An Open Letter to the Jews of South Florida

For Itz Brownstein,
to talk about at dinner (at 4 pm)

To begin with, I won't even pretend that I can appreciate, at an emotional, intellectual or visceral level, what you as a people have been through. Name another people and its genocidal treatment - Armenians, Rwandans, Bosnians, Native Americans - and what you will find is that they were once subjected to an awful pogrom which resonates through history, but that it was a singular experience, the product of specific historical circumstances. Not so the Jews. No, anti-semitism occupies a special place in human history, a blood libel and an institutionalized bigotry drawing its strength and endurance from religious sources, powered by hatred which never completely loses its potency. There are some, like David Irving or Ahmadinejad, whose hatred of the Jews is so complete, so consuming, that they even seek to deny you the dignity of remembering the truth about what happened in the Shoah.

Anti-Semitism is vile, diseased, a sickness which has served as the motive force behind the greatest crimes in history. The Inquisition, the wholesale pogroms and displacement in Russia and so many other places, and the most odious of all offenses against decency and humanity, the Holocaust. And beneath the skin of your supposed historical friends lies many an anti-Semite. Winston Churchill, who even after Kristallnacht in 1938 praised Hitler as a "great man." Charles Lindbergh, who was house hunting in Berlin even after the deportations began, who consulted with the Luftwaffe on their use of planes gladly sold to them by American aircraft companies. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who as a young lawyer in New York proposed a system for reducing the numbers of Jews at Harvard, finding their representation there "excessive." Gandhi, who worked against the establishment of a homeland for Jews except in Tanganyika - there was a brilliant idea from the Mahatma - why not a refuge for the Jews in a former German colony? Churchill and Roosevelt again, who blocked the escape of the Jews from Germany at every turn, refusing to expand immigration quotas even as your parents and grandparents were rounded up and sent to death camps.

So you learned to trust yourselves and only yourselves. You could do without the "help" of such false friends. Jews built a country of their own in Israel. They built a mighty nuclear arsenal, probably the second most powerful in the world with the additional advantage that it probably works. The American nuclear arsenal is run by the same people who managed FEMA's response to Katrina. As your ancestors did, you entered the learned professions in numbers vastly disproportionate to your representation in society, the kind of thing that bothered FDR so much. Yet it was a survival mechanism; corporations, clubs, neighborhoods all could be restricted. You needed a direct means of making a living which did not depend on the solicitude or occasional enlightenment of Gentiles.

You learned to think for yourselves as well. You are not easily persuaded by the reassurances of the goy; you've been down that road too many times, and it has led to tragedy. Even Albert Einstein, still in Germany in 1933, wanted to believe that Nazism was not as bad as it appeared to be. It was exuberance, he said, as the German people shook off the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty. They don't mean it.

Never again. If Albert Einstein could make such a mistake...So now here comes this smooth talking guy with the Muslim middle name running for President, and he sat in a church in Chicago for twenty years, and one of the things that this pastor whom he admired so much did was to confer a lifetime achievement award on the anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan. When I lay it out like that, it's pretty heavy. That doesn't look too good at all. It's small surprise that Barack Obama stopped just short of dancing the hora when he visited with AIPAC not long ago. And that prayer he slipped into the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem? I think I know what it said: "Fellas, please - hak mir nisht ken tshaynik with this Reverend Jeremiah shtick."

Here's my sense, from a guy who has searched his own soul for traces of anti-Semitism and has never been able to find anything worse than occasional envy at the professional excellence of some of his legal colleagues: I don't think Barack Obama is an anti-Semite. I just don't think he rolls that way. I think he's spent some time around anti-Semites. So have I. Know how I know I have? I'm not a hermit. So all I ask, as an American who's very concerned about the possibility of an unsuitable, quite possibly unstable candidate like John McCain winning this thing and leading America to ruin, is just give to Barack Obama what you have always asked of the world, but have not always gotten: a fair chance. That's all. If you vote against him, make sure it's for a reason you've thoroughly examined, and that you're convinced your decision against him is not based on the kind of prejudice which you, as a people, have always abhorred. I'm not talking about prejudice against blacks, because Yahweh knows the American Jews, as Barack acknowledged in talking so movingly about the deaths of the Jewish Mississippi Civil Rights workers, have done more for civil liberties than all other American nationalities combined. Even today it is Jewish legal leadership which champions the rights of Muslims detained unfairly at Guantanamo, who represented them, and won, in the historic habeas corpus case just decided. No one can fairly question your commitment to ethics and equal justice. So I draw on that and ask you to exemplify, once again, that spirit of fairness in November. Delve deep, in that peerless intellectual tradition which has always been your hallmark. And then decide. For we're all in this together.