Viewing Racism in Light of Jewish History

My dear friend Rona, circa 1986, glamer than we are now, in her office at the NGO where she worked then.

In late October a man with a gun went into a Pittsburg Synogogue and shot a dozen people. In the days following the atrocity, radio and TV featured an incredible run of rabbis, Jews and Jewish experts hectoring us about racism.

While living in Israel in 1986, I read a slew of Jewish history (Abba Eban’s My People, A History of the Jews, the best written) and a precise pattern emerges: any time a sizable portion of a country's population is left in the economic dust, racism ignites. It happened in Spain, repeatedly in England, so often in Russia they coined a special term for it “pogrom,” and most disastrously in Germany when the country could not pay its WWI reparations.

There is always some bonehead like Adolf or Donald around the place with a box of matches. Count on it.

Then, I believed it could never happen here. I did not envision American elites enriching themselves beyond all decency, which, in the wake of the 2008 Recession has pauperized ordinary people and local governments supposedly serving them, creating homelessness, a drug epidemic, and fanning anti-Jewish racism.

The Jews are not to blame, but blaming/hectoring victims only exacerbates the problem. Not one news organization (on air or in print) I heard bothered to educate people on this history.