Cowardice

 

 

There are only about 15 million Jews in the world, compared with roughly 2.4 billion Christians and nearly 2 billion Muslims. Yet even in South Florida, where Jews are far more visible than in most places, we are still a minority. Miami‑Dade has about 130,000 Jews—around 5% of the population—living alongside a far larger Christian majority and a smaller but growing Muslim community; Broward has roughly 150,000–186,000 Jews, perhaps 10–15% of its residents, again dwarfed by Christians and sharing minority space with Muslims. But we are not treated as a minority. People who dislike us say we control all the money, the politicians, the banks, the media; we make wars happen to perpetuate our hegemony; we commit genocide.

In Germany with the rise of the Nazis, these myths to demonize our people. We poisoned the blood of the German volk, took advantage of the hard work of Aryan Germans and used the blood of German children to bake Passover matzos. The Catholic Church perpetuated the larger blood libel that the Jews killed Christ and signed a Reichskonkordat agreeing to early legitimacy of the Third Reich, neutralizing Catholic political opposition to Hitler, decimating political resistance to Jew hatred. Bottom line: as long as the Church was left alone Nazis could persecute Jews. This perfidious cowardice did not cause the later exterminationist enterprise, but it did grease the wheels to the greatest crime in recorded history—the Holocaust.

Here in Miami and Broward, Jews share sidewalks and supermarkets and waiting rooms with Haitians, Cubans, Colombians, Brazilians, Venezuelans, and African Americans, all of us speaking different languages but equally expendable when the powerful need a convenient scapegoat. The bitter joke is that in South Florida, minorities are the majority, but we are carefully taught to fear each other instead of noticing that we are all standing in the same line of fire.

The US Congress is a paradigm of cowardice. Senators and Congressmen, afraid to be “primaried,” have knuckled under to the fearmongering of Donald Trump’s call that diversity is “poisoning” the blood of America. He conducts a campaign to gaslight the public into thinking that foreigners and immigrants are the source of our problems. He has banned all immigrants from “shithole” countries (brown or black). Of course, there are some criminals who should be deported and have been denied admission through proper vetting. And it is correct to seal the border, so immigrants come in legally after vetting. But sledgehammering the problem solves nothing.

South Florida is a petri dish for this experiment in fear. A state government hundreds of miles away in Tallahassee passes anti‑immigrant measures that fall most heavily on Miami‑Dade and Broward, where immigrants clean our hotel rooms, cook our food, drive our Ubers, and care for our parents. They talk about “illegals” as abstractions. We meet them handing us towels on Collins Avenue and checking our blood pressure in the ER. The same cowardice that once looked away from antisemitism in Europe now looks away from cruelty here at home, as long as the tourists keep coming and the cranes keep building.

Undergirding the philosophy of people not trusting strangers are the reptilian fears of evolutionary biology. These fears must be moderated by laws and norms that have evolved through value systems both religious and secular. When those laws and norms become subject to attack those of us who care must stand up to the threat. People in positions of leadership must bear the burden of stepping up to tell the truth. Those who do not will not be treated kindly by history.

During the 1950s, the McCarthy era, Americans were paralyzed by fear of losing their jobs by being branded a Communist by a power‑hungry senator, until a courageous Edward R. Murrow exposed him as a fraud. These days, Morrows are hard to find. Social media has replaced CBS News as the national arbiter of responsible journalism. That is no arbiter at all.

The person who tackled the shooter in Australia and later suffered two bullets was courageous. These supposed leaders who are more fearful of losing their jobs speak strongly for term limits for Congress and the abolition of dark money in politics. The Supreme Court is about to consider a case that might extend this license for corruption on the faux argument of free speech.

Those who argue that they like what Trump is doing but acknowledge his depravity, greed and self‑dealing are complicit. Cutting health care benefits to the poor is the hallmark of a degraded society. A society that surrenders its decency to prejudice and scapegoating. Rationalizations of fiscal concern ring hollow when the oligarchy rules the land, creating billionaires floating on superyachts while the poor go hungry, get sick and cannot afford health care. The preposterous idea proposed by the Trump regime and its congressional acolytes saying that giving $2,500 to individuals instead of “giving it to insurance companies” to pay their health care bills in lieu of insurance is insulting.

You cannot fool all of the people all of the time. But history shows you can fool enough of them, long enough, if cowardice prevails. The question—for Jews, for immigrants, for every minority in South Florida and beyond—is whether we will once again stand quietly in line while someone else decides whose blood is worth poisoning.