all who support them are Pro-Death, Pro-Genocide but not Pro-Life, unless they mean Pro White Life.

Jerry Falwell Sr. was the first prominent sellout for political power. He created the Moral Majority to create voting bloc for all those who wanted the restoration of White Power. The Moral Majority was clearly the White Majority in America. Brown people, Liberals, Gay people and others who were not white conservatives were not true Americans.

When the Moral Majority dissolved in 1989, it spawned a dozen other organizations with Christian labels grasping for secular power. By 2016, Evangelical leaders flushed doctrine, covenants and commandments down a cosmic toilet and showered blessing on an entitled racist who despises everyone mentioned in the Beatitudes.

But this is not new territory for Evangelicals. Before the Civil War, Evangelical Churches in the America South blessed the especially vile form of slavery practiced in slave states. When the South was defeated, the same Churches supported Jim Crow laws creating American apartheid. Churches were just as segregated as voting booths, schools and drinking fountains.

Since World War II, American Evangelical leaders have blamed the reclusive biologist Charles Darwin for inspiring Nazi leaders with the theory of evolution. They assume Darwin is responsible for Social Darwinism, which is akin to believing Albert Einstein developed the philosophy of moral relativism.

Do I think Trump will turn on the 5 million American Jews? Maybe. But it’s more likely that a national crisis will let a worse racist than him grab power. Trump, unlike Hitler, is a coward and a bully who dodged the draft and attacks men who actually have courage.  He is more sleazy than Nazi.

But I am quite sure the Evangelical Church will corrode further and faster as it receives power and privilege from its new god in the Oval Office. Its millionaire preachers will abandon all traditional faith for its orange-ish golden calf.