Quote of the Day (Bernard Malamud, on Anti-Semitism and the ‘Unpolitical Man’)

"There's no such thing as an unpolitical man, especially a Jew. You can't be one without the other, that's clear enough. You can't sit still and see yourself destroyed."—American short-story writer and novelist Bernard Malamud (1914-1986), The Fixer (1966)

As a teenager, few books left a deeper impression on me than Bernard Malamud’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a Jewish handyman or “fixer” unjustly arrested on suspicion of murder of a Christian boy in Czarist Russia. An ordinary man with no prior interest in politics, Yakov Bok becomes, by necessity, all too aware of injustice—and, through his refusal to give up, ennobled in his struggle to prove his innocence.

Though set in pre-Communist Russia, The Fixer had obvious applications to the U.S.—not merely in the casual but widespread anti-Semitism in this country throughout the last century, but more virulently, in a deep, tragic miscarriage of justice: the lynching of Jewish factory owner Leo Frank, for a crime he did not commit—the 1913 murder of his 13-year-old employee Mary Phagan in Atlanta. 

Malamud’s novel was not just an examination of prejudice, particularly anti-Semitism, but a call to action against it wherever it appeared. That lesson needs to be re-learned today in this country. Many of us desperately want relief from the shrieking outrage of political partisans on cable news and social media, but I’m afraid it’s a useless cause. 

Whether we like it or not, we are being called to make a stand, as John Adams, at the time of the American Revolution, did when he wrote, "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy." These days, we have to make war against hatred. As much as I want to, no matter how hard I try to turn away from the outrage of the day abetted by the White House, it finds me. The times leave us no choice.

Atlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGill, in a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial on the bombing of a temple in his city 60 years ago, could not have been more precise in tracing the origins of this act of terror—and how, like a deep moral stain, it could—and did—spread: 

“You do not preach and encourage hatred for the Negro and hope to restrict it to that field. It is an old, old story. It is one repeated over and over again in history. When the wolves of hate are loosed on one people, then no one is safe.”

Charlottesville…Pittsburgh…Which city will be next? More important, who will be held to account for encouraging this real “American carnage”?