POWER “HAVES” and POWER “HAVE-NOTS” TWO-CLASS SOCIETIES

History has shown that all societies in all places at all times were and are comprised of two classes with vastly different amounts of power to influence how the immediate society and the outside world and its peoples will conduct themselves; one class with enormous power, the Power Elite, and the other, with miniscule power, the Clueless Class – whatever their rank or position or source or amount of income, whose members are essentially powerless except for the power they can exert within their particular social, economic, cultural, or religious milieus.

Odd as it may appear, the two classes are not and have never been in conflict with each other but rather are in a total symbiotic relationship. As with most such relationships, the ones who produce the honey are not the beneficiaries of that production. For their benefit, one of the great canards promoted by the Power Elites is that individuals belong to several substantially different economic classes within the societal structure of their nation when in fact only two real classes exist; the Power Elites and all others.

Those nations that have participatory governmental systems - as when people vote for other people to represent their wishes and govern them - are most often comprised of people educated/indoctrinated to believe that they belong to classes and groupings of people in some form of hierarchy that vote their interests and beliefs and have impact on the future events in their lives. The descriptions of “Middle Class” and “Lower Class” and “Upper Class” and “Poor Class” and “Have-Nots” and “Street People” intentionally pit segments of the population against other segments of the population by dividing the people into those who hold certain types of jobs and have a sum of disposable income against those who hold other types of jobs and different amounts of disposable income.

Religious Orders and churches of various belief systems assist the Power Elites by adumbrating the differences between the Classes, i.e., “We are all God’s children, made in His image” plus, “You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.” Castes, guilds, Service Clubs, political parties, local power elites (the banker, the factory owner, and the like,) generally belong to opposing political parties they believe best represent their interests. In ALL societies of any political, social, geographical, and economic make-up, there exist two classes – and only two classes; the Power Elite and every other human being in that society. If you belong to the Power Elite, you know it. If you do not belong, you may not know it but are probably a member of the Clueless Class and by historical practice, help the Power Elite retain its power.

HISTORY - TRUTH OR FICTION - A BIT OF BOTH

I believe that history, the stories passed down from generation to generation, have the underlying purpose of enhancing the image and position of the creators of that history. That does not mean necessarily that those who write the histories are culpable. Those who control the printing presses, the purchasers of school history books and those who control the dissemination of the information that becomes the generally accepted version of past events, are part of Power Elite political, information, and educational establishments. When enough time passes between the present and past events so that the information as a tool becomes useless to the current Power Elites, historical truth, or as much of it as can be obtained, comes out. At minimum, a generation must pass. Generally, a half century and often more must pass before those who managed to save the actual shards of the broken vessels of truth (or their heirs or protégés) are allowed to present those truthful elements of historical events intentionally hidden for nefarious purposes. Analogous situations of manipulating thinking are more readily shown by the connotative use of language to imprison ideas inimical to the Power Elites. The words, liberal, socialist, commie, right-wing, “support our troops,” atheist, and the like, are reasonable examples of how the plebes are educated and language used to create mind-sets just as “current” history is used for that purpose. In many other ways, the education of populations must produce pliable populations capable of being manipulated for the narrowly common good of the Power Elites.

POLEMICS VS. HISTORY

Espousing a point of view of a historical event would appear to be a departure of belief in history as the word of god. Historians believe in the truth of the written word as substantiated by the factual evidence presented by the writing historian.

The flaws are many in the theory of practical history. The naiveté of history readers can be counted on, relied on, to continue the belief in the historical record of an event or period of time. Practical history presumes the existence of a bundle of facts laid out for the reader in sequence to give understanding and meaning to those past events. Another obvious flaw lies in the interest in the historian’s point of view of the events about which he or she writes. A third flaw lies in the distance of time or the magnitude of the event that prevents a true and accurate picture from being drawn for the present-day localized reader of past events. The winner or loser in the event being written of obviously presents problems of veracity or problems of acceptance of material as reliably factual or simply the facts made up by the winner/writer of the history. Skin color, ethnic or religious background, language, geographic location, localized or personal experience and knowledge, and so on, all affect the veracity of the written words of “history.” Thus history becomes his story.

If it is indeed his story, then history becomes a polemic for a point of view. It is my contention that ALL history is a polemic..

IRAQ IS TEACHING HISTORY - PART TWO

The conflict in Iraq will continue until the Power Elites of the United States and its associate Power Elites that were involved in the decision to enter Iraq initially and subsequently, are assured that the oil wealth in the ground will inure to their control.

For this control to be assured requires a partner Iraqi government and cessation of substantially all the internecine and inter-mural conflicts that prevent that control from being exercised. That government will be established when the the larger Power Elites agree on the division of the assets being fought over and when smaller Power Elites are assured of some portion of the spoils of war. To date, (February 2008) the dancing and romancing and killing prohibit the establishment of a less than shakey coalition government. However, there are signs of increased cooperation growing on the willingness of the more arrogant and more powerful to give up larger than anticipated shares of "their" wealth just to put out the large number of brush fires in the country.

What continues unabated are the terror activities of the loony Islaamic fundamentalist fringes for whom control of wealth is a side issue. For them, control of the future is more important. Their evaluation of Power has more to do with control of populations than of material assets. It is not for lack of appreciation of the value of Iraq's assets. It lies in their belief that by controlling the population, they will indeed control the oil of the country. Stabilization of the conflict through the establishment of "normal" government functioning, is anathema to the fundamentalist leadership. (By the way, my use of the word "looney" derives from my strong belief that sanity lies in valuing human life over self and population immolation for the cause; any cause except self defense.)

The conflict will end for sure. The question is, "When will it end?" I have no yardstick by which to measure the future and provide an answer. What I do know is that Power Elites of all kinds and sizes will continue to seek ways to increase and protect their power and that "have-nots" will continue to try to reverse their fortunes.

IRAQ IS TEACHING HISTORY

The initiation of the war in Iraq by United States Power Elites and the years of conflict since its inception provide a perfect history lesson.

The war is based on the drive by oil interests and armament manufacturers to increase their wealth. Add the financial vultures, the construction outfits, the "contractors" of all kinds, to that immoral cadre and you see them all licking their bloody chops in Iraq.There is literally no other sane explanation for the invasion and subsequent actions by the United States government and the forces that drive that government.

The constellation, or better put, conglomeration of competing entities could never have been anticipated by the initiators of the conflict. Three major ethnic goupings; the Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds were unleashed to vent old furies on each other. The religious underpinnings of these three groups splintered into distinct groupings identified by charismatic religious leaders and not-so-charismatic Mullahs and Imams and fragmented further by their mosques' locations in the country. Fighting cadres are also made up by large and small geographic area loyalties. Tribal fealties and fealty to their sheiks, splintered the splinter groups into smaller splinters. And now add all the foreign lunatic Islaamic fundamentalist groups that put feet on the ground to fight for whatever piece or pieces of the pie they could obtain through force of terror. And finally, historical Power Elites who patriotically joined the homicide, religicide, and fraticide, to compete for their share of the wealth.

It must be made clear that the ones who fight and die, are NOT members of Power Elites. They are patriotic or religious or simple-minded puppets motivated by manipulators who use their bodies and their blood to acquire, protect, or maximize, their wealth.

By learning from the past, the more powerful the Power Elite was when it entered the fray, the more powerful it will be when it comes out of the fray. So, my prediction is that the United States and its minions and manipulators will come out with the lion's share of control over Iraqi oil - which is why the fighting goes on, why the ability and willingness to form a cohesive national government is non existent, and what the whole exercise is about anyway. Ask Dick Cheney.

POWER ELITES - THE DRIVING FORCE OF ALL CIVILIZATIONS - PRIMITIVE AND SOPHISTICATED

This is a particular way to look at history. By looking at major and lesser known historical events through the narrow lens of the Power Elites manipulation of people and resources to acquire, maximize, and protect their power, the reader might unfairly accuse me of being a conspiratorialist at worst, or at best, narrow minded or single minded. Yet history, the stories of what happened in the past, can only be understood fully by applying this diagnostic framework to those events that shaped nations and civilizations and brought them to where they are today. Furthermore, by application of this tool, today’s happenings can be more fully understood and tomorrow’s events predicted with greater accuracy. Perhaps the more desirable goal of being able to affect the world for the betterment of humankind’s lot can be inched forward in defiance of the goal of wealth and power accumulation by Power Elites. However, this caveat must be added; humanistic, educated, caring, self interest, will never acquire a modicum of power compared to the power accumulated by Power Elites. So inching forward against their depredations holds little hope for peace and tranquility for mankind. The only real hope for a safer and better future for the peoples of the world lies in the convergence of the interests of humankind and Power Elites. That will happen when the planet Earth is attacked by power Elites from outer space. Then the peoples of the earth will become equal unless, and get this, Earth's power Elites join outer space's Elites.

What is and who are the Power Elites? What are you talking about?

Power is control of assets. Assets can be natural resources, manufacturing capability, slaves, land, livestock, mines, railroads, newspapers and all media of communication, markets and money, and anything and everything that is the currency of wealth or produces wealth.

Elites are groups of wealthy people, families, old-boy networks, people and groups of people with guns, monarchs, sheiks, dictators, and any configuration of people who control large assets. Power Elites also control political institutions and systems in order to control their wealth, often behind opaque curtains.

Wealth acquisition and its corollary, power acquisition, unify the Power Elites of the world. Despite the logic that might lead to the belief that Power Elites are in competition, they generally cooperate for their greater good despite occasional conflicts over substantial mother lodes of immense profits. They come together very carefully in a variety of places and forums to share their views on how best to achieve the maximization of their power.

Is "FUTURE HISTORY" an oxymoronic phrase?

“Future History” is written by governments in the employ of power elites. Wait for the next explosion. But they know what's coming. This is an example of how future history is written in the U.S.

Toward the end of the 2007 United States congressional session, after twelve years of deliberation, a bill was passed by both houses of congress that enables fertilizer of the explosive kind to be manufactured without regulation by the government. Money controlled this dangerous legislation.

What caused a twelve year delay in Congress regulating sales of this explosive? Why did Congress “quietly” pass this legislation? The “Fertilizer bill” states the material is an “explosive.” Did Congress regulate sales of “fertilizer” or “explosive?” Why and how did the bill fall short of the strict law counter-terrorism and federal law enforcement people hoped for?

A knowledgeable experienced government consultant stated that “the bill really does not guaranty anything for the security of the citizens of the United States.” The bill has left “federal officials, outside experts and even some in Congress uncertain about exactly what” this bill is about. Do these words mean that the bill is meaningless if not worthless? Probably. Why did the “fertilizer/explosive” industry pay to support this bill? Did the industry support this garbage legislation BECAUSE it was meaningless and worthless? Is the 8 billion pounds of this material sold in the U.S. alone, a source of income for Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Mississippi, and other lawmakers who enabled this “meaningless and worthless” piece of legislation to endanger the citizenry of this country? (Mississippi is “one of the nation’s largest producers of ammonium nitrate.”)

What happened in Congress smells like fertilizer of the bull kind.

REMEMBER WHEN?

Hi Bob,

Haven't spoken in a long time. Hope you are well.

I read your description of life as it was for us as kids in The Bronx and remembered when I was ten. A thought passed through my head as I read of our past life. How fortunate we were to be born and brought up in America. Though most kids wherever they are born and go through childhood and remember their childhoods with delight, we were particularly blessed. We had clean water to drink and bathe in. We had warm beds on winter nights. We had parents who read to us and books to read for ourselves. We did not have to wait for our hunter or fishermen fathers to return with enough food to feed us - or with no luck on the hunt - to our ensuing hunger. We had doctors and dentists, teachers, and cops, we had candy stores and delis, we had clothing and shoes. And no matter how much money our parents earned or had, we thought we were rich, or at least we never thought we were poor.

But my thoughts turned to today and now. How many kids in how many countries live in fear, hunger, uncertainty, illness, thirst, cold? How many kids know to use a rifle rather than a pencil? How many smiling dressed up children wearing explosive belts pose in front of powerful smiling adults? How many kids learn to hate rather than to love?

So it's not only the modernization of the life in these passing years that I see; it's the degradation of the quality of life and the demeaning of the value of human life itself. It’s the world-wide spread of the disease of hatred and of "education" to destroy the "other." It's the spread of powerful weapons into the hands of children and childish powerful politicians and powerful ideologues and religious zealots, all intent on using those weapons to kill human beings to increase their power.

And for me, even more frightening, is that our country, the United States of America is among the nations LEADING THE WAY to hatred and intolerance. Our country is the major supplier of weapons to the world and is reinforcing the immorality of "Might makes Right." We have become the major bully of the world with our enormous wealth and power. The outcome has been in recent years and will continue to be the increasing death-rate of our kids. They will go from playing stickball in the streets of New York to dodging bullets in the streets of Baghdad. And they will be sent there and to other lands by men who benefit from the increase in the flow oil by the increase in the flow of blood under the pretense of spreading democracy.

So that's what your "Remember when?" did for me. It brought me full circle from now to then to now. Thanks a lot.

Nach

HILLARY ROOSEVELT

FDR never mentioned his opponents through four presidential campaigns. he won the nomination four times and he won the presidency four times. He only spoke about his ideas, about what he believed the country needed, about what he was going to bring to the country and what was needed for the American people.

He ignored his opponents. He never gave them the time of day nor the value or dignity of a moment of his time. He never responded to their attacks. Eleanor ran around the country telling the American people all the things FDR was going to do for them. She never mentioned his opponents by name either nor give them the dignity of a response to their attacks nor their claims of superiority. As far as the Roosevelts were concerned, there was no opposition.

So, Hillary - change your name. And do what the master did. And tell your husband to do for you what Eleanor did for Franklin.

$ MONEY $

In adulthood, and even earlier, I had little regard for money as a driving force of what I worked at. I needed money as does everyone in a money society. But I worked more from interest in what I was doing than for monetary remuneration. And early on I realized that the worth of a person, the value of a person, had nothing at all to do with the amount of money they had.

What does money mean to you? What can money do for you? What does lack of money mean to you and do to you? How do you feel about people with limitless amounts of money? Should all people have “enough” money? How much is “enough” money? How do you feel about strangers asking you for money? How do you feel about people you know asking you for money? How do you feel about giving money and how do you feel about lending money? Is there a connection between good people and money or bad people and money that changes the nature of the money? Do religion and charity necessarily have a money connection? How do you feel about good people without money? How do you feel about bad people without money? Now put the shoe on the other foot. How do you feel about good people with money and bad people with money? Do you think a lot about money? A recent article in Scientific American discussed a finding that people who think about money are less likely to help others – in any kind of situation. How about that!

I suppose I could fill pages with questions about money. I suppose I could fill even more pages with answers to questions about money. Now I’ll tell you about how I feel about money and what I think about money. The two are very different for most people, I believe. People seem to be able to tell you more what they think about money than what they feel about money. Is that understandable, or what? I suppose telling what one thinks about money is less revealing than talking about what one feels about money. No? Let’s see what I can dredge up from my mind about my thoughts and feelings about money.

I’ll spend some time on my early memories about money. I remember finding a penny in the street when I was about five years old. I was walking with my mother and became very excited at seeing this treasure lying in the Bronx gutter as we walked along. I picked it up and showed it to her and she smiled and told me I was now very wealthy. I felt very wealthy. I didn’t know we were money-poor, that there was a “depression” in the land in 1932. Even before that moment, I remember before I was five – probably four – and we were living in New Jersey. My mother bundled up my brother Chaim and my sister Helen and me and she gave them a nickel with instructions to go down to the corner candy-store and buy me a birthday present. I remember clearly that it was a nickel, and I remember thinking that it was a huge amount of money. Indeed, perhaps in those days it was a huge amount of money to spend on such a non-essential as a birthday present for a four-year-old. They picked out and bought a lead dirigible painted blue and gave it to me. I was a very happy child to have received such a munificent gift. I do not know or remember if Chaim and Helen were jealous of me or if Mom had given them money to buy something for themselves. The money and the gift made me feel very good. Is that what money is supposed to do? Make one feel very good? I suppose so.

The money fountain of my mother never dried up. Somehow, she always had just enough to handle the requirements of keeping her children from ever feeling “poor.” In addition, Chaim and I became early workers for money. He became a delivery-boy in a butcher shop when we moved to Rochambeau Avenue after several years of selling newspapers on his small route of neighbors and friends when we lived on Southern Boulevard. I was his employee in those first ventures. Then I took off on my own to become a shoe-shine boy with my friend Henry Hoffman. And in between, we poked our greased sticks down the subway grates when we spied a coin down in the darkness there – usually pennies or nickels. On rare occasions I’d pull up a quarter. What a candy binge we’d have then! Abie in the candy store would ask us seriously if we had stolen the money from our mother’s pocket-book. “No way!” We easily convinced him of our moral rectitude – especially with the grease from our sticks still covering the coins as evidence of our honesty. But Abie’s idea was a good one. I began stealing from my father’s pockets with regularity – when he was home on the Sabbath. These were formative years for my developing sense of money. I went on to develop all sorts of scams and even engaged in outright thievery of valuable objects from my Aunt Fay’s apartment down the block from where we lived. Fay is long dead but the mystery of the disappeared gold necklace remains a secret buried to this day in my blackened brain. I stole it by taking the key to her apartment from its hiding place in our apartment and ransacking her jewelry drawer. When I went to cash it in for money at a local jewelry store, the jeweler informed me in stentorian tones that I must get a letter from my mother or father before he could give me the enormous sum of ten dollars for the necklace. I left and returned the next day with letter in hand, written as neatly as a nine-year-old could write giving me permission to sell the piece, and signed with a flourish with my mother’s name, “Mom.” The jeweler weighed the chances that he would be caught but the temptation of getting a piece of jewelry worth a couple of hundred dollars for a mere ten dollars increased his belief that my mother was simply a near illiterate who desperately needed money and was too ashamed to come into his store herself. I’m sure that is the story he formulated in his mind to be prepared were he ever to be questioned by the police. I convinced my mother I had made enough money shining shoes to purchase the Gilbert chemistry set I brought home, having bought it with my ill-gotten gains. I was learning all about money.

I learned even more when I was taught to play dice with a couple of big guys who made me feel as big as they were by their compliments over my prowess at earning money by shining shoes. They were completely awestruck by the fortune I showed them I had earned that particular Sunday morning. I had about seventy-five cents. Well, if I was smart enough to earn that money, obviously I was smart enough to learn how to roll the dice and increase my stash by the amounts each of them had in hand – about thirty or forty cents each. And so we took our turns rolling the dice until – you guessed it, maybe. I wiped them out. It was then that I learned a very important lesson about money that I have carried with me through my life. They convinced me that we had been playing for fun. Not only that. They convinced me that I had to pay them for teaching me how to play. How did they do that, you may ask? They did it by standing up very tall next to me with their fists clenched and looks of fearsome determination on their faces and in their eyes, and visceral sounds of increasing anger in their voices. I willingly returned their money and willingly turned over to them my shoeshine earnings for that day.

The lesson I learned is that money and power go together.

I earned my first money, $2.00, from my literary endeavors when I was about eight by submitting this amazingly witty pun to a New York Daily News contest of those years; “The player was shackled on the forty yard line.” I must have been poisoned by that success.

The U.S. Government as Business Partner

The government spends billions of your dollars to assure airline safety.

The government spends as little as possible to assure your driving safety.

Why?

Why are the nation's roads in such terrible condition? It's good for so many businesses that motor vehicles are smashed up, messed up, destroyed. Think of the amount of money made by the businesses that build new cars and by replacing those cars and trucks, by repairing them, by re-painting them and replacing their broken parts, by making them look good again. Think of money made by the insurance companies and the medical industry. How much money is made on Pacheco Pass in California, the long-lived site of automotive destruction. Fire department budgets are enhanced by the need to rush to Pachico Pass. That's true for police departments. Ambulance companies and tow-truck companies love Pachico Pass. Why is there no Driver education program and no driver testing program - or at the very least - why are State programs not created equal? The reason? Because inexperienced untrained drivers smash up more vehicles than well trained drivers.

Why is Consumers Union doing the government's work in automotive safety testing? Because the government won't be helping its business partners by doing that, silly. It's not repairing the roads, developing country-wide road building standards, unified signage, break-away light-poles, non-skid roads over bridges and myriad other tasks that need to be performed by government to reduce and even eliminate automotive collisions.

Now be aware that we are talking about the vehicles and not the people in them, We need for the people to crash and drive another day. Safety for people is in high demand, People pay for cars and not the other way around. Safety belts, baby seats, and airbags, are OK. Front and rear radar systems that warn against a crash are not! Impact frame absorbtion is good. But so are blackened rear windows that prevent early warning of what's ahead of the vehicle ahead of you, are not! Eliminating dark windows means eliminating some crashing, don't you know? And who among you has ever received a citation for not signalling?

So how come the nation's commercial air fleet is in such amazingly good condition and pilots are trained and tested to the highest possible standards and aircraft mechanics the same? Because no one would fly if planes crashed, dummy!

UNDERSTANDING THE CONFLICT BETWEEN ISLAM AND JUDAISM

Two children meet. One is a Palestinian and the other, an Israeli. “Hi,” the Palestinian child says. “My name is Jihad. My name means, ‘Holy War.’” The Israeli child says, “Hi. My name is Shalom. My name means, ‘Peace.’” What is the larger meaning of this?

Two soldiers meet in combat. One is from Hezbollah – the “Army of God.” He carries a Kalashnikov and is wearing a black cloth around his head and a belt made of explosives so that if he is struck in the head, he has no protection, and if he is struck in the explosive belt, he will be blown to pieces along with anyone near him, fellow soldier or opponent or any non-combatant, preferably a Jew. When he dies in combat, he will become a martyr who will ascend to heaven and be greeted by seventy virgins who will treat him kindly and he will be carried to his grave by a mob chanting Allah’s greatness and “Death to the Jews.” The other is a soldier in the so-called Defense Army of Israel. He wears a full suit of modern Kevlar armor and a Kevlar encased helmet to protect him as much as possible from the impacts of bullets, grenades, and assorted shrapnel. He carries a variety of sophisticated weaponry. If he dies in combat, he will be carried to his grave in a plain wooden coffin, surrounded by sobbing family and friends, and fellow soldiers – if that is militarily possible. What do these differences show about the ethos of two armies?

To reach a minimal understanding of the conflict between Islam and the West demands some knowledge of history, politics, religion, economics, and geography. These subjects are standard requirements for analyzing historical events. In addition, the culture, the language and the mores of the populations contribute importantly to this kind of study. These factors create a spider-web of interconnected forces that determine how individuals and groups function in any society. The differences between those forces in the Arab world and the Western world explain why terrorism and “martyrdom,” two-class societies of sheikdoms and kingdoms, acceptance of low standards of living by masses of Muslims, and the easy inducement to violence, are the norms in today’s Arab world.

“We are all Hezbolla,” is today’s cry of the masses in most of the countries of the Moslem world. “We are all Palestinians,” was yesterday’s mob mantra. “Allahu Achbar,” (Allah is Great), is an always present chant that bodes ill for the non-Islamic world. Gamal Abdul Nasser’s Egypt sent its whipped up population through the streets of all its cities in June of 1967 screaming, “Death to the Jews,” only to suffer ignominious defeat and a major death toll themselves. The level of literacy and the education level in the Moslem world is low and narrow, confined in a major portion of the population to the Koran which by itself serves as the source of all knowledge and provides Mullahs and Imams with the enormous powers of teachers, judges, and highly respected leaders of the laity. And as the interpretations offered in the mosques is individualistic, so too are the denotative and connotative meanings of words and language. “If I say I shall do a thing, you must agree that it is already done.” Fickleness of thought and the ease and quickness of opinion changes is a manifestation of the knowledge and education level of the masses. “Yesterday we loved the Americans. Today we want them to go home,” is heard with frequency in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now in Lebanon. Islam swings between, “The Jews are our brothers” to, “Death to the Jews.” “Well why not? If it benefits us, we will say one thing and swear on the Koran that it is so. If it does not, we will claim with equal fervor that the thing is odious in our eyes.” Arabic lends itself to wondrous phraseology. Consider this description of a toady. “Twenty thousand British battleships could not pull his moustache from his master’s behind.” Cyrano de Begerac showed that the power of language is also the power of love. All national leaders and tyrants know that the power of language is the power of war.

The place of religion in the Moslem world is almost incomprehensible to religionists and lay people in the Western world. Even fundamentalist Christians must find Islamic fundamentalism anathema to belief in God without the overlay of morals and ethics of which Christianity has taken ownership. Mullahs are often dictatorial and they and their followers allow of no deviation from their religious and civil dictates. The Koran – or rather, those favored portions of the Koran chosen and interpreted by individual Mullahs, becomes immutable law. Even the idea of peace with the Jews, pro and con, can find the appropriate portions in the Koran. The Koran and fundamentalist preachers’ exploitation of the bloody passages and mandates in it are foundational to this period of conflict between Islam and the West. Conflicts also arise between Mullahs and their followers and other Mullahs and their adherents based on unique Koranic interpretations. In addition, the sects and shades of belief provide more deadly divisions. As the Iraq debacle has shown, Sunnis and Shiites often fight each other unless they have a common enemy against whom to draw their swords.

The conflict rests on the shoulders of the ethics and mores of the Arab/Muslim world and manifests itself in terrorism and the bloodshed of wars. This world is vastly different from the Western world. It is a world in which, as in ancient times, tribalism and shamanism hold powerful positions, where superstition and religion are indistinguishable in many minds. It is a world in which the value of human life takes second place to pride, customs, history, geography, religious belief and sectarianism. There exists a code or sensibility of honor very different from the denotative meaning of those words as used in the Western world. In the Arab world, “honor” is what any man says it is. It is a world that accepts slavery and the abasement of women as normal and proper. It is a world that accepts dismemberment and beheading as appropriate punishment for religious and civil crimes. It is a world where a religicized rock holds life and death in its location on a map. It is a world where unwritten law is changeable at will by despots of all stripes. It is a world where wealth endows the wealthy with disproportionate power over the non-wealthy. It is a world mired in primitivism and savagery when a man’s “honor” is offended or when “infidels” are the offenders or when religious sensibilities of any kind or dimension are impugned.

The oligarchs in the Arab world make common cause with the dominant religionists in their midst or with those most threatening to their survival. The support of the oligarchs enables the Mullahs to impose their will on adherents often by way of reward provided by their patrons. The Arab and Islamic nations are ruled by warlords, kings, or sheiks. Only Egypt has a dictator who rules by false-front elections. From the 1948 establishment of the State of Israel to this very day, the Arab oligarchs have pointed to the Jews as the source of all the ills that have befallen Arabs and Moslems throughout the world. And those countries close to Israel have attacked that tiny nation time and time again without managing to destroy it. If the oligarchs were ever to defeat Israel, they would then have to find another scapegoat to justify their continued luxurious state and their populations’ miserable existence.

Except for narrow segments of societies in the various Arab countries, the work ethic of the Arab world does not resemble that of the Western world. This is not a claim that all Arab workers are less hard-working than their counterparts in Western societies. Nor is this a claim that given the proper resources and motivation, that Arab workers could not be more productive than what their country’s economies show. However, low gross domestic product, low levels of economic activity, more primitive production facilities through the entire spectrum of their economies – with the exception of foreign-controlled oil production – have kept populations in all the Arab countries in an inferior economic condition. This window of economic activity reflects a broader picture of backwardness throughout the Arab world. However, those millions of people know through their television sets what amenities and luxuries they are missing. The prevailing belief is that it is the Jews and the existence of Israel that has prevented them from advancing and acquiring the goods and goodies of the modern Western world. It is not difficult to assume, therefore, an intense jealousy and some level of hatred for the Jews and the Jewish state exist in the minds and hearts of the people. Those feelings are easily exploited by willful and clever Arab leaders.

The educational systems in the Arab world have the primary of function of teaching the Koran, love of their nation’s rulers, and loyalty to existing regimes. In many instances, hatred of the West and of Israel is taught in equal measure. Saudi Arabia is the main supplier of text-books to the Arab countries. The anti-Jewish, anti-Israel material fed to millions of young minds has had a poisonous effect whose impact is seen in the development of terrorism and the on-going conflict between Israel and the surrounding Arab nations. Education to hatred and intolerance keeps the fire burning that is a part of the conflict in the Middle East.

Is there a way out of this situation? Perhaps. Separation of church and state is a prerequisite to peace. America led the way to this political course in the past. However, with the increased sway of fundamentalism in American politics, fundamentalism in the Moslem world will be much harder to remove from political structures. Secular public education is a requirement for a foundation for peace to be prepared. And other necessities to reduce the conflict are education to peaceful co-existence throughout the years of public education, raising the standard of living of the Arab masses through self-help mechanisms of loans and education, destruction of armaments held by non-government bodies and organizations, education to and implementation of modern societal functions such as government, civil law, business development, health-care systems and the like, building modern infrastructures of energy supply, water and sewage treatment, increased transportation capacity, public housing to replace shanty-towns and refugee camps. All of these enterprises will demand enormous infusions of capital with substantial monetary profit. But then, war and terror eradication demand enormous infusions of capital that gets blown into bits.

HOW TO BE A SUCCESSFUL ARMS MERCHANT

"The (stolen Cezanne, Degas, van Gogh and Monet worth $163.2 million) Zurich (Museum) works came from the collection of the late Emil George Buhrle, a German industrialist based in Switzerland who built his fortune selling arms to both Nazis and Allied forces during World War II." By Geraldine Baum of the Los Angeles Times

Cultured monsters moving in polite circles of smiling men and women, donate from their blood-profits so the hoi polloi may enjoy the fruits of their perfidy. The value of his donation was but a small portion of the profits reaped by Buhrle from the stream of blood that flowed from the veins of bodies torn apart by through his industry - with government approved arms purchased with tax money paid by the millions of families whose sons provided the bodies so that Buhrle and his business competitors could profit.

The important history lesson of the day is, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto others - but never do unto you."

IF I WERE A FUTURIST

The search for meaning in current events mandates an understanding of the forces at work that control whatever is controllable that triggers, manipulates, and creates the ever changing landscape of mankind’s history. Just as scientists search for natural forces that lead to earthquakes, floods, landslides and other such phenomena, so too, social scientists, historians, economists, political scientists, and philosophers, search for causation and meaning in the historical events that lead to beneficial change and to upheavals and disasters, whether caused by human good or evil intent, or by humans benignly or unknowingly setting in motion a train of events that spins out of control. The general search in nature and history is motivated ostensibly to understand events, in part to predict them, and in both contexts, to attempt to bring good or to mitigate the impact of disasters on the human condition. The specific goal of power holders in their search of history’s lessons is to contain forces at work to unseat them from their thrones.

Control of humongous historical forces demands humongous power. The creation, the accumulation, the aggrandizement and protection of such power, and the means by which it works its will on the world, is the focus of this book. From the outset, it appears that in every society, at all times in human history, power was a commodity always in demand and the more one had of it, the more one wanted of it. The drive to maximize power by individuals and cabals of individuals seems as prevalent in the psyche and as much a part of evolution as any other element in nature’s drive to assure “survival of the fittest.” And, “the fittest” means the most powerful. Through the ages, violent personalities became magnets to power elites, themselves violent in their drives to maximize power. Their violence, however, was and is now, rarely attributed to them. In their drives to acquire, retain, control, and maximize power, violence through surrogates is a tool well understood and well used by them.

Power, as used herein, is control over assets and lives. “Assets” means wealth of any kind; armies and armaments, cotton and cattle, ships and slaves, olives and oil, diamonds and diamond mines, and money, money, money. “Lives” means workers and soldiers, mothers and their wombs, children’s minds and mob mentalities, votes and vetoes, and the lives and deaths of any number of people – no matter if in the millions - at any time in any place. Slavery throughout history was and in some places today, is, a measure of power. Slavery means ownership of lives in “fee simple absolute,” a term usually applied to an estate in land limited absolutely to a person and his or her heirs and assigns forever and without limitation or condition. Slaves and control of lives translates to “wealth” and the more one has of wealth, the more powerful one is. Until the relatively modern development of substitutes for muscle power by machine power, slaves were an integral component of economic systems. Control over masses of humans with chains and whips has been replaced by AK 47’s and UZI’s, by wages and legal systems, by indoctrination through patriotism and religion, and often by intolerance and hatred of “others.” The doled out benefits by the powerful of the day often buy allegiance of the masses.

Maximizing power was, and is, the driving force of civilization. Power in this context came into being parallel to the time when assets could be accumulated and exchanged for land, the natural resources of the earth, air, and water, goods created and generated by labor expended on natural resources, and services. The concept of “maximizing power” explains the history of mankind as different geographical areas around the globe moved from the nomadic hunter-gatherer stage of human development to a more predictable and controllable settled existence. Sedentary life styles became common in towns and villages and then cities. Only with the development of planned agriculture and animal husbandry, excess production and storage capability made wealth accumulation possible. That in turn enabled the exchange of goods and services for other desirable assets. If the exchange was not fair or freely given, the powerful took by power – through legal chicanery, with lobbyists, by taxation and poll taxes, by imprisonment, by force, or by killing. Specialization and separation into castes, guilds, priesthoods, landholders, warriors, serfs, and myriad creators and producers in any layered landed society, enabled the accumulation of power, enabled control over the powerless by the powerful, enabled the establishment of tribes, fiefdoms, nations and nation states. Identifying the nature and methodologies of those driving forces of civilization at work is necessary to understand how power is obtained, maximized, or lost, and how societies and the mechanics of life were changed as a result of power-aggrandizing conflicts that erupted and were mollified.

Power began its career rooted in hunger, greed, brute strength and savage cunning, fraud and fakery. Early power creators and their minions sought benefit in stratified societies with themselves on top of the heap. The accumulation of power worked to the benefit of the wielders of power – the “stronger” - to the detriment of those subject to control by the wielders of power – the “weaker.” Not much has changed over the years. Might makes Right. The truism continues to this day. Power elites are strongly hereditary. Families, title-holders, old school ties and old-boy networks, military association, clubs and social registers, old wealth and extreme wealth, all produce members of the elite. The power elite is made up of people who grow into their roles, have doors opened for them, are aware of their power and know how, when, where and with whom to enjoy it and use it. Once in the club, they know it and do not easily allow new people into it.

Control of education systems, communications systems, and political systems, are the main ways that power stays in power. With the elite’s connivance, the overt wielders of power in today’s world work diligently to persuade populations that educated self interest is not beneficial but rather detrimental to themselves, their own interests, and to the societies in which they live.

Power functions like mercury in its liquid form. When relatively small globules of mercury stand alone on a flat level surface, their cohesive nature enables them to retain their shapes. However, when the globule becomes too big, it tends to split into two smaller globules. Or when another globule comes too close, the two globules may join together. Without carrying this analogy too far, power elites rely on each other to reinforce their power within the structures peculiar to that power elite except when one elite attempts to aggrandize its power by taking over the structure of another. As an example, religious power structures within national power structures rely on support from each other. Rarely will a national power structure attempt to subvert or overthrow the existing religious support structure. However, when a conflict arises between the two, as happened in the reign of Henry V in England, the king replaced the religious structure with one more to his liking. His power elite overcame the power hierarchy of England’s Roman Catholic Church. More common conflicts erupt between similar power structures than dissimilar ones. In a bland form, political parties in democratic countries vie for favor from an electorate. However, underpinning for both or all such parties flows from the economic power structures within those countries – often with both sides calling on God for support and claiming God as their supporter – and with both sides calling on all their churches to support their righteous paths. Yet religions do not equate their moralist cries against abortion and stem cell research with a need to cry out against the immorality of war or the monstrous money-producing armaments industries that foment wars to assure continued profits. Such religious moral teaching is inimical to the needs of their power elite back offices.

Communist China, in its march toward a capitalist economy in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, has fought vigorously against the establishment of religions in that country. The leadership has recognized that religion, rather than being the opiate of the people as Karl Marx predicated, was an energizer of the people to create and support a competing power structure. Foundational elements of power structures include abhorrence to power sharing. Power, in all its shapes, sizes, and manifestations, jealously guards what it has and works assiduously to expand its borders. In the news of August 7, 2004, lower level officials of the government in some agricultural areas are simply taking away land from peasants for use by the state and imprisoning or shooting protestors. So much for the ideals of communism in what is essentially a fascist, by definition, Chinese state.

A paradigm of the tenet that religion energizes people to create competing power structures, can be derived from the war being conducted primarily by the United States in Iraq. After the initial invasion, all of the power structures of the country – tribal, religious, geographical, ethnic, economic, political – each with their adherents and their history, are now (2004) engaged in a massive power dance with and against each other and with the connivance, assistance, or goals of the mighty power of the United States, to retain, gain, or return to power. With the definition of power clearly in mind, the control over the assets, the goods and services of people, and this includes territorial control, one can understand the indoctrination by Imam’s of the various sects of relatively primitive and under-educated people to give their lives to martyrdom for the power elites’ causes. Land and buildings have been religicized by the Imams. Opposing sects have been demonized by Imams of different sects. The call has become common-place to cleanse the “holy” land of demons, devils, and foreigners, that brings forth the suicide zealots, the knife-wielding beheaders and Kalachnikov-wielding street fighters to commit religicide. This is immoral control by religious power over the minds of masses converted to the service of power elites.

The nature of power elites is varied. The power elite of New Orleans is a fascinating study of intertwining families, political dynasties, geographic heavyweight chunks, historical impediments, and combinations of local small power elites that magnify their power by cooperating with other local small power elites. New York City presents as complex a structure of a totally different nature. Analogies of the lone tree, the wild forest, the cultivated rows of Christmas trees planted yearly for November harvest, the giant redwoods of California, and the yucca trees of desert prominence, all have their hierarchies, their friends and enemies, their turf, and their history as they wield their power. This analogy may help explain the function of power entities. Using trees as an example, when a tree stands alone, it derives nourishment from the surrounding soil, provides shade, fruit, and soil replenishment to the surrounding ambiance, and grows old, fat, gnarled, and widespread over its domain. When other trees/power entities are in the neighborhood, they compete for nourishment, sunlight, and the very air itself, and in that struggle grow tall and lean, and grow faster than the stand-alones of the forest. The struggle leads to an early death for the weaker trees. The forest is not always a live-and-let-live environment. It can be cut-throat in the extreme. Kingdoms isolated by geography become old and fat, dynasties may suffer small scale power squabbles, but the powerful old king or emperor sits on his throne and is replaced by his designated heirs into perpetuity – it would seem to contemporaries. And then, a foreign power interrupts what seems like the natural order of things. Newness and change infect the power holders. Power elites chosen by god suffer transformation and are overthrown, guillotined, exterminated by disease or by technology, or simply by the superior force of a superior invading power elite.

The friends and associates of power elites change as they grow – out of everyone’s need to grow their power over their world. In an agrarian society, a successful farmer becomes a strong friend of the local banker, the mayor of the town, the business members of Rotary International and other so-called “service” clubs. His wife comes off the front porch of her early struggling years and joins the Ladies Auxiliaries, the tea clubs, and they both become golfers and members of the country club. In a capitalist society, a small business establishment grows into a mighty conglomerate and then into a multi-national company. In the initial stages, the entrepreneur who has discovered a process or product that fills a broad need, manufactures and grows and provides for that need while employing workers who in turn grow the economies of their particular locations. This is a generally positive evolution whose major negative may be the exploitation of employees whose share of the growing profit stream that results from their efforts is disproportionately small. That company exerts power commensurate to its size – first within the confines of the walls of the business, then within the town or locality, then within the county or State, and finally, within the country, and then internationally. All this while, the nature of the power changes from simple limited monetary control in a small geographic area, to political and economic control over larger populations and political forces that affect the lives of ever larger numbers of people. The friends and associates of the founding entrepreneur and his upper echelon employees and Board members tend to be similar in social, political, economic, and philosophical views and functions. They all need each other and support each other and keep tabs on each other. They may join forces when they deem it appropriate or cut each others’ throats when they deem it appropriate. Power aggrandizement is the determinant of what and when such changes are appropriate. Power elites are like chameleons. They freeze into position to blend in and disappear to an aggressor’s eye or they change their coloration from true blue to red, white, and blue, to green, or Nazi grey to protect their lives. They will adopt the dominant religion of the environment and wave the flag of their environment, no matter the change in national loyalty so long as they prosper and grow. They will go to war or sue for peace if they believe that move will enhance or protect their power no matter what other forces or isms are at work. They give up when they have lost the battle and then join the victor to grow again. And to refer to Karl Marx, it is important to understand the dynamics controlling these changes; that every power configuration contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction.

Looking back, it is somewhat possible to see the future. The undulating history of conflict between materialist driven power elites and religiously driven power elites appears to be a human syndrome. And just as materialists use the tools of religion in their strategic and tactical planning, religionists will use the tools of materialism. The great equalizer in the future battles of the worlds will be weapons of mass destruction. Iran in 2004 seems to be in the forefront of melding fundamental religious power with the latest nuclear weapon technology. Will morality and ethics sway these battles? Will mutual assured destruction hold sway? Will martyrdom be so attractive to religionists as to become their secret weapon? Will science in the hands of the materialists give them the edge to survive?

Terrorism as a means of acquiring power seeks to achieve maximum impact on the affairs of society using minimum, narrowly focused destructive power. With murderous attacks on populations and institutions, terror-based power elites appear to believe they can effect major change in the way the world is run. The sad truth is that such attacks only benefit and strengthen existing power elites by providing cover for their own depredations on society’s resources. It is reasonable to assume that power elites support terror to accomplish just that. This kind of pact with the devil was made by the ruling family in Saudi Arabia to hold them safe and harmless from the extremism of Wahabism. However many decades this kept the family safe, the respite could have been predicted to come to an end with attempts to replace or destroy the power structure of that kingdom’s elites. Terrorism against the State of Israel, supported and condoned by ruling oligarchs, has kept the power elites of the twenty-two countries in the Arab world sitting on their thrones by inhibiting competing home-grown power elites from gaining traction through popular support. And, however simplistic it may appear, support for terror against that small nation garnered and continues to garner support among all but a few secure countries at the United Nations General Assembly – believably for the same underlying reason; stability at home, and of course, abroad in the Arab world through oil production stability. The cost of terrorism to the existing power elites is meaningless simply because any destruction, human and institutional, is profitable. The danger to existing elites lies in the potential loss or diminution of power. When terror organizations figure out how to take over power elites, as Hitler and his cadres did in Germany and Stalin and his supporters did in Russia, then the elites will maneuver to join them or embrace them and enter into profitable partnerships with them until the next seismic event occurs. Iran today, in control of religious power elites, is not sharing their goodies with outside power elites any more than Kim Il Sung of Korea is sharing his power cookies. Therefore, they have been ostracized and branded as part of the “Axis of Evil.” That portends poorly for the elites in those countries and explains political decisions taken by outside forces whenever exchanges occur with those two “pariahs” who don’t want to share. If this sounds like school-yard squabbling, it is. But it is high stakes squabbling and it often leads to heavy gunfire and loss of life and, more to the point, a shift in power.

The outstanding “pariah” entity through the ages is the Jewish People. The Jews and Jewish power elites have never wanted to share their power. Indeed, if Jews are true to their religion and to their identity, it would seem they cannot share power. This “stiff-necked” people has been used and abused by power elites from their earliest identifiable manifestation as believers in “One God.” This identification set them apart and at odds with every other tribe, kingdom, oligarchy, dynasty, political and economic grouping in existence at their date of birth on Mount Moriah and continuously and subsequently into modern times. Being “separate” became part of their core identity. The Ten Commandments, the “Laws of God,” handed down by their God on Mount Sinai made murderers, adulterers, thieves, and immoral creatures out of all the then existing rulers and their power elites. Is it any wonder they were delegated to be hated and reviled by every people in every place they sojourned. If they were “right,” about one God and the morality of the commandments, then everyone else was wrong. More important, if their God was all-powerful, what happens to the power of the power elites. As is the nature of power elites, they work at absorbing power wherever and however it exists. The creation of other monotheistic religions, Christianity and Islam being the most successful, and the isolation of the Jews from all other power elites was the counter-attack. The Jews became the piñata of the world, being struck, pierced, and after raining intellectual, scientific, medical, artistic, and materialist goodies of many varieties down on ungrateful masses of people, ripped apart and destroyed. Power elites and their front rulers offered the Jews the choice of assimilation, expulsion, or death. The attractiveness of assimilation to the upper classes of the Jews, the power elites of the Jews, often believing and hoping their status would be improved by joining the dominant culture as much as they were allowed, led to significant cleavages among the Jews. Strong religionists became the torch bearers that maintained the group’s identity over millennia as richer more connected brethren divorced themselves from Judaism and its traditionalism and age-old ritual observances. So, while the Jews were a landless powerless identifiable scapegoat group, at the same time, the Jews were and are fully appreciated by the power elites for the benefits that their scapegoat status brings those ruling entities. Every misery known to mankind is attributed to the Jews by power elites to deflect the pain and outrage of oppressed and poor populations in even the most affluent and democratic countries regardless of whether a Jewish population even exists in that country. The Bible as history and subsequent reasonably verifiable accounts provide sufficient documentation to support the conclusion that the Jews have been subjected to the vilest forms of bestiality for the millennia of their existence because of their refusal to subjugate themselves to the power elites in the communities in which they lived and because they are readily identifiable. In the year 2004, the nations of the world appear about to embark on yet another monstrous anti-Semitic crusade against the State of Israel to create once again the landless uprooted indefensible Jewish condition that allows persecution and scapegoatism to rear its ugly head. While genocide of millions of blacks takes place in Africa, the 150 nations of the world led by Arab oligarchies condemn Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, for building a fence against terrorism to protect its population.

Power elites in democratic societies must function in surreptitious ways. A subset of this maxim is that when autocratic societies evolve or revolutionize into democratic societies, the elites take care to protect their power without appearing to be anti-democratic. Protective coloration, found in the animal world to provide cover for predators as well as victims, enables fascistic functioning to appear democratic. Hitler was voted into office.

It may appear odd and even antithetical, that power elites function at the highest levels of government in democracies. However, the very first democracy was founded by power elites. The United States was established by the new power elites of colonial America to replace those centuries-old elites of England. The wealthy colonists believed they could safeguard their status and impose their control over the territory and treasure of America. Those huge assets merited revolution and overthrow of the royal system of governance. A new untried system of governance was established by the power elites whereby the owners of property could exert their collective will over the wealth of the united colonies. The unique nature of this new system was that it enabled all free men to participate in governing the country. That freedom was an outgrowth of the suspicious nature of the Founders and their concern that the variety and number of new power elites extant in the late 1700’s somehow balance themselves so as not to enable one or a grouping of any of them, to wrest power from the others. Thus were born political parties, a new concept that allowed competing interests to present their interests to the voting public, to compete for power. Thus, “Democracy.” George Washington was concerned about how power was to be controlled by the people. He thought that political parties were “potent engines by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the Power of the People, and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.” Washington’s concerns were justified by the reality of the system. President Dwight. D. Eisenhower, chosen by the elite of his day, warned the American people of the dangerous power of “The Military-Industrial Complex.” It is reasonable to assume that he was removed from his pedestal by that same cabal and placed in a grey area of history books.


Looking forward without reference to past events – which is patently impossible but worthy of contemplation - one can conjure up a future completely different from what we see around us today. Futurists can project visions that appear to have no reference points in the present. Even predicting human evolution through the thousands of years of mutations creating the fittest forms to survive the depredations of time, can be an exercise worthy of effort regardless of believability.

If I were a futurist, I would predict the continued existence of viruses, cockroaches and power elites surrounded by a grey human existence.


Copyright by Norman/Nachum Meyers 2004

INTERNATIONAL “ORDER”

It used to be, “You stay out of my business and I’ll stay out of yours.”

By agreement, the nations of the world have set up strong high opaque insulated fences between them that allow their rulers and the power elites that control them to exercise their power unmolested by any other nation’s intervention. The fences consist of the laws or absence of laws of each nation and between and among nations. The fences, also known as borders, have developed and are maintained by a variety of agreements, treaties, pacts, and rules of behavior between individual nations and communities of nations and by international agreements that delineate acceptable and unacceptable means and methods of intercourse among them.

The key to understanding these webs of agreements lies in examining the needs of power elites to protect their positions. The key to understanding when and why the agreements are broken lies in examining the desires of power elites to enhance their power or to protect their power from encroachment by powers outside the national borders.

Because of the variety of forms of internal governance among the nations of the world, a set of generally accepted conventions has been established and developed, and for the most part also observed, over centuries that allow for brutal dictatorships to live comfortably side by side with the most quiescent of democratic nations. The prime example is Switzerland that has in the past had Hitler’s Nazi Germany on one of its borders and Mussolini’s Fascist Italy on another, with hedonistic France on the third border and horrendous wars and holocausts exploding all around it. By international agreement, Switzerland was “neutral.” The Swiss, in peace, could milk their cows and make their cheese and chocolate, manufacture fine watches, and sell their products to all comers. This is called, “International Order.”

Other events took place by international agreement at Switzerland’s borders that were less bucolic. Turning over to the Nazis of Jewish refugees constituted abiding by such an agreement by the “neutral” Swiss. Serving as Nazi Germany’s money launderer also constituted abiding by international agreements, thus enabling that murderous regime access to needed supplies for its war machine that were not available for purchase with Reich Marks.

This cozy international arrangement is in process of Darwinian mutation. Brutality and savagery are returning to an earlier mode. Internal factions within nations are rising to power, driven by religious sectarianism, by minority ethnicities within nations rather than nationalism, by local warlord competition for control of resources valuable on world markets, and by uncontrolled political dissension within weak national structures, are changing the nature of power elites and as a result, the nature of “international order.”

A reasonable assumption can be made that existing power elites will not easily relinquish their power. Multi-national oil companies will not allow their wealth to be "stolen" by the people in whose lands they perform their theft of natural resources by agreements with local strongmen who benefit themselves from such rape. We should see ever greater exercise of savagery and brutality to regain fiefdoms. But, mutation is in the offing.

EDUCATE TODAY FOR TOMORROW’S WORLD

They wore black hoods and waved Kalashnikovs. They jumped walls and stormed houses. They pulled a man from a car and held a pistol to his neck. They learn to kidnap and kill. They question and execute hostages, plant bombs, and fire sniper rifles. They are small and skinny. Their pre-pubescent voices break as they screech their training mantra, “Fight them and God will torture them through your hands.”

They are the new generation of mujahedeen, holy warriors. They are fighters and leaders of tomorrow’s world. Except the ones who blew themselves up in suicide attacks.

(Thank you for this info, Ned Parker of the L.A. Times.)

Should we show these videos in our country’s classrooms now to prepare our youngsters, to educate them, for tomorrow’s world?

WHEN THE WEALTHY SHOP AT WALMART

How they walk, talk, look, choose, pay.

How elegantly dressed, perfumed, and bejewelled.

What they plan to tell spouses, friends, employees.

How they point in amazement.

What they buy.

A bag of apples to share and never eat because of their false teeth.

How they push their near-empty carts slowly and with glee.

They are so pleased, so impressed to see poorly dressed people buying food.

Huge piles of food in their carts, those poor people.

And the languages spoken. Oh my! How foreign sounding.

How they describe their experiences.

“It was so, so, so democratic!”

Hillary

Hillary will win. If you want to go with a winner, go with Hillary.

THE HISTORY OF RELIGION

THE HISTORY OF RELIGION
Betrayal of Belief

Religion is the edifice built upon people’s need to believe in a higher power and their need to explain the inexplicable and provide answers to the unknowable. It is the institutionalized system that incorporates people’s attitudes, beliefs, and practices generated for that deep purpose and exploited by charlatans for their aggrandizement. True believers of stature and honest belief preach to the masses from the front of the stage while the real action is taking place behind the drawn curtains of religious edifices; acquisition of wealth and power.

At the time about thirteen thousand years ago that some human-inhabited geographic areas began the move from hunter-gatherer societies to communities of herders and farmers, religion came into existence. Prior to the establishment of permanent habitation, there are no signs of religious structures or systems of worship. The single outstanding difference between migratory and sedentary societies is the accumulation of wealth through surplus production of agricultural products and the good, services, and habitation needs of people in those societies. Surplus led to barter and to the exchange of goods for services and the establishment of specialized craftsmanship, to the accumulation of wealth and its byproduct, power, and the byproduct of both, stratification of societies with richer and poorer, stronger and weaker.

It is reasonable to assume and there is some anthropological evidence that prior to the establishment of religion, people believed in “higher” and supernatural powers. The indiscriminate equation of the laws of nature and the universe with the existence of superhuman powers probably arose in human cognition with the growth in awareness of the immensity and vastness of natural forces and the recognition of human inability to control or affect those forces. Thus began man’s belief in gods that manipulated natural forces. However, primitive clans, families, individuals, and tribes, were busy trying to feed themselves rather than allocating time and material to the worship of superior powers. Perhaps early man prayed or danced for rain or successful hunting without religious leaders, houses of worship, and sacramental equipment. Stories were told and re-told through generations of events or people that in some way influenced the forces of nature. The skeleton of belief embedded in religion was erected as the stories spread from individuals through families, then tribes and clans, and into structured societies. Belief was the need and religion was the ready answer.

Early statues and objects thought to be conceptualizations of powerful gods have been unearthed with little more than their existence as evidence of modern man’s belief in higher powers. Burial grounds were non-existent in early migratory periods, so even prayer to an especially powerful human predecessor was improbable. But the idea of being able to influence or propitiate those powers through prayer, gifts, and sacrifice contributed to the birth of religions and their parasitic institutions. Religions and the formalities attached to their practice were created and exploited by those who saw power and a profit in them, as is generally the case with so many human inventions. The absence of the shards of religion throughout the million years of humankind’s existence prior to the revolution that took place when animal and land husbandry began to show a profit provides some evidence of when religion reared its head.

The strongest nail in the creation of religious edifices was the invention of writing; writing based on an alphabet that came into use approximately three and a half thousand years ago. The rules and regulations could be spread out among the populations and pointed to by religionists as having emanated from god. The bible as the word of God. How convenient.

Learning to Do It Right from History

Naturally, the common people don't want war but, after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy and it is alwaysa simple matter to drag the people along. Whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a parliament or a Communist dictatorship, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for a lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.

Hermann Goering, 1893-1946, fieldmarshal, German Army, founder of theGestapo, President of the Reichstag,Nazi parliament, and convicted warcriminal. Speech, 1934.

The Present Age of Savagery

Thomas Friedman’s “flat earth” description and his discourse on globalization describe the enormous power the internet and computers have given individuals. Fareed Zakaria’s piece in Newsweek of January 14th, 2008, ‘What People Will Die For,” describes the enormous killing power individuals have acquired in recent times.

The unifying element of this awareness and thinking is that people with little education, low or even non-existent levels of humaneness and “civilized” socialization, with smarts and large desires for power are learning to use religion, primitive ethnic and tribal affiliation as a substitute for patriotism, and the weapons of destruction so easily obtained from merchants of death to “forward” their goal of power acquisition.

Through the centuries, power elites fought each other or joined each other to gain or protect their power, often advancing mankind’s march to higher standards of living and well-being. Now we see low-level charismatic power-hungry individuals deconstructing that mode of relating. This fragmented control of power bodes ill for peace anywhere in the world for the foreseeable future. Examine the explosions of death in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. We see this control-fragmentation among the non-governmental wielders of enormous destructive power in Iraq and we see its support and encouragement by religious leaders of all stripes. Madrassas are used as religious schools of weaponry, and death to the “other,” the “non-believer.” We see the arsonists of power in multi-cultural and multi-religious societies lighting their fires between “others” with easily obtained small weaponry and with fire power unimaginable even twenty years ago. What is happening in India and Pakistan and Afghanistan and Indonesia and Sri Lanka and Darfur and other places in Africa clarifies how the transfer of power by machete and machine gun to non-elites is taking place.

How do the traditional power elites of “civilized” society in nation-states stop this exploding phenomenon? How long will the deconstruction, the return to pre-civilization, go on? How many innocents must die before we revert to civilized killing by nations going to war with nations?

Mankind’s savagery through the ages has had many faces. Webster’s dictionary definitions of “savagery” and “savage” serve to identify the core elements of this claim. “1 a: the quality of being savage b: an act of cruelty or violence c: an uncivilized state,” and “savage” means lacking the restraints normal to civilized man; also, to attack or treat brutally. Did the power elites bring this on themselves and those of us with little or no power by amassing wealth and denying its benefits to the masses from whose womb savagery was reborn?

Introduction to NachumNorman's world

February 2, 2008

My world is the world as it exists. My world is also the world I believe exists. The two may not be compatible.

I also wish to change the world to a better one. The thought that the world I am leaving to my progeny is irksome, even terrifying. In my early years I consciously took on the challenge of making this world a better place for mankind. I joined with others in learning, singing, teaching, acting and re-acting to events around me, fighting, building, creating, writing, speechifying and haranguing, and always thinking of how things are made the way they are and how can I change them for the better. Looking back, looking around me now, and looking ahead to what I believe will be coming, I am horrified at the extent of my failure to measure up to that early challenge.

So now, aside from trying to follow the golden rule in my dealings with those with whom I come into contact in my daily life, I primarily write. I do this in the hope that the reader will be both entertained and educated.

I wish to copy a memoir I wrote a few years ago on what being Jewish means to me. It clues the reader in to a large portion of what makes me tick. I believe that is enough for my first blog.


WHAT BEING JEWISH MEANS TO ME

Norman Nachum Meyers


DEDICATION

This essay is dedicated to my daughter Gayle who, out of well-hidden frustration at some of my wandering responses during a serious discussion about Judaism, asked, “Dad, what does being Jewish mean to you?” This outpouring of thoughts and memories in response to her question represents the best of my present ability to answer it.

N.M.

May to October, 2002
Sunnyvale, California
PREFACE

Well, my daughter asked me what being Jewish means to me. So before I can answer that I have to define for myself the nature of being a Jew and ask the question, “Really, what is a Jew?”

People who say, "Well" and "So" before answering a question, generally are Jewish. And also, people who answer a question with a question are probably Jewish. One can surmise that I must be Jewish from my inclusion of those elements in my opening sentences. If you are not Jewish and since you obviously are reading this, lots of stuff here may not make any sense at all to you and you might not surmise anything. I’ve included some translations for your benefit. This is a relatively superficial journey through my mind and my memory and some things might not make sense to anyone for that reason.

I hereby issue a disclaimer for my definitions. All are mine and not necessarily those of anyone else, living or dead or imaginary. I also believe that my definitions may change over time, just as I believe that Judaism in all its ramifications has changed through the years and will continue to change. Many Jews, especially in the mini-sect Orthodox spectrum, will cry out that preserving Judaism requires a complete absence of change, a constant devotion to the Word as handed down by Divine Providence as they interpret it. Not I.

I must make a clear unequivocal statement; being a Jew and being Jewish is one and the same thing by my definition. One cannot be a Jew without being Jewish nor be Jewish without being a Jew. So, the essence of being Jewish is to call one's self "Jew" or "Jewish." To the truly Jewish person, whatever constitutes a Jewish person in one's own mind or whatever motivates one to define one's self as being a Jew or Jewish is immaterial and unimportant. Perhaps those undergoing conversion to the Jewish faith who have not yet arrived at total acceptance of their Judaism may question their identification. But a Jew is a Jew and is Jewish and knows it without question.

Being Jewish means belonging in an important and meaningful way to a group of people across the face of the earth that calls itself Jewish. As a Jew you are an M.O.T. That is, a Member Of the Tribe. You are wrapped around by the Jewish People and you wrap around them. If Stanley and Livingstone were Jewish, when they met in darkest Africa, they would have hugged and Stanley would have asked with caring, “Vus machs du ah Yid?” (How's it going, my Jewish friend?) And with a shrug of his shoulders Livingstone would have answered, "Nisht azoy gefaylach,” (Not so bad,) instead of the cold handshake and “Doctor Livingstone I presume?"

Before continuing to write words that I have transliterated from Hebrew or Yiddish, I want to point out that the “ch” sound is pronounced like the “ch” in the German word. “Ach.” For example, the name “Chevron” is not pronounced “Shevron.” And the name “Nachum” also takes the sound of the German, Ach.

To be considered Jewish by others requires some huge number of definitions whereby people other than Jews define Jews. It is also totally unimportant how others define you as Jewish or whether they define you as Jewish at all. In California’s Sequoia National Park in 1948, I sat in a cabin that I shared with Clyde, a fellow worker who came from the Deep South. (He was proud of the fact that when he walked down the sidewalk on the main street of his town, a nigra would step off the sidewalk to let him pass - or else!) Clyde asked me what I was. I told him I was Jewish. He told me that I couldn't be. He knew that Jews had horns and it was quite evident to him that I did not have horns. So by Clyde's definition I was not Jewish. To counterbalance Clyde's inability to pick out a Jew when he saw one, I was hitch-hiking cross-country and got picked up late one night in the mid-west by a trucker who turned on his cab light, looked intently at me and said, "I'm a Dago. What are you, a kike?" I was taken aback by the pejoratives and, in a smiling friendly fashion because I didn’t want to lose the ride, answered, "You may be a Dago but I'm not a kike. I'm Jewish." After that formal introduction, we rode together for about five hundred miles telling accident and family stories and plenty of jokes. So to my Italian truck driver, Jews were kikes and he knew one when he saw one. To top off this "definition by others" issue, a young Seventh Day Adventist co-worker from Visalia, California averred strongly that I could not be Jewish because, like her, I took my Sabbath day off on Saturday. Since to her knowledge only people of her brand of Christianity observed the Sabbath on Saturday, I had to be a Seventh Day Adventist and therefore, could not be Jewish.

All persons born to a Jewish mother are ipso facto Jewish unless they do not want to be and convert out or simply abandon being Jewish. This ancient “law” grew out of the simple fact that only the mother of a person could be ascertained for a certainty, never the father, and therefore the matriarchal lineage was determinant. Also, Sarah’s descendants were Jewish and Hagar’s were not though both lineages sprang from Abraham. Of course now, with DNA testing available, the father can also be determined to a certainty. The Nazis of Hitler’s Germany didn’t really care which parent was Jewish. They killed you if you were Jewish even if only your father was Jewish.

All persons who define themselves by religion as being Jewish are Jewish. Regardless of what any other co-religionist may aver, if one practices the religion called Judaism or the “Jewish Religion,” one is Jewish. Any group that defines itself as religiously Jewish is Jewish regardless of the rituals, practices, or foods that attach to that practice. Whatever strictures, rules or requirements may be demanded of a person who wishes to convert to the Jewish religion, once that person completes the passage and is accepted into the congregation of that particular denomination, that person is then Jewish. No Jewish religious group can declare that any other Jewish religious group is not Jewish and its members are not Jewish even though such declarations emanate from Ultra-Orthodox religionists with great vehemence – as if their proclamations are handed down from Mount Sinai. Of course there may be a problem with a young boy I met in San Jose wearing a Magen David (a Jewish star) who swore he is Jewish because he believes in Jesus Christ and everyone knows that Jesus was Jewish. Some religious groups have declared themselves Jewish without having had any prior connection to anything Jewish but rather claim descent from Moses or other biblical characters. That is a problem. Are they false Jews? Can DNA testing verify their ancestry? And if it does and they have not practiced any form of Judaism for five thousand years, are they still Jewish? And Jews for Jesus who strongly assert their Jewishness may not present a problem to the Israeli immigration authorities or atheistic Jews but might to Jewish religionists who may reasonably consider them converts to Christianity. Are they false Jews? But if you are of the Jewish faith by yours or anyone else’s definition, you are Jewish by my definition. I have no high barriers to entrance to this elite group while at the same time I remain skeptical of some assertions of faith. All descendants of Abraham and Sarah are Jewish unless somewhere along the line they or their forebears converted or opted out.

If a person who is otherwise Jewish declares to himself or others that he or she is not Jewish and does not wish to be Jewish, then he or she is not Jewish. Maybe “Jews for Jesus” fits in this category although atheists may be Jewish.

Born a non-Jew yet having a Jewish “neshuma,” a Jewish soul or spirit, that is having compassion for all humans and acting on that compassion, does not make you Jewish. It does make you a non-Jew Jew if that definition sits well in your mind.

That brings me to morality and ethical behavior. There are plenty of immoral and unethical Jews. To my way of thinking, their functioning calls a foundational element of Judaism and being Jewish into question. Yet I do not excommunicate them. I am required by my concepts to include them with reservations.

These are my definitions of what a Jew is and what being Jewish is. It obviously is not simple to be Jewish like it is to be Catholic or Muslim, I think. But, with a bit of patience, you will be able to state with some degree of assurance whether you are Jewish or not. Now that you know that I am Jewish by any and all the tests I can think of, I'll get on with the task of figuring out what being Jewish means to me.

FOREWORD

Thinking about how I arrived at being Jewish by my definitions has led me through labyrinths within labyrinths. Mentally retracing that path in order to describe what being Jewish means to me has turned out to be an exploration of all the facets of my being and much of the history of my life. What quickly became apparent in the process is that being Jewish is a major foundation block of my personality and existence. I must explain what I mean by “major foundation block.” People’s identities are tied to their names. When you knock on someone’s door and they ask, “Who is it?” you answer by giving your name because that equals who you are. Under hypnosis, it is almost impossible to convince someone that their name is different from what it really is. That is a foundation block. When asked about themselves, many people will quickly tell what they do, what they work at. “I’m a welder.” “I’m a farmer.” “I’m a doctor.” People identify themselves by their occupations. That is a foundation block. A common answer people give to the question, “What are you?” is their religion or their ethnic background. “I’m catholic,” “I’m Italian,” “I’m Hungarian,” “I’m Jewish.” That too is a foundation block. So by ethnicity and religion, being Jewish is a major building block of my personhood.

As is true with most people, my name is an indelible part of my being, my identity, and my self-image. I call myself and think of myself as Nachum. People call me Nachum or Norman depending on when, how and where we met. In schools and businesses here in the United States, I am known as Norman. Some friends and family members started off knowing me as Norman and as they learned that I think of myself as Nachum, switched. Some who call me Nachum switch to Norman in business settings in order not to confuse the goyim (non-Jews). Chronologically, both names were given to me at birth as with most Jewish children born outside of Israel. But I chose, or the choice was made for me, to use Nachum for that portion of my life that began when I was nine years old (except in school and later, in business). I was nine when I joined Hashomer Hatzair, which is Hebrew for "The Young Guard." Hashomer Hatzair was a Zionist socialist youth movement that indoctrinated young Jews from the Diaspora to become pioneers in Palestine to build a homeland for the Jewish People and live in a kibbutz, an agricultural collective settlement. My Hebrew name began its ascendant use in Hashomer Hatzair along with my positive Jewish consciousness. I was an apprentice in a sheet metal shop as a teenager. The master mechanic with whom I worked most often was a Yugoslav socialist from Trieste named Hugo who, for ease and speed during work, called me Tony. Yet when we sat over lunch engaged in a political discussion or spoke about more personal things, he called me “Nakoom” (He couldn’t pronounce the guttural “ch.”) to show the seriousness with which he took me and our discourse. He understood that I was really, Nachum. Many of my non-Jewish friends today have made that switch.

The Hebrew root of Nachum means soothe or calm. My family name is Meyers, which, without the "s," is an infinitive that means "to bring light to" or "to enlighten." And in some measure, because of the Jewish character of my given and family names, from the time I became an aware person I have been a conscious Jewish person. However, I make no claim to being a big soother or enlightener, although at times I have been both.

Being Jewish grew in me and affected me as a child member of my family, as a person living and working in different milieus, as a member of Hashomer Hatzair, in my formative years through school and work and then as a kibbutznik and an Israeli, as a husband to two wives who brought their own Jewish souls, traditions and rituals and values into my life along with those of their families, as a father and family patriarch who learned while teaching his progeny, as an observer and participant in the historic events that affected and affect Israel and the Jewish people, as a businessman, including specifically my twelve years as owner of Cafe Tel Aviv, by having a whole body of mostly Jewish friends, and finally, as a friend or enemy of those who have made and would make Jews and Judaism their friends or enemies. Perhaps this list does not cover all the ways that I became Jewish and the ways being Jewish has affected me and became part of my nature and descriptive of who I am, but it's a beginning. More ways that I am Jewish will percolate to the surface as I go on, I'm sure.

There was a time, after the Six Day War, when being Jewish was "in" and became a source of pride to many Jews. I also walked with head high, proud of (and concerned about) my children who were in Israel and proud of my Israeli Jewish brethren. But being Jewish can also be a burden as evidenced by the centuries of persecution and the fact of the Holocaust. That burden has become heavier for me in recent times since the beginning of the second Intifada in Israel in 2001 and continuing to the date of this writing in the autumn of 2002 with suicide bombings and the rise of anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish sentiment in the world growing out of the Israel Palestine conflict.

I must confess there were times when I definitely did not want to be Jewish. That feeling crosses my mind on occasion even now in my older years. When I was a youngster it seemed so much easier to be a
WASP or even an Italian. When people ask me if I’m Italian, I sometimes answer, “With a nose like this, what do you think?” My age has affected what being Jewish means to me. The outstanding change the years have wrought is that I have gone from being a non-believer and a follower of ritual to teach and retain Jewish values and culture, to thinking that religion may be the cause of more harm than good for mankind. The events that affected the Jews through the years of my life have also obviously affected me. I want to be Jewish today and I want to lead the crusade for justice in the world that I believe is the Jewish mission on earth. That means I personally must cry out against injustice by Jews, that I must decry the religion into which I was born and indoctrinated for its sins of commission and omission, that I must renounce all religions and patriotism too, as heinous tools of power elites throughout human history. And I must do that while extolling the magnificence of my Jewish heritage. This being Jewish isn’t simple for me.

Just as wines become more complex with age, I became more and more Jewish and my Jewishness took on a complexity that grew from my experiences and the influence of many others through the years. Perhaps my explanations here of how some of those people and experiences affected me may not resonate with the reader. Nonetheless, I was changed by teachers and mentors, by family and friends and others who may not have even noticed their affect on me. And I have been changed by events that will leave scars on my memory and joyful impressions that I want to savor through my remaining years. Perhaps the analogy of wine aging and gaining complexity is a good one for the ever changing and growing nature of what being Jewish may mean to me into the future. I just hope the wine doesn’t go sour in the bottle.



THE EARLY YEARS

Nothing comes to mind about being Jewish before moving from New Jersey to New York City at the age of five. I have no recollection of going to the synagogue or of Jewish events at home in my pre-school years. We moved into my grandfather's tenement at 555 Southern Boulevard in the Bronx sometime in 1932. I guess my father did not make a go of his business - a small Five-and-Dime store in Red Bank or Asbury Park in New Jersey. I do remember that he worked for a while as a salesman for a dairy company but, because he didn't drive, couldn't make a go of it. He brought home all kinds of paper toys that had the dairy's name on them, cutouts of the cow jumping over the moon and the little dog laughing to see such a sight as the dish ran away with the spoon. (The first poem I remember memorizing.) During the Depression, my father was a peddler who loaded up a small Five-and-Dime store into two cartons that he carried, walking from house to house in poor neighborhoods of small towns. His hands were callused from the ropes that bound the cartons and his feet were gnarled and contorted, as I remember seeing him soaking them in a basin of hot water and Epsom salts on his return from his weekly rounds. He considered what he did was “business” rather than physical labor. After the Depression my father became a "stationary" peddler with a succession of little Five and Dime stores in poor sections of New York City where he hardly made a living it seemed.

We lived in single-family homes in New Jersey. I have recollections of a wood-burning boiler in a cellar with wood stacked neatly nearby, lawns and trees, slate sidewalks that buckled from tree roots and winter freezing, white porches and back yards, and a crawl-space under one house situated next to a gasoline station. My brother Chaim and I had a secret club there where we lit candles, a big No-No, and where our club came to an abrupt end one day when my mother smelled smoke coming up under the sink as she was washing dishes. She grabbed me from the bed I was napping in, ran next door to the gasoline station and told them her house was on fire. The gas station stored used tires in that space and Chaim and I had left a lit candle on a tire where it burned down to start melting the rubber that generated the acrid smoke my mother smelled. The gas station people hosed down the crawl space and padlocked the little door we had used to enter our "club house.”

A variety of indicators of Jewishness come to mind from those early years in the Bronx. Our new small friends asked which church we belonged to or whether we were Italian, as many of them were. I learned to say I was Jewish and didn’t go to church. They were
horrified because they had been told they would burn in hell if they didn’t go to church. Somehow, I felt that being Jewish protected me from burning in hell. I recall seeing four sets of dishes being loaded into barrels when we moved from one home to another, as we did too often, even after we moved to the city. For non-Jews reading this, I had better explain. Jews do not mix kitchenware on which meat is prepared and served with those on which dairy is prepared and served. So that requires two sets of everything. Then, on Passover, we need two completely different sets for the seven days of that holiday. That is to assure the remembrance of the days we ate unleavened bread on our rush out of Egyptian slavery. So we needed four sets of dishes, pots, pans, silverware, and serving dishes. We also were forbidden to eat pork or shellfish and those foods were never allowed into the house. All that is called, “Keeping kosher.” We were told by our parents that we could not eat in our friends' homes because we were kosher. It meant we couldn’t eat off their non-kosher dishes nor eat their non-kosher foods.

I remember my father coming home for the Sabbath on Fridays. My mother lit candles then. We had challah and special foods like meat and chicken and often sponge cake on Fridays, and my Aunt Esther and her beau, my future Uncle Morris, came for Shabbat dinner. My brother and I went to schul (synagogue) with my father and I remember hating the shlep (the long walk). I recall going to chaider (Hebrew school) and hating the nape-pinching rebbe (rabbi) Katz. An even greater indignity was going to chaider on one skate. We were too poor to afford two pairs of skates so after fighting over who was getting the skates, Chaim and I would push our way to chaider, each on one skate. A truly Solomonic decision by my mother - cutting the pair of skates in half.

I can't pinpoint the year I internalized the differentiation between being and not being Jewish but it must have happened between the ages of five and nine. At the age of five I knew I was Jewish by force of the Italian kids on Southern Boulevard but didn’t really know what that meant. I knew by the age of nine that I had to sneak my shoeshine box out of the house on Saturdays because of shabbos (the Sabbath, in Yiddish). Shining shoes, an activity that provided me with the income I needed for candy and ice cream, was forbidden on the Sabbath as was all work and also was simply NOT Jewish. But stealing money from my father's jacket as he lay sleeping on Saturdays was Jewish and a double sin. It was Jewish because being Jewish caused me to steal for movie money. And it was a double sin, first for the stealing and second, for stealing on shabbos. So even though my brother and I had a Saturday night distribution network of about twenty customers for the New York Daily News and Daily Mirror, my earnings from that and shining shoes were insufficient for my candy needs. Because we were Jewish we had to wait until sunset to signal the end of the Sabbath to begin our distributions. In the face of competition by the Italian kids who could start as soon as the truck dropped off their bundles of papers we were at a severe business disadvantage. Even then, I did not connect that disadvantage to my being Jewish. It was just a kind of fact of life for my family. The awareness of being Jewish osmosed slowly through the early years of my life. Shortly after moving to the Bronx, I knew for sure that when someone asked me what I was, I had to answer, "Jewish." I remember when a couple of new kids moved into our neighborhood. We befriended them because their parents were wealthy enough to buy, for a nickel each, both the "Mirror" and the "News" on Saturday night. When we asked them what they were, they answered, "American." No amount of prying or cajoling could get them to answer differently. It is true they didn't look Jewish or Italian. Frankly, to this day I don't think they knew what they were. Maybe they weren't anything. Hmmm? They ate white bread. By the way, as you went up and down the five flights of stairs to our apartment on the Boulevard, you could always tell which apartments were Jewish and which were Italian; the Jewish ones smelled of fish and the Italian ones of garlic. I suppose that’s true for lots of apartment buildings in New York City.

One of my first friends in the Bronx was an Italian kid my age named Joey Montalbano. He lived in the tenement next to ours. His father owned a shoe repair store on Jerome Avenue where he stood all day repairing worn-out shoes that only the Depression made worth fixing. I thought he must have been very wealthy. I was allowed to play in his house but was warned never to eat there because it wasn't kosher. Joey had a set of Lionel trains that ran around his tree at Christmas time. We often played with them in the living room where his frail, black-clad grandmother sat, cane by her side, rocking, humming old Italian melodies and plucking at a hair on her chin. Every so often she would yell at Joey in Italian that we should speak Italian. She wanted to know what we were chattering about. Joey would yell back - she was hard of hearing - that I couldn't speak Italian, that I was Jewish. She would tell him that I was Italian, that a kid with a nose like mine had to be Italian. Then she would pick up her cane and take a swing at me, yelling in broken English, "Whats'a matter? Speak Italian! Whats'a matter, you ashame-a you heritage?" Joey's little old Italian grandmother reinforced my Jewish heritage by wanting to reinforce my imagined Italian heritage.

I do not remember when I first ate treif (non-kosher food). On hikes with Shomrim we shared our sandwiches and that probably was the first time I mixed meat and dairy. I was in my late thirties when I first ate shellfish. Barbara, my second wife, introduced me to Chinese food. I do remember my first hotdog. I bought it when I was about eight in a Kosher Delicatessen on Jerome Avenue in the Bronx. My father considered such places dens of iniquity because they lured unsuspecting Jews into eating what he considered treif. Eating meat without the acceptable rebbe's heksher (stamp of approval) simply meant abdicating your soul to the goyim and was almost as vile as eating chazir (pig - definitely treif). I was not sure what would happen to me when I ate that hotdog. I just knew that all my friends ate hotdogs and I was missing out on life's greatest delicacy. Nothing happened. I didn't tell my father. I stayed alive to write this.


MY FATHER'S JEWISHNESS - JOSEPH MEYERS

Perhaps it would help to tell you everything I know or believe I know about my father's Jewishness and his religiosity. I think they were one and the same to him - but I'm not sure what he thought. My first important awareness was that my mother's Jewishness didn't count to him. Whatever it was, it wasn't good enough. I do not know if I remember seeing my father spit in my mother's face when he came home one shabbos evening and found her lighting the candles after sundown, a major sin both for being late and for lighting a fire on the Sabbath - a great No-No. Or perhaps I conjure up that image from having heard this sad tale from her several times throughout her life. That spitting triggered their first separation when I was about six years old. My second awareness was that my father considered himself a devout Jew. He lay t'fillin (phylacteries), prayed all the morning and evening prayers, observed the Sabbath and the holy days, ate only glatt kosher food, and observed - I presume - all the mitzvot (commandments).

The doing of good deeds and the giving of charity are examples of mitzvot. I remember a particular Friday when my father came home to our apartment in the Bronx. The door to the apartment was directly opposite the bathroom which contained a toilet and a bathtub – no sink. In my house you washed your hands in the tub because washing in the kitchen sink, as most of my friends did, was against the rules. Food was prepared in the sink and maybe the meat soap and the dairy soap would get mixed up. This particular Friday my father brought home a black man who stood shuffling outside the door, hat in hand, poorly dressed and obviously embarrassed. This was not an unusual occurrence. My father motioned him to come in and my mother rolled her eyes but went to the door to welcome him. During the Depression my parents barely had food to feed the three kids and the two of them, so she was a little upset because they had argued over my father’s largesse in the past. And here he was, dragging in a stray. My father motioned him to wash his hands in the bath tub – which he did – and we sat ourselves down at the kitchen table to a meal of borscht and probably chicken and vegetables. I remember the borscht because the man had never had such red soup before and my father had to convince him to try it. (Perhaps he thought it was made with Christian blood.) This was a way my father fulfilled the commandment to do charitable acts, to perform the mitzva, the duty of doing good deeds. Seeing this functioning as a child became part of what is my Jewish heritage. When the man left, my father wrapped what was left of the challah and pushed it on him to take.

My third awareness was that my father was not a learned Jew. He did not intentionally or verbally pass any of his Jewishness on to his children. If anything, it was through complaints about our non-observance that he educated us. He davened (prayed) in Hebrew with gusto but didn't understand a word of what he was saying. Though I may be wrong about this, he never imparted to me a single translation or explanation of any prayer he ever uttered. We boys, rarely with my sister Helen, would walk to schul with him of a Saturday morning. We would hold the siddurim (prayer books) and the huge tanachim (the five books of Moses - with commentaries of the sages) in our laps, and fidget like crazy. A kindly schul-mate of my father's kept rolls of Lifesavers and other lemon candies in his pockets for kids like us. That old man may not have understood psychology, but he did understand squirmy kids and how to quiet them down. The men prayed separately from the women. They muttered and nodded and bent and wailed with their prayer shawls wrapped tightly around their swaying bodies. And they mumbled on and on except for an occasional loud Blessed be He or an Amen. The chazzan (the man who chanted the prayers) would sound as if he were in terrible pain most of the time as he chanted his way through the required never-ending supplications. The seats were hard and very uncomfortable and the bathrooms stunk from urine, tobacco and snuff. Schul was boring. It never had meaning for me other than as a place to get sponge cake after services. I learned not to drink the whiskey that went with the sponge cake after the first time my father suggested I down a glass. I spewed the harsh drink all over the place - to the amusement of the alte cockers (old farts) gathered round the kiddish table (a table for blessing the Sabbath generally laden with challah, cakes, cookies, wine and whiskey). During lulls in the service or when the rabbi was giving his sermon in Yiddish, we were allowed to go outside. I would play with nuts for nuts against the side of the building with other bored Jewish kids. Jews were forbidden to carry money on the Sabbath. I did not have the vaguest idea why my father insisted on dragging us there. Jews are required to keep their heads covered at all times – I think. I was always scared to death that when my yarmulkeh (a skullcap) fell off my head, as it did on occasion, I would be punished instantaneously by god - who obviously was a member of my father's schul.

Joe Meyers had an extensive family. He came from Poland in his teens and worked diligently to bring his father, mother, and several siblings over to America. I know this from my mother. My father really never talked with me about anything, and certainly not about his family. I remember getting dressed up to visit his parents who lived with one of his sisters in some other section of the Bronx. They were white-haired and frail and wore gold-rimmed glasses, and were very old. My grandfather wore a square-top yarmulke and seemed always to be davening. I have no recollection of him or my paternal grandmother ever uttering a word to me. Maybe they did not speak English. My father’s sisters and brothers and their spouses and their children, my cousins, were scattered around New York and New Jersey. However, none of them approved of my mother as a match for my father who was the least successful of all of them. So relations were always cold and uncomfortable, even felt by me as a child. I have had no contact with a single person from my father's side of the family for decades. What a waste of family. Even when I was young, our families never got together or did anything together like Shabbat dinners or Pesach. There was a cold unbridgeable gap between them. But I did learn that my family on both sides was of the Jewish faith.

As the local Jew-boy, my father, the five-foot-two scrawny representative of the Jewish “race” in the predominantly black Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, the capitalist who always had difficulty paying the rent on his little stores and who went to the bank with pennies in paper bags was considered wealthy and was often beaten and robbed for his money. “The Irish cops turned the other way when I went by,” he said from his hospital bed. “Were the pogroms in the shteitels much different?” he asked. I learned that the down-trodden generally look for someone else to “trod” down on and that it was often the Jews who ended up underfoot no matter where on the face of the earth they were.

Though he never related to me directly in any way that I can remember, my father insisted that I go to chaider (Hebrew school) and study for my bar mitzvah. If he spoke to me at all, it was to inquire how I was doing in chaider. I was not a "scholar" in his eyes because I couldn't daven freely and because of my ineptitude in reciting the aleph base (the Hebrew alphabet) and the Genesis statement, "b'raishit, elohim barah et ha shamayim v'et ha'aretz." ("In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth".) I was an "A" student in regular elementary school and very bright, but to my knowledge he did not know or care about that or anything in my life other than for his few rare involvements with my religious education. Even that was totally marginal. I was trained for my bar mitzva by a young bearded garlicky smelling man with thick eyeglasses who was poor enough to accept the small offering my father gave him to train his ignorant little boy. At my bar mitzvah, on the bima (the raised platform in the synagogue), my father read ahead of me aloud and caused me to lose my place constantly. That, plus my lousy singing voice contributed to the miserable performance I would have turned in anyway because of the high fever I spiked the prior evening, seemingly a requirement for all bar mitzva children. For the first time I remember being very angry with my father. I gained my independence from him on my bar mitzvah day by virtue of that anger. What a disappointment I was to everybody including myself. I was not accustomed to failure.

My father read the Yiddish papers of those days. I have a recollection of Der Tag - The Day, and the Forvertz - The Forward - being in the house. On shabbos, after a morning at schul and a good lunch at home, he would lie down in the bedroom and read. When he came to the jokes, a full page of them as I recall, he would call out to us - in English - to come sit with him. So whichever kids were around would go in and sit on the bed. That was nice since it was an unusual treat to be with my father. He would read Yiddish jokes to us. Of course, I did not know Yiddish, so I couldn't follow the jokes and certainly could not appreciate them as he did. However, after being accused of not knowing Yiddish and being scorned for my ignorance - scorn was big with my father - being pretty smart, I soon learned the cadences that preceded the punch lines and often managed to laugh at the appropriate time. And that in turn brought fatherly approbation, a rare commodity. When my father would begin to snore as he lay abed after amusing himself with the paper, I took my revenge by ransacking his jacket pockets for change and stealing off to the forbidden movie house across the street. On Saturday evenings we kids would playfully threaten to punch my father in the eye so he would see stars and then he would finally allow us to go to the movies because the first star appeared in the heavens to signify the end of the holy day. I did learn from my father that the Sabbath was a very important Jewish day.


MY MOTHER'S JEWISHNESS
ROSE STORCH MEYERS GREENBERG

My mother was a follower of Judaism as she was a follower in so many aspects of her life. She grew up in a family that was not at all concerned with affirming or practicing their Jewishness in any way. Though I do not remember my maternal grandmother, Bella, at all, my maternal grandfather, David, was a clear figure in my life as the landlord of the building in which we lived for about six years. His second wife, Tillie, a shriveled tiny woman to whom my grandfather always referred as "She," (as though that was her name) rarely spoke with us. She was religious but that didn’t interfere with him in any way. I can remember my father going down into the boiler room of our building at 555 Southern Boulevard to burn the breadcrumbs he scraped up from our kitchen with a feather on Pesach eve (necessary prior to the start of the holiday prayers). My grandfather would never think to do such a thing. For him, shabbos and holidays were times to drink and play cards. His family followed the Jewish traditions usually dragged into them by in-laws at times of life-altering events like births and brisses, bar mitzvahs, weddings and deaths. So my mother functioned, superficially knowledgeable about the forms and rituals of the traditional Jewish family but rarely proactive in demanding that we follow a Jewish lifestyle. She was coerced into observance of the rituals by Joe Meyers without much resistance. I do believe that she truly was a quiet atheist all her life. Her remark in later years when she went with us to our Reform Temple that “It would not have been so bad if only they didn't talk about god so much,” epitomized her Judaism and her feelings about religion altogether. The fact that three of her children and many grandchildren lived in Israel and had a strong connection to the Land and the People of Israel, did not really convert her to being an active Jew in any way. She provided a generally Jewish home for her husbands without over-concern for the nicer points of the religion. But she knew she was Jewish and she let us youngsters know she was Jewish by lighting candles, keeping kosher, and putting challah on the table so long as she was married to Joe Meyers.

My mother was one of seven children. None of her siblings or their spouses were overly religious. All of them had been raised in Jewish homes and knew the traditions and how to daven. They shared in our family's life-cycle events and holidays, except for her brother Joey,
who married an Italian woman named Lizzie. They were pretty much ostracized by both of their families, Joey by his family because he was a drunk and married a shiksah – a non-Jewish woman - and Lizzie by her family because she married a Jew. They lived near us in the Bronx but we did not have much to do with them because of my father's attitude of rejection and also because of my mother's fear of Joey when he was drunk and would come pounding on our door late at night.

Sam Greenberg, my mother's second husband, though Jewish in a benign way, knew of Hashomer Hatzair through his daughter Elisheva. She was Danny Duberman's first wife. Danny is the brother of Simcha Duberman, my sister Elana's husband. All of that generation were Shomrim at one time in their lives. Sam made no Jewish demands on my mother and gladly joined her on trips to Israel to visit Chaim who, for many years was unable to come to the United States to visit her. She and Sam divorced after several years of an up and down marriage and she lived alone until her death in 1986. The last months of her life were spent in a Catholic hospice that provided her with the best possible support by all who worked there. My old friend, Bob Janoff visited her there. He is a Jewish convert to “born again” Christianity. Knowing of her atheism, he asked her what she would say to god when she went to heaven and saw that he existed. She replied, “I’ll tell him I’m sorry.” She received a Jewish burial. She really would rather sit in the dark. She is mourned by me deeply.

Those were the Jewish connections on the Storch side of the family and that is the story of my Jewish inheritance from my mother as I remember it. I believe that her main contribution to my Jewishness was that freedom I have to weigh what is good and bad in the religion and to live my life accordingly without guilt.


SCIENCE AND ATHEISM

Being Jewish and being religious were one and the same to me as a child. I read voluminously from very early on and science, mechanics, the physical and natural worlds, cause and effect and how things work were all fascinating to me. I became aware of the conflict between creationism and evolution early in my life though I would not have used such descriptive words. I cannot recall when I consciously became an atheist or a non-believer but it was certainly before the age of bar mitzvah, of that I am sure. I turned away from religion long before I became a conscious cultural and political Jew. I remember thinking that I wanted to be an American and to be able to answer the question, "What are you?' by stating emphatically that I was an American. Such was the strength of my "knowledge" that there was no such thing as god and that praying and being Jewish, going to schul and fulfilling the requirements to pray were futile uses of time and energy. Yet despite having comfortably internalized my atheism based on scientific exploration and discovery, I was never able to bring myself to answer, "American," to the question of my identification. Something other than god and religion stuck to me to make me Jewish. Being Jewish was not eradicated by science as was god. I became a Jewish atheist without a hint of paradox, conflict or contradiction in my mind in that self-description.



ANTI-SEMITISM

The anti-Semitic incidents in my life, although not many, have made me a stronger Jew. When I was a kid, the other kids on the block made it known that Jews weren’t particularly desirable playmates. You were a Jew-boy, a kike, a dirty Jew. Even your friends would turn against you if they were in a taunting group of their peers. My mother helped us learn to shrug off that crap by telling us those kids were jealous of us. Of course it’s one thing if kids talk that way but when you are a child and you see adults treating you with disdain, disgust, even hatred, you call yourself into question. Any child that is subjected to that kind of behavior has to think to himself, “Something is wrong with me.” It causes damage to one’s psyche if adults, especially teachers, are anti-Semites. Teachers can create a great deal of turmoil in a child’s mind.

“Assembly” every Thursday at Creston Junior High School in the Bronx was the occasion for listening to Piano-legs MacMurray, (thus named by us kids because this huge woman’s exposed fat legs tapered down to fleshy ankles pouring out around her shoes,) bang out the Star Spangled Banner on the piano as we sang our national anthem. She pounded out the themes of various classical pieces of music to which we children sang out made-up mnemonic lyrics. It was also the time that Miss Noonan, the vice-principal, played high priestess and preached her doctrines of good and evil. A third elderly virgin, Miss McCarthy, my English teacher, (who I knew hated me because she forced me to stand in front of the class to reel off grammatical rules that she knew I did not know) was the other component of our in-house Holy Trinity that had cold regard for little Jewish boys who made up the ethnic preponderance of their classes. Also, our teachers seemed to like girls much more than boys. Dress code required boys to wear white shirts and tie. Kids who came to school on assembly days without a tie often dashed into Dr. Brandon’s or Mr. Levy’s room for the loan of a tie from the stash they kept in one of their closets to avoid the certain hugely public scorn and wrath of the Trinity. I think the two men were the only Jewish teachers in the school.

Bright kids went to Creston because they had the “R”s there, a program called the Rapid Classes for smart children to go through middle school in two years rather than the normal three years. Henry Hoffman was my friend from the age of nine and co-shoeshine business associate. He and his parents had escaped from Nazi Germany in good time and his accent was still thick in those years. He was a burly youngster and not afraid of anything. On this particular Thursday, we sat together in Assembly and chatted quietly as the auditorium filled as each class filed in under the watchful eyes of their teachers. Finally, with all present, Miss Noonan stood up and waved for quiet which generally occurred instantaneously. She stood there waiting, grey hair pulled severely back into a flawless bun, white-faced, skinny and short, peering through steel-rimmed glasses, arms crossed against her unimpeded chest. You could feel intense animosity pouring out of her. After an excruciatingly long moment, she raised her right hand and pointed in my general direction and said, “You. You. Stand up!” The kids around me and I pointed to ourselves with big question marks on our faces. “No, no. You,” she said. A couple of kids half stood tentatively. Noonan marched from the front of the room and up the aisle toward where we were sitting and clearly pointed to Henry. “You,” she demanded, “You, stand up.” Henry stood. “Don’t you know yet that talking in Assembly is forbidden?” Henry shook his head and said something about that it wasn’t he who had spoken. “Well,” Noonan declaimed, “If you can’t learn the rules here and if you don’t like it here, you should go back to where you came from.” There was a long long moment of absolute quiet and then with an even thicker guttural German accent than usual, Henry said, quite forcefully and loudly, “Go fuck yourself!” He worked his way out of the row to the aisle where Noonan was standing with her mouth flapping, marched up the aisle and out of the school. Don’t ask. First there was thin tittering giggling laughter. Then there was the thick fear of absolute silence. Assembly ended abruptly and we were marched back to our classrooms. I learned later that Brandon and Levy threatened to bring charges against Noonan to the Board of Education for something and that she had backed down from even trying to expel Henry from the school. Henry came back to school a week later and nothing was ever said about the incident. Henry, Dr. Brandon, and Mr. Levy taught me and every Jewish kid in school that day a strong lesson in how to deal with anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism helps make you more Jewish if you are Jewish, mostly. Or it makes you want to run away from being Jewish. It may not be difficult to determine how anti-Semitism, a disease of hatred, enters the human body. It is like a viral infection. Carriers spread the disease to non-Jews and in some rare instances to Jews who become self-haters and Jew haters. It is more difficult to understand the effect the disease has on the Jewish subjects of a hatred that is vastly different from intolerance, although it does resemble that syndrome. Anti-Semitism was a major formative element in my perception of myself as a Jew. I don’t know how much I was affected by the control anti-Semites exercised over the paths of my life. I was conscious of my anger and fear in reaction to displays of hatred toward me personally as a Jew and toward Jews as a class of people. In my growing-up years I learned different lessons from those adults who displayed courage in their reactions to overt anti-Semitism and chose to emulate them as I grew more secure in my Jewishness.

All over the United States and probably all over the world, in the absolute privacy of restaurant and other public toilets, people give vent to their innermost thoughts. Obscenities of libido-driven pencil pushers are scratched alongside obscenities of twisted hate-filled minds that imbed the swastikas and Jew-hating filth on the walls. “Hitler is dead, long live Hitler. He didn’t finish the job but we will.” This never-ending stream of hatred was seen by me as a child, was seen by my children and by their children, and apparently will be seen by their children into eternity. In different places and different ways, the antipathy, if not outright hatred of Jews has made itself felt. In the winter of 1944, I was hitchhiking up to Montreal and got a ride late in the day with the owner of a Lake George motel. He graciously invited me to stay over in exchange for an hour’s work and continue my journey the next day. That evening, after a lovely meal, he, his wife and their son were going through requests for reservations at the motel for the coming summer season. As they read out the names, the Goldbergs and Feinsteins and Cohens were tossed into the fire because, as my host explained when he saw my questioning look, “They sound so German, don’t they?” I couldn’t bring myself to tell this warm lovely elderly proto-American couple that I was Jewish. I don’t know why but I think it was because I was embarrassed for them and also, I did not wish to embarrass them. Anti-Semitism is part of being Jewish. It is rare outside of Israel for Jews not to become aware of hatred directed at them because they are Jewish. It becomes a part of the mix that goes into defining for one’s self what it means to be Jewish. Some hide from it and hide their identities to avoid it. Others face it and become stronger Jews because of it. I became stronger. I agree with my mother. They are jealous of me.

In the mid-sixties when I was running Café Tel Aviv in New York, resurgent Nazi groups were holding rallies in what used to be called “German Town.” That was an area of Manhattan around 86th Street from Second to York Avenues. One group spread leaflets around the
area announcing their coming. Some customers from the café and I went to these rallies to disrupt them in a variety of ways and to hand out counter-leaflets. We contacted Jewish groups like the Jewish War Veterans, the Anti-Defamation League, some synagogues and others to alert them to this nascent danger.

The New York Post – September 16, 1966

AT NAZI RALLY - ISRAELIS LOOK BACK IN ANGER

They are almost ghostlike, picking their way quietly to the edges of the shouting crowds, and it is only in their eyes that one finds passion.
It was these silent, hard-eyed Israelis who worried the police last night. On the east side of York Avenue, James Madole was performing his weekly National Renaissance Party ritual with his force of ten men dressed in Nazi-style uniforms with lightning bolts where the broken crosses of the Nazis used to be. Across the avenue and two sets of barricades almost ten times as many persons shouted in protest.
Madole shouted a racial epithet and was instantly drowned out by a collective moan. One of the silent Israelis crossed over to Madole’s side of the street and stood defiantly next to one of the neo-Nazi’s supporters. “I’m a Jew,” he said softly as three Nazis moved behind a police officer. “I’m a Jew,” he repeated following them, “and I’m alone.”
An elderly woman stood nearby, shocked at the scene. “I remember,” she said, “in 1927 when I was in Germany, a crowd of these people held a rally under my window. I called the authorities and they said, ‘Sha, Shtill.’ ‘Shh, quiet.’” “Tonight,” she added, “they are under my window again. No one will ever again tell me to be quiet.”

I followed the loudspeaker vehicle to White Plains where I destroyed the speakers and filled the gas tank with sugar. Madole didn’t show up again for three weeks. Our gang went to the next rally with garbage can lids from the café and sticks for banging them. We handed out lollypops to the passersby and asked them to yell asking the popsuckers to go home. We handed out helium-filled balloons printed with, “NAZIS HAVE NO BALLoonS” We worked with the Police Department to prevent them from getting permits without a payment for overtime work by the Sanitation Department based on the huge amount of litter we created in the area. Then the Jewish War Veterans obtained rally permits for corners used by Madole. Madole stopped coming. But the Madoles never die.

Israeli sailors in ports around the world have make it clear that anti-Semitic remarks will not go unpunished. Jews have worked hard to fit into their homelands as other ethnic and religious groups have. Now we are accused of owning the media, the banks, the governments, and everything else of value. Would that it were so. Antipathy to the stranger sojourning in their midst is common in the nations of the world, especially if the stranger appears to be achieving a higher standard of well being than the indigenous population. That identifiable difference allows demagogues and power seekers of all stripes to point to the Jews as the cause of the ordinary person’s sad condition. Filling the millennia old role of scapegoat continues, as does fighting the anti-Semites who cast the Jews in that role.

Now, with the rise of Jew-hatred in the Arab world, a new form of anti-Semitism has come into being. It appears more rational. It is hatred of the “enemy” though it uses age-old stereotypes and draws from the same wells of racism and prejudice. I hope that with the arrival of peace between the Palestinians and Israel and the establishment of a Palestinian state, it will abate and crawl back under the rocks from which it emanated. An age-old fear and a churning in my guts rises again from this powerful hatred of me because I am Jewish. I suppose that is part of what being Jewish means to me today.


HASHOMER HATZAIR

Hashomer Hatzair is a progressive Zionist youth movement with ties to the left wing Kibbutz Artzi movement and the Meretz political party in Israel. In America it is primarily an informal educational movement which is based on the idea of youth teaching youth and focuses on progressive Zionism, secular Jewish identity, social justice and peace. As an impressionable youth, Hashomer Hatzair to me was the Jewish Boy Scouts. Hashomer Hatzair was "The Club." Hashomer Hatzair was the "Movement" – the T’nuah and the "Organization." Hashomer Hatzair was "The Young Guard" whose name was taken from the Shomrim, the organization of guards of Jewish settlements in the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Israel, in the early part of the 20th century. Hashomer Hatzair is a socialist Zionist educational movement founded in the nineteen twenties in Poland to educate young Jews to make aliyah – to go up - settle on the land in Palestine on collective farms called "Kibbutzim" and to provide a homeland for the Jewish People even before most knew they needed one. Hashomer Hatzair provided almost total immersion in an anti anti-Semitic ambience. The gift of Hashomer Hatzair was pride in being Jewish and belonging to the Jewish People, pride in changing the almost universal perception of the Jew from money-grubbing, weak and bearded, pale, defenseless, bespectacled and hook-nosed, to a radically different perception of Jews as tanned, strong, scouting, pioneering, proletarian types such as we young Shomrim. We were going to Palestine to build and to defend what we built by force of arms if necessary. My father asked the prototypical question of all parents of Shomrim, "So how come you want to go to the desert to dig potatoes and get callused hands instead of going to school to be a doctor or an engineer here in America?" He never heard or accepted the answer to that question that lies in the State of Israel, the homeland of and for the Jewish People. We Shomrim helped build that homeland, we, the pioneering hard working strong-handed potato-digging Jews.

In 1937 in the Bronx, Chaim wanted to join the club. My mother agreed on condition that he take me along to the Saturday evening meetings probably so she could go to the movies. He had no choice. My first madrich, Yak Klein, taught us how to tie knots and to say a few Hebrew commands like Amod Dom! (Attention!) Amod Noach! (At Ease!) and how to count to ten in Hebrew. Yak taught us how to dance the Hora and to sing, "Artzah alinu, artza alinu," how to play games and how to do things in a group. Yak Klein taught us the price of being a chalutz, a pioneer, and a Shomer in a hostile environment when he was shot and killed driving a tractor on the fields of Kibbutz Chatzor in 1947. Big Eddie Cohen, who also settled on Kibbutz Chatzor and married the girls’ troop leader, Ruthy Geshinsky and who built and worked in the valve factory there, taught us to hike and climb, to play soccer, to row and swim in Pelham Bay and Orchard Beach. I remember him, giant young man that he was, standing in our rented rowboat, throwing the oars as far as he could into the water, telling us to jump out and go get them. He lay himself down in the boat to tan as we drifted farther and farther away. So out we skinny Jewish kids jumped, into the cold water to learn a lesson in self-reliance. We rowed our sunburnt bodies back to port feeling great. Eddie still lives on Chatzor.

Dov Seligson was our leader for a short period in the early forties. His parents owned a Kosher deli near the ulam (the meeting hall). We scrawny youngsters would line up at their counter with our few pennies to buy a loaf of corn bread and each of us would get a free taste of baloney or salami. They took pity on us because Dov was so big, like the Hebrew translation of his name, Bear, and we were so small next to him. His smile of acceptance and his willingness to take on any job no matter how onerous, served as examples for us when we became leaders. Dov was also killed by Arabs on Kibbutz Chatzor in 1947. I cried like a baby and wrote this poem when I heard the news.


IN MEMORIUM

The fire has died out now
No longer bright, leaping, eager
Its hunger sated, its thirst quenched.
It brought warmth and light
Helped us in our travail
Eased our burden.

Dov the strong, Dov the Bear
Hearty of spirit and soul
Dov whose body took leave
But left for us the spirit and the soul.

Though the fire is out
The room seems still warm, still light
Wonder stirs not
The truth is bright

When Aryeh Malkin, Suzy, as he was called, who now lives on Kibbutz Ein Dor, fell down the cliffs of the Palisades in New Jersey while we were hiking along its face and over-dependent on a thin clothesline, we learned rescue techniques and first aid and independence from our leaders. We also learned more scout-craft than we anticipated by the need to bandage him and prepare a stretcher to carry him that we never used because when we were ready to lift him on to it, he jumped up, laughed, and told us he just wanted to see what we would do with a wounded comrade. His postcards from Rochester, New York, where he was assigned to start a new branch of Hashomer Hatzair, were strong incentives to continue converting ourselves into chalutzim (pioneers to the Land of Israel). He wrote about his work in an automobile tire re-capping shop and when he came to visit us in the Bronx, he described his proletarian endeavors. In some measure my love of physical work grew out of my respect and admiration for Aryeh. My mother got to know Aryeh when he came to beg her to allow us to go to summer camp. That was a scene. We nervous kids would gather in the living room with my mother, my Uncle Charlie and Aryeh. Aryeh would sweat and fidget under the grim glare of my uncle - who would have to pay the fifteen or twenty dollars the camp charged for a two-week sojourn in the Catskills or the Mohawk River Valley. But Uncle Charlie was only grinding Aryeh for fun, as I later figured out. He always agreed to pay and he always convinced my mother that it was safe for us to go. He even paid the bus or train fare to get us there. But I don't know how much the fact that the camp was Jewish affected his largesse. I think not at all.

I learned to love nature in Hashomer Hatzair. We hiked, we camped, and we learned and taught scout-craft. It became part of our lives and part of our world outlook. We were Jewish scouts and we learned to treat the environment with respect. We learned to leave the woods the way we found them. Especially after a few of us Shomrim were caught and hauled into the Alpine, New Jersey police station for cutting down saplings in the Palisades State Park to use as walking staves. Aryeh had to come to court and plead for us and to promise that he would make sure to teach us to respect the laws of the park and of nature.

When Aryeh left the Bronx, Lisa Engels took over. She too lives on Kibbutz Ein Dor. Our separate groups of boys and girls were joined and we had discussions on gender equality that led us young male chauvinists to appreciate the role of women in the new world we were going to create in Palestine. Lisa was probably physically stronger than any six of us scrawny kids put together and that made for gender equality too. Women’s role in Jewish life, however unequal it might appear from the practices of the religion, was far more emancipated than in most other religions and societies. Our discussions in Hashomer Hatzair on feminism, the role of women in kibbutz and in politics, and on their capability in the variety of human endeavors, led to a keen appreciation of the difficulties that women faced in achieving equality in the world. Even in the supposedly emancipated kibbutzim, women worked in the laundries, the kitchens, and the children's nurseries just as in bourgeois society. Interestingly, they themselves hooted men out of their “women’s” domain when some brave male attempted to integrate himself into the laundry work force or the children's houses. The dam of tradition held strong against the currents of gender equality. Lisa led her newly post-pubescent charges with aplomb and high intelligence through the intellectual exercises of Marx, Engels, and Freud. We read, discussed, and argued into the nights. We all fell in love with her, boys and girls. She did set our Jewish consciousness straight on so many aspects of what was expected of us in the new society we were creating. The real outcome of all this was that being Jewish meant relating to women with a sense of equality rather than with a Victorian sense of respect.

I spent the summer of 1941 living at the Hashomer Hatzair hachshara (training) farm in Hightstown, New Jersey, working at nearby chicken farms. Then, in 1942, along with a few other sturdy and dedicated youngsters, I slaved under the whip of Asher Fischman to build a kitchen and dining hall on a distant meadow to be used that summer for Camp Shomria. We made up a song about Asher making workhorses out of us. We wheel-barrowed sand and cement for a mile through muck and mire to create the foundation for the building. We hauled wood on our backs that rainy spring because trucks couldn't get through to the building site. Work and Judaism became synthesized as we prepared ourselves to make aliyah to kibbutzim in Palestine. Because of the war and the prohibition against non-military travel, the older members at the chavah (farm) were stuck in America. The British prohibited immigration into Palestine during the war. Many of the men and some of the women of the chavah worked in defense industries in the surrounding New Jersey plants and learned trades that were to prove useful in Israel. After the war, Kibbutz Aliyah Gimel left for Chatzor and a new round of Shomrim came in. Asher in later years became chief electrician in Be'er Sheva when he left Chatzor after the War of Independence. Being Jewish for me is tied to being able to work hard physically, to develop muscles and grow calluses, to be a worker and a builder.

People who have been members of Hashomer Hatzair for even a few months of their lives have been strongly affected by it in ways that are difficult to explain. I’ll try. First, one gets the idea that being Jewish is immensely positive rather than a source of discomfort and at times anguish from being different from the majority of other kids. You begin to think, “I’m Jewish and proud of it.” Then there is the impact of the idea that what you are doing as a young person is immensely important, that what you are doing will change the world. That is so different from the way the world treats young people, it’s a shocker. Being treated as an adult when you are fourteen or fifteen can have a big influence on the way you see yourself from then on. It empowers you in your peer setting outside the movement and also in the adult world around you. The bounce in self-esteem is huge. You become much more responsible for your decisions and actions. And then you find yourself in an accepting environment among girls and boys without coyness or embarrassment. That can make one feel so good about one’s self. Those positive, inclusionary feelings of self-worth and empowerment can never be forgotten. A large measure of the gratitude that one feels toward the movement in later years redounds to the madrichim, the group leaders we had as youngsters. The good feeling of those years comes back to me when I see those men and women in my mind’s eye. I was multiplied and enriched by them. They cared about me, focused their attention on me and listened to me with respect. They opened doors to the world of politics, science, art and music. They guided us young people to a new value system by which to live our lives. My horizons were widened by them. I was emboldened by them to go out into the world as a full person, unafraid and strong. How could I or anyone else touched by that magic wand ever forget the experience. I wonder if the madrichim knew what they were doing.

Bentzion Beinin was our madrich after Lisa left. World War II drained our young men. When he left for the army after a few months with us, we pretty much were on our own. We became "Bogrim," adults, by the standard of the Movement, leaders of youngsters entrusted to us to educate through the levels of the Hashomer Hatzair system. I probably learned more in the years I spent as a teen-aged madrich in 1943, '44, and '45 from the reading, the sichot (discussions), and the preparation that went into indoctrinating a new crop of youngsters. I had to keep one step ahead of the kids. They also wondered if I knew what I was doing. Learning, teaching, and leading the way were Hashomer Hatzair values. They are quintessentially Jewish values. I live by them, I enjoy their fruit, and they are part of what being Jewish means to me.


MY BROTHER - CHAIM (HAROLD) MEYERS

People influence our lives in myriad ways. Many of my mentors outside of school settings were important to developing my sense of being Jewish. Chaim was crucial. In 1938 and 1939 I went to moshava (Hashomer Hatzair summer camp) in Waterford, New York, near the old Erie canal in which we fished, parallel to the banks of the Mohawk River in which we swam (and where I was saved from nearly drowning by the detested Akiva Meyer who had the miserably annoying habit of continuously blowing air forcefully out of his nostrils.) We slept in World War I, U.S. Army tents erected over dirt floors and furnished with old army cots. When he reads this, my brother will be surprised to learn that he affected me deeply when I saw him in the mornings, standing on the dirt floor of his tent as he lay t'filin, strapped his arm with dark leather bands and placed the little square leather-bound box on his forehead under his yarmelkeh and with siddur in hand facing east to Jerusalem, he stood davening. This must have been shortly after his becoming bar mitzvah. By this act, in contravention to the clear atheistic message of Hashomer Hatzair, Chaim made a symbolic statement that being Jewish involved religious observance at the cost of possible, nay, probable ridicule and harassment. There were other ways in which Chaim's steadfast Judaism served as my beacon, unbeknownst to him or me. He rebelled less than I against my father and my father's deep but superficially understood faith. Older than I by two and a half years, it was his example that led in many more ways than I understood as a youngster, to my own sense of Jewishness. And though I am not generally an accepting person, I learned from him an ability to accept and also that acceptance of “the other” is a strongly Jewish trait.

Chaim was my older brother and no matter how rotten I was as a kid brother, he protected me from big kids and stood up for me. As children, he guided me in our neighborhoods. He led the way in our childhood businesses. He was the quarterback on our P.A.L. football team and taught me, a smallish child, to lie down quickly in front of onrushing monsters from opposing teams. He cried when I was hurt in an automobile accident when we were playing stickball on the street in the Bronx. He may have cried then thinking he would catch hell from our mother for letting me get hurt. He led the way to Hebrew School and he led the way for me in Hashomer Hatzair. Below is a portion of a letter Chaim wrote to me from the army when our Hashomer Hatzair group was replacing soldiers on the “Home Front” by harvesting fruit in the Hudson River Valley during World War II. He was concerned that my teen-age angst was interfering with my work as a member of Hashomer Hatzair. I was sixteen.

August 16, 1943

Chazak Nachum,
Overshadowing, or rather the ultimate object of, all your doings must be to create a stronger t’nuah (the “movement” of Hashomer Hatzair).That is, if you are honest with yourself that you are part of the t’nuah and want to fight for the same things the t’nuah is fighting for. Perhaps you will argue that you are too young. But don’t forget that you are the leadership now. Yes, questioning and trying to understand all of what the t’nuah really is must be a process of steady education. Nachum, as a selfish Shomer – selfish for the t’nuah, I ask that our Shomrim try to keep in mind just what they are in the movement for! And what must be done!
We are creating a movement (at this point I just thought of your group of youngsters – which I see as something real good because they are the shavet – the troop – which you created – a part of the movement). And in spite of all our difficulties we must see our road ahead of us – and stick to it. Yes, it hurts at times – but this is our life.
Chazak v’amatz, (Be strong and courageous) Chaim

Chaim led the way to making Aliyah. He led the way to the synthesis of being Jewish, Zionism, kibbutz, and living a life free of religion. He led the way to showing me what a good person is. And in all ways, because he is such a strong Jew, he helped me to become one. I thank him.

MEYER WEISGAL

I was working as a helper on the roof at 924 West End Avenue in Manhattan. Acme Roofing and Sheet Metal had the contract to repair the roof with hot tar and I was up there with Hugo and another helper. Chaya Weisgal, a fellow member of Hashomer Hatzair lived in the building. On the Friday afternoon that the job was nearly completed, I started whistling down the airshafts. We had a distinctive Shomer whistle and I could whistle quite loudly, so I knew if Chaya was at home, she'd probably hear it. Sure enough, a window in one of the airshafts opened and Chaya's voice came floating up asking who was there. She yelled her apartment number up to me. After helping load the truck with the tools, leftover supplies and garbage, I took the elevator up from the basement to her apartment and rang the doorbell. Meyer Weisgal, Chaya's father, flung the door open. He had bushy grey hair, was of medium height and build, and had piercing grey eyes. He looked me up and down as if I were a Martian. I guess I did appear out of place since I was wearing my tar-splattered work clothes and probably smelled of sweat and tar. This was a relatively elegant apartment building, so he may have wondered how I got past the doorman below. "Who the hell are you?" he thundered." My name is Nachum. I’m a friend of your daughter's," I replied. He looked me up and down again, wondering whether to slam the door in my face. He turned in to the apartment while maintaining a firm grip on the doorknob to block my possible forced entrance and yelled, "Helen, there's some son of a bitch out here to see you." I was shocked by the vehemence of his voice and the epithet. (I had that lower-class reaction that my mother was being insulted.) He turned back to look me up and down and I looked him squarely in the eyes and somewhat heatedly said, "You may be ‘some son of a bitch,' but I certainly am not." He stepped back as if I had hit him. Though he used foul language constantly and swore like a trooper, no one had ever spoken to him as I did then. I learned later that those who knew Meyer expected and were accustomed to his "colorful" language.

Chaya reached the door and ushered me past him to her room, not knowing what had just transpired. We had spent a pleasant hour together talking and listening to music when there was a knock on
the closed door. The maid stood there and motioned Chaya out. She whispered that her mother preferred the door to her room remain open. I guess Shirley Weisgal must have heard the story of my encounter with her husband and surmised that some ruffian had entered the premises. No problem. The door remained open. Chaya and I were not yet romantically involved, anyway. At about six o'clock, the maid appeared again and told Chaya her father wanted to see her. She left and returned with an invitation for me to stay for Shabbat dinner with the family. I was shocked again. I told her to thank her folks but that I didn't feel comfortable accepting their gracious invitation, especially in my grungy condition and wearing my decidedly un-Shabbat work clothes. She did that and five minutes after she came back to the room, Meyer showed up and threw one of his own shirts at me and grumbled something about “I had to stay for dinner” or he would be “insulted.” There was a merry gleam in his eyes. And so after washing up, I sat down with my torso covered by a clean blue shirt several sizes too large for me. It was the most luxuriously appointed table that I yet had the pleasure of sitting down to in my young life. We were served by a liveried black maid and I was surrounded by well-dressed, well-spoken and important-appearing people who blessed the Sabbath candles, sang the blessing over the wine and the challah and proceeded to eat the Shabbat dinner. I was engaged in the conversation like a regular member of the group around the table. I can see in my mind’s eye exactly where I sat at the table sixty years ago. That was my first meeting with the man I came to consider my surrogate father.

Meyer was a dynamic and exciting man, Jewish to the core in everything he did and in the life he led - and he did some grand things. He was an editor of major Zionist publications, an impresario of Jewish stage productions, Chaim Weizmann’s secretary in the United States, the Secretary of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, a major fundraiser for Aliyah Beth and the Haganah, and the crowning glory of his life was the founding of the Weizmann Institute of Science. He invited me in to several work situations which, had I been of a different nature and caliber, could have led me to positions of great importance. Between 1943 and 1952, I met, worked for and with, dined and exchanged pleasantries with major Jewish figures of the early years of the establishment of the State of Israel. On and off, I was an office boy, a confidant, an active worker in two major Jewish organizations and an aide-de-camp to many important Diaspora and Palestinian Jews as well as for Meyer himself.

I first went to work for Meyer at his home on West End Avenue where he was creating his first book, an encomium to Weizmann by world class scientists and Nobel Laureates. Initially, I picked up and delivered the offerings of those famous men who resided in or near New York, I ran proofs to and from printers, I made and served coffee into the wee hours of the morn. I began to proofread the galleys, learned the marks of the proofreader and made corrections to the grammar and spelling of the writings, to the surprise and delight of my mentor. In this way I earned his great respect, for he was a man who loved the English language with a passion, as he did Yiddish. His Hebrew remained poor - a sore spot with him always - and he was proud of my Hebrew when I worked for him in Israel at the Weizmann Institute in Rechovot. He loved my voice on the telephone and I was assigned to answer his calls at the apartment on condition that I stop saying, "You know" repeatedly. He cured me of that habit and cursed or blessed me by sensitizing my ear to those who overuse "you know" and similar thought-pausers. And he reinforced my love of English by his own beautiful use of the language, written and spoken.

Meyer took me with him from his home to the offices of the Jewish Agency at 342 Madison Avenue where I worked for a while as an office boy. From there he sent me to the Zionist Archives and Library at 41 East 42nd Street where I worked along with Elya Hurwitz, another Shomer, under the tutelage of Sophie Yudin. Sophie was a martinet with her library (as much as a rotund, very short, very overweight, bespectacled person can be a martinet). She taught me her filing system, a slightly modified Dewey Decimal System to accommodate languages other than English for the newspapers, magazines, books, and belle lettres of an outstanding collection of then recent and current Jewish writings. Most of the material was in English although there was a small Hebrew section as I remember. When she found a misfiled item, her stare through her steel rimmed round glasses boring in from under her sharply pulled back grey hair made you feel shorter than she was and I doubt she got over the five foot mark. But in the year 1944, I read voluminously in the Archives and I met and talked with scholars and researchers. I learned about a Jewish world that had heretofore been unknown to me, the world of Zionism outside of Hashomer Hatzair. I think Meyer sent me there as much for my education as to read major Jewish and Zionist publications that he had contributed to and edited through his early years and which were major achievements of which he was deservedly proud.

I returned to the Agency in 1946 as a money runner, meeting guard, and factotum for David Ben Gurion and his wife Paula, Leo Cohen, the orthodox John Hancock of Israel's Declaration of Independence, (I knew many of the signers of the Declaration personally,) Yaakov Dostrovsky known in Israel as Yaakov Dori, the first Chief of Staff of the Defense Army of Israel, Zeev Shind, one of the founders of the Israeli navy and the future Israeli maritime company, ZIM, Mina Rogozhik with her clipped British accent, a founder of the underground Haganah's Voice of Israel, Tuvia Arazi, a shadowy person who ran sections of the overseas operations of the Haganah in those years, Reuvain Dafne of Kibbutz Ein Gev, a parachutist who jumped into Europe to try to save Jews, Josef Cohn, a Weizmann confidant and overseer and emissary of the Institute, a couple of World War II soldiers, Tzvi Swet and a young man from Haifa whose name I don't remember, from Great Britain's Jewish Brigade from Palestine who were double amputees - having stepped on landmines during the British campaign in Sicily in World War II and who were brought to America by the Jewish Agency to replace their Egyptian hospital issued tin can prosthetic legs, and others whose names I have forgotten or never knew. These were the Jewish men and women who made real my connection with the land of Israel and the people of Israel and the creation of the Jewish State. And there was Louis Lipsky.

Louis Lipsky was as warm a man and as steely a man as can be wrapped in one person. He was enormously successful in unifying the extra-ordinary variety of temperaments that existed in the Jewish leadership in the United States in the critical years leading up to Israel’s birth. His integrity made him trusted by all who came within his ken. I wrote to Meyer when he died.


Nachum Meyers
430 East 83rd Street
New York, N.Y.

May 31st, 1963

Dear Meyer,

I saw you at the Schul today and thought to say hello to you downstairs. But I didn't feel like bucking the crowd for a casual greeting and in case you thought it strange that I didn't come over, I'm writing this note.

Just a little Lipsky story which you might appreciate and which l, in retrospect, fondle in my memory. As an office boy for the Jewish Agency in 1946, I was at Mr. Lipsky's office at least once a week to get checks signed and almost invariably I was ushered into his room rather than being made to wait in the anteroom. This in itself was strange enough because on the occasions that I had to see the other "big" men like (Abba Hillel) Silver, (Nahum) Goldmann, (Stephen S.) Wise, et al, I was made to wait in the outer offices as was befitting my lowly position.

On this particular day when Lipsky finished signing the checks he looked up at me with eyes that for sheer steely insight most closely resembled yours and said, "Who are you?" With a little prodding from him I told him about how you had hired me and that I was a member of Hashomer Hatzair and that one day I too would go to Israel.

He got up from behind his desk, walked around to me and put his arm around my shoulders. We walked slowly to the door and as I turned to say goodbye to him, he extended his hand and smiled. In that gravelly voice of his he said to me "You are one of us, then. Goodbye Nachum."

Well, Needless to say, he made me feel like a vital element of the machine rather than a lowly cog. I walked on air for quite a few days after that, warmed to the very cockles. At last year's Weizmann Dinner I strolled with him to the dais. He refused to have me help him so our arms were linked rather in comradeship. Every time I ever came in contact with him I was warmed by the sweetness of the man. And so I went to say goodbye to him today. That's all.

I trust you are well, Meyer. Please say hello to Shirley for me and accept my best wishes on your fortieth wedding anniversary.

Sincerely,

Nachum

As the war ended in Europe and the tragedy of the holocaust unfolded, we at the Jewish Agency began to receive letters from concentration camp refugees asking for help contacting family in the United States and from American Jewish families trying to get information about relatives in Europe. The overseas letters were dumped in my lap to try to decipher the names, search through the nation's phone books in the New York Public Library, and try to connect family members, first by making phone calls and then, by passing the letters on to those who believed they were connected. I worked with Bea Gumpert, who knew several languages. Between us we managed with great satisfaction to score a substantial number of hits. We had simply set up the Agency's family reunification project and I found myself heavily involved in some of the desperate attempts to bring European D.P.s together with their American relatives. This part of my job reached painfully into me as the magnitude of the tragedy became clearer. The question, "Why?" kept arising in those days. The only answer was, "Because they were Jewish."

In 1948, the Jewish Agency became the Israeli Consulate. There was a confusion of roles and titles but by then Meyer was well on track toward the completion of Phase One of the Weizmann Institute. He commuted back and forth to Israel and I rarely saw him. I left the Agency and returned for a time to Acme Roofing, which by the way, was owned by a Shomer family. Old man Beinin died and his three sons and one daughter, all of whom had been in Hashomer Hatzair, now ran the shop. The two younger brothers, Benzion and Duddy, made aliyah. I made aliyah in October of 1948. I signed on a ship as Supercargo (the company man in charge of the cargo) at the request of one of the Jewish maritime companies operated by the Haganah. Those semi-clandestine companies were established first for Aliyah Beth - the illegal transporting of Jews from the death camps of Europe to Palestine under the British White Paper prohibiting such illegal immigration - and subsequently for the transport of arms to the Haganah underground and to the army of the young State of Israel under an American embargo. I had joined the United States Merchant Marine in 1945 after being declared 4F, ineligible for military service. Thus, I had a mariner's "ticket." That seaman’s license was essential to Haganah flying me to Mexico City and then to place me on board the Sea Trader sailing from Vera Cruz, Mexico, with a 4,000-ton load of barrels of aviation gasoline, ostensibly to some southern European port. I replaced as Supercargo another Shomer who had become ill. Midway in the voyage, the captain was to receive radioed orders to divert to Haifa. My job as Supercargo was to make sure he did that. Haganah also agreed to provide free passage for my wife Tova and our sons Danny and Avi on an American Export Line passenger ship to Israel. They arrived two weeks before me and went to Chaim's kibbutz's staging area in Natanya, which was called "Kibbutz Eilat." As coincidence would have it, Chaya Weisgal married a member of Kibbutz Shuval and came to live in the Negev. Meyer would visit the kibbutz on occasion to see her and to learn at first hand what was happening in this desert outpost across the road from the largest bedouin tribe in the country. In a gesture of largesse, he paid for screening on the dining room windows because the flies sharing his food there appalled him. We were pleased to see each other and in mid-1949 at Meyer’s request, I took a leave of absence from the Kibbutz to work as his aide-de-camp in Rechovot.

I had a room in Meyer and Shirley's newly built home on the Weizmann Institute campus and settled in to carry out whatever tasks he assigned me. I was in the country less than a year but had picked up Hebrew quickly and had acquired a reasonably good accent by mimicking Sabras – native born Israelis. That contributed to his decision to hire me. It was an exciting time. Buildings and roads were being rushed to completion, laboratories were outfitted with the latest and best equipment, scientists from all over the world were hired and billeted, lawns and full-grown trees were being planted in the sand, and people, people, people, kept coming from all over the world to see the miracle taking place in Rechovot. Meyer had enormous good taste. His choices of everything from flora to architecture to decoration were spoken about and lauded. That is not to say there wasn't conflict over many aspects of what was happening there. I thrived in the excitement and the tumult. I was a temporary member of the Weisgal family and dined with them often. I began to fully appreciate Meyer’s sense of humor and the importance of that humor and the jokes he told in his amazing ability to obtain money, to overcome bureaucratic Levantine lethargy and to remove an enormous variety of obstacles to opening the Institute on time. Around the table during my months there, I sat in intimacy with Golda Meir, Moshe Sharett, Yitzchak Ben-Tzvi, Levi Eshkol and Abba Eban; three future prime ministers and two foreign ministers of the State of Israel. I became a friend of Maurice Samuel, a prolific writer on mostly Jewish themes and a dear friend of Meyer's. He was a fun man and I loved our shared, generally humorous, views of the people parading through the Weisgal manse. He deeply respected and loved my Shomer roots and Shomrim in general. I mingled with and poured drinks for Nobel Laureates and famous scientists and wealthy contributors from around the world. Unbeknownst to both of us at the time, I met my future second father-in-law, Harry Levine, there. This immersion in the highest ranks of Israeli political, financial, and scientific life grew out of my connection with Meyer, whom I loved and respected. The intense involvement in the early years with the founding fathers of the State of Israel was an incredible experience. I watched history being made, I met the men and women making that history, I was a participant in its making, and I was aware history was being made while it was happening. I was less aware of the impact all this had on my Jewish soul.

While visiting my children living in Israel in the Sixties, I would stop in at Rechovot and visit with Meyer and Shirley. In recent years I have knelt and wept at Meyer’s gravesite on the grounds of the Institute near Chaim Weizmann’s house. I imagine that I was a disappointment to Meyer. And in hindsight, I was a disappointment to myself. I was simply too unaware, too unknowledgeable, too unsophisticated, and too uneducated to take advantage of the huge opportunities he opened for me. But the milieu he created as he swept through life was so totally Jewish that were I myself not totally Jewish, I could not have functioned effectively in it at all. I served him well and breathed the heady air of being in the know and being close to the “important” people of that era. I hope I was loved by him as I loved him.

FROM SCHNORRING TO FUNDRAISING

To shnor means to beg. Fundraising is high class begging. I did both for Jewish causes. In every Jewish home there was a pishkeh, a squarish little box with a slot on top, painted blue with a map of Palestine and the words Jewish National Fund printed in white. Blue and white are the colors of the Israeli flag and have long been the colors of the Jewish People. The box was to be filled with spare change during the year and turned over to the synagogue or wherever it came from to be emptied and then returned to its special place on top of the icebox alongside the radio. The money went to plant trees and buy land in Palestine. When I was nine, I was given a round box by Hashomer Hatzair with the same colors and slot on top, and told to go raise money from everyone I knew and even from those I did not know. Per instructions, I stood on the subway steps of the 149th Street Station of the Pelham Bay line of the subways that snaked their way through the Bronx. I shook that can there on Friday afternoon until sundown and on Sunday through the day because it was forbidden to collect money on the Sabbath. Late in the day on Sunday I went with Chaim to our ulam, our Hashomer Hatzair meeting hall, to turn in the box, have someone collect them for a trip to wherever the money was counted and later to find out how much our group had collected for the national cause. It was no fun. But the older kids got to go on the subways for "Collections." That sounded like fun. Hah!

I got to be older and I got to go for "Collections" on the subways wearing my Shomer uniform of a double-pocketed light blue work shirt and a green and later a navy bandana around my neck with a tie ring in front. This subway jaunt was always against parental orders. It took a lot of courage to get started but once in the swing of things, it became easier - and, as the pishkas became heavier, it got even easier. New York subway cars have a door at each end and one in the middle. From the terminus of the swing of roughly eight stations up and down the line to correspond to the six or eight cars that made up a train, we, mostly two Shomrim would get on the train through the middle door of car number one and as the train pulled out of the station, my partner or I - mostly I, would declaim in the loudest voice possible to override the screeching screaming train noise, "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Jewish People are building a new nation in their ancestral homeland. The Jewish National Fund provides money to plant trees, drain swamps and purchase land for Jewish pioneers to settle refugees from all over the world. Please give as much as you can." Or if it was for Histadrut, we would yell about the chalutzim building homes for the refugees from war-torn Europe. Or if it was for Hashomer Hatzair, we would say it was we young Jews going off to Palestine to do these wonderful things. Then we would walk up and down the train, shaking the boxes loudly under the noses of the people sitting or standing there, waiting for the pennies, nickels, and dimes that went toward building the Jewish homeland and, I guess, our strength of character. I did this three times a year for eight years. It was on one of these trips, waiting for the train to pull into the next station that I stood next to a man who called me a fucking Jew and scratched a swastika on the subway door with a knife.

I did two stints as a fund-raiser for United Jewish Appeal and one for the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. Meyer Weisgal got me in. He thought it would develop me into someone he could use for the Institute. Those two organizations made fund-rising a science. Success was measured not by the amount raised but by the cost to raise a dollar of useable money. The competition between the two in that regard was fierce and Federation generally came out on top. No other organization came close to the efficiency achieved by these two expert fundraising giants. The Red Cross was laughably or sadly totally inefficient, fifty cents to raise a dollar compared to eleven cents for Federation and fifteen cents for UJA in one year that I remember. That was so probably because Red Cross did not have many Jews on staff. Most of the underlings of the profession spent six months at the UJA office followed by six months at Federation followed by six months at UJA, and so on back and forth. The same skills were needed in both places and people made a career of fundraising. Saul Diamond was my first boss in the mill. Jewish, good looking, intelligent, hard working, he had come up to his permanent position in the UJA handling his specific trades; lawyers, butchers, commodities traders and others that I don't remember. He spoke so smoothly and tried, without success, to train me to do likewise. Briefly, we would contact the best known most successful members of his trades and professions and inveigle them into sitting on the UJA Board of their profession's fundraising committee. We tried to get the best known or most respected as the chairman of that Board and then, we would do all the mailing and phone calls in his name to get "his" people to a fundraising dinner. We would "sell" tables and the members of the Boards would be squeezed by the chairman to buy for themselves and convince their friends in the trade to buy full tables at $100 a seat, or sometimes more, which was a small fortune in those days. We also had the chairman ask as many people as he could to make pledges in advance of the dinners that would be announced there as he went around the room embarrassing people into giving. We had the names of everyone in the profession on index cards. As a peon, I would sit all day making phone calls in the name of the chairman to tell people about the affairs, then call to get them to agree to buy seats, then call to remind them to come, then call to make sure they were coming, then call to thank them for coming or to ask them to contribute even if they had not come, all the while with their index cards in front of me with information about them that included how much they had contributed in prior years and other personal stuff. What a job! You had to be Jewish to love it. And I did it once for the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1961 after I came back from Israel, which is how I met Barbara, my second wife.

Not everything we did in fund-raising was legal nor was everything we did with the money legal. But what we did was always honorable. In 1945 plans were made to get the Jews who survived the holocaust into Palestine. The British White Paper made that operation "illegal." The Mob in the United States made serious contributions of contacts and money to the Jewish cause. The connection of Italians with the Jewish community in Palestine began after World War II when Jews were being smuggled out of Europe through small Italian ports on the Mediterranean and the Adriatic Sea. Later, through Meyer Lansky and other Jewish mobsters, aid and intelligence was provided to the cause as well as money. Much of the acquisition of weaponry in the United States and other Western countries was illegal. I drove Yaakov Dori to arms depots and I drove Zeev Shind to shipyards. We purchased a huge amount of surplus war materiel and shipped it as agricultural equipment under the United States arms embargo to the Middle East. I carried money, cash, from our offices to other offices to pay for purchases or to bribe petty officials and dock bosses. Smuggling was an important capability, and we Jews did a lot of it in the late nineteen forties, of arms and supplies to our underground forces in Palestine. We had a crating warehouse in the Bronx staffed almost exclusively by Shomrim. Some of our people ended up in jail when a crate labeled “Agricultural Machinery” slipped from its sling and crashed open revealing military weaponry. My old buddy, Zev Esakoff, worked in the warehouse and learned his trucking and shipping trade there. Adina and Yitz Gordon turned their contacts, knowledge, and experience in the world of shipping to good personal advantage as the years rolled by. Wealthy Jews gathered in hotel meeting rooms where an engineering drawing of a ship was pinned to a board. Every section of the ship had its cost posted. The Jews in the room bought sections of the ship over the course of an evening's fundraising. Meyer would not let them out of the room until the whole ship was purchased. I stood guard outside those rooms along with other young men.

My work at the Jewish Agency for Palestine was nitty-gritty small stuff. I was trusted and reliable. And I was involved because of Hashomer Hatzair and Meyer Weisgal. The fact that I was Jewish simply never entered my thinking but, in retrospect, I could not have been involved by the higher-ups were I not nor would I have been where I was in that milieu were I not Jewish.


TOVA RAPHAEL MEYERS

When Tova, my first wife and mother of my first four children, and I met in Hashomer Hatzair in 1943, she brought to our small groups a much greater knowledge of the Hebrew language, religion, Jewish literature and history, than was common among our contemporaries and also among most of our leaders in the movement. A large measure of my knowledge of Judaism and Jewish history was learned from her. She led me by the hand through the bible, the learned rabbis and philosophers, and the many sources of the ethical teachings of our forefathers. Her mother, Hanna, was born in Poland and maintained an observant home. Her father, Tobias or Toby as he was called, was born in America to a large Jewish family that struggled up in almost typical fashion from the pushcarts and tenements of the Lower East Side to the relatively clean airy apartments of the Bronx. Their home was kosher. No meat or chicken ever had a single drop of blood or juice left in it when it was brought to the table, god forbid! Tova’s parents observed the Sabbath, candles were lit, and they went to schul. Four sets of dishes were kept in the kitchen cabinets. Every New York City apartment had huge kitchen cabinets to accommodate the Jewish families' required four sets of dishes. The two-compartment sink in the kitchen identified the milichdickeh (milk) side and the fleishechdickeh (meat) side by the blue or red letters embedded in the soap on each compartment. Tova went to chaider and to regular New York City schools, studied Hebrew and knew it well by the time we made Aliyah in 1948 with our first sons, Danny and Avi.

When we married we moved to a "railroad" flat on 6th Street near Avenue B on New York's Lower East Side. In 1946, we held Danny's bris (ritual circumcision) in Tova's parents' apartment at 1704 Washington Avenue in the Bronx. Most of our two families squeezed in for the occasion. His pidyon ha-ben (redemption of the first male child) was held at our 6th Street apartment. That ritual calls for the father, if he is a member of the temple functionary class, a Levite, or a member of the ordinary class of Jews known as Yisrael, to pay a Cohen some amount of silver to redeem him from compulsory service to the priestly Cohen class. In Danny's case, we were honored to have Meyer

Weisgal and his wife Shirley come to our extremely modest apartment to receive the roll of quarters that symbolically redeemed our son from service to the high priests of old. I must confess that were it not for Tova's and her mother's knowledge of Jewish rituals, Danny would still have his foreskin and he would still be in thrall to the Cohanim of the world.


BARBARA LEVINE MEYERS

Barbara and I met at the Weizmann Institute of Science office in New York City in the early sixties. We reconnected at Café Tel Aviv in 1964 and married in 1965. Her father, Harry Levine, was the treasurer of the American Committee of the Weizmann Institute. I had met him briefly when I was Meyer Weisgal's aide-de-camp for the six months preceding the formal opening of the Institute in Israel. The Levine family was typical in its upper middle class observance of the religion. Being fairly wealthy, they were major contributors to all things Jewish and Israeli. Barbara brought into our relationship her own rock solid appreciation and love of Israel and all things Jewish. She carried with her the years of observance of ritual and custom that she was exposed to by her family. She and I meshed perfectly as Jews. Her degree of religiosity matched mine. If anything, because of her more organized nature, our children were assured of the presence of Jewish content in our family life. Both David and Gayle were born during the Cafe Tel Aviv years. Barbara’s love of our People and her awareness of the need for synagogue attendance for the education of our children and identification with their Jewish heritage were critical to our family. The meshing of family life with the intense nature of the New York Israeli cafe scene was handled adroitly by her to the successful inclusion of our children, our relatives, and our friends into our very Jewish life. Barbara made practical the meshugas (the craziness) of those years. She provided the settings at home and at the Cafe for the sharing of us as a Jewish family with our employees and customers. This was no small achievement. We had thousands of customers and hundreds of employees. Through it all ran the Jewish nature, the Jewish foundation of our life. Barbara learned spoken Hebrew. She learned the Israeli songs. She learned the foods. And all of it became a part of our living Jewish lives as engineered by Barbara.

As the years of marriage passed, our home maintained its Jewish character. We traveled to Israel often to see family and friends and to touch our land in important ways. Now, our Friday Shabbatot at home with family and friends joining in the songs and rituals, the synagogue attendance, the awareness of what is happening in the Jewish community, are made part of our lives and contribute to the ongoing Jewish content of our lives. Together we have made the yearly Pesach Seder an occasion of Jewish renewal, a strengthening of our historic connection with our People and its values. The thirty to forty people who share the Seder with us, adults and children, will carry their memories of those festive gatherings into their lives. The recitation of the Haggadah as we read it around the room, the asking of the Four Questions by the children, the buying back of the Afikoman, the welcoming of Elijah and the recalling of the Ten Plagues, all live in our memories. We obey the commandment to "tell it to our children" with seriousness and in full awareness of our Jewish commitment.


KIBBUTZ SHUVAL

British Mandate regulations in Palestine forbad the establishment of new Jewish settlements ostensibly to reduce tension between the Jewish community and the Arab population. Kibbutz Shuval was one of a group of eleven illegal “Points” that were put up clandestinely overnight in 1966 under the noses of the British army. The British also operated pursuant to Ottoman land laws that prohibited the demolition of any roofed structure. So the British army could not tear down anything with a roof, no matter how new. That frustrated British attempts to prevent Jewish settlements from being established on lands purchased by the Jewish National Fund. When I arrived in November of 1948 the kibbutz was barely two years old. A water silo-watchtower stood at the highest point of the settlement and was fed by a double (“illegal” under the British) pipeline. A two-story concrete defense building was built with rooftop machinegun emplacements. The building also served as a hospital and clinic Tents and wood cabins surrounded the tin-roofed dining hall and kitchen. Other buildings included a communal shower made of corrugated metal, an electric generator enclosed in a concrete block structure, agricultural equipment sheds with an enclosed shop, a wood-working shop and a machine shop, a couple of major underground bunkers loaded with food, cigarettes and water and a safe space for women and children, if necessary, sets of machinegun emplacements around the whole kibbutz and finally, a set of two barbed wire fences with a minefield between them. The fields stretching away in the semi-arid Negev desert had been cultivated with field crops and a vegetable garden was planted sufficient for the needs of the kibbutz. A dairy shed and herd were in place along with a major chicken breeding system. The carpentry and machine shops served the needs of the kibbutz and also brought income from outside work. A communal laundry and clothing storage house provided for the needs of the members.

Kibbutz Shuval was founded by three groupings of people; Sabras from Ben Shemen, a youth village where native Palestinian Jewish kids went to school, South African members of Hashomer Hatzair who recently had made Aliyah, and finally, a group of holocaust survivors from Buchenwald and other Nazi death-camps newly arrived in Israel. On orders from Hashomer Hatzair, Chaim joined that group in Germany where he had left the U.S. army at the end of the war and led them through Europe to Rotterdam and the ship waiting to take them to Palestine under the British embargo. He had worked hard convincing the powers that decide such things to include the South Africans so there would be some people in the kibbutz with whom he could speak English. The mix was hugely successful at acclimatizing the newcomers to the country and invigorating them to enormous backbreaking activity in the fields of the Negev. The kibbutz movement used that mixing process to help absorb the huge influx of Jews from around the world at the end of World War II. The newcomers learned the language and the values and were integrated into the ways of the country more quickly as a result of being part of these disparate groups. And in the end the kibbutzim were strengthened by that variety in its members just as the United States is a stronger country for the variety of its citizenry.

In those early years, kibbutz members worked from dawn into the night to accomplish with scant resources and primitive equipment what was a minor miracle. Men worked while it was light and stood guard duty after dark. Mothers and children were living in Netanya away from the dangers of the southern front where Egyptian troops had attacked along the roads leading north to the main population centers of the country. The kibbutzim were often the first line of defense against the invaders. In the winter of 1948 I was put into a room to sleep on my first trip from Netanya to the kibbutz after arriving in Israel. The route down was cold, long, and circuitous to save running into Gamal Abdul Nasser’s Egyptian divisions that were encircled in what was described as the “Falujah Pocket.” The biblical area of Plugot was where the modern-day battle that stopped the Egyptian army on its march north to the Israeli heartland took place. I was wakened at four in the morning by Chaim joyously jumping on me when he came in from the fields where he had been plowing through the night preparatory to sowing winter wheat. We hugged and kissed and talked until he fell asleep in my arms. I tell you all this because the old concept of what a Jew was hardly encompassed the ability or the knowledge to create what this new Jew created and defended. The tailor, the storekeeper, the soft-handed office worker were reincarnated as callused farmers and laborers and soldiers too. My concept of myself as being Jewish and what being Jewish means to me, includes the ability to do all those things that were done to build the kibbutz, till the soil and defend the country.


ISRAEL

Unless you are religious, you don't think too much about being Jewish in Israel. I lived in Israel from 1948 to 1959 in two Kibbutzim, Shuval and Ruchama, and in the cities of Rechovot and Ashkelon. Shabbat began on Friday evening, went through Saturday, and Sunday was a day of work. The holidays we celebrated were mostly biblical. We celebrated Independence Day and stood silent at eleven o'clock on Yom Hashoah, Remembrance Day for the holocaust. The official language was Hebrew of course. But a hundred other languages were spoken there. The official signs in the country are in Hebrew, Arabic, and English. The food was different from typical American fare, but once accustomed to it, eating raised no awareness of being in Israel or being Jewish. The jokes were not much different from what one hears in factories or coffee shops anywhere in the world, I think. The traffic cop who stops you for speeding sounds the same as any other traffic cop, politely aggressive. Perhaps the driving attitudes and the lack of courtesy generally alert you to the fact that you are not in America. The outstanding difference between living in Israel and living in the Diaspora for a Jew is that there is no hint of anti-Semitism in his life in the traditional sense, unless being shot at is anti-Semitic. Raising my children in Israel gave me a huge sense of comfort. I knew they would never question whether it would be better to not be Jewish, as I did. I knew that no one there would call them, "Dirty Jew" as happened to me as a kid in the Diaspora. I was happy that they would not carry a galut mentality with them for the rest of their days. The prejudices in employment and education, the social ostracism that impedes Jews in many areas of life in the Diaspora would be absent there. And there, if the Jews are accused of owning all the banks and controlling the media and running the country, it’s true and won’t be considered anti-Semitism.

Living in Israel in those early years, I was acutely aware that everything I did, every pipe I hauled, every crop I harvested, every cinder block I laid, every weld I made, was going toward the building of a homeland for the Jewish People. I can see my work still standing today in Shuval and Ruchama and Ashkelon. That feeling may have grown out of my Zionist upbringing or my sense of drama or simply an awareness that I lived in a period of change that would be pointed to as an historical period. On the first Yom Ha'Atzma'ut (Independence Day) I remember well the scene in Tel Aviv and the feelings of the people there and my own feelings. It was the sense of having a huge weight lifted off us as individuals and as a People. I contributed to that happy state of affairs and I enjoyed the benefits of that fact and it was uplifting. That splendiferous day made being Jewish exciting and powerful to me. I wrote this in the kibbutz in 1949.

Independence Day – Israel – May 15, 1949
One year ago by the Hebrew calendar, the ancient Jewish State of Israel was re-declared. It was not reborn, for the Jewish State existed in the minds of a People to the extent of becoming a State of Mind rather than a physical entity. But one year ago we, the Jewish People, declared to the world for the third time in our history that the physical State of the People of Israel was back in business. We told them a third time with letters of blood that the State of Mind of “Next year in Jerusalem” has come this year. That if we please, it will remain that way until we are so destitute of blood and the soil so dry of our sweat that we start to wander once again.
In the one year since the declaration of our independence we have lost, completely and with finality, that sense of frustration that so colored Jewish life in the Diaspora and to an extent, here in Israel. Now, wherever one goes in this land one feels the surge of song, the joy of being a Jew among Jews and one becomes conscious of the feeling that whatever is done here is done for ourselves, for the benefit of our People and for the benefit of our children. We have done away with subservience to foreign rule. We have done away with obeisance to foreign law. Now, with conscience and idealism we are forging our future. That knowledge is writ in the faces of the people, written with deep slashing strokes into the faces of our workers, our new countrymen, our soldiers and our statesmen. It is there for all to see, the smile and the singing eyes, the upheld head and the firm swinging stride of the people in the street.
On this day of celebration, the streets of Tel Aviv were thronged with people. Half of Israel, it seemed, was there to commemorate and rejoice. The chevrei kibbutz rode into the city on one of our big trailer-trucks. On the left side of the truck, a red flag and on the right the flag of Israel. On the top of the wooden ladder front was attached a metal sign with the word, “Negev” written proudly over a rough map of the southern desert. We passed trucks full of people, as ours was. We passed people on the roads and from one and all came smiles and the wave of the hand. We waved and smiled and sang and shouted. It was a great day and it shall continue to be a great day for as long as the Jewish People care to remember.
A parade was scheduled and although we arrived two hours before it was to start, every available space to park was occupied. The streets were covered with waving masses of Jewish humanity, smiling, laughing, talking, arguing. Every building along the parade route was jam packed from bottom to top. The roofs were occupied, the balconies, the windows, the ledges, the trees and the advertising pillars and signs were hung with people. That day along the route, no home was private. Complete strangers walked into your house, through your rooms and onto your balcony. Or else, the more agile simply climbed the face of the building to the vantage point of your window and no amount of argument, no threat could dislodge the grinning intruder who probably didn’t understand what you were saying anyhow because it was said in Hebrew, or was young enough to just smile and make believe he didn’t hear you. I climbed up a ledge and onto a balcony, through someone’s window, through their bedroom and out the door to another balcony. On the way, the woman whose apartment it was said something to me which I did not understand so I simply said, “Bvakasha,” and continued on in. The chaver clambering with me told me that the lady objected because at some time in the future I might use the same means of entrance for a purpose that might not be so honorable as today’s was.
The sun was hot and the ice cream vendors were doing a land-office business. The police were having a difficult time trying to keep the crowds from closing up the streets. We were told three times that the parade would not start altogether because two main streets were made impassable by the crowds. But we were not deceived. We knew the parade would start even if the police didn’t. Our planes started roaring overhead and the applause almost drowned out the noise of their motors. They kept coming over, wave after wave. Piper Cubs and thundering Messerschmidts and Spitfires. It was terrific. Then came the parade. It was exceptional in the fact that every company wore real uniforms. The sailors were all dressed alike as were the Jeep squads and the Walkie-Talkie boys and for the army of Israel, that is an exceptional and unexpected event. About our army, I must say that the clothes they wore were never considered an important factor in our winning of the war. True, recently the edict was handed down that one and all must be dressed in khaki, but khaki was made an ambiguous color by the soldiers in the defense army of Israel.
It is difficult to describe the feeling that swelled in me as I walked down Allenby, pushing and jostling, with the planes overhead and the police roaring up and down the avenue on their motorcycles. Out of that hubbub and racket, that tumult, there came over me such a feeling of happiness and belonging as I have never felt before. The concept of “our air force” and “our country” came with such force that at the moment it was strange to cope with those ideas. Until then I had not given much thought to the matter, as little as I would give to the Air Force belonging to the American people. But as my mind ranged over the thousands of years that we had no land and no national machinery and more pointedly, as I thought of our recent struggle to achieve those things, the realization came to me, not of the “fact” that we now have those things, but of the concept of their being ours, of there being an Israeli Air Force, of there being an Israeli government, Israeli ships, and an army and the whole rigmarole of a country that now belongs to the Jewish People. These were the thoughts and feelings that gave me happiness.
So we drove back to the kibbutz, again waving and singing and smiling and waving our banners whipping in the wind. We passed fields and factories, stores and houses. The flag of Israel flew from every structure, every car and every tractor. We passed a recently mown hayfield and one of the chevra said, “See there, our fields must also be ready to harvest soon,” and I thought that “our fields” means the whole of Israel.


SABRAS AND OTHER ISRAELIS

We Jews are a polyglot people as varied as the nations in which we lived before the “Ingathering” of millions of Jews into Israel. However, the indigenous Israeli, the Sabra, stands out from the rest with clarity. A Sabra is the fruit of the cactus and the term is used to describe native born Israelis because they are supposedly "thorny on the outside and sweet on the inside." Sabras speak their native tongue in a way that learned speakers of the same language, of which there is a multitude, barely understand them. In three short generations they have taken Hebrew from the bible to the bedroom and the street. With a directness as hard as a piece of oak, these native-born Israelis have created a new language from one that has lasted for five thousand years and they have created a new kind of Jew from a People that has survived for five thousand years. This change is revolutionary. Without it, Israel would not exist today. I was accepted into a group of Sabras who were my friends and partners for many years. They opened doors to work, the theater, the arts, to games and sports, to the Hebrew language and to the world of politics, to everyday life as it was lived in our land and they enabled me to understand the deep strong roots of modern Israel.

When Tova and I decided to leave the kibbutz, I looked without success for a home we could afford. We decided to leave Israel. When that decision became known in the kibbutz, we were forced to leave there quickly. Don and Chayutah Chetsroni came down the dusty roads of the Negev on their motorcycle to Ruchama to invite us to stay with them in their one-bedroom home in Rechovot until a promised house in Ashkelon was completed. They did not want us to leave the country. I had met this Sabra couple during my six-month stint at the Weizmann Institute in Rechovot. We accepted their invitation and moved in with our two young children and one more on the way. The four and one half Meyers occupied the bedroom and the two Chetsroni's occupied the living room. We met all their friends and families, almost all of them Sabras, played games, talked, and worked. I generated great mirth learning the components of the motor vehicle and the rules of the road in Hebrew to enable me to get a driver’s license. I succeeded, got my license and a promised job as the driver of a brand new "Super White" truck, the envy of every other driver in Mekorot, the Israeli Water Company. Don’s boss, Tzvi Ya’ar, whose family was generations-old Israeli, called some friends to get me my coveted job. In Israel it’s called, “Protektzyah.” Six months in Rechovot flew by and we moved into our new home in Ashkelon. Don and Chayutah followed us and Don and I became partners in a metal fabricating shop. Don was a master machinist and welder. Chayutah's parents, Tsilah and Dudya Luchanski, old Bilu'im Rechovot settlers, were instrumental in helping us make these moves and set up the shop. Tsilah was a housewife and Dudya was a saddler and harness maker with a tiny shop on a Rechovot side street but they knew everybody it was important to know. The Sabra network worked.

In Ashkelon, because I was viewed as a Sabra, I became an integral part of the community that was being built there to integrate hundreds of thousands of new immigrants from Europe and North Africa into the country. Our shop provided much of the steel-work required in the buildings of early Ashkelon, Barnea and the surrounding countryside. We welded pipelines and lay sewage lines. We erected water tanks created playgrounds. I sat on the town council and on the board of a local bank. I acted in the local theater group. I was the Ma’az, the man in charge of the town’s civil defense. I was a Rotarian and president of Rotary. My first four children grew up in a community surrounded by Sabra children of Sabras and immigrants. We surrounded ourselves with Sabra friends and ate, danced, and sang with them.

If I had to choose a word that describes a Sabra, apart from the standard definition, I would choose "pragmatic." If a bus is stuck in the mud, the passengers get out and push it, along with nearby bystanders. If a million Jews must be brought from Europe after the holocaust and another million that were chased out of the Arab countries of North Africa and the Middle East and housed and fed, the Sabras will lead the way to getting it done. If the main road to Jerusalem is blocked by Arab machine gunners in the hills, another road will be built under gunfire to bring water and food to the inhabitants. The Sabra epitomizes, "Eem tirtzu, ain zo agadah." "If you will it, it will be no legend." Being Israeli now means that if you will it, it will be done. Sabras are modern Jews. I like to think of myself as one of them, perhaps without as many spiny needles sticking out of me. But I do not believe I could stand living in the States today if I were a Sabra.


CAFE TEL AVIV

I needed falafel. That urge led to a twelve-year hitch as the owner of Café Tel Aviv on 72nd Street in New York City. How I got there is another story, but what I did there and what happened to me there is part of this story. In the beginning, 1961, the Café had an occupancy permit for thirty-five. So naturally I squeezed a hundred people in on Friday and Saturday nights – and still had a line of people outside no matter the weather. Over a six-month period in 1967, I built a whole new Café Tel Aviv in a 7,000 square foot defunct bowling alley in the cellar of an office building at 100 West 72nd Street just two blocks away. There I obtained an Occupancy Permit for 275 people. Perhaps it was prescient of me to anticipate the floodgates opening to the identification of the Jewish people of New York and the world with the laudatory accomplishments of the Israeli army in overpowering three Arab armies supported by ten other Arab states in six days in June of 1967. After that feat, just as everybody is Irish on Saint Patrick’s Day, everybody and his cousin, except for Arabs, was Jewish as a result of the miracle of the Six Day War. I became a non-rabbi rabbi, host, match-maker, money-lender, psychologist, master of ceremonies, and friend to the thousands of people who became my customers from 1961 to 1973.

After the ‘67 war, Israeli clubs were sprouting like mushrooms. I opened El Avram in Greenwich Village with Israeli entertainer Avram Grobard and Bob Janoff as partners. There too, a similar milieu was created with a similar clientele. But I did not affect that place nor was I affected by it in the same way as with the Tel Aviv. I sold my shares in El Avram within several months of opening.

Jews of all stripes, colors, countries of origin, socio-economic status, degrees of religiosity except for glatt kosher observers, you name it, came to Café Tel Aviv for the nourishment of food, song and dance, chavershaften, dates and marriage. One Israeli band and one band of any other kind stood on our stage hammering out music for singers, famous and unknown, for belly-dancers and for Yemenite dancers, and for singing and dancing by the crowds of people, Israeli, American, Arab and Armenian who patronized the place. I created an Israeli-Jewish world on 72nd Street. And everyone who came there brought his or her own world to the Café. As many stories that I told on and off stage, a hundred were told to me. I knew over two thousand people by name and to this day, many years later, people look at me and say, “You know, you look familiar but I don’t know from where.” And when I say, “Café Tel Aviv,” their faces light up as they remember a unique place and time in their lives.

I can’t begin to recount all the elements that would reveal the Jewish nature of the place. The food, the entertainers, and the music for sure. But also the way we trained our wait-staff, the décor and colors of the appurtenances, the welcoming painting opposite the front door that said, “Bruchim ha’ba’im,” (Welcome to those who enter here,” in Hebrew), the room-length mural that stretched behind the stage that depicted the history of the Jewish People from Genesis to the creation of the State of Israel, the babble of Hebrew, the clientele itself and the reputation of the place, all bespoke the Jewish character of the café.

In the center of this milieu, I was created anew with every person and story, every interaction with people from the initial greeting to the final farewell, from the taking of money to the lending of money, from the advice I got – on everything from the food to what to do with my life – to the advice I gave – on everything from the food to what to do with their lives, I was Jewishly enhanced.

There is a Hebrew proverb that states, “You know a person by his pocketbook, in his cups, and in his anger.” At the café, I learned about people in all three of those ways with a vengeance. I listened to the stories told by drunken ex-Israeli soldiers of their own killing and of their comrades dying in their arms. I heard about marital struggles and monetary struggles of newcomers and second and third generation Queens and Brooklyn Jews. I separated knife-wielding combatants who took vulgar words to heart. I argued with well-dressed patrons who wouldn’t leave a tip on large checks because, “You charge too much,” as if they would behave that way in a non-Jewish restaurant. It is hard to imagine or measure what I gained from my years at Café Tel Aviv.

From Café Tel Aviv I learned that being Jewish meant being aware of what is going on around you, being more sensitive to people generally, expecting people to lean on you for support and for the infliction of their particular brand of pain, that the supply of nudniks (loosely, pains-in-the-ass) is unlimited, that everyone can cry but not everyone can laugh, that having a support system, even an imaginary one, is necessary to happiness, and that money, though it so often appears to be very important, is not, unless you don’t have any. I doubt if I could have learned all these things if I had opened a goyische establishment.


THE WARS OF ISRAEL

The 1948 War of Independence, the Sinai Campaign of 1956, the Six Day War of 1967, the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the Lebanon Campaign and two Intifadas, all emanated from the Arab world's desire to kill Jews and wipe out the State of Israel. The Arabs claim that our return to our land is their “Nakbah,” their tragedy. Seven campaigns of annihilation after the holocaust had killed six million of our People. Billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives have been expended in the pursuit of killing Jews. Does any other People know what it feels like to be the bulls-eye of a target in a shooting range. We are so hated and despised that we must be exterminated like an undesirable infestation in the land of our Bible, our land of Canaan, our Promised Land, the land reclaimed from desert and swamp by me and my comrades so the remnants of our European brothers and sisters could find a new life away from danger, the land that religious Jews pray to by facing east every day of their lives and have prayed to for two thousand years. Today, in the fall of the year 2002, Israel is still being assaulted in many of the same ways it was assaulted in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973.

July 1967

Where to begin? The stories are numerous, varied, heroic, and sad. Some are even funny in a macabre sort of way.

******
The war starts. The Israeli radio, The Voice of Israel - Kol Yisrael - is intent on broadcasting music, more martial than usual, but music rather than news except for the hourly reports. The Arab stations in Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon, are broadcasting "news" and for those in Israel who speak and understand Arabic, the news is horrifying. "Tel Aviv is in flames, Haifa is totally destroyed, hundreds of Israeli planes have been shot down, Egyptian armored columns have penetrated the southern portion of the country and are making rapid headway toward the population centers of the country."
In Ashkelon, a large number of residents are immigrants from North African countries. Arabic comes more easily to them than Hebrew, and in any event, there is no news from Kol Yisrael. The town lies a scant six miles from Gaza, heart of the dreaded and feared Palestine Liberation Army. Most exposed to the fury of the Arab attack is the southern portion of Ashkelon. With great keening and wailing and pleas to the Almighty, the people flee their homes. Clutching jewels, transistors and children, they make their way to the supposed safety of the shelters in the center of town. Calmer heads try without success to quiet this emotional screaming mass of people. They are sure they are doomed. The proof is on the radio. Soothing words have no effect. Radio Cairo and Radio Ramallah are spurring on their armies with news of victories over the hated Jews.
"Soldiers of glory, our Holy War has hardly begun and already we have nearly destroyed the Zionist wretches. We have cut their amour to pieces, downed their planes, bombed Tel Aviv. The Jews are running like rabbits, jumping into the sea. Our brethren even now have put the torch to Ashkelon and the Jewish intruders are fleeing for their lives."
And in the shelters of Ashkelon, the people heard the news that the town was burning and they were fleeing. Some of the more daring poked their heads out of the security of newly dug trenches, sandbagged buildings, and concrete bunkers. They looked for fire and could see none. They smelled the air for smoke and there was none. No one was running anyplace. As a matter of fact, the whole town had the serene quiet air about it as on any early Sabbath morning when people sleep late and the streets are sunny and deserted. One man smiled and called his crying wife to the top of the steps. She stopped wailing at her imminent destruction and started to giggle. Others came out of their warrens, smiled and giggled and called to yet others to come see the "destroyed" and “burning” town of Ashkelon. The smiles became broader, the giggles turned to laughter and soon the streets were crowded with babbling, laughing people, patting each other on the back, dancing jigs and roaring hysterically at nonsense that had so frightened them a short while ago.

******
Max Dektor’s son, Chevron, had finished his three years of army service a few months ago. The surrounding Arab countries sounded war cries and the U.N. forces in the Sinai had been withdrawn. When the call-up started in May he was sure that he was going to return to his unit and would soon be seeing old buddies. The days passed and his unit's radio code was never mentioned. He received no notice to report for duty. He was left alone. He felt sorry for the poor guys who had to go charging off into the army, their lives disrupted, their work halted in the middle of whatever they were doing. In a way he considered himself lucky. But it did seem strange as the end of May approached, to be walking around in a town full of women, children, and old men. He began to feel uncomfortable. Everyone kept asking him what he was still doing at home.
He went to his old base and asked the commanding officer there if a mistake hadn't been made. Perhaps his name had been misplaced and if so, he didn't want to benefit from a technical error. "No. There is no mistake," he was told. He just was not being called up at this time. He should go home and wait, and if he were needed, he would be called.
June first came and again Chevron made the trip to the base. "No. Not yet. Don't worry, we'll get to you when we need you." This time Chevron waited till dark to return home. He didn't want to be seen in town. His father tried to comfort him. Chevron accused his father of
using his considerable political pull to keep him out of the army. Max was hurt by the accusation and told Chevron that it just was not true. For a third time, Chevron went to the base and was sent home. Max didn't know what to do for the boy. Chevron wouldn't go out of the house. He moped. He even cried.
And so, in desperation, Max went to his connections and using his considerable political pull, managed to get Chevron called up to serve.

******
Every town and city has an army officer who serves as liaison officer between the army and the local community. If a soldier gets drunk or gets into trouble, if he needs a bed or a meal, the Katzin Ha-ir takes care of it. There are also less pleasant duties connected with the job. The war in June of 1967 lasted six days. For the Katzin Ha-ir of Rechovot, Chaim A., the war lasted an eternity.
Chaim A. and the chaplain of a unit in the Sinai made their way to the home of Sara W. She sat in her small third floor apartment in stoic silence as they told her of the death of her son David. When they left she sobbed uncontrollably for many hours. When the doorbell rang that evening, she tried to wipe away the tears. There stood Chaim A., this time alone, and this time with a telegram in his hand. With tears in his eyes he told her of the death of Tzvi, her first-born. An hour passed before he left her.
Sara W. had four sons who were called up in May and early June. Her husband Zev was also called up along with his light truck. Now one son had died when his tank was hit in Sinai and another had perished from a sniper’s bullet in Gaza. The Katzin Ha-ir made the trip up the three flights of stairs the following morning to tell Sara that Uri had died fighting valiantly in the streets of Jerusalem. Sara did not a cry. She had no more tears. Some hours later, again with a chaplain, Chaim A. came to tell her that her husband’s lorry had struck a mine and he had perished to save the land of Israel. Sara W., forty-seven years old looked seventy-four years old. She went out to her balcony and sat sightless, numb, dumb, with agony.
A jeep pulled up across the street from the quiet house on the tree-lined street. Chaim A. and a chaplain got out and started to cross. They didn't climb the three flights. Sara W. came hurtling down to them to the pavement below her balcony. She had given all she had and for her there was nothing left to live for.

******
Three Arab soldiers and two Israeli paratroopers were loaded into the ambulance. All their wounds had been bandaged by Israeli medics for the trip to the hospital. When they arrived at the hospital, the two paratroopers were dead of unbandaged stab wounds. The doctors refused to touch the wounded Arabs.

******

The Arab had his hands in the air as he approached the half-track. He was smiling and jabbering. When he was ten feet from the vehicle he opened his hands and lobbed two grenades among the eight men seated there. Six died immediately and two died in the hospital. The Arab also died.

******
In Qalqilia the people surrendered. They were told to bring their arms and ammunition out of the houses. From one sunbaked two-storied house, a white flag fluttered. Nearby an Israeli soldier watched as the people stacked rifles, bullets, grenades, and other paraphernalia of war. From the house with the white flag a rifle cracked and the soldier fell dead. The front door was smashed open. The house was filled with Arabs. A recoilless cannon mounted on a nearby jeep took aim and fired repeatedly. The house and everything and everybody within were destroyed. The white flag fluttered and fell with the dust.

******

Thirty-five years later, our two Peoples are still fighting the same war. Israel will remain a beacon of democracy and freedom in the Middle East, even for the very people who want to destroy it. Today I write on the internet to Jews and Arabs, to friends and family trying to point the way to peace. I write to my senators and congress people and even to the president to weigh in on the issues that will affect Israel and the Middle East. It is a sad and frustrating job. I care deeply for the life of every Jew and every Arab wasted in this senseless war that will end one day. In the face of the continuing Arab campaign of annihilation of their own people and my people, in the face of Jews who cannot see beyond their own perception of the right and wrong of this conflict, being Jewish means working assiduously for peace, for shalom.


RELIGION

Thinking back to my early years, I do believe my family and friends described themselves as being members of the Jewish People because they were born Jewish into a religiously distinguishable group. “What are you?” “I’m Jewish.” Some common physiognomy could and did lead some to call Jews, Jews. But the generally acceptable identification and definition of a Jew was a person who practiced the Jewish religion and was a member of the Jewish faith. So that was what being Jewish meant to me early on as much as I thought about it. The fact that I describe myself as an atheist and anti-religion does not erase the importance of the Jewish religion from my being Jewish. The long history of the Jewish People found in the bible and replete with descriptions of the Jewish People's relationship with god and worship, is still my history. And because of their belief in god, the Jewish People underwent cataclysmic events that affected their collective and individual psyches. Also, the impact of Jewish history and religion on the Western World is indisputably huge. So it is no surprise that the impact of Jewish history and religion on me is also huge. I was born into it, exposed to it, enjoyed it and suffered from it, and have expanded it internally as a source of joy and power in my life. I intentionally propagated it, the impact of Jewish history and religion, in my children and to whatever extent possible, in their children. It is their history and may be a source of joy and power in their lives as it is and will continue to be the source of hatred and pain.

We never went to schul as a family living in Israel. In one form or another, all four of my sons with Tova became Bar Mitzvah, Sons of the Law. What impact that religious moment had in their lives, I cannot say. Tova and I fulfilled our duties as Jews as we saw fit. Our sons were raised in a Jewish home and through our Zionism and our own love for our Judaism, they were inculcated with their own sense of being Jewish. As my children with Barbara were growing up, we joined the local schuls to provide the Jewish connection to the rituals, the schooling of the language and history, and the contact with other Jewish kids and families. David and Gayle became b'nei mitzvah and their lives today are lives of conscious Jews. On Shabbat we light the candles, sing the prayers and follow the ritual to tie our children and their children to our People. On Pesach, we conduct our Seder with the avowed intent of passing on to our children the heritage of their People. Consciously and actively passing on this heritage is an important component of what being Jewish means to me. I do not have to be religious to do that.

I am not a religious Jewish scholar. Over the years, in chaider as a child, in Hashomer Hatzair, under the tutelage by family members such as it was, and from courses in college and from serious discussions and seminars to off-the-cuff conversations, the knowledge about the Jewish religion that I have acquired does not qualify me to enter any biblical knowledge contests. What I consider important in that knowledge of the religion and its history is the awareness of and the imperatives of the moral and ethical content carried down through the years by the Jewish People and imparted to me as part of my being Jewish. I also think that religion has commandeered ethics and moral behavior and indoctrinated faithful believers to think morality and ethics are an integral part of religion and religious institutions. Ethical and moral precepts are used to undergird the institution of religion while it works together with local and national power structures to achieve worldly goals. How daring to think religion and ethics are not connected at all! How unusual to think that religious institutions have usurped and religicized the goodness of ethical and moral behavior and preaches such behavior as if it grew naturally out of religion. Religious power elites also work toward relicizing love of country. The “One nation under god” debate in the United States is a prime example of the encroachment of institutional religion into the laical world. My goal in these years of my life is ask my world to weigh the benefits and the detriments of religion. It is against the pain and suffering caused by religion, the shedding of blood by religicide that I fight. I take this on as a Jewish goal because I think that religion exploits and controls believers for less than the ethical and moral ends it preaches. For the benefit of those who believe in a higher power, I declare here that I am not in contention with belief and the grounding that belief gives to humanity. It is with faith in religion and the religious institutions built on people’s need for belief against which I cry out.

The following diatribe was dashed off for a couple of Jewish websites.

Shalom,
As much as the destruction of religious institutions appears to me a desirable goal, the world has been mesmerized by religions into believing they are not the evil force they truly are. Wiping out religion and replacing it with ethical humanism is too formidable a task to accomplish in the next millennium. The more modest goal of separation of church and state throughout the world should be reasonably attainable.
This is a war for the hearts and minds of masses of people. This is a war of education, of propaganda, of enlightenment. At every turn and in every instance where religion is shown up for what it is, a supporter of power structures and an instigator of death by religicide, the course of action to be pointed out must lead to political separation. A constant din must be maintained to alert people to the dangers of religion and religious input and control of the political process.
Atheists, humanistic ethicists, and agnostics have been too reluctant to buck the strong tides of religious oceans. For the most part, they try to keep their heads down. After all, how far can they get in their own lives of work, school, love, family, friends, all of whom have what is called "respect" for religion. This ingrained respect is a huge deterrent to effective action. The first step must be to separate the attack on religion from its association with an attack on belief, humankind's fundamental need. Also, care must be taken to separate the charlatans of religious institutions from the poor deluded good religionists who will defend their institutions to the death. The point of attack must be to convert deluded ethical devout religious leaders to the awareness that they are involved with murderers and panderers of death through religicide.
The second point of attack must be in identifying and exposing the charlatans who have earned the respect of people as leaders of religious institutions. That has to be performed in both delicate and coarse ways. This is a war to be conducted over centuries. I do not suggest nor imply that this is the way to achieve peace in the Middle East in the near term. For now, it is sufficient to identify the mullahs and rabbis who preach death and hold them up for the anti-gods that they are.
A variety of perceptions have colored the reaction to my proposition that religion is evil. They range from, "Not my religion!" to "They are not ALL evil." What I posit is not really related to the nature of religion as a vehicle for worship per se. That is, I do not contest that what religion says it offers is not delivered. But religion has a superior goal to the mere structure in which believers can make obeisance to their gods. My claim is that religion is a creation of power elites to be used as a tool for controlling people; individuals, small groups and huge masses of people. The power elite may be the single witch doctor or Shaman, the chief of a tribe, the king who is himself the representative of god on earth, the combination of the Vatican and Nazi Germany, or the government of the United States with the varied and diverse religious establishments of the country. The need for people to believe in a higher power has made them susceptible to the lure of religion; they are told how to pray, when to pray, and where to pray - and they can do it with others to reinforce the rightness of their need and the righteousness of their belief. The fact that missionaries may have the purest of motives does not detract from the fact that control of their converts passes to the power elites that supported the missionary work in the first place. The fact that various religions and religionists have cultural and historic aspects unrelated to power but only concerned with the true well-being of their adherents does not detract from the fact that all religions enable evil to flourish by their affinity to power elites. All religions without exception are prostituted by power elites. Even the religions that claim "Peace" as an integral part of their very essence - like Judaism - are prostitutes because they sell their wares to pacify, to lure, to inveigle the masses into actions detrimental in cataclysmic ways to their well-being and the well-being of others.
Is there one piece of dirt or rock worth the life of a single individual? Not really! Yet religion religicizes dirt and rocks into holy entities so their believers will die for them. Young men die for god and country. Who benefits? God? Surely not! The martyr? No. The power elite does. The sellers of arms do. The oil companies do. The Sheiks and Shahs and Mullahs do. The country is said to benefit. Who is the country if not those who lay down their lives in the wars that religion and patriotism tout as good and necessary? Religion has religicized love of country and patriotism. Religion is evil incarnate. Religion is the actualization of harm to its believers. As to its murderous affect on non- religionists, non-believers and "other"-believers, no knowledgeable person will deny the religicide the inquisition inflicted on its victims nor the religicide of the Crusades nor the religicide of the poor Irish who need to die their Protestant deaths at the hands of the Catholics and vice-versa.

Rational enlightened self interest is the road out. But people must be willing to take that road.

Nachum Meyers

As an eye-opener to the way religion achieved its power one simply goes to the Ten Commandments as an authoritative source for the Orwellian laws of our religion-bound universe. “You shall love your god with all your might.” Your god is all-powerful and can kill and resurrect. Wow! What power. The Jews religicized the need for a day of rest - the Sabbath. They religicized needed sanitary requirements relating to the food we ate and the utensils we used to serve the food. Infractions of the religious rules brought heavy divine punishment. A youngster in a bar mitzvah class asked, “Why are the penalties so severe for infractions so small?” The answer lies in the need to control the people. The demands and injunctions of the bible and the prayer books are amazing in the enormity of their power to control adherents to Faith. As a Jew, looking at this amazing reservoir of evil that we bequeathed to humanity, I am re-thinking my placement in the universe of Judaism. Does being Jewish mean to me that I am complicit in this monstrous crime against humanity? I think so. Being Jewish also means I must do something about it. I must fight to replace religion with humanistic ethicism through teaching enlightened self interest.

MY CHILDREN

What has become apparent to me through the years is that I have become a stronger Jew, more Jewish if you will, from the teachings of my family members. This edifice of the Jewish family has been enhanced by the young men and women who are my children, their offspring, and their significant others who are Jewish. My goal was to assure that they became conscious aware Jews. They responded by establishing Jewish homes, by serving Israel in its armed forces and in other ways, and by their connections with friends and family in Israel, by learning and speaking Hebrew, by their activities and contributions to the Jewish community, by caring for the Jewish People, their People, and more important, their caring for all people. When I look at them and talk with them, I am rewarded deeply by their lives as Jews. That noches (pleasure from children) comes to me because I myself am a Jewish parent.

Just as teachers learn from their students, parents learn from their children. If neither of them learns, they are missing a great opportunity. When I started this assignment, the thought immediately came to the fore that being Jewish means teaching my children what it means to be Jewish. Only sitting here writing this essay does it enter my consciousness that my children have taught me a great deal about the subject. My children are as varied as any six (or eight) human beings can be. They relate to me as adults and as children. Some more easily than others have been able to convert our relationship from parent/child to adult/adult. I take responsibility for failing to provide the guidance or the tools to make our relationships more mature than they are.

Through the course of their years they have been exposed to and experienced the dynamics of other families. I watch them today as they meet and greet each other, hug and kiss each other, talk with each other and share with each other. Though they stem from two very different kinds of mothers, in adulthood they have melded in important ways and to a reasonable extent despite the difficulties of such melding after a messy divorce. Watching them interact I have learned better how to treat them as the individual adults they are, each with radically different personalities. My children have taught me how to be more accepting, not only of them and their foibles, but also of all people. They have taught me, often a tactless individual, to be sensitive and aware of the needs and sensibilities of others. This has sometimes been a difficult lesson for me to learn, but they have persevered with kindness, tact, and respect, to educate me for my happiness with them and with my world. It's true that sometimes they have to figuratively slap me around for my own good, but they do it gently.

It is important to Jews, that is, to those of us who care about being Jewish, that their children marry Jews and that they do not marry non-Jews. I write this without animosity toward those among my family and friends who themselves or whose children have married non-Jews. In the old days and in more rigid societal structures, it was difficult to find non-Jews who did not bear within themselves some seed of anti-Semitism. I make this statement without any intention of trying to prove its truth or validity; it is an assumption of mine. In these recent generations and in democratic places, it is easier for Jews to find soul-mates who are not Jewish, who think of Jews as other human beings with their own particular backpack of history and tradition, who do not carry within themselves that bitter seed of animosity or hatred toward Jews passed down from a previous generation. None of my children has married a non-Jew. They have taught me a simple lesson; that however open-minded and free-thinking and accepting Jews and non-Jews of our day may be, there is a line that must be crossed if Jewishness is important to them. If a non-Jewish beloved is able and willing and wishes to convert, then there is no line to be crossed.

I am pleased to learn that lesson because I am an ethical humanist who might have been content with a world without religious divides, patriotic divides, and historical divides. As much as I am Jewish myself, I think I would have crossed that line in the interest of saving the human race. They, my children, believe they can save the human race without crossing the line. I know that one of them came up to that line and with great sorrow and sacrifice, turned around and walked away from it. I learned a great deal from that vicarious experience.

TEMPLE SINAI NURSERY SCHOOL

After joining the Temple when we moved to New Jersey in 1967, I became active in its activities, volunteering in all sorts of ways to make my experience there and that of others, meaningful. In those years I became president of the Brotherhood and a member of the Board of Directors. But most important, twenty-five years ago I was a Founding Father of a nursery school at our temple in Tenafly.

I fought tooth and nail against the stodgy reluctant Temple hierarchy to get the school started and to keep it funded until it was self-supporting. Our goal was to provide a healthy Jewish environment for youngsters to learn age-appropriate skills to deal with their peers and with life. The school today is lauded as it continues its happy role in that community. I led our founding committee through a values clarification course to enable us to conduct meaningful searches for our school principal and our teachers. My goal was to assure the inculcation of Jewish values into future generations by providing a healthy start to our children in a Jewish environment. And by the way, today it is a major source of Temple income. I count the Nursery School at Temple Sinai as one of my greatest achievements. And that is so important a part of what being Jewish meant to me then and means to me today.

HOLIDAYS

I am not sure when I became conscious that Jewish holidays were observed in addition to all the other school holidays. I do know that my mother was required to write a note excusing us from school on those holidays that fell on school days when my father was home. If he was not home, my mother wrote a note only for the big ones like Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Pesach. As a child, I enjoyed Purim and Simchas Torah. The revelry was so different from the usual seriousness of my schul experience. Apples and candles and greggers - noise-makers, and flags, and dancing, and other foods, made those holidays joyous. On the other hand, the High Holidays were generally boring and sometimes scary, as when I peeked at the guys up front, Cohanim, who had wrapped themselves in their talissim (prayer shawls). That was a big No-No, like peeking at god and getting blinded for the affront. So much fear is connected with religion. At home, the holidays were observed as days of rest, except for Pesach. Pesach was always about food. Those were days of reading Manishevitz Haggadot, falling asleep under the table until dinner was served and then asking the Four Questions or searching for the afikoman. Actually, eating was big on all the holidays except for Yom Kippur when we were supposed to fast but never did. Chanukah was always fun because my aunts and uncles outfitted us with new clothing and we ate all kinds of goodies. And the songs were fun because they weren't dirges. My family never consciously explained or educated us about the Jewish holidays and, because of my father's on again, off again appearance at home, there was no constancy to holiday observance.

Most of the youngsters who were members of Hashomer Hatzair celebrated the Jewish holidays with their families. But some holidays were used to indoctrinate us about becoming better Shomrim. L'ag B'omer was important as a scouting and sports holiday. Pesach was used to symbolize the movement's desire to wean us away from the fleshpots of our bourgeois American existence and send us to the land of our forefathers as Moses led the children of Israel through the desert for forty years and then to the land of Canaan. The parallel is apparent. Chanukah epitomized the struggle to retain our Jewishness in the face of tyrants forcing us to kneel to other gods. And we planted trees on Tu B’Shvat, early environmentalists that we were.

In the kibbutz and in Israel generally, holidays are celebrated as historic events as well as religious ones. Succoth (the festival of booths) and Chag Habikkurim (the holiday of the first fruits) were festive occasions on the kibbutz. The members dressed in white and children wore wreaths of flowers they had made. The tractors and farm implements decorated with fruits and vegetables and festooned with streamers were hauled in a gay parade. Purim was a day of plays, parades and masquerades, especially in the cities and towns. The Od LoYada parades in Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem had young Queen Esthers, Mordechai's, and Achashverosh's lining the sidewalks and marching through the streets. The commandment to drink until you could not tell the difference (Od lo yada) between Mordechai the hero and Achashverosh the villain was obeyed by believers and non-believers alike. Pesach in the early years was a major catering and entertainment event in kibbutzim. Anyone who had a relative or friend in any kibbutz begged to be invited. The dining rooms were decorated with paintings from all the children’s classes and white cloths covered the usually inelegant tables. Flowers and bright sashes covered the cloths and hung from walls. The tale of the Exodus was told in myriad ways by children and adults. Young and old went forth from Egypt in song and with gusto. You knew you were Jewish then like Americans know they are American on the Fourth of July. On many of these occasions, history mingled with religion transmogrified into a patriotic fervor to be Jewish and to be Israeli. No child raised in Israel of the least observant family would question his Jewishness. Every adult living in Israel who shared the bloodline, fathers' or mothers' or both, whether from atheist Soviet Union, the primitive mountains of Yemen, or materialistic America, seemed to know in their guts that they were Jewish and what it meant to themselves be Jewish. This was especially true on Israel Independence Day and at eleven o’clock on Remembrance Day during the two minutes that the entire country came to a complete halt and people got out of their vehicles or wherever they were and stood with bowed heads in complete silence amid the wailing of sirens to remember the dead of the holocaust and the dead of the wars between Israel and the Arab states.


FOOD

People who fly from Israel on El Al, the Israeli national airline, "steal" the bagels and cram them into their handbags just in case they should get hungry in America. El Al, with awareness, prepares itself for this Jewish concern about the next meal. Jewish food and attitudes toward food stem from two main sources, the religion and the fear of imminent starvation. Big and plenty are important Jewish food considerations. Jackie Mason, the Jewish comedian, described a scene in a restaurant where someone orders a slice of cake, is given a normal portion and declaims, "You call THIS a slice of cake?" By the size of the slice you can know if you are in a Jewish or non-Jewish restaurant. The slice of cake should be able to feed a Protestant family of twelve. Then you know you are in a Jewish restaurant. The corned beef in a sandwich from a New York kosher deli should be enough to make at least four California corned beef sandwiches in Fresno. So when you look at food and you say to yourself, "How will I ever be able to eat this humongous portion?" you know you are not Jewish. There must always be more than enough to feed the table. If there aren't leftovers, the Jewish person has not cooked enough. If someone leaves food on the plate, that shows they didn't like it and insults the homemaker. If guests don't ask for seconds, they must have not trusted the homemaker to make enough and ate just before they came to visit.

Of course there's the whole issue of kosher food, food that is permitted or prohibited by Jewish religious law. The law prohibits Jews from eating certain animals such as pigs and shellfish because they are considered unclean. (By the way, all pigs wish the whole world was Jewish.) Laws of kashrut (relating to being kosher,) dictate the way animals must be slaughtered before they can be eaten by a religious Jew. Most peoples of the earth do not have such a large number of laws relating to food. So people who grow up in religious homes are directly affected by food in terms of Jewish law. Even people who may not be orthodox themselves but grew up in religious homes may have difficulties swallowing when they eat non-kosher food. You remember the feelings evoked by those foods when you marry and set up your own home. You want your wife to prepare the same kinds of foods to replicate the tastes you developed as a youngster in your mother's kitchen. Or you want your husband to like the kinds of foods you prepare that provide the kinds of tastes you both grew up with. Jewish cuisine is identifiable like any other ethnic or national cuisine by the manner it is prepared and cooked and the combinations of spices used. Jewish cooking creates tastes and smells that linger with you from childhood. But the variety is enormous and reflects the great number of places that Jews have lived. This fact does not prohibit you from eating Chinese food on Thursdays or pizza and pasta on Sundays.

Nations, cultures, and religions have foods associated with their holidays. So too, the Jewish Sabbath and holidays are marked with special foods. There must be two challahs, the twisted sweet bread served in Jewish homes on the Sabbath to signify the sweetness and plenty of the day of rest. The table is covered with a white cloth and the good silver and dishes are used. The wine is served to bless the day and to help distinguish between the workdays of the week and the pleasures of the day of rest. Passover matzah, Channukah potato pancakes, Purim humentaschen (Haman's ears), apples dipped in honey on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, are etched in my gastro-memory.

The foods themselves may not be in and of themselves particularly Jewish. But fried foods are eaten on Chanukah to commemorate the miracle of a small jar of oil, one day's supply that lasted for eight days and kept the eternal flame burning in the temple until new pure oil could be prepared. So any food cooked in oil like jelly doughnuts or potato pancakes, becomes a Jewish food on that holiday. Food ties us to the holidays we observed as children and into adulthood whether Thanksgiving turkey, hot dogs on the Fourth of July or, god forbid, ham on Christmas. Certain foods have symbolic meanings specifically to remind us of long-ago events. The Pilgrims eating turkey and our eating turkey today, four hundred years later on Thanksgiving Day is a good example of how food impacts on being an American. Eating matzah on Passover to remind us of the haste with which the Jews left Egypt and the years spent in the desert solidify the memory of the food our ancestors ate that serve as a mnemonic for those historic events. Eating a hardboiled egg and parsley dipped in a bowl of salt water are both real and symbolic reminders of the Jews crossing the parted Red Sea, the season of spring, and the salty tears of the bitterness of slavery and even tears for the death of Egyptians. My being Jewish is wrapped up in those holiday meals as much as in the holidays themselves.

The names that were given to foods by my mother, and I suppose my Yiddish-speaking forebears in Europe, names like flanken and kugel and gefilte fish and latkes and gehakte leber evoke a Pavlovian reaction, not only in the salivary glands, but also in the atavistic memory cells of a Jewish person. The foods my mother, my aunts, my wives and in-laws prepared, and the special foods of each of the holidays served and eaten over the years created a link between those foods and my Jewish soul. Chicken soup with kneidlach or farfel, anybody?


HUMOR

Appreciated or not, my ability to find humor in so many of life's situations is part of my Jewish nature. There is no situation, however terrible, that a joke cannot be found in it. There is no serious occasion that cannot benefit from a clever pun or a humorous twist. I didn't learn this from the atmosphere. It is part of my Jewish heritage. Perhaps it is their ingrained sense of humor as much as their faith that has enabled Jews to survive centuries of persecution at the hands of an enormous variety anti-Semites. When you make fun of a tyrant, he is diminished and becomes less fearful. Jews have lived in a world where the only thing that calmed the terror for a while was a joke.

Charlie Chaplin, Jerry Lewis, Jackie Mason, Woody Allen, Danny Kaye, Carl Reiner, Gene Wilder, Fanny Brice, Zero Mostel, Totie Fields, Don Rickles, Sid Caesar, Victor Borge, Roseanne, Marx Brothers, Robert Klein, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Alan King, Red Buttons, Buddy Hackett, George Burns, Jack Benny, Mel Brooks, Jerry Stiller, Rita Rudner, Phil Silvers, Jerry Seinfeld, Joey Bishop, Milton Berle, The Three Stooges, David Steinberg, David Brenner, Rodney Dangerfield, Billy Crystal, Henny Youngman, Andy Kaufman, Howie Mandel, Gild Radner, Ritz Brothers, Marx Brothers, Joan Rivers, Allen Sherman, Marcel Marceau, George Jessel, Madeline Kahn, Elaine May, Adam Sandler, Garry Shandling, Nachum Meyers. More and many more and many many more names belong on this list. And our humor has been used for centuries. So take this example, please.



LANGUAGE

The Jews have had an affinity for languages that grew out of their wandering in many lands. This may be more of an individual trait than a national or People trait. However, because so many Jews speak so many different languages, language itself has become an important part of being Jewish. Respect and love of language seems endemic to the Jewish People. The two biggies that identify the Jewish People are Hebrew and Yiddish. I learned Hebrew well at the hands of my fellow kibbutznikim and my Sabra friends. What little Yiddish I know will not get me beyond the few jokes I can tell in that language. However, I love the English language and I believe that this love is a Jewish trait that grew out of my respect for reading and my love of writing. Ability with language means ability to communicate effectively. I try.


READING

Reading was Jewish. I knew that from the number of books in my home and the number of books in my non-Jewish friends' homes. I remember my mother reading to me as a child. Perhaps that was her major contribution to my Jewishness aside from simply being my mother. I dragged her to the libraries near our homes so I could take out eight books a week rather than the two allotted to junior readers. Her presence also allowed me into the adult section of the library so I could slake my thirst for the science books and other non-kid books stacked there. For years, I ate apples and read the eight books after school. Of course, I also re-read many favorite books that I owned. I never lacked for books. My uncles on my mother's side gave us gifts of board games and books. Uncle Lou, like my nephew Harvey today, kept a diary of every book he read.

I know that reading is Jewish because the Jews are the People of the Book. I know that it is reading that has enabled the Jewish People to survive through their belief in the Five Books of Moses as the foundation of their existence. I know also that it is from reading and imbibing the accumulated knowledge in books that has made them successful business-people, eminent doctors, lawyers, scientists, writers and Nobel Prize winners far beyond their numbers in the world would otherwise explain. I believe that one day, a Jewish reading gene will be discovered that is passed on from generation to generation through the course of Jewish history. I believe it because I have seen my own children reading with the same love and affection for books that I had, and I never said a word to them about reading. It must be genetic.


GUILT AND SHAME

The old David Brenner joke is that he, a Jew, teaches his Catholic wife guilt and she in turn teaches him shame. I’m not sure about Catholics but I do know that to be Jewish you must have both guilt and shame and teach both to your children. A Jewish child soon learns that there is something not quite OK with his bodily functions nor for that matter, with his body itself. His mother soon lets him know that he is leading her to an early grave. Jewish fathers make their contribution to this embedment of guilt and shame by setting impossibly high standards for their children in school, work, income, choice of mate or job, and so on. It is a rare Jewish parent who brags about his or her children to themselves. To others, yes – always. But to themselves and to their children, never.

Perhaps religious teaching of purity and morality has led to the psychiatrist’s couch, to frigidity and impotence, self loathing, and the loony bin. Oedipus and Electra must have been Jewish. Didn’t Freud say so? And I am not sure that circumcision and castration are two words that are as remote from each other in the Jewish mind as they are in the dictionary. The saving grace of Jewish guilt and Jewish shame is that every Jew has it, so it can’t be all bad. And I guess if you don’t have it, you can’t really be Jewish. Without revealing too much of my inner workings, suffice it to say that I have an adequate amount of shame and guilt to assure you that I am Jewish in that respect.

ETHICS

The bible and the Ten Commandments have had a major impact on the course and history of human interactions. Western civilization has developed a body of law based on the Mosaic code. The ethics of the fathers, the Jewish fathers that is, led to the way we relate to people and how we deal with the world in our daily lives. In large measure, I have internalized my ethical yardstick derived from those teachings. A song that comes from the sages sung in prayer in the synagogue proclaims that the world stands on three things; on the Torah, on prayer and work, and on the doing of good deeds or charity. This is the essence of religious Judaism. The Torah is the law. Know the law, follow the law and uphold it. Pray to god and work hard. Do good deeds through charity and caring for your fellow human beings. Today we see religionists killing others of different faiths because of their religion. I have great difficulty in equating the good that religion preaches with the horror of the bloodletting caused by religious differences and often by religious instigation.

I have a concept of ethics that I usually try to apply to most of my actions - except possibly when I am driving. That concept grew out of the story told about the great Rabbi Hillel, who was asked to explain the bible while standing on one foot. His response was, "The Torah is about the way you treat your fellow man. All the rest is commentary." Of course, this is a restatement of the Golden Rule. I really can't think of a better guide in making life's decisions that affect others. Ethics treats of good and bad. It treats of the product of your actions in everyday life. I believe that Jews are sensitive to the hurt that one human can inflict on another because of or in spite of the persecution and hatred we have undergone as a People. I try to relate to friends and family and to all people who come into my ken with caring and awareness. I try to treat others with kindness and honesty. I trust and obey authority but remain aware that authority must be questioned when one deems its behavior unethical. I believe that being an ethical human being is an essential part of being Jewish. Despite occasional lapses, I try to be an ethical person. But ethics and morality have nothing to do with religion nor does religion have any inherent or intrinsic relationship with ethics. Religions have stolen ethics and morality and use them to nefarious ends unequally with good deeds.

WORK

The type of work we choose often depends on where our parents are from, what their social standing was and what they did to earn a living. Jews have been wanderers throughout their existence by force of powers often beyond their control. Wherever Jews lived over the centuries the one tool they could carry with them in their wanderings was their brains. Brainpower versus muscle power has become a highly held value among Jews, especially among the European or Ashkenazi Jews. Perhaps that resulted from Ashkenazis being uprooted much more than their North African or Sephardic co-religionists. Jews of my ilk succeed by using brains rather than hands and manual laborers were looked down upon. I related how my father denigrated physical work. His perception did not affect me perhaps because of Hashomer Hatzair. Through a substantial portion of my working life, I worked at and enjoyed hard physical labor.

But being a good student and learning have led to endeavors like medicine, law, finance, and other brain-power fields at which Jews have excelled. Jewish doctors and lawyers are held in high regard. People rarely give great acclaim to truck drivers or welders, Jewish or otherwise. A Yiddisheh kup, a Jewish head, is esteemed. My years have been studded with formal learning. My work in the variety of fields that have appealed to me always entailed study and learning the skills and engineering of the trades and the finance, business knowledge, and law of the businesses I have worked at. In essence, I am an integration of the "New Jew" who works with his hands and the learned person who is held in high esteem for his knowledge. The new work ethic of Israelis and the old values of study and learning of the Diaspora are elements of my Jewishness.


FATHER, GRANDFATHER, GREAT-GRANDFATHER

These adjectives describe me as a male blood relative of someone who calls me by the title of Father, Grandfather, and now great-Grandfather. I am not sure if that responsibility I feel as a Jew in those roles is necessarily reciprocated in any measure. So I will deal with the responsibility as a one-way street and measure the success of my functioning by the emulation I perceive in those family members as they themselves pick up the responsibility I see so clearly for myself.

I do not here wish to minimize the affection I feel toward the ladder of in-laws that has accumulated in my family so far. And I do not want to take credit for the marvelous sense of Jewishness that emanates from the female mates of my male descendants. It is just that I have been around, more or less, from the birth of those in my bloodline and feel more responsible for the outcome of their Jewishness.

As this patriarchal character I have become, I realize that the more eccentric I appear and the greater my shift away from religion because of my perception of its negative impact, the more likely I am to alienate my progeny. I recognize and appreciate their goal and need to preserve their Jewish roots and to pass their heritage on to their children. So having been successful at inculcating that need in them, paradoxically I now endanger our relationship by moving to antagonism for the Jewish religion and all religions. I must trust their capacity to accept me as a changing person. My goal is to save future generations from war and I hope that struggle will educate them to understand what being Jewish means to me today. Croesus said, “In peace sons bury fathers, but in war fathers bury sons.” War is aided, abetted, and supported by religion. The Jewish religion is no exception.

Perhaps the danger is great that the Jewish People will disappear if the Jewish religion disappears. On the other hand, perhaps the very nature of religion can be changed to become truly moral and ethical rather than preaching those tenets to keep the sheep in line for the power elites to lead to slaughter. A huge change to this end was taken when the United States constitution established the “separation of church and state” doctrine in the face of thousands of years of absolute religious control over the lives of masses of humanity. We see today the constant battle in the United States to overthrow that doctrine by the forces of religion. Today we engaged in a conflict with those who wish to overtly religicize the “Pledge of Allegiance.” I will do battle to turn the tide in the direction of total release from religion’s nefarious grip on the minds of believing people. My hope is that the Jewish People lead the way to freedom from religion while at the same time maintaining the cultural and ethical heritage that distinguishes it. And I hope that all cultures and peoples can survive in a new milieu free of the ravages of religion.


DEATH

The Jewish way of death is a combination of common sense and age-old religious practices. It is highly ritualized by the religion. We bury our dead quickly and, if orthodox, we bury them in plain, unpolished, wooden boxes. I believe that is the major contribution orthodox Jewry has made to all Jews and I highly approve of it. We are commanded to mourn and our mourning is structured so that little thought or effort must be put into the “How” of it by grief-stricken family members. Family and friends are commanded to visit, support and comfort the bereaved.

And the dead live on in the memory of all those who knew the deceased rather than in some unknown or unknowable place in the sky or heaven or hell. I highly approve of these practices. I am aware that religion has taken control of the process and the practices. However, I know that the same process and practices can be carried out without benefit of clergy and without the approval of Jewish religious institutions. The difference may be less efficiency in the dispatch of the dead to their final earthly resting place. However, I do hope my loved ones can support my desire for the absence of prayers praising god and telling us how great he is customarily recited by rabbis and mourners. I like the “No Religion” idea very much. Let the rabbi come as a friend of the deceased, period, end of report.



EPILOGUE

When I started to respond to Gayle's question about what being Jewish means to me, driving up to Lake Shasta over Memorial Day weekend, I immediately felt that the response could not be simple or short. I did not realize that the response would be so complex and so long. Of course, being Jewish, why say in a few words what can be said in many? This exploration has been fun, sometimes difficult, and sometimes surprising as I thought about the elements of my Jewishness. It is apparent that I am conflicted as I try to find my path away from religion while retaining the good that it has swallowed up. The same goes for my love of two countries, Israel and America, with their history, language and culture versus the evil effects of patriotism. I know I could write more if I explore my memory and my file cabinets further. But somewhere, this has to end. This is it.