Southern Poverty Law Center Co-founder (Board Emeritus) and MRFF Advisory Board Member Joseph J. Levin Jr.’s Talk to a Jewish Congregation in Santa Barbara

February 2, 2020

Shalom, Y’all!

The world changed in a shocking way November 8, 2016. Donald Trump, a man who relied upon anger, bigotry, lying and fear-mongering to fuel his entire campaign is President of the United States. We’ve now experienced exactly what this historic transformation means.

One week after the election, I spoke to the National Council of Jewish Women in Cleveland. It was scheduled before the election, and the topic was supposed to be “implicit bias.” That’s not where I went then and not where I’m going this morning. Arguably, over the past three years, we’re back to an era when bias (especially the rejection of diversity) is not just hidden in the larger population; it is open, and it is extensive. What the Southern Poverty Law Center observed during that campaign and this Presidency has been an invigoration of extremists and extremist groups, ranging from old Klan leaders to neo-Nazis, other white supremacists and radical anti-immigrant groups. They feel validated.

         In January 2019, at a Temple in Teaneck, N.J., I struggled to think of something useful to say about what happened in Pittsburg’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood at the Tree of Life Synagogue. And, Highland Park, Mich. (Muslim family house burned down); and, Jefferson, KY (2 AF-Am. dead) White man said, “Don’t shoot me.” Killer said, “I won’t shoot you. Whites don’t shoot whites.”; 2 women murdered in a Tallahassee, FL yoga studio, because they were women. All I could come up with, as angry as those tragedies made me, was that it was equally disturbing that I wasn’t surprised. And, since then, there’s been El Paso (Brown people); New Jersey (Jews), California,  and, of course, the New Zealand mosque; and on-and-on. New Zealand is especially significant because it reinforces our concern that we’re looking at a white nationalism of international scope. A hate-filled manifesto believed to be written by the New Zealand attacker included references to the Second Amendment, with the gunman writing that he hoped conflicts over firearms would eventually lead to the United States splitting along political, cultural and racial lines. He also wrote that he supports President Donald Trump “as a symbol of renewed white identity.”

In a news conference following the attack, Trump said he had not seen the manifesto and did not see rising white nationalism.

There’s more to come.

SO, I’D LIKE TO TALK ABOUT THE HISTORY I EXPERIENCED, ONE OF EXPLICIT BIAS THAT I BELIEVE PROVIDES A VALUABLE LESSON FOR THE PRESENT

 I was born in 1943. My Father was Jewish, a native of Newport News, Virginia. In 1882, my great-grandparents, Isaac and Annie Lipman, ages 16 and 15 and married, walked from Odessa to Bremen, Germany.  They were escaping the “ethnic cleansing” Instituted by Alexander III.  Alexander III succeeded his father, and like many of the Romanovs had a global vision for Russia. He was committed to making Russia great again through intense nationalistic and isolationist policies.  Sound familiar?

         My Dad had an easier trip. He migrated to college at the University of Alabama and graduated from its law school in 1934. He moved to Montgomery to practice law with a classmate, and eventually established his own commercial practice.

My Mother, Anne Hutto, was born in Jasper, Alabama, a descendant of generations of farmers, the youngest of 14 siblings, moved to Montgomery, met my father and they married. My mother was raised Christian but converted to Judaism. On her side, the “Ottos,” as they were known when they immigrated from Germany to SC around 1735, likely left Germany because of the religious persecution of Lutherans.

My great-grandfather, John C. Hutto, was a major in the Confederate Army. There’s a Sons-of-Confederate Veterans Camp named for him in Walker County, Alabama. I heard a lot about “Johnny Reb” from my uncles growing up. I could not have imagined that the Confederacy and its symbols would rise again to such prominence.

I never knew anything as a kid but Jim Crow segregation. Racially separate water fountains formed a metaphor for the culture. Every white person I knew was a racist. So was I. And, just in case you might think that growing up Jewish made a difference; it didn’t. Jews as a group were just as bigoted as anyone else. Those who weren’t – a couple of Yankee rabbis – were run out of town by their congregations. Assimilation was the name of the game.

The Jewish community itself was sharply divided. There were Reform Jews, Conservative Jews, and Sephardic Jews, each carrying lots of attitude about the other. Before WWII and well into the 1940’s and early ‘50’s, there was a country club for Reform Jews and one for “the others.” Racial bias was just part of the package.

         In 1955, the Bus Boycott occurred. I was 12 years old, and until then rode the bus all the time. The day the Boycott began was the last day I ever rode public transportation in Montgomery. Conversations included discussions of “outside agitators” and Yankee trash stirring up the “Negroes.” The city proceeded to close down the public parks and concrete in the public pools in order to avoid court-ordered desegregation.

The atmosphere in Montgomery was poisonous.

There was little justice. And, some of the lawyers and judges were the worst offenders. Judge Walter B. Jones, a Montgomery Circuit Court judge, was a vicious racist. As a judge, he banned the NAACP from operating in Alabama.

In 1957, six years before his death, Jones published his most infamous editorial in the Montgomery Advertiser, where he was a frequent commentator. It was entitled, “I Speak For the White Race,” and, sadly, for his time, I think he did. He concluded his racist diatribe with the following words:

We have all “kindly feelings” for the world’s other races, but we will maintain at any and all sacrifices the purity of our blood strain and race. We shall never submit to the demands of integrationists. The white race shall remain forever white.

If this sounds familiar, this is the voice of white supremacy and the alt-right of Stephen Bannon and Stephen Miller today. Not 1957, TODAY!!

And, these people were representative of the larger community. It’s like what a wise commentator once said about the Texas legislature – “If you think these folks are bad, you ought to see their constituents.”

Sounds pretty harsh, but this was our environment, one of the perversion of law, an oligarchy with wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a few, who played on racism to keep working class whites thinking about something else. Again, sound familiar?

You might think that surely that was my motivation to get a law degree and work to correct the vast injustices all around me. Not hardly. As a noted author, (Anais Nin, ah-nah-EES/neen), put it,

There are very few human beings who receive the truth…by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment….

When I left my lily-white public schools of Montgomery in 1960, I entered the all-white University of Alabama and joined my all-white, Jewish fraternity. We had fraternities and sororities then for Jews and Christians. There were Jewish fraternities for Southern Reform Jews, Southern Conservative Jews, and, of course, Yankee Jews. No line left undrawn!

We thrilled to our all-white football team, which gave us (1) the opportunity to re-fight the War of Northern Aggression, and (2) show solidarity with George Wallace.

In what was my junior year, 1962, a fraternity brother, Melvin Meyer of Starkville, Mississippi, wrote a “Crimson White” editorial supporting “integration.”(Ole Miss & James Meredith was actual subject.). That resulted in a barrage of hate calls to the frat house (where we lived at the time), and a cross was burned in our front yard by the United Klans of America, then headquartered in Tuscaloosa. (Michael Donald case) So, the Klan was mad at Melvin, I and many of my contemporaries at the University were mad at Melvin and in my hometown, the Jews were mad at Melvin, wondering why we tolerated such a radical in our midst. It was quite a combination of critics. What Melvin wrote and the way I and others reacted to it changed the course of my thinking and began to alter my view of the world.

So, in 1966, I graduated from Law School. Practiced a bit with my Dad, then went to Ft. Benning, GA for basic officers’ training. Back in the day, unless you were a draft dodger like Dick Cheney and Donald Trump (and yes, Bill Clinton), you likely got drafted, you enlisted, or you came out of college, law school or grad school with a 2-year ROTC obligation. For me, I was in Military Intelligence. Finished my basic infantry officer training at Ft. Benning GA, 6 weeks at MI school at Ft. Holabird, MD; and was prepared to go straight to Vietnam; as had the majority of my infantry and intelligence classmates. Then New York City intervened. I know you’re wondering, what in the hell is he talking about!

Well, the Army sent me to Manhattan: We don’t have time for that story, but what I did  get out of my 2 years in the city was a sense of the larger world! A sense of diversity. I worked with African, Italian, Irish, and Asian Americans; and even retired Jewish cops! I didn’t know there were Jewish cops! And, though seemingly contradictory, I came to realize both how irrelevant and how important those differences were. It brought me to that last “fragment,” that Melvin initiated 7 years earlier.

         Serendipity intervened. In 1969, I returned to Montgomery and met Morris Dees. We tried some cases together, started a law firm, and in 1971, with the help and encouragement of Julian Bond, who served as our first President, established the Southern Poverty Law Center. I was very lucky. I found a use for my law degree that I never could have imagined.

In its first decade, the SPLC desegregated the all-white Alabama State Trooper force; created an Alabama legislature that went from 1 black representative in 1972 to 19 by 1974; desegregated the Montgomery YMCA, which had entered into a secret agreement with the city to essentially act as a public recreational provider for its white residents; required the U.S. military to treat male and female service members equally in the provision of benefits; stopped the federal government from funding forced sterilizations of poor women; and much more.

Litigation was the primary focus of those early years, but as the 80’s and 90’s rolled into view, the Center established KlanWatch, the predecessor to our current Intelligence Project. IP operates as a check on the activities of a broad array of hate groups and as a resource for law enforcement at all levels of government. We filed cases against and recovered millions of dollars in damages from hate groups in Texas, Ala., NC, Kentucky and Oregon. In 1989, we unveiled the Civil Rights Memorial, designed by Maya Lin and dedicated to the martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement. We recently celebrated its 30^th anniversary. And, in 1992, the Center initiated its Teaching Tolerance program, which, among many other activities, distributes tolerance material and award-winning video and text kits free of charge to schools all over the country.

So, we arrived in the 21^st Century with all the proven programs in place, and others underway. There’s our Juvenile Justice project, which morphed into a broader Children’s Rights Initiative operating in Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia and Alabama, taking unprecedented steps to improve the lives of children caught in the “school to prison” pipeline; Economic Justice; Criminal Justice Reform (Prisons), a newly invigorated Voting Rights Project and our Immigrant Justice Project, which is fighting for the rights of immigrant labor throughout the South and the nation through litigation and legislative action. We originally directed our attention to the abuse of documented and undocumented immigrants by the agricultural and timber industry in the South. Since Trump and his sycophants took office, we’ve radically changed direction by establishing our Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative (SIFI), the purpose of which is to provide representation to the thousands of immigrants being shoved into deportation detention centers across the country. We now have projects in 4 different locales, 3 in Georgia and 1 in Louisiana. We’ve also partnered financially and programmatically with other groups trying to address the flooding of deportation centers. It’s a huge problem.

We have an extensive LGBTQ rights project, which includes litigation that has successfully struck down debunked “conversion therapy” programs, ensured military benefits to same sex couples, and, again, much more.

And, within the last year, we’ve created the SPLC Action Fund, a 501-C-4 non-profit, which will give us the opportunity to engage much more heavily in state and federal legislative and electioneering issues. So much detail!  SPLC Website!

As I prepared this talk and looked back over the last 49 years and thought about where we started and where we are as a country now, it brings me back to my main point. Where are we?!!! What country is this? I thought the stories of bigotry and hate were relegated to the fringes of our society. I was wrong. I see, smell and feel the 1950s and 60s.

In 1920 H.L. Mecken wrote, “As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and a complete narcissistic moron.” (Fmr Secy Rex Tillerson – “F-ing moron!”) [H.L. Mencken, Baltimore Evening Sun. July 26, 1920.

         After Charlottesville, a Washington Post/ABC News survey revealed that 9% of Americans believe it’s “acceptable” to hold white supremacist or neo-Nazi views. That’s 30 million people who “strongly agreed” with the statement. More frightening to me was that 41% had no opinion on the matter. Really? After Charlottesville, 41% had no opinion!! 42 percent in the survey thought Trump had put neo-Nazis and white supremacists on an “equal standing with those who opposed them.”

         After that, Newsweek reported on a poll conducted jointly by Reuters and Ipsos, in conjunction with the University of Virginia Center for Politics. It found, among other things, that 31% of respondents said they strongly or somewhat agreed that the country needs to “protect and preserve its white European heritage;” 39% strongly or somewhat agreed that “white people are currently under attack in this country.”

         Nearly 1/3 of respondents failed to express support of interracial marriage, with 16% agreeing that “marriage should only be allowed between two people of the same race,” 14% neither agreeing or disagreeing, and 4% saying they just didn’t know. An analysis by the pollsters found that those who gave indifferent answers were “more likely to have views that leaned more toward intolerance than away from it.” Larry Sabito, director of the UVa Center said this, “ Let’s remember, there are 250 million adults in the U.S., so even small percentages likely represent the beliefs of millions of Americans.”

So, what is the “inner soul” of our people?

Those who are most at risk, undocumented immigrants; people of color; religious minorities (especially American Jews and Muslims); everyone in the LGBTQ community; women who deserve control of their own bodies; have every right to be afraid.

This kind of overt bigotry has been justified by our President, his Vice-President and their various surrogates. The extremist and alt-right elements of our country feel as if their positions regarding white supremacy, anti-Semitism, hate of LGBT individuals, Islamophobia, Xenophobia and Misogyny have been fully validated. These views have only been enhanced by Trump’s behavior and words following Charlottesville. (“very fine people on both sides”)

Even before Charlottesville, Kevin McDonald, an outspoken anti-Semite and former professor, wrote, “This is an amazing victory. Fundamentally, it is a victory of White people over the oligarchic, hostile elites.” Andrew Anglin, proprietor of the Daily Stormer, a truly sickening website popular among neo-Nazis, declared, “Our Glorious Leader has ascended to God Emperor. Make no mistake about it: we did this.” White Nationalist Leader Richard Spenser praised Trump’s first statement commemorating Int’l Holocaust Memorial Day, that intentionally failed to make any reference to Jews. He called it the “d-Judification” of the Holocaust.

         And, former Klansman David Duke, about whom Trump once falsely claimed to know nothing, said, “President Trump is off to an amazing start, God bless him for it!” “We simply want our own country and our own society.” Again, this all occurred before Charlottesville, which only strengthened white supremacist views of Trump’s support for them and their dogma.

         As the SPLC has reported, “[i]n the first three months after Trump won the presidency, [we] recorded an astonishing 1372 hate incidents, nearly all of them election-related. (Trump Effect)

And the numbers undoubtedly understate the real level of organized hatred in America. In recent years, growing numbers of right-wing extremists operate mainly in cyberspace until, in some cases, their followers take action in the real world. Dylann Roof, who murdered nine black churchgoers, is an early example of that — he had no real-world contact with hate groups before deciding, based on propaganda he read on the Internet, that it was time to start a race war.

         There was an the enormous leap in anti-Muslim hate groups, from 34 in 2015 to 101 in 2016 — a 197% increase, due to the unrelenting propaganda of a growing circle of well-paid ideologues; and the incendiary campaign rhetoric of Trump — his threats to ban Muslim immigration, mandate a registry of Muslims in America, and more. The Muslim-bashing had consequences. For example, in October 2016, just before the election, three members of a militia-like group called the Crusaders were arrested and charged with plotting to blow up an apartment complex in Kansas where 120 Somali Muslim immigrants live. The attack was reportedly set for Nov. 9, the day after Election Day. These men were convicted in 2019.

         You probably recall, in May 2017, the white supremacist, who murdered two men and injured another, who were only trying to protect two Muslim women who were being verbally threatened on a train in Portland, Oregon.   

         Trump appointed and continues to appoint staff with connections to anti-Muslim groups. Stephen Miller is the most prominent. I’ll get to him later. Mike Pompeo was confirmed as secretary of state in April 2018, despite his connections to anti-Muslim figures like Frank Gaffney and Brigitte Gabriel. That same month Trump tapped John Bolton to be his national security adviser. A month later, Bolton hired Fred Fleitz of the anti-Muslim hate group Center for Security Policy (CSP) as his chief of staff. Fleitz left that role in October to return to CSP as the group’s president, replacing founder Frank Gaffney, who moved to an executive chairman position.

         Beyond anti-Muslim events, there was the murder in NYC of Timothy Caughman, a black man, by a known white supremacist; the killing of Richard Collins, III, on the University of Maryland campus by a neo-Nazi sympathizer; and, in my own hometown of Montgomery, a gay woman was attacked after leaving a local bar where LGBT individuals had been ridiculed by an unidentified person. During the incident, the man said, “This is now Donald Trump’s America.”

         A deep dive into the 1372 hate incidents revealed that nearly half of these involved people referencing Trump, either by name or by parroting his rhetoric: for example, groups of white thugs intimidating minorities while chanting “Trump,” or swastika graffiti accompanied by the words “Make America Great Again.”

         These views were not only enhanced by Trump’s behavior and words following Charlottesville, but his overtly racist remarks regarding Haitians and Africans. (“s-hole”); beginning virtually all of his remarks on immigration with illustrations of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants (rapists, murderers, MS-13, and “animals & breeders;” and suggesting an end to birthright citizenship); and his false claim that thousands of Terrorists were caught at S. Border. Don’t forget Trump’s former Chief of Staff, John Kelly, referring to unregistered DACA kids as “lazy and can’t get off the couch/can’t get off their asses;” classic racist terminology.

And, of course, Trump puppy Stephen Miller claiming that the poem containing some of the most meaningful words our nation has ever known was not really the message of the Statue of Liberty, because it was installed in 1903, 17 years after the Statue was erected in 1886.

It should be pointed out that the poem was originally written as part of a fundraising campaign for the erection of the statue, three years before the Lady would become a part of the NY Harbor/Manhattan (NJ) skyline.

                  By the way, I did some very limited research on Stephen Miller’s ancestry. Ironically, his mother’s family immigrated from Belarus in the early 1900s, escaping the Russian pogroms. They had nothing, and his great-grandmother only spoke Yiddish. So, I guess he wouldn’t let her in today.

“‘Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!'”

         As some of you probably know, the SPLC recently uncovered hundreds of Stephen Miller emails prior to his joining Trump, indicating his strong connection to a variety of white supremacist web sites and his feeding of that racist and xenophobic propaganda to the alt-right website, Breitbart. These emails prove beyond question that Trump’s most influential staffer regarding issues of immigration is himself a supporter of white nationalism. I’m not sure we’re done.

         A condensed expert definition of Sociopath:  Sociopaths are “professional liars. They fabricate stories and make outlandish, untruthful statements. Because they have practiced lying so much, they are able to make these lies sound convincing. As their experience with lying grows, so does their confidence and assertiveness in telling their lies. Sometimes their lies are stories to get sympathy, others are lies about work they have done. Sociopaths have no typical feelings of guilt associated with claiming someone else’s work as their own. They only care about their image and will do whatever is easiest to create it.”
A former autocratic ruler put it this way:“I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few. Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see even heaven as hell, and also the other way around, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise. The greater the lie, the more readily will it be believed.  So, make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually the people will believe it.” Hitler.

As Voltaire stated, “If I can get you to believe absurdities, I can get you to commit atrocities.”

         Who is Trump and where is he headed? A member of Parliament once said to Disraeli, “Sir, you will either die on the gallows, or of some unspeakable disease!” Disraeli’s reply was, “That depends, sir, whether I embrace your policies or your mistress.” You can apply that as you will. To paraphrase a John Bright quote, “[Trump] believes he is a self-made man, and worships his creator.” We’ve already observed him using the widow of a Navy Seal killed during the Trump-authorized 2017 raid in Yemen, for his own political purposes during his address to Congress. A Slate magazine commentator put it best, “Trump has no valor, so he steals it.”

So, here’s Donald Trump, a man with no ideology, no principles; an empty vessel. Is he a racist? Is he a misogynistic predator? Is he a xenophobe? Is he an anti-Semite? Is he an all-around bigot? Is he a sociopath? It doesn’t matter! It’s not what’s in his head, if anything; it’s the words he chooses to use; the actions he takes.

And, whom did Trump appoint as his chief strategist? Steven Bannon, a man who’s made nice with white supremacists and neo-Nazis and turned the formerly very conservative website, Brietbart, into a mouthpiece for what a former Breitbart editor called, “a cesspool for white supremacist mememakers.” Former Brietbart writer Ben Shapiro is quoted as saying, “Bannon allowed the site to be taken over and used by…people who are not fond of Jews; not fond of minorities.”

As pointed out in a Eugene Robinson Washington Post commentary:

“… [T]oday’s white supremacy tends to shy away from         overtly racial terminology. Listen instead for words such as        ‘culture’ and ‘civilization.’ The idea that the United States   is the land of the free and the home of the brave is        because its ‘civilization’ is ‘European’ or ‘Western’ –      euphemisms, basically, for ‘white.’ “

         That’s the alt-Right, folks. These are the people who feel “validated” by Trump!

         Bannon himself stated that Breitbart is a voice for the alt-Right. After joining the Trump campaign, his connection to the website came under much sharper scrutiny from the media, and it became necessary for him to claim there was no anti-Semitism associated with its publications. That wasn’t true. As the SPLC pointed out in a February 2017 article, the trend of anti-Semitic commenters skyrocketed on the site during Bannon’s reign. Its references to “globalist elites,” traditionally an anti-Semitic dog-whistle used by the radical right and right-wing populists in the U.S. and Europe, became what we described as a “rolling narrative” covered extensively by Breitbart.

         And let’s not even get into Sebastian Gorka, the Hungarian Trump aide caught wearing Vite’zi Rend lapel pins, a group that was allied with the Nazis during WWII.

         When some of the criticism died down in post-election December, Bannon re-embraced Breitbart’s readership. An article in Politico quoted him as saying:

         “It was always great to hear what the hobbits had to say     because at the end of the day, what they had to say       mattered most. This whole movement, it’s really the top   of the first inning.”

SO, WHAT INNING ARE WE IN NOW?

         Interestingly, in early 2016, Matthew Heimbach, then head of the Traditionalist Youth Network, a white supremacist group, described Donald Trump as the “gateway drug” to outright white nationalism. He was right then and is right now. The number of hate groups operating in the country in 2018, according to our hate count, achieved a historic high, rising from 892 in 2015, to 917 in 2016, to 954 in 2017, to 1020 in 2018. That is the all-time high in some 30 years of SPLC counts.

         In 2018, we added two male supremacy groups to the hate list for the first time, because the vilification of women by these groups makes them no different than other hate groups that malign an entire class of people. The male supremacy movement believes that women are not people and that men should hold a superior place in society. According to these groups, all women are genetically inferior, manipulative and stupid.  

         The groups reduce women to their reproductive or sexual functions. A Voice For Men & Return of Kings. Incidentally, there’s a strong component of that among white supremacists in general.

         Also, in 2018, the SPLC published a report showing that from 2014 – 2017, more than 100 people had been killed or injured by alleged perpetrators influenced by the alt-right, a movement that continues to access the mainstream and reach young adults. From 2014 through 2017, there were 13 such episodes, leaving 43 dead and more than 60 injured. Nine of the 12 incidents we identified occurred in 2017 alone, making Donald Trump’s first year in office the most violent year for the movement – 17 dead and 43 wounded. Our report also found that of the 12 alleged or convicted killers connected to this new generation of white supremacists, the average age of perpetrators was 26 years. Only 3 have been older than 30, with the youngest being just 17.

         And, just to add to the list, Nikolas Cruz, the 19-year-old who slaughtered 17 people at Stoneman-Douglas H.S. in Feb. 2018, in Parkland, in a private Instagram group chat, repeatedly espoused racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic views and displayed an obsession with violence and guns.

In one part of the group chat, Cruz wrote that he hated, “jews, ni**ers, immigrants.” He talked about killing Mexicans, keeping black people in chains and cutting their necks.

As for gays, Cruz said, “Shoot them in the back of head.” White women drew Cruz’s hatred as well, specifically those in interracial relationships, whom he referred to repeatedly as traitors.  And, to make my larger point, there’s an Instagram picture with Cruz wearing a Make America Great Again hat. According to the ADL, the number of anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. grew by almost 60% in 2017, with incidents on college campuses nearly doubling from 108 in 2016 to 204 in 2017. Also, the FBI reported a 17% increase in hate crimes in 2017. None of our 2017 numbers included the 2018 deaths at Parkland, Tree of Life, Ky, or the Tallahassee women.

         In 2018, alone, the SPLC documented that, “at least 40 people in the U.S. and Canada were killed by those motivated by or attracted to far-right ideologies” of the alt-right.

Just last year, in my neighborhood, someone painted a swastika on an electrical box in front of a Jewish home. The incident plus photo went on-line on the “Next Door” website. It produced another story of a swastika being painted by kids on rocks surrounding a near-by pond. One of our neighbors posted a comment, opining that it was nothing to worry about; “they’re just kids.” And where do you think they got this idea from? Parents? Classmates? Web?

Our school systems, public and private, must do a better job of educating our children so that future generations do not fall prey to the same bigotry and hate that we’ve seen for far too long. On that exact point, TT launched Teaching Hard History, The American Slavery Project, which offers teachers a way in which the difficult issue of slavery can be presented to students. We characterize it this way: “A terrible legacy of slavery and white supremacy undeniably influences life in the United States today. It is present in the U.S. system of mass incarceration, in police violence against black citizens, and in white society’s acceptance of poverty and poor educational opportunities for people of color. “

Let me corrupt Shakespeare a bit by paraphrasing some famous lines from Macbeth:

[Trump] is but a walking shadow, a poor player                      that struts and frets his hour upon the stage.                          And then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an                    idiot, full of sound and fury, SIGNIFYING                                    NOTHING!

I wish I believed all of that. It’s the “heard no more” and “signifying nothing”parts of which I’m most skeptical.

         But, on a more positive note, what the past several years have reinvigorated in me is the sense of identity and concern within the Jewish community.

         I’ve seen it all over the country, and it’s reaffirmed for me how important that is. Jews in particular can relate to the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim rhetoric that we have listened to for the last four years, in ways that are unique. We have a history that makes us appreciate that this isn’t new.

         It’s happened before. We saw it in the pre-WWII “America First” rhetoric of the anti-Semites like Charles Lindberg, and many others. The theme then and now was “Eugenics;” that Jews were inherently unfit for America. It’s that kind of thinking that got the St.Louis, which was filled with Jewish refugees, turned around from and sent back to Europe where many eventually died in concentration camps.

         So, what can we do to mitigate the hate and rebuild the “inner soul” of our country? It’s all about community. Speak up in the community. Work in the community. When you hear attacks on immigrants, LGBTQ individuals, American Muslims, racial and religious minorities, whoever the “others” may be, say something. Don’t let it go unanswered. Make sure that, in the future, the “inner soul” of our people bends toward truth, compassion, and justice.

In 2017, Temple de Hirsch Sinai, a synagogue in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, was marked with graffiti that read, “Holocau$t i$ fake hi$tory!”

         It was painted in large letters on a wall inside a meditational area on the temple grounds. Although a neighbor was so distraught by what he saw, he covered the graffiti with a sheet on which he wrote, “Love Wins,” the Rabbi, Daniel Weiner, took it down, saying,

“It was a very sweet gesture and touching, but we took [the sheet] down. I think it’s extremely important that people see this.”

After ramping up security, Rabbi Weiner added, “And as we take all of these precautions, we are also adamant in our conviction that we will not allow the toxicity of intolerance and a growing climate of hate to define who we are, how we live, and what our nation can be. [ ] The majority of us needs to push back against that and convey that America is still America … there’s no place for hate or tolerance of toxic expression.

         The week after the attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue, the Jewish Federation of Central Alabama hosted a community event in Montgomery. Participants included Jews, Christians, Unitarians, Muslims, and just plain unaffiliated citizens. One of the most important themes was that “hope” is not enough. We must act!

W. Churchill said this, “Life is fraught with opportunities to keep your mouth shut,” which leads us to one of Dr. King’s most important quotes, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” In Nov. 2019, a 17-year-old Syrian refugee was beaten on a San Diego trolley for speaking Arabic. “It wasn’t just what happened that made me mad and made me sad. It was the silence of others. Why didn’t they help me? Why [ ] did [they do] nothing while I was being beaten?”

         King also said this: “If you can’t fly, then run. If you can’t run, then walk. If you can’t walk, then crawl. But, whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward.” Our slogan at the SPLC is: THE MARCH CONTINUES!

         If I can quote Winston Churchill once again, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing once they’ve exhausted every other possibility.”

I end here with a quote which I believe is very important in this era of Trump, Pence, Miller, Pompeo, Barr, anti-Muslim immigration restrictions, DACA repeal, general xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia misogyny, you name it.

“America has never been united by blood or birth or soil. We are bound by ideals that move us beyond our backgrounds, lift us above our interests and teach us what it means to be citizens. Every child must be taught these principles. Every citizen must uphold them. And every immigrant, by embracing these ideals, makes our country more, not less, American. We all came here for a reason.  Juntos podemos. Together, we can. Make America not just wealthy, but generous and just.” (2001 Inaugural Address & Speech to Congress of GWB).