Why we have not won the Iran War

The last few weeks have been positively insane.

The off-again, on-again war in Iran has been spectacularly mismanaged. The President of the United States is conducting a war like a befuddled hamster trying to escape from a maze. He goes around and around with no possibility of freeing himself.

Trump needs to send in troops to take Kharg Island and dominate the land around the Strait of Hormuz. Cut off all Iranian revenue. He also needs to bomb Iranian infrastructure: bridges, train stations, airfields, roads, and water treatment plants. This is a war against an implacable enemy fueled by fundamentalist, fanatical, revolutionary religious fervor, seeking to become the hegemonic power in the Middle East, dominate the Sunni Muslim world, and destroy the Abraham Accords and any reconciliation between Arabs and Jews. Surely this theological Frankenstein cannot be allowed to acquire a nuclear capability that shields its aggression. And just as surely, the President needs to step up to the plate. We have been at war with Iran for forty-seven years. We need to end it on our terms.

Unfortunately, Trump is more concerned with maintaining power in Congress so that he is not impeached for corruption, prosecuted after leaving office, and possibly sent to prison. The big house instead of the White House. (I did not make that up.) It has been argued that this was the reason he ran for a second term.  His prime-time crazed rant, absent of evidence, this time may finally wake up some of his cultish followers to his bat shit crazy 2020 election loss obsessions.  Because Trump can never lose?  Right?  J.D?  What do you say?

Shortly after Putin's war began, I said that the Europeans needed to mobilize and prepare to fight the Russians. They, too, are acting fearfully. That will get them nowhere. They need to send troops into Ukraine and kick Putin out. Issue an ultimatum. Conscript an army. With the aid of the Ukrainians, Putin could be evicted in short order. Dictator-bullies respond to force. History has taught us that lesson very well. I will not bore you with examples; just trust me. Putin has stated his raison d'être—the restoration of the Soviet Union, the collapse of which he considers the greatest tragedy of his life.

But Putin knows he cannot use nuclear weapons. Finally, the Germans are rearming (isn't that a frightening thought?), but they have the wherewithal to defeat the Russians, especially with their French and British allies. They must not wait for the mercurial Trump to leave them twisting in the wind if they do not meet his transactional agenda. (We know he is a crude, money-grubbing, gilded parvenu.) Trump, however, was right to make the Europeans spend more instead of freeloading on American largesse. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. The perfect cannot be the enemy of the good. Yada, yada, yada. Sometimes clichés and memes work well. Originality in all things is not possible. It may not be possible at all. There's nothing new under the sun. Okay. I talk too much.

These days, immediacy has become the public's default expectation. There is less patience for results to emerge over time. Social media, television news, and diminished attention spans all push us toward instant conclusions. People can no longer concentrate on a book. They prefer doomscrolling on X, Facebook, or Instagram, where snippets of information appear by the minute. I do, too. But I am old and have read many books.

If one looks back to World War II, which for America lasted four years, battlefield losses did not provoke roundtable discussions on CNN. People waited for the next day's newspaper to report the news. They then went back to their lives, clipped ration coupons, and hoped for better news tomorrow. Columnists wrote weekly columns that allowed people time to think about what they had read and form their own opinions. They did not simply tune in to their favorite network to confirm what they already believed.

I do not know whether that was better, but it left more room for thought. Yet here I am sounding off and expecting people to agree with me. Or not. Well, mostly agree.

The Founders Return

"Well, Doctor, what have we got—a republic or a monarchy?"
"A republic, if you can keep it."
— Benjamin Franklin, September 17, 1787

Morning

Dawn breaks over Washington on July 4, 2026. The city is unusually quiet. The first light catches the Capitol dome, the Washington Monument and, beyond them, the Lincoln Memorial. Three familiar figures emerge from the morning mist. They stop without speaking.

For several moments they simply look.

Jefferson: It has changed.

Hamilton: Everything changes.

Jefferson: Not first principles.

(He looks toward the Capitol.)

Some things endure.

Madison: If they did not, we should not be standing here.

(A long silence.)

Hamilton: Two hundred and fifty years.

I confess, gentlemen, I doubted our experiment would endure so long.

Jefferson: I never doubted the people.

Hamilton: No. You doubted governments.

Jefferson: With reason.

Madison: Which is why we required both.

(Jefferson smiles.)

Jefferson: We entrusted our future to scarcely four million souls.

Now there are hundreds of millions.

Hamilton: We stitched together thirteen uncertain states.

They united a continent.

Their commerce circles the globe.

Their influence reaches every shore.

I confess, dear sirs, even my ambition did not extend so far.

Jefferson: Nor mine.

History has exceeded even our fondest hopes.

Madison: As it should.

The purpose of one generation is not to prescribe the future, but to preserve its freedom.

(Church bells begin to ring in the distance.)

Jefferson: Listen.

Hamilton: Bells.

Jefferson: No.

Freedom.

Many languages.

Many peoples.

Many faiths.

One Republic.

When I wrote that all men are created equal, I understood those words less fully than those who came after us.

History has enlarged them beyond their author.

Hamilton: There speaks wisdom.

History has corrected me more than once.

Madison: It has corrected us all.

The Constitution

Morning awakens the city.

Hamilton: Tell me, James.

Has the Constitution succeeded?

Madison: Better than its authors deserved.

Jefferson: Better than its enemies expected.

Hamilton: Better than its guardians?

Madison: It has survived civil war...

economic panic...

world wars...

assassinations...

prosperity...

depression...

and every variety of ambition.

No Constitution preserves liberty by itself.

Only a people can do that.

Jefferson: Franklin understood.

Hamilton: "If you can keep it."

Madison: Exactly.

The Constitution was never intended to govern in place of character.

It presumes restraint where the law is silent.

Hamilton: A commodity forever in short supply.

Jefferson: Especially in politics.

(They exchange knowing smiles.)

The Argument

They begin walking toward the Capitol.

Hamilton: What troubles you most?

Jefferson: Not disagreement.

We disagreed on almost everything.

Hamilton: With considerable energy.

Jefferson: Sometimes more energy than wisdom.

Madison: Disagreement is the price of liberty.

Contempt is its enemy.

Hamilton: Explain.

Madison: We imagined no perfect government because we knew there would never be perfect men.

The Constitution was not written to guarantee wisdom.

It was written to restrain folly.

Every generation discovers new ways to test it.

Every generation is tempted to believe its own necessities justify ignoring it.

If the Constitution has survived, it is because enough Americans have remembered that no victory is worth preserving if liberty is lost in winning it.

Jefferson: Every administration discovers reasons to enlarge its authority.

Hamilton: Every opposition discovers an affection for constitutional restraint.

Jefferson: Human nature has been remarkably consistent.

Madison: It was the only constant upon which we dared rely.

Lincoln

The three men stop before the seated figure of Lincoln.

None speaks.

At length...

Jefferson: Who is he?

Madison: Abraham Lincoln.

Hamilton: The Union was threatened.

Madison: It nearly died.

Jefferson: And slavery?

Madison: It nearly destroyed everything we built.

(Hamilton removes his hat.)

Jefferson: Then our greatest contradiction became their greatest trial.

Hamilton: And their greatest triumph.

Madison: They preserved both the Union and the Constitution.

That was no small achievement.

Jefferson: Then perhaps constitutions are not defended by lawyers after all.

Hamilton: No.

By citizens.

The Republic

Night settles over the National Mall. Fireworks illuminate the sky. Families gather. Children laugh. The Founders watch quietly.

Hamilton: Tell me honestly.

Knowing all that has followed...

would either of you begin again?

Jefferson: Without hesitation.

Liberty has never been safe.

That is no argument against it.

Hamilton: James?

Madison: I would alter very little.

We did not write for angels.

We wrote for men.

Jefferson: Then we understood human nature.

Madison: We understood enough.

(The fireworks intensify.)

Hamilton: What have we learned in two hundred and fifty years?

Jefferson: That liberty is harder than revolution.

Hamilton: That governing is harder than winning office.

Madison: That preserving a republic is harder than creating one.

(A long silence.)

Jefferson: Alexander...

Were we successful?

Hamilton: Not entirely.

Jefferson: James?

Madison: No generation ever is.

Each inherits the Republic.

Each enlarges it...

or diminishes it...

before placing it in the hands of those yet unborn.

That is the covenant of self-government.

(The bells begin to ring.)

Jefferson: They are still arguing.

Hamilton: Good.

Jefferson: Good?

Hamilton: Better argument than obedience.

Madison: Better still if argument leads to understanding.

(The three men turn toward the sound of a familiar voice.)

Jefferson: Benjamin is calling us.

Hamilton: Shall we go?

Madison: Our work was never to finish the Republic.

It was to leave it in their hands.

(The three walk slowly into the morning light.)

Only one voice remains.

Franklin: "A republic, if you can keep it."

Public Sentiment and the Iranian Threat

Franklin Roosevelt was always a politically astute observer of the American public. That understanding was one of the foundations of his success as a leader and one of the reasons he was elected four times. He understood well what Abraham Lincoln meant when he wrote that "Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions."

Moving America from isolationism to a war footing was a herculean task. Mobilization required more than factories and ships. It required shaping public will. Roosevelt accomplished it incrementally through a long campaign of persuasion: a fireside chat here, a warning there, a patient explanation of gathering dangers abroad. He spoke to Americans with intimacy and confidence. There was little braggadocio, little exaggeration, and no obvious effort at self-glorification. Most importantly, the public generally believed he was telling the truth.

Events in Europe certainly helped his case. Britain was being blitzed nightly. France had fallen. Much of Eastern Europe already lay in ruins beneath the Nazi boot. The threat was becoming harder to ignore.

Yet Americans remained deeply reluctant. Barely twenty years earlier they had endured the slaughter of the First World War. The mud of the trenches, the bloodshed, and the Spanish influenza pandemic remained vivid memories. The prevailing sentiment was simple: no more foreign wars.

Roosevelt therefore moved step by step. Rearmament. Cash-and-carry. The first peacetime draft in American history. The destroyers-for-bases agreement. Lend-Lease, which he famously compared to lending a neighbor a garden hose to extinguish a fire without demanding payment in advance. Each measure would have been politically impossible had he attempted it all at once.

The present administration has done none of this with respect to Iran. It has not undertaken a sustained effort to explain the Iranian threat to the American people. It has not sought congressional support. It has not articulated a coherent strategic vision. As a result, many Americans believe the United States is merely being dragged into another Middle Eastern conflict on behalf of Israel rather than confronting a threat that affects Western interests more broadly.

Iran's rulers seek regional dominance. They aspire to exercise influence or control through proxies and client forces stretching from Lebanon and Syria to Yemen and beyond. They seek a nuclear umbrella beneath which that influence could expand further. They have repeatedly threatened Israel, challenged freedom of navigation in the Persian Gulf, and used disruption of maritime commerce as leverage against the world economy.

The economic implications are not abstract. A closure or serious disruption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has reverberated through global energy markets and affected consumers far removed from the Middle East. The resulting instability has not stopped at the region's borders.

Nor is the problem purely economic. The regime's ideology is fundamentally hostile to liberal democracy. As Douglas Murray has observed, it is animated by a revolutionary religious zeal that is difficult for secular Western societies to comprehend. When political leaders repeatedly proclaim their intentions, prudence suggests we should take them seriously.

Iran must not acquire a nuclear weapon. On that point there appears to be broad agreement across much of the American political spectrum. President Trump likely understands this. Yet understanding a danger and persuading a nation to confront it are two different things.

Roosevelt understood that the cost of confronting a threat early is often less than the cost of confronting it later. He recognized that free citizens had to be persuaded that a distant threat would eventually become their own. A Nazi-dominated Europe, he believed, would ultimately threaten American security and prosperity.

Iran is not Nazi Germany. Historical analogies always break down if pressed too far. Yet Roosevelt never had to contemplate a Nazi regime on the threshold of acquiring nuclear weapons. But the lesson Roosevelt taught was not about Germany. It was about leadership. Democracies do not automatically mobilize in response to distant dangers. Their leaders must explain, persuade, educate, and prepare.

Despite placing himself rhetorically alongside Lincoln, President Trump has yet to demonstrate Roosevelt's understanding of broad public sentiment. Leadership requires more than declarations, slogans, or social-media posts. It requires building a durable public consensus behind difficult decisions.

Whether this president possesses that capacity remains an open question. The stakes are high enough that Americans deserve a clear answer.

Az Me Darf a Gonef

My father was a hotelman. He often relied on unreliable employees who either did not show up for work, got drunk, or were dishonest. He would stand by the window watching employees sneak off the premises with towels or food from the kitchen hidden in laundry baskets. The aggravation never ended, yet he needed them to run the hotel.

One day, in youthful innocence, I asked him, “Dad, why don’t you just fire the ones that are dishonest or don’t show up?”

He looked back at me wistfully and said, “Duvid, Az me darf a ganef, nemt men im fun der tlie.”

“If one needs a thief, one takes him from the gallows.”

These marginal employees often lasted only until payday, when they inevitably got drunk or disappeared, leaving the kitchen and dining room short staffed. Dad would find himself back in the kitchen cooking, washing dishes, and mopping floors. The philosophy that sounded so practical in the moment simply kicked the proverbial can down the road. It solved nothing permanently, but it functioned long enough to get through the rush season.

America made a similar Faustian bargain with Donald Trump.

Many Americans believed he would cure the ills he railed against: inflation, unemployment, foreign wars, uncontrolled immigration, jobs lost to globalization, and institutions they believed had abandoned or humiliated them. Some were hanging on economically while working two jobs. Others watched manufacturing towns collapse after decades of trade deals that exported jobs to countries with cheap labor. Many believed cultural elites looked down on them as backward, disposable, or irrelevant.

Trump understood that anger better than his opponents did.

To his supporters, he was not merely a politician. He was a battering ram. A man willing to fight institutions they believed no longer represented them. They overlooked the vulgarity, the dishonesty, the chaos, because they believed only someone outside the accepted rules could break a system they thought was already corrupted against them.

In their minds, they were cutting the thief down from the gallows because they needed him.

And, in fairness, some of the administration’s policies did address real concerns. Illegal immigration was reduced. NATO allies were pressured to spend more on defense. Iranian proxies were weakened. The administration projected strength in ways many Americans found reassuring after years of drift and uncertainty.

But the bargain carried costs that grow more visible by the day.

We have watched a kaleidoscope of ethical evasions, loyalty tests, self dealing, and assaults on institutional norms. A President increasingly treating the machinery of government as personal property. An Attorney General viewed by critics less as guardian of the Constitution than as personal counsel to the man who appointed him. The line between public duty and private protection has become dangerously blurred.

Yet if one opposes this administration only with outrage and moral superiority, one learns nothing.

Economic dislocation is real. Cultural humiliation is real. The anger of people who believed themselves abandoned by political, financial, and media elites is real. A democracy that ignores those realities creates conditions in which citizens become willing to make dangerous bargains.

That may be the enduring lesson of Faust.

Faust thought the devil would bail him out of a universe of despair. Americans, too, sought a solution for profound dissatisfaction — revenge against scornful elites, relief from insecurity, humiliation, economic fear, and the feeling that the people running the country neither understood nor respected them anymore.

But Goethe’s Faust obtained redemption not because he was innocent, but because he kept striving to be better. The damnation of eternal hell was avoided because Faust never stopped reaching beyond his own failures and illusions toward something higher than himself.

So, too, must we strive to blow past this dark chapter of our times.

Not merely by condemning one man, however deserving of condemnation he may be, but by understanding how millions of Americans came to believe that cutting the thief down from the gallows was their only remaining choice.

Are things as bad as they seem?

May 2026.  Observations

People are thinking that Trump has lost his way. But that does not seem possible, because he never found it in the first place. For someone with his keen political instincts, it strikes me as not unusual that he has no moral compass, because voters either do not care or care only about themselves. This has been true many times throughout our history, but moral leadership, or at least a modicum of it, has existed to some extent among the elites.

If it is true that leaders do not possess some element of decency and respect for their countrymen, then we are doomed to fail. It almost seems that we are on the cusp of that, if one looks around. But maybe not. Even a crook makes some correct decisions. After all, Nixon went to China. Trump may solve part of the Middle East problem while he screws everything else up domestically.

American history teaches us that there have been moral lapses before: presidents who presided over the killing of Native Americans, who were segregationists, who were racists, who were slaveowners, who catered to robber barons. There were titans who built the railroads, cornered the oil markets, burned down their competitors, shot strikers — but often these lapses were followed by reform movements. Hopefully that will happen again after this dark chapter of corruption returns permanently to Mar-a-Lago or to Leavenworth. I believe the American voter will wake up from this nightmare.

Jill Lepore, the Harvard historian, has just written a new book, We the People, the premise of which is that the Constitution needs to be amended from time to time, and that the difficulty of amending it has thrown a monkey wrench into not only the efficiency, but more importantly, the fairness by which we govern ourselves.

A number of things must be done — the discarding of the Electoral College, and the direct election of the President of the United States. One person, one vote. One methodology would be awarding each state’s electoral votes to the national popular vote winner, thereby avoiding the necessity of a national recount if there is controversy.

Next, proportioning the Senate more in line with population without abolishing the influence of each state — perhaps by adding senators in tiers and capping representation at six per state, so that the Senate does not simply become another House. Or alternatively, leaving the Senate alone but increasing the size of the House to create more equal representation. And stop gerrymandering through national legislation.  Moreover, institutions and lawmakers are not keeping up with vast technological change and upheaval.

Unfortunately, the conservative elements of society have vested interests in keeping things the way they are, even if that includes massive wealth inequality, raging corporate profits, and increasingly desperate economic conditions for the working class, soon to be run off the road by robots, literally and figuratively.

60 Minutes ran a piece this past Sunday night about immigrant truck drivers being disqualified from renewing their licenses. The piece made no mention of the fact that soon there may not be any truck drivers at all. Those 18-wheelers scaring the shit out of us, barreling down the middle of the expressway, will be piloted by more cautious robots, perhaps relegated to the extreme right lane as in Europe. No time pressure. No need to get to the next rest stop to sleep.

Americans are getting a rapid dose of the future, but lawmakers are struggling to keep up with it. The idea that a Terminator may someday come after us is frightening, but somehow we forget the past. There were frightening times then also: wars, famines, the Great Depression, the Spanish flu killing millions, the Cold War.

Surely we can survive a few years of an unscrupulous, narcissistic, self-enriching president who might occasionally make a correct call here and there. Even Chauncey Gardner got the flowers to bloom.

Why we do not know the end of the War story.

 

 

So, here’s the deal.  The Trump administration thinks that it can change the government in Iran by bombing the shit out of them.  

 

President Trump thinks that airpower has changed the equation that internal political forces can be changed from the air.  Historical precedent basically says otherwise, but we do not know if the assumption is still correct because warfare has changed with the use of precision guided bombs, accurate intelligence as to the conditions on the ground.  We also don’t know if the CIA and the Mossad are organizing opposition on the ground or what political forces are being internally deployed yet.

 

We have never really seen an entire class of political leadership eliminated on the first day of an air war.  David Petraeus said that it was a remarkable accomplishment.  It probably was.  But as they say in the stock market, since past performance is no guarantee of future success, we do not know if this success story will continue.  It’s a huge gamble.

 

What I do not understand is the need for US government officials to make up reasons that will play out better for optics than the truth.   The American objective is to alter the threat of Iranian hegemony and a world order threatening Islamist revolution.   The idea that women must cover their heads, that there be a morality police, that civil rights are absent is unacceptable to us.  This is not within our control, though.  It must become unacceptable to the Iranian popple, whose track record of Jeffersonian principles is the same as Russians.  They lived under a Czar, or a Shah or a Communist dictator for hundreds or thousands of years.   Can we change those cultures?  Will they ever change?  The Czar was murdered, the Soviet Union collapsed, the Shah was ousted and we got Putin and Khamenei. One a murderous kleptocrat, the other a religious theocrat.  Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

 

Yes, the idea that Iran was moving toward nuclear weapons by amassing a huge conventional shield of missiles and armaments to protect its malign project is true.  But an increased inspection program could arguably have succeeded in delaying it for a few years. But kicking the can down the road was not an acceptable alternative for Trump or Netanyahu.   Most Israelis favor Trump, despite the love-hate relationship of American Jews who lean left.

 

The argument that a nuclear armed foe that has been at war with the US and Israel for 47 years, exporting terrorism through its proxies, killing Americans throughout the Middle East, supporting the erasure of Israel,  spending billions in support of that goal dispels the argument that the US has entered a war of choice, a somewhat puzzling position for the Democrats to take.   The idea that because Trump did it transforms it into an evil deed.    Maybe so, but maybe not.  Hakeem Jeffries reduces his credibility by arguing that housing costs have gone up and poor people are starving because of this war.

 

The jury is out on whether this will be a misbegotten adventure or an astounding success in eliminating a source of religious zealotry that threatens the world order.  Oil us up today, the stock market is down, but here in Miami, the sun is shining and the threat to Dade County does not feel as imminent as the Cuban missile crisis did so many years ago.  We simply do not know at this early stage what will happen.  Predicting success or failure is not possible—yet.

Unafraid and afraid

Are we sure that the currents of history are changing because of a President whose ideas are an anachronistic resemblance of an America gone by? A nostalgic view of a white country that existed before the internet, before social media, before cellphones, before smartphones. A country where gays were swept under a carpet of denial—whose existence was not even acknowledged by polite society? A Miami where hotels blatantly denied admission to Jews, Blacks, and Latinos? White and colored restrooms? Segregated lunch counters?

Where gentlemen’s agreements among the WASP class excluded all those who did not conform to the standards of whiteness that were de rigueur in polite society? I had a friend who belonged to those clubs and rationalized the membership because she wanted to be with her friends. “Would you want to be in a club if the people were not your friends?” she would actually say that.

 

I grew up in Miami Beach. My parents moved here permanently in 1948, and I attended first grade here. I attended North Beach Elementary, where we had to pray to Jesus in the morning with a devotional conducted by the principal, Mrs. Mizner, even though many, if not most, of us were Jewish. We learned Christmas carols, and our housekeeper took us to Burdines on Flagler Street to see Santa Claus. My parents were not around, because they were working at their hotel day and night during the busy Christmas season. In the spring, we would pack up and head north, closing our house, placing acrid “DampRid” crystals to absorb the humidity in the house and keep the palmetto bugs at bay. We had one television, and I was the remote control. “David, change the channel,” Dad would say, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth in his wife-beater undershirt. We had no air conditioning until later, and Dad did not want to run the monstrosity because it was in a wall by the dining room and created a hurricane-force wind of freezing air. Plus, it was too expensive. “Dad, it’s really hot.” “Nah,” he would say, “take off your shirt and air your body.”

 

Dad would watch the CBS Evening News with Douglas Edwards and then Walter Cronkite. He hated Republicans and would never vote for one. “There are no good Republicans; they just want to keep everything for themselves.” When Joe McCarthy came to Miami and stayed at Dad’s hotel, Dad put his principles aside after suffering through the McCarthy hearings and hosted the Wisconsin cheesemakers’ convention at his hotel. McCarthy was the guest speaker. Even though Dad hated McCarthy and was orgasmic when Murrow took him down, Dad was happy to pocket the revenue from the delegates, most of whom were just ordinary folks from Wisconsin trying to make a living and down here for a bit of sun and sand.

 

Dad was not a big fan of Ike either. He called him MacArthur’s aide-de-camp and did not like his treatment of Truman and Marshall, and that Ike took a long time to stand up to McCarthy and said nothing when Oppenheimer was blacklisted. Mostly he loved Truman and Roosevelt. When Kennedy was assassinated, we sat in front of the TV for three days, tears in our eyes. At least Kennedy had Marilyn Monroe, not Stormy Daniels. The other politicians simply did not measure up to the Democrats.

We would watch the early civil rights marchers on TV, and Dad would call them troublemakers but admitted that maybe they had a point. He understood prejudice, having been its victim in his youth and having lost all his family to the Nazis. He paid his Black employees the same low wages he paid his white ones. After all, he was a capitalist.

 

We had a housekeeper, Kay, who had lost her boyfriend in the war and worked for us for room and board plus $25 a week. She was our nurse, our babysitter, and referee between me and my spoiled princess sister.

 

Later on, when Nixon ran for President, Dad made no secret of how wicked and evil Nixon was. I was living in New York at the time and voted for Nixon. For this I was never forgiven. Even later, when I returned to Florida and lived through Watergate, refusing to acknowledge the crimes, I learned a good lesson. Dad understood good and evil better than I did. He also understood life a bit better. But I was young and unafraid.

 

Now I am afraid.

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.

 

 

Happy Anniversary Republican House, Senate, and Presidency

We’ve been treated to a year of chaos. Immigration roundups by masked men in the streets, trade disruption, and corruption unseen in American political history. The tariff regime, a brainchild of a president who does not understand economics, is undercutting American farmers and small businesses, let alone imposing a tax on hardworking Americans who now face the economic uncertainties of a world fraught with the perils of artificial intelligence coming to eat their jobs. Tariffs are inflationary. Ninety-nine percent of economists have said so. But Trump does not agree.

Let’s go on. A government shutdown causing mass flight delays and flight controllers calling in sick because they are not being paid. Thousands of government employees laid off. The House and Senate are now the Circumlocution Bureau, each passing responsibility to the other and refusing to do their job. Mike Johnson, the worst Speaker of the House in history—the most lickspittle—has closed down the House so they do not have to vote on health care subsidies and tax credits, effectively depriving people of accessible health care. And they have not funded SNAP payments and food stamps so poor people can go hungry. This bothers members of Congress not a bit, since they have their parking spaces at National Airport, their superior health care benefits, their staffs, and so they can do nothing for people who will go hungry. Let them eat cake. Donald Trump can use his wealthy donors to tear down the East Wing of the White House and build a golden ballroom. No chance for corruption there, eh? After all, these donors have government contracts based upon merit, no?

And what about Trump’s vacillating support for brave Ukrainians who are fighting a Russian dictator, killing thousands of Russian troops to stop aggression threatening all of Europe? We have seen this play out in 1939. Putin must be stopped. And NATO will eventually have to send troops into Ukraine, although no one in the West, least of all Trump, recognizes it. We need an FDR, not a DJT.

Federal workers, who live from paycheck to paycheck, are unable to put food on the table for their families, or pay their mortgages and car payments, or afford health care.

But wait. Elon Musk will become the first trillionaire. There is something obscene about that. What can one individual do to improve his lifestyle with one trillion rather than four hundred billion? This Dickensian dystopia did not exist even in the great writers’ cynical expressions of it. Trump has brought us Oliver Twist on steroids. Hungry children cannot get food stamps, but Musk gets a trillion?

The acquiescent Supreme Court expanded the power of a madman and will soon rule on his tariff agenda. The oral argument questions have the pundits predicting that they will strike down the destructive tariffs, but oral arguments are often deceptive. Long experience in the law has told me that. One cannot escape the ability of judges to craft decisions to their dispositions, despite Amy Coney Barrett’s new book artfully telling the tale of impartiality and respect for precedent. We’ve heard it all before, including mendacious confirmation-hearing songs and dances—from Barrett, from Kavanaugh, from Gorsuch, and from Alito. Liars all. It must be Alito’s wife’s fault—he being a scholar of sixteenth-century English jurisprudence as a rationale in his opinion in Dobbs, creating a mishmash of abortion rights in the overruling of Roe v. Wade and a half-century of judicial precedent.

In a revolt against the establishment, New York City has elected a mayor of electric campaign imagination, yet dubious qualifications to govern. We’ll see how far he can get with his government grocery stores, rent-frozen apartments, free buses, and higher taxes on small businesses. Let’s see how all those progressive young Jews and older leftists who voted for this anti-Zionist mayor fare. Let’s see how he manages the most Jewish city in America. Let’s see how he gets along with the Hasidim in Brooklyn. They are not Mets fans. They are Talmud fans. They are Zionists. And, by the way, they tried all that socialist nonsense. It was called the Soviet Union.

Judging from the Democratic victories this past week, voters seem to be waking up. Trump’s promise to bring inflation down, to lower the cost of living, to make life more affordable, has not come true. Democratic messaging on affordability is hitting its mark, aided by the reality of lost jobs, soaring grocery prices, and the distractions of masked ICE agents in the streets arresting schoolteachers and people with dark skin.

Somehow in this great land the sun is shining,
Somewhere the land is green,
Somewhere the path shall beckon;
But we know not when ’twill be seen.

The Democrats have failed us, the Republicans too.
Socialists will not help us,
We know that so well;
But in this land transformation shall brew.
We know from time to time
Someone, somehow arises
To bear the burden for us,
But we know not when.

When it all seems so hopeless,
It might be then.

Trump's Troops

It’s hard for me to discern whether Trump is a power-drunk madman, a politically savvy con man, a malevolent fascist, a corrupt politician, an ignoramus, or a narcissistic teenage bully. All of the above seems about right. His supporters would argue he's a clever diplomat, a forceful businessman-economist-president who’s been mischaracterized by the mainstream media and who will revivify American industrial might. I do not subscribe to the latter, however.

Still, I tell myself—and my despairing friends—that he’s done some things right. Jumping in to bomb the mullahs and his contribution to the Abraham Accords are signal achievements. His motivations toward these ends, whether ignoble or noble, are irrelevant. If he can achieve a real peace agreement there, he would deserve the Nobel Prize. He also bullied the Europeans into paying their fair share against a revanchist Putin. On the other hand, he allowed the appearance of being Putin’s puppet—subject to salacious blackmail involving kiddy porn, with the Russian holding the kompromat.

Does it really matter what the underlying psychopathy is if he muddles through? Well, yes. He’s done so much damage to the norms of our society. Will future presidents seek the same unbridled power? The old question—do the ends justify the means? To what end, and at what cost? The damage to our institutions—are they permanent, or will they heal when Donald leaves the scene? Will we return to normalcy?

In 1932, before FDR was elected, the U.S. and world economies were on life support. Communism seemed a plausible alternative for many elite American intellectuals, many of whom were embedded in the labor movement and the entertainment business. They had sickened of the Hoover administration doing little to intubate the dying patient. Unemployment was at 25%, Americans were starving, standing in soup kitchen lines, and a “Bonus Army” of hungry, dispossessed World War I veterans camped out on the Anacostia Flats near Pennsylvania Avenue. President Hoover sent Douglas MacArthur with troops to disperse the starving men and their families. Major George S. Patton—yes, that Patton—rode around on horseback, directing armed cavalry against the veterans. Tear gas was used. The nation was treated to a spectacle of abuse: men who had fought to “make the world safe for democracy” herded into paddy wagons and gassed—again. Their makeshift shelters were burned. The national reaction was outrage, contributing to Hoover’s landslide defeat by FDR later that year.

In New York City in July 1863, amidst the Civil War, four days of draft riots decimated parts of the city. 120 people were killed. Lincoln had to dispatch troops to quell the violence. The rioters turned on Black residents, who fled from lower Manhattan to Harlem. Lincoln had no choice—but it was necessary. A murderous, sanguinary, savage war raged on, ultimately taking 700,000 American lives. Battlefields across the country, littered with bloated corpses, filled the lenses of Matthew Brady’s camera.

Trump, meanwhile, is doing his best to provoke his own civil war—having polarized, with the help of social media and Rupert Murdoch, the American public.

He says, without evidence, that “Democrat sanctuary cities” are rampant with crime and that the Army must intervene. He claims these cities can’t police their own streets. Has anyone actually seen cities burning down? Crime is down, according to government data.

What we do see is an accumulation of tech oligarch wealth unseen even in the Gilded Age—wealth that would make Rockefeller blush. Corruption at the highest levels that would embarrass Boss Tweed. And let’s not forget the retribution: Trump’s campaign of prosecutorial revenge against opponents, and even career law enforcement officials assigned to his cases.

From crisis to crisis—mostly manufactured as distractions from his dubious trade policies and tariffs, which have damaged and even bankrupted American farmers—he’s left a trail of consequences. The government has had to issue subsidies to make up for lost markets in China and elsewhere. Half of America’s soybeans were going to China. Yes, the Treasury is collecting more money, but to what effect? Trump’s zero-sum game will ultimately boomerang. The raw accumulation of power for its own sake always plays out to tragic denouements.

Nothing is ever completely bad or completely good. Responsible leadership should do more good than harm. Benjamin Franklin said at the Constitutional Convention, “This Constitution can only end in despotism when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government.” Trump is pushing the envelope—but Americans must shoulder the blame and pay the price for electing him.

The King and the Vulgarian

The King and the Vulgarian

Many of my South Florida neighbors were riveted this year by the HBO series *The Gilded Age*, devoted to the foundations of America's old-money aristocracy and its competition with the newly monied class of the late 19th century. The loosely knitted history of the Vanderbilts (represented by the fictional Russells) cracking the New York establishment still resonates. The scandalous story of Consuelo Vanderbilt’s divorce—heaven forbid!—rocked New York society. Quelle horreur!

Julian Fellowes, the creator of this high-falutin’ soap opera, won a slew of Emmys for his earlier epic *Downton Abbey*—essentially a Noël Coward play, minus the acerbic wit (with the notable exception of the recently departed Maggie Smith as the Crawley clan’s dowager matriarch). In *The Gilded Age*, that contrarian spirit lives on through a wonderful Christine Baranski, who plays Mrs. Agnes Van Rhijn, a woman whose Mayflower pedigree allows her to look down her nose at the arriviste Russell family.

These programs tap into the American fascination with royalty—or at least our admiration for it, provided it resides across the pond.

But now, we have King Charles III, a real king, entertaining an imposter king: Trump. A vulgar paradigm of American excess—still snickered about in English royal circles—recently found himself seated beside the King of England, Defender of the Faith and titular head of an empire long vanished. There they were, together in a grand dining hall at Windsor Castle: the heir to the Britannia that once ruled the seas, the nation of Gladstone, Nelson, Disraeli, Churchill, and Queen Victoria, Empress of India… now prostrate before a gold-plated, orange-tanned, coiffed American president.

This president’s pedigree? Stiffing creditors, consorting with sexual predators, conducting incoherent foreign policy, taxing citizens through regressive tariffs, waging war on the less fortunate through a cabal of incompetent acolytes, and suggesting that criticism from the press should be subject to government sanction. Oh—and let’s not forget the insurrection and the Big Lie about the 2020 election.

I try to comfort despairing friends and fellow citizens by reminding them that we’ve been through worse: two world wars, the Great Depression, Vietnam, institutional anti-Semitism in the early 20th century, and earlier demagogues—Joseph McCarthy, the Red Scare, Father Coughlin, Huey Long, and the American Nazi Bund. Let’s not forget the original “America First” movement, which would have let England sink into the Nazi abyss. Or Charles Lindbergh, Nazi sympathizer.

But then, we had FDR. Truman. Eisenhower. And others in the Senate and the House who led the way through times that could have been even darker.

Now, however, we face exponential changes in societal structure—changes that demand even greater leadership. Perhaps an AI president and Congress? Does anyone seriously think Trump is smarter than ChatGPT? More literate? More informed?

Just imagine it: no more hot-air politicians on *Meet the Press*. No more Senate windbags. No more overpaid Congresspeople with better health insurance than their constituents. Just robots telling us what’s best. Some Soylent Green for lunch, a little Soma to sleep.

Sound far-fetched? So did AI.

Crossroads of Faith and Democracy

 

My father once told me, quoting Disraeli, that “the secret to success is constancy of purpose.”
Well, if this election cycle was a success, it succeeded mainly in driving Americans mad. And I mean mad in the bonkers sense, not the “angry” sense that American English so often misuses.

We’ve endured an unrelenting assault on our senses—by the media, by social networks, and by friends who’ve been so deranged by the onslaught of opinion, misinformation, disinformation, and rumor that we’ve algorithmically relegated them to the trash bin. There, they sit alongside solicitations from Amazon, the Vitamin Shoppe, and LA Fitness. Our email filters now tune them out entirely.

I can’t fully grasp the motivations of Americans who still support MAGA Republicans, despite having been fed a steady diet of explanations from journalists, friends, and even clergy. (Clergy, after all, have fewer topics to ruminate on these days, since many can no longer persuasively argue—except to the true believers—that God, or some facsimile thereof, still exists.) Polls suggest that only about half of Americans now say with certainty that God is “up there” on a cloud, answering prayers, His white beard festooned across the heavens.

Given that most of the Founding Fathers were deists—skeptical of prayer but believing in some form of divine creation without divine interference—it’s hard to see why evangelicals, fundamentalists, and conservative Catholics embrace recent Supreme Court decisions as “progress” in the American experiment enshrined in the Constitution of 1789.

Take abortion. It is a religiously fueled issue that has deeply divided the nation. Donald Trump—who lost the 2016 popular vote by three million—appointed three religious zealots to the Supreme Court. They misled Congress during confirmation hearings, then overturned abortion rights that had stood for over fifty years, with disastrous consequences. That Trump had no popular mandate did not trouble him or Mitch McConnell in the slightest.

Religion in America has flourished because of the separation of church and state, not in spite of it. The absence of a state religion was a guiding principle for the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock in 1620. The founders affirmed this freedom—though in early America, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Rhode Island were still settled by distinct religious factions. Back then, without a national polity or modern communications—no telegraph, no internet, no mass-circulation press—there was little exposure to competing points of view.

Today, the irony is stark: fundamentalists attacking the very separation that has allowed religion to thrive. Religion can be beneficial, but it is far too easily manipulated by unscrupulous politicians who profess no sincere faith, guided only by expedience.

The Electoral College is another relic of 1789—a compromise with slave states, many of which used biblical justification for human bondage. Eighty years later, the Civil War tore at the nation’s fabric to end that supposed divine sanction. Lincoln himself was no conventional Christian; his blend of rationalism and fatalism allowed him to evolve beyond the doctrinal defenses of slavery found in both Old and New Testaments. Some modern theologians have had to redefine those texts entirely to sidestep their endorsements of bondage.

We shouldn’t kid ourselves: religion fueled that war, as it has fueled countless crusades, pogroms, and inquisitions. And the persistent idea that “if Jews were Muslims there would be no war in the Middle East” ignores an even darker truth: without two thousand years of Christian teaching that Jews killed Christ—and thus were wicked, subhuman, and fit for extermination—there would have been no Holocaust.

Which brings us to today’s rising tide of anti-Semitism, still anchored in those ancient tropes. The claim that Israel is committing genocide against Hamas willfully inverts victim and aggressor. Hamas exists for the destruction of the “Zionist entity,” not for building a viable society. Building tunnels and firing rockets at your neighbor is no substitute for building schools, hospitals, and civil institutions—nor is kidnapping, raping, and slaughtering civilians.

Intolerable Cruelty

When I was a young man, I veered into the Republican camp. After voting for Humphrey in 1968, I voted for Nixon in 1972 and Ford in 1976. My New Deal liberal father almost disowned me. He hated Nixon with a passion reserved for former SS members, especially after Watergate. But even worse, I worked for and campaigned for Reagan in 1980. I thought Carter did a poor job as President. I did not regret voting for Reagan nor my invitation to his inauguration, although I did not attend. I turned Democrat in 1992, with Bill Clinton, and remained such until the present day. My father never forgave me for my apostasy. I know now, with the benefit of hindsight, I was sorely misguided. I regret all of it, because Dad was right when he told me, "Every bit of beneficial legislation for the people comes from Democrats." That has not changed, even though Republicans are selling a different brand of Kool-Aid.

I continue to be astonished by the cruelty of this administration.

The rounding up of immigrants in the fields, in places of employment, and in their homes. People hiding and afraid to go to church, and under the advice of prelates, being forgiven for not coming to worship. In the eyes of the Catholic Church, one risks damnation for not following the dictates of the holy bishops: to come to confession, to come to prayer, to take communion. Unable to work, to pray, to walk freely in the streets recalls the horrors of the police states from which they escaped to America.

Hunger is growing in America. PBS and NPR are not the only ones losing their federal funding. Food banks feeding the poor and needy will be losing their federal monies; Medicaid will no longer be available for many. Draconian work requirements for the disabled augur poorly for them. The President wishes to strip many naturalized citizens of their citizenship. Reminiscent of the Nuremberg Laws, this quest is frightening.

Will no one in Congress challenge this denigration of our laws and the Constitution? Are senators and congresspeople so afraid of losing their parking spots at National Airport?

The United States has shined through the presence of immigrants. From the earliest days, and especially in the 19th century, until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1924, the United States had unrestricted immigration. Until that discriminatory act, anyone without a communicable disease could come. Today, of course, that is not possible, but our doors should be open to non-criminals, the border should be secure, and through a liberal vetting process, people should be allowed in to fill jobs that are open.

Scientific funding to the National Institutes of Health, the firing without cause of essential federal employees, in the name of government efficiency, strikes me like the firings on The Apprentice. The cutoff of funding for Radio Free Europe, giving hope of the American ideal (what happened to that?) to many in the unfree world. The harming of our allies in Canada and Mexico by placing tariffs on them is basically unconscionable. They are not the Chinese, competing for hegemony with us; they are our friends whose economies are placed in jeopardy by their largest trading partner. These inflationary tariffs will wreak havoc on Canadian and Mexican employment and will inflate the price of goods here in America, according to a substantial majority of non-partisan economists.

It risks the devaluation of the dollar and investment markets and U.S. debt. The U.S. dollar has had the luxury of being the world's reserve currency, and if that is changed, we will lose control of markets and erase the benefit of being able to monetize debt by increasing the money supply. Countries that do not have this control must obey different rules, like balancing their budgets. A balanced budget here? The chance of that is smaller than finding alien life on the moon.

Pure Trump transactionalism is not the basis for international relations. While it is true governments act in their own national interest, not recognizing that long-term national interest cannot be trumped by anger and simply short-term political popularity seeking. If the long term is ignored because of misplaced petulance, the national interest is not well served.

America at a Crossroads

t’s been a while since I’ve written. I feel badly for my recent silence. Depression, helplessness, and frustration at my lack of a bigger platform have kept me quiet. But for whatever it’s worth, here goes:

Americans are shocked and amazed at what is happening to our country. To those who voted for Mr. Trump—whether because you felt left behind, believed promises that inflation and foreign wars would be solved on day one, wanted lower taxes, were frustrated by empty shelves, or worried about job automation—I have to say: you were misled.

These promises were part of a Trump playbook long known. Ask the creditors left unpaid in Atlantic City, the students at Trump University, or the buyers of Trump-branded steaks and coins. Trump is our 21st-century PT Barnum, but he doesn’t believe a sucker is born every minute—he knows it’s every second. Compared to Trump, Ponzi, Barnum, and other snake oil salesmen look like a junior high baseball team facing the New York Yankees. He’s a major-league confidence man.

(Apologies to the Bronx Bombers, a team I’ve adored for ages. I could have used another analogy, but I’m tired.)

Most Americans who cast votes for Trump had their reasons. There was the supposed economic crisis (that really wasn’t), the “America going down the drain” argument (it wasn’t), the unsecured border, the “Joe Biden deception,” and the disastrous debate. The last-minute selection of a Democratic candidate who wasn’t the product of the primaries, but was instead anointed by Joe Biden, left many feeling the process was unfair and uninspiring. It was not the Democrats’ finest hour. Joe, intoxicated by power, didn’t want to go. He should have kept his original promise not to seek a second term. At least then, Democrats would have had a fighting chance against a master manipulator of fear.

Now, we face a form of authoritarianism unprecedented in our 250-year-old republic. There’s an attack on higher education—yes, it needs reform, especially to address extreme left-wing antisemitism—but it’s being done with a sledgehammer, not thoughtful policy. We see the militarization of policing, the degradation of the civil service, and the panicked rehiring of those fired without thought for the consequences. Foreign aid workers, whose tiny fraction of the budget did so much for our world image and influence, are gone—costing us dearly in goodwill and, as Bill Gates warned, in the lives of thousands of children.

Now we see unbridled corruption: a president blatantly enriching himself and his family at taxpayer expense. We see the violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause, with the acceptance of a $400 million airplane “gift” to the U.S. government, destined for Trump’s library—possibly in Miami, God help us. We see the HHS Secretary, an unqualified anti-vaccine advocate, firing qualified medical professionals from the vaccine board. RFK, Jr.—a scoundrel and a liar—fits right in with the dramatis personae of the Trump administration: the drunkard Pete Hegseth, the clueless Linda McMahon, the silly Kash Patel undermining the FBI as not even the rigid, constipated James Comey could, who himself undermined Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

The most frightening part? This president is only six months into his term, and there is no one to restrain him. Certainly not the Republican Congress, whose members are terrified of losing their primaries—and their parking spaces at National Airport. The rest abandoned ship during the first term, wrote books, and are now glad they’re not there. But now, the ship of state may sink—with all of us aboard.

WHY SCARS TRAVEL DOWN THROUGH GENERATIONS

Today is Yom HaShoah.  April 24^th. Holocaust Remembrance Day.  I know there is a great concern about the present generation not remembering the unspeakable crimes of the 3d Reich and of their collaborators.

I have written previously how the war affected my family, my relationship with my father, who was permanently scarred by the experience of losing his parents, his sisters and brothers and the story of how he brought his two young sisters, and 21 other survivors from his hometown to America.  His mother, sisters and brothers were deported  to Auschwitz among the other Hungarian Jews when Adolf Eichman arrived in Budapest in a final paroxysm of Nazi hatred, during the spring of 1944, after the Hungarian Nazi aligned government collapsed.   There they faced the line of selection, to the left gas, to the right, work yourself to a starvation induced death.  The war was lost, but Hitler figured he could still finish the job of cleansing Europe of Jews (Judenrein).  Some 500,000 to 600,000 Hungarian men, women and children   were hastily deported to Auschwitz, within approximately three months.   The last Jews of Europe that still had not been under the German boot until then. Many of them were gassed upon arrival and immediately thrown into the blazing crematoria.   I know that my grandmother and other aunts, uncles and cousins joined them in their ride to death.  Some, more able bodied and young were spared to work. Among them, my aunt Sherry.

Near the barracks was a gallows with three prisoners hanging, frozen in death. Elie Wiesel came from the same hometown as my grandparents.  Someone asked him where was God?  “He is there hanging from the gallows,” he said.

Below is a picture of my Aunt Sherry, a gifted artist in line fourth from the left, in her uniform.  Ultimately, my father rescued her and 21 others from the DP camp operated by the British, after the liberation.   She was 60 pounds, her brain inflamed.  She came to America in 1946, among the first wave of DPs (displaced persons).  The photo was taken by the SS and is present in the records of Yad Vashem in Israel, in its Auschwitz album.   She has passed on, but was a sensitive, loving mother to the autistic son she had after marrying a man who had also lost his wife and children, and yet had later served in combat in the south Pacific with the US Army.  She never lost her Jewish faith, although one could easily question why.  She did many oil paintings when she arrived, including a portrait of me and my mother below. I had other lovely aunts who were more fun but none so talented yet tormented or had suffered as much.

My father, having come to America in 1923, went home each year until 1939 but when the war came and he could no longer visit  nor introduce his bride (my mother) to his parents or bring insulin to his diabetic father.  He tried in vain to get them to America, but after the immigration and nationality act of 1924, it was no longer possible.  His father was fortunate, dad said, dying of diabetes, saving him from the indignities of being gassed and burned.  Dad said, “if God were so powerful, and he was bloodthirsty so I reject him.  And if he was not powerful enough to stop the madness, he does not exist.”  Yet Dad still went to synagogue on the holidays and ran his hotel for Jewish, mostly religious guests.

People ask me if I was affected.  Well, yes I was.  My father ran a hotel in upstate New York from 1951-1971.  Many of the people there were survivors, and I grew up among them.  Many did not want to talk about their  horrifying experiences, many did.  I listened to them and absorbed their stories.  It was a terrible time to be young and innocent and to learn such things.