Jews will not replace us!”
That was the repeated chant of neo-Nazis and KKK marchers in Charlottesville.
What were they talking about? And how did the “many fine people” (so characterized by President Trump) feel about any perceived association with those hate mongers?
President Trump (with severely limited knowledge of American history) said, “We all live under the same flag.”
Our keen social critic, Steven Colbert, highlighted what should have been evident to anyone with eyes, and anyone who wants to be true to “facts.”
Colbert reminded Trump that the anti-fascists were carrying American flags while the neo-Nazis and KKK were carrying Confederate and Nazi flags.
Where does patriotism reside?
But, what about the Jews?
At a North Shore “Current Events in Perspective” library program this week, I asked a diverse group of folks how they interpreted the blatant anti-Semitism.
Do you wonder how many of those Nazis and KKK folks ever met a Jew, one woman asked?
The smart folks at the library discussions, people of all backgrounds, clearly understood that Jews have been scapegoated and brutalized for centuries, especially by people who never met or associated with them.
Part of that, as one library commentator noted, was because of “Christian terrorism.”
People like Peter Stuyvesant, an early governor, situated in Manhattan, depicted Jews as “the very slayers of Christ.”
He sought to deport the small number of Jews who had arrived in Manhattan, and to bar any others from coming (an early religious test for immigration).
A best-selling book from decades ago, “I’m OK; You’re OK,” captures ongoing prejudice, hostilities, and discrimination.
Actually, the title, itself, affirms the kind of society we aspire to be.
The problem is that too many people notice differences and conclude that folks who are unlike them are “not OK.”
Gunnar Myrdal, a hero for Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote in the 1940s that prejudice begins most quickly with visual perception — hence noticing color differences.
He astutely indicated that sexism also is based on a visual (later commentators added ageism — at both ends of the life cycle, one can see who is young or old).
Ethnicity, religion, and nationality are not so quickly discernible.
Yet, Irving Howe in World of Our Fathers (along with many other immigration scholars) noted that newcomers often felt impelled to seek cosmetic surgery to look more like the dominant cultural group.
In the United States and elsewhere the power of stereotypes often drove attitudes and conduct before “the Others” were ever encountered (a parallel example is that some of the most virulent anti-Catholicism came from rural areas of America where people had never met a Catholic).
As Jews arrived in larger numbers (with more religious differences, along with clothing and appearance that set them apart), and as they clustered in just a few areas of the coastal U.S. (especially New York), the scapegoating and demonizing usually arose when there were economic and other strains in the larger society (such as Trump highlighted to rural whites who had economic and identity anxieties).
Then, blame the Jews — distort them as international bankers profiting from war; predominantly as radicals who came here but sought to overthrow democracy and capitalism; as people taking over the media and entertainment, and, in so doing, undermining traditional American values.
Some of the worst bigotry in U.S. history occurred in the 1920s with striking parallels with hate groups today: calls for severe immigration restrictions, revival and expansion of the KKK (including in the North and on Long Island), and rabid, isolationist, nationalism.
It is no accident that Alfred Kazin entitled one of his books “New York Jew.”
The antipathy by many rural folks toward cities linked Jews to all their urban negativity.
In the July 31 New Yorker, a son described the letter of recommendation a Professor at University of Virginia had sent for his father’s application to Yale Law School. He wrote, “Gerald is a Jew, but he is not one of these New York Jews. He is from Virginia. And that makes all the difference.”
Henry Ford, during the 1920s, used his wealth and media to counter cities and Jews.
An editorial he wrote in his Dearborn Independent speaks volumes with its implied anti-Semitism: “When we all stand up and sing, ‘My Country ‘Tis of Thee,’ we seldom think of the cities. Indeed, in that old national hymn there are no references to the city at all. It sings of rocks and rivers and hills — the great American Out-of-Doors. And that is really THE Country. The real United States lies outside the cities.”
As the Jewish passion for learning was early manifested in New York City, anti-Semites mockingly said that CCNY has come to signify “City College, Now Yiddish.”
Little did they anticipate that CCNY would become the proletariat Harvard, producing more Nobel Prize winners than the first American college.
Indeed, CCNY’s most prominent graduates were Jews.
