Praying for a Change of Heart

Two of the most enduring holiday entertainments involve a change in the main character’s heart. In the upteen versions of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (as seen in this image), malignant miser Ebenezer Scrooge repents after late-night visits from the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future. Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, a kind of American Christmas Carol, pulls salt-of-the-earth George Bailey from a fatal jump off a bridge, to which he’s been driven by Bedford Falls’ equivalent of Scrooge, banker Henry Potter.

For nearly three-quarters of a century, American Roman Catholics were accustomed to praying for “the conversion of Russia,” the Soviet state spearheading an atheistic assault on  religion.

This alarming Christmas season might at last induce Americans—including Catholics who constituted the key swing group in the past three Presidential elections—to pray for another dramatic change of heart: Donald Trump’s shift away from the authoritarian path he has followed more assiduously than ever before.

It’s no wonder that Silicon Valley has embraced Trump in his second term, as no American politician has so embraced one of the tech industry’s biggest mantras: “move fast and break things,” as when he quickly demolished the East Wing of the White House.

In the last two weeks, however, several incidents have increasingly called into question what PBS Newshour commentator David Brooks termed the President’s lack of “moral acuity,” including:

* telling a Bloomberg News reporter who was asking a follow-up question, “Quiet, piggy”;

* referring to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as “seriously retarded” in a Truth Social post, leading to a tripling in use of the slur on social media in the hours afterward;

* adding his name to the JFK Center for the Performing Arts, only hours after its board (whose directors were stacked in his favor) voted him the honor;

* affixing negative plaques to White House West Colonnade signs of prior presidents he loathes (e.g., Joe Biden was “the worst President in American history”);

* alleging that the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife by their son Nick was “reportedly due to the anger he caused by others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction … known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME."

Let’s spell out the unprecedented nature of these remarks and actions:

*No other President has had public buildings or monuments (re)named in their honor while in office, and in most cases this occurred after their deaths.

*No other President has publicly derided the physical attributes of female reporters.

*No other President has bandied the word “retarded” about in public to deride another person’s intelligence, like the kind of 1950s middle-schooler who used to be called “fresh.”

*No other President has falsely ascribed a family’s private tragedy—arising from one member’s addiction or depression—to public opposition to White House policy.

None of these incidents touch on policy matters. They relate only to Trump’s character, or lack of it. For that reason, in no way can his diehard defenders default to the “what-about” option they have invariably employed about his opponents.

A relative asked me recently how I thought history would judge Trump. Though I told him this would depend to a large extent on Trump himself, I think now that the larger question is how history will judge us—especially my fellow Roman Catholics—for not just putting him in power in the first place, but returning him to the Oval Office, when his instinct for unchecked power had become obvious with the January 6, 2021 insurrection.

For years, I groaned at the prospect of sermons touching in any way on government policy or officeholders. These all seemed too divisive, too oblivious to the compromises needed to advance legislation.

But Trump has fundamentally changed the situation. There is no longer any realm of life—including sports or entertainment—that is beyond his commentary and befoulment. 

To borrow what John F. Kennedy said about the racism undergirding segregation in the 1960s: “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.”

Trump’s remarks and actions beg for a forthright condemnation by the American archbishops, not the muted, passive voice-laden admonitions of their recent statement on violations of immigrants’ rights.

Over the past decade, few matters have dismayed me as much as the affection held by many Catholics for Trump. 

Just a few weeks ago, for instance, a fellow member of a Catholic group to which I belong complained that the President had been “investigated to death,” ignoring the fact that his political rise was made possible because local officials hadn’t investigated him enough early in his career.

That immunity from prosecution (including most GOP senators refusing to go along with impeachment) only ensured his current impunity in defying even legal efforts to stop him.

The Roman Catholic hierarchy in the United States cannot escape its own responsibility for the disaster now unfolding.

By emphasizing the overwhelming importance of outlawing same-sex marriage, transgender designation, abortion, or even contraception, it didn’t merely narrow the focus of what Joseph Cardinal Bernardin had rightly termed the “seamless garment of life” but effectively tore it to pieces. Other issues, such as civil rights, immigration, climate change, and economic justice, were inevitably downplayed.

The point man for this approach, and the one best exemplifying its dangers, is the now-retiring Timothy Cardinal Dolan. As President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) from 2010 to 2013, he led national church policy and advocacy, including opposition to Obamacare regulations calling for religious-affiliated institutions like hospitals and schools to provide contraception for employees.

More recently, as a recent New York Times article noted, he not only served on Trump’s “Religious Liberty Commission” but joked in a private phone call that he spoke with the President more than with his own mother.

That friendliness and solicitude were the bonds that ensured the prelate’s silence when Trump engaged in humorless insults of Democratic rivals for the Presidency at the 2016 and 2024 Al Smith Dinners, occasions normally given easygoing bipartisan joshing.

“Instead of telling Trump he was over the line, Dolan enabled him in his blasphemous effort to cast his campaign as a quasi-religious crusade and himself as a saintly martyr saved by God,” Times columnist Maureen Dowd correctly observed. “The conservative cardinal didn’t care about soiling the legacy of the great Democratic patriot Al Smith.”

Last week, when Brooks decried Trump’s lack of “moral acuity,” he elaborated on why the President's recent unhinged behavior is so disturbing: “Authoritarian leaders know that a certain part of the population likes it when they see the great leader idolized and venerated…. It is a form of psychological amassing of power to turn yourself into a demigod.”

Brooks likened such acts to those perpetrated by Mao Tse-Tung and Joseph Stalin. But there is another historical comparison that Dolan and like-minded colleagues on the USCCB might better understand: In abrasiveness, vindictiveness, financial and sexual corruption, and megalomania, the President is the modern equivalent of the pagan Roman emperors in the days of the Apostles.

Those emperors engaged in self-aggrandizement even as they persecuted the early Christians. These days, Trump has pursued self-preservation and self-aggrandizement even as he disregarded the civil liberties of undocumented aliens, many of whom are members of the very church led by Dolan and company.

In ignoring Trumpism’s increasingly open appeals to nativism, bigotry, and authoritarianism, the more conservative archbishops overlook a glaring 20^th-century dark spot in American Catholicism: the inflammatory radio broadcasts of Fr. Charles Coughlin that fueled the rise of the Christian Front in the 1930s.

They can rest assured, however, that American Jews still remember that the church hierarchy did nothing to stop Coughlin until the U.S. was at war with the Axis powers in 1942. Complicity, now as then, will breed consequences.

Quote of the Day (Anna Stolley Persky, on an Alarming Note Received in April, 40 Years Ago)

“Esther opened the first note on a Tuesday, on a breezy April afternoon in Northern Virginia. The note—off-white paper, folded twice, addressed in capital letters to ‘The Jews on Elm Street’—had been slipped into the mailbox underneath several bills and a Sears, Roebuck catalog….Sliding the rest of the mail under one arm, Esther opened the note. Inside the note was one thing, just a symbol, and yet not just a symbol, not to Esther and certainly not to her grandmother, who had barely escaped the war. Inside the note was a swastika, intended just for them, the only Jews on Elm Street.”—American lawyer, journalist, and essayist Anna Stolley Persky, “The Jews on Elm Street,” Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, September-October 2024

With all the things requiring my focus these days, I don’t have the time to take in all the detection fiction I want to read. But this short story by Anna Stolley Persky called insistently for my attention from its first few paragraphs.

It’s not just a crime story, but a coming-of-age tale involving 14-year-old Esther, forced to confront mounting, insidious terror few would believe possible in the Northern Virginia suburb Cherry Tree. And—especially relevant now—it’s about the persistence of antisemitism, decades after the US defeated its most dangerous exponent in World War II, and about the ordinary people—even those, like Esther’s beloved grandmother Orly, waning in physical strength—called upon to defend against it again.

The threatening notes in the initial paragraphs of this short story escalate until Orly pieces together the clues to determine who was responsible for sending them. Though it is set in the mid-1980s (there are references to Columbo reruns and to Murder, She Wrote, “a newer show Orly had started watching”), it is all too applicable to America in 2025:

“Here, Orly thought, was a life lesson for Esther. The authorities were not necessarily there to protect THEM. Here was the lesson she never wanted, but always needed her granddaughter to understand. Maybe things changed a little. Certainly, this country was better than others, but eventually it all circled back to the same idea: They would always be struggling against the same prejudices, over and over, generation after generation.”

I greatly enjoyed this, Ms. Persky’s first published fiction—and evidently, I’m far from the only one. It has been named a finalist for the Robert L. Fish Memorial Award for Best First Mystery Story, to be given in early May. I look forward to more work by this fellow Columbo devotee who, like me, believes, as she noted in this guest post for the “Something Is Going to Happen!” blog, in the importance of “character-driven” detective novels.

Quote of the Day (Franklin Foer, on Rising Anti-Semitism and Decaying ‘Democratic Habits’)

"The forces arrayed against Jews, on the right and the left, are far more powerful than they were 50 years ago. The surge of anti-Semitism is a symptom of the decay of democratic habits, a leading indicator of rising authoritarianism. When anti-Semitism takes hold, conspiracy theory hardens into conventional wisdom, embedding violence in thought and then in deadly action. A society that holds its Jews at arm's length is likely to be more intent on hunting down scapegoats than addressing underlying defects. Although it is hardly an iron law of history, such societies are prone to decline. England entered a long dark age after expelling its Jews in 1290. Czarist Russia limped toward revolution after the pogroms of the 1880s. If America persists on its current course, it would be the end of the Golden Age not just for the Jews but for the country that nurtured them.”—American journalist Franklin Foer, “The End of the Golden Age,” The Atlantic, April 2024

(The image accompanying this post, of Franklin Foer at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, DC, was taken Sept. 17, 2023, by Sdkb.)

This Day in Confederate History (Judah Benjamin, Sole Jewish Member of Davis Cabinet, Dies)

May 6, 1884— Judah Benjamin, who served close friend Jefferson Davis in three different Cabinet positions in the short-lived Confederacy, died at age 72 years old in Paris, thousands of miles and two decades removed from the slaveocracy in which he made his fortune and to which he devoted his considerable bureaucratic talents.

Few figures of the Civil War are as little known and mysterious as Benjamin. Much of that owed to his anomalous position as a Jew in a region of the country that was not merely Christian, but even overwhelmingly Protestant. 

But some of the obscurity that clings to his name derives from his actions rather than his character.

Like Aaron Burr, another enormously able politician and lawyer often perceived as traitorous, Benjamin put precious little to paper, even confessing that he had “never kept a diary or retained a copy of a letter written by me,” all aimed at frustrating attempts to ferret out the truth of his life by subsequent biographers.

In this effort he was only partly successful. While leaving little in his own hand, he couldn’t stop other people from writing about him.

And, as someone who served successively as the South’s Attorney General, Secretary of War, and Secretary of State, he couldn’t evade their judgments—more often than not, negative.

“Judah Benjamin was the most politically powerful, and arguably the most important, American Jew of the nineteenth century,” wrote biographer James Traub last year. “He was also the most widely hated one, not only in the North but in portions of the South. Benjamin does not deserve our admiration; but like some other figures who have yoked their lives to deplorable causes, he nevertheless deserves our attention.”

Had Benjamin done anything other than commit himself to the “peculiar institution,” he would have long since been acclaimed a great American success story. A native of British-owned St. Croix, he emigrated with his family first to North Carolina, then Charleston, SC.

At age 14, his brilliance shone so brightly that one of the city’s leading Jewish merchants offered to pay his tuition to Yale.

Even a dismissal from the university on mysterious grounds only slowed his progress rather than stopping it, for he simply relocated to New Orleans, where he transformed himself into an attorney with a thriving practice—and, courtesy of an advantageous marriage to the Catholic Natalie St. Martin, the owner of more than 100 slaves.

In 1852, Benjamin became the first Jew not to have converted to Christianity to win election to the U.S. Senate. Only a year later, he turned down another distinction—nomination as the first Jew to the Supreme Court—probably because the high court hadn't achieved the status it came to enjoy in the 20th century.

On the other hand, serving in the Davis Cabinet was an important but thankless job:

*As Attorney General, he soon discovered he didn’t have courts to speak off:

*Later, when Davis transferred him to the War Department, he had to laugh off taunts that he was the “clerk” of his strong-willed President, only to incur the wrath of the populace when, despite his flair for paperwork, armies in the field were missing vital supplies;

*Finally, after Benjamin accepted responsibility for a problem that really his, a grateful Davis moved him over to the State Department. Here, his exploitation of cotton’s commercial value in attempting to win diplomatic recognition from Great Britain and France was “a luminous failure,” according to historian Frank Vandiver’s Their Tattered Flags: The Epic of the Confederacy (1970).

In Richmond as in New Orleans, the short, plump, but witty Secretary of State cut quite a figure on the social circuit, leading to a late-20th century description of him as "the Confederate Henry Kissinger." 

Mrs. Harrison Burton recalled in a 1911 memoir that Benjamin brought to the home of a Richmond hostess “his charming stories, his dramatic recitations of scraps of verse, and clever comments on men, women, and books.”

All to little or no avail. Benjamin not only remained what Vandiver called “the most disliked man in Richmond,” but one who, despite considerable administrative skill and his failure to practice the faith into which he was born, elicited the latent anti-Semitism of much of the populace.

Most, if not all, of the criticism that came his way was unfair. As I noted in this prior post, the War Department may have been the most unstable of all the positions in Davis' rickety Cabinet, buckling under the Confederate President's touchiness and micromanagement, not to mention its disadvantages in materials and organizing a new government from scratch.

In the waning days of the war, Benjamin was nothing if not grimly realistic, advocating manumission in exchange for any slaves who joined the Confederate Army.

Then, as Ulysses Grant broke through the defenses surrounding Richmond in early April 1865, Benjamin refused to entertain the pipe dream that the government could somehow slip out of the city and reconstitute itself further west, where surrender was not yet an actuality.

In the war’s final days, Benjamin made one of the most daring escapes of any of the Confederates, resorting to one disguise after another—and even surviving more than one shipwreck—to make his way first to Florida, then to Great Britain, to which his birth in St. Croix entitled him to citizenship.

Benjamin had much more to fear from capture than his Cabinet counterparts: according to a June 2023 article in The Tablet by Jay Solomon and Jane Singer, his creation of a spy ring starting in the North and stretching into Canada led Union investigators to tie him to the assassination plot that killed Abraham Lincoln and nearly did the same to Secretary of State William Seward, an adversary dating back to their days in the Senate.

The U.S. extradition effort was no more successful than Benjamin’s wartime campaign for “Cotton Diplomacy.” His legal skills now allowed him to flourish in Britain, where he lived out much of the remainder of his life, building a prosperous practice, even reputation for brilliance, to rival what he achieved in New Orleans.

Though the former Southern politician entertained Davis on the few times his old boss came to England, Benjamin otherwise never looked back on his old life and never returned to the United States.

Unfortunately, success at the bar seems not to have brought happiness to the domestic sphere for Benjamin. 

Though he destroyed most of the documentation about his life, enough remained to show that he subsidized separate quarters in Paris for his wife, who had long provoked gossip with her spendthrift ways and extramarital affairs.

In one of the most heated Senate debates in the late 1850s, Benjamin dismissed an abolitionist’s jibe that, as the descendant of a people who had suffered at the hands of the Pharoah, he was being hypocritical in defending slavery—that he was, in effect, “an Israelite with Egyptian principles.”

Posterity has not shrugged off that charge so easily, complicating any attempt to come to grips with why this most brilliant of attorneys could be so blind to the foremost human rights question of his time.

(For a fascinating comparison of Benjamin with a Jewish appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court who served for years, see this August 2019 blog post from The Times of Israel by Tzemach Yehudah Richter.)

Quote of the Day (William H. Gass, on Anti-Semitism, ‘An Unmitigated Moral Catastrophe’)

“Rationalist philosophers, from the beginning, regarded ignorance and error as the central sources of evil, and the conditions of contemporary life have certainly given their view considerable support. We are as responsible for our beliefs as for our behavior. Indeed, they are usually linked. Our brains respond, as well as our bodies do, to exercise and good diet. One can think of hundreds of beliefs—religious, political, social—which must be as bad for the head as fat is for the heart, and whose loss would lighten and enliven the spirit; but inherently silly ones… nowadays keep their consequences in control and relatively close to home. However, anti-Semitism does not; it is an unmitigated moral catastrophe. One can easily imagine how it might contaminate other areas of one's mental system.”— American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, and philosophy professor William H. Gass (1924-2017), “Ezra Pound,” in Finding a Form: Essays (1996)

The image accompanying this post, showing William H. Gass at the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Awards, was taken Mar. 10, 2011, by David Shankbone.

This Day in Literary History (Zola Sparks Firestorm With Defense of Wrongly Accused Dreyfus)

Jan. 13, 1898—French novelist and journalist Émile Zola had raised the hackles of censors before with his often sexually frank novels. 

But nothing matched the intensity of the storm that swept over him when, in a ringing front-page open letter to the President of the French republic published in the socialist the Socialist newspaper L'Aurore, he charged that army Capt. Alfred Dreyfus had been falsely charged with espionage—and that embarrassed military and political leaders had continued to cover up the miscarriage of justice after learning of their mistake.

Largely apolitical until this time, Zola learned a couple of months before the details of the case from a friend of Lieutenant Colonel Georges Picquart, the head of French intelligence—who, for his efforts to reopen the investigation and expose the real spy who had handed a military document to Germany, Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, had found himself reassigned to Tunisia.

Zola not only brought to wide public attention the grave injustice done to Dreyfus, who had been stripped of his command and imprisoned in a penal colony on Devil’s Island, but issued a prescient warning about the factor that had made the captain a scapegoat: the “odious anti-Semitism, of which the great liberal France of human rights will die, if she is not cured of it.”

By naming the culprits in the affair—not only Esterhazy but top generals and three handwriting experts who had perpetuated the coverup—Zola took a calculated risk, daring the authorities to prosecute him under defamation laws so that the full details of the case could be exposed at trial.

It would be hard to overestimate the impact of the Dreyfus Affair on French political, military, media, cultural, and religious institutions. For a dozen years, the nation was consumed by each twist in this controversy, dividing into roughly two factions: the anti-Dreyfusards, who tended to be monarchist and Roman Catholics; and the Dreyfusards, with a more republican and secular orientation.

Even among the unusual figures in this controversy, Zola stood out. In 20 novels over a four-decade career, he proposed a school of writing that came to be called naturalism, in which characters are observed as if under a microscope, less obedient to free will than to instincts such as greed and lust. His frankness on the latter score, whether through a prostitute in Nana or a pair of adulterous lovers who murder a husband in Therese Raquin, caused sensations.

Zola could be unappreciative or dismissive of people who influenced or aided him. Writing about Gustave Flaubert, he criticized him as “a shameless joker, a paradoxical thinker, an impertinent romantic who made my head spin for hours with a deluge of astonishing theories,” while contrasting Flaubert’s painstaking writing process with his own, which was “forged on the terrible anvil of daily deadlines."

When a British book publisher was prosecuted for obscenity for translating novels by Zola, the writer not only didn’t support his friend but told a reporter that a successful prosecution might be better for him, as readers could hunt them down in the original French rather than endure cheap translations into English.

Assessing Zola in a retrospective history of the first decade of Masterpiece Theatre (which featured an adaptation of Therese Raquin), host Alistair Cooke assailed the author’s “exhibitionism” and flair for self-dramatization. Although there was some truth in the characterization, Zola also truly did expose himself to real legal and physical danger with “J’Accuse.”

He not only was indicted for defamation, as he expected, but also was exposed to death threats provoked by the vitriolic anti-Dreyfusard press. After being condemned to fines and a year-long sentence of imprisonment, he fled to England, where he stayed until the charges against him were dismissed.

Captain Dreyfus would not be reinstated until four years after Zola’s death in 1902. Nevertheless, the novelist died still firmly believing in perhaps the most famous quote from his expose of this shameful chapter in the life of France: “Truth is on the march, and nothing will stop it."

The dozen years of the Dreyfus Affair were a mad swirl of events in France’s Third Republic: “intrigues, fraud, resignation and overthrow of ministers and the parliament, riots, assassinations, suicides, the attempt of a coup d’état and an alarmingly widespread anti-Semitism,” in the words of a 2015 post from the Europeana Newspapers blog.

It was a mark of the tumult of the time that even Zola’s death in his home became swallowed up in the dizzying news cycle. Rumors circulated that he had been murdered by anti-Dreyfusard fanatics.

The results of the inquest indicated carbon-monoxide poisoning, but the public was told simply that he had died of natural causes. It would not be until 1927 that an anti-Dreyfusard stove-fitting contractor allegedly confessed on his deathbed to have blocked up the chimney while mending the roof, and not until 1953—a full half-century after Zola’s death—that a French newspaper published this account. After so much time, it may not be possible to fully establish the truth of the account.

(For more on Zola’s still-contested death, see this 2015 blog post from Dr. Gabe Mirkin and Richard Cavendish’s September 2002 account in History Today.)

“J’Accuse” marked the turning point in the larger uproar of the Dreyfus affair, which itself represented a hinge moment in Western history. Its repercussions were long-lasting, even global, as it:

*contributed to the formal separation of church and state in 1905, to prevent any repetition of the virulent anti-Semitism displayed by many French Catholics in the controversy;

*convinced Theodor Herzl that, even after consistent, enduring attempts at assimilation in relatively liberal France, European Jews were not safe, and spurred him to advocate for Jewish immigration to Palestine in an attempt to create their own homeland;

*foreshadowed, through the interaction of government, mass media, and ephemera, the modern news cycle of nonstop ideological firestorms;

*paralleled the 21^st-century divide between secular, urban liberals and more religiously orthodox, rural conservatives;

*inspired intellectual crusades against judicial verdicts perceived as blighted by ideology or prejudice—including, in the United States, the Sacco and Vanzetti, Alger Hiss, and Rosenberg trials.

Even at the turn of the 20^th century, film directors recognized the dramatic impact of the Dreyfus Affair, with French filmmaker Georges Méliès staging and shooting 11 one-minute silent reenactments of the trial. In one of the first cases of government censorship of motion pictures, the French government banned further exhibition of Melies’ pioneering film effort. (Indeed, that ban on cinematic treatments of the affair would remain in effect until 1950.) 

That did not stop other nations’ filmmakers from depicting the scandal, including Richard Oswald’s Dreyfus (Germany, 1930); William Dieterle’s The Life of Emile Zola (U.S., 1937); José Ferrer’s I Accuse! (U.K.–U.S., 1958); and Roman Polanski’s An Officer and a Spy (J’Accuse) (France, 2019).

(For a useful summary of many of these films, see Thomas Doherty's Fall 2020 overview in Cineaste Magazine.)

Quote of the Day (Christopher Buckley, on the Start of the Summer When All Mel Broke Loose)

“MEL IS CONDEMNED BY THE PRESS. Mel is pulled over by a centurion for driving his chariot at great speed, and accused of having a blood-alcohol level exceeding that mandated by Tiberius. ‘Arrest me not,’ he telleth the centurion, ‘for I owneth Malibu. And thou lookest a bit Jewish unto me.’ Sayeth the centurion, ‘Tell it to the procurator.’”—American comic writer Christopher Buckley, “Shouts and Murmurs: Stations of the Mel," The New Yorker, Aug. 21, 2006

At this time 15 years ago, the film industry was still reeling from the fallout over Mel Gibson’s arrest for drunk driving in Malibu the prior month. (That's his mug shot in the accompanying photo.) 

The initial report by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department—that the actor-director had been detained “without incident”—turned out to be incorrect, with the tape leaked to celebrity Web site TMZ.com showing that Gibson tried to run away, then went into an anti-Semitic rant against the arresting officer.

Two years before, Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ had provoked accusations of reviving the ancient “blood libel” of Jewish responsibility for the death of Jesus. His outburst during his arrest seemed to confirm all that his critics had been saying about this ambiguous, even problematic box office hit.

In the above paragraph, Christopher Buckley demonstrated his usual comic genius with his parody of the stations of the cross. If he had held his fire, he would have found even more material in the next few years, when audiotapes surfaced of Gibson telling his much younger girlfriend, Oksana Grigoriev, that she “deserved” to be beaten and that he’d “bury” her.

Four years ago, there was talk about Gibson’s “comeback,” given the Best Director Oscar nomination he received for Hacksaw Ridge, his first effort behind the camera since the disastrous 2006 film Apocalypto (which, Buckley waggishly suggested in his satire, Gibson had offered to rename Fiddler on the Roof II).

Fifteen years after his Malibu melee and PR mess, though, Gibson is unable to fully emerge from the shadow cast by his past anti-Semitic, racist, and homophobic comments, not to mention his drunken, violent behavior—a history not just viewed in a different light because of the #MeToo movement, but also by actress Winona Ryder’s claim (denied heatedly by Gibson) that he referred to her in the 1990s as an “oven-dodger” (a reference to the Holocaust).

Photo of the Day: Tree of Life Synagogue, Pittsburgh PA—One Year Later

It was only a little over a week ago that, while being driven in an SUV through the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, I saw out the window the Tree of Life Synagogue. 

I wasn’t struck simply by the way the building (designed by architects Alfred Marks and Elkan Avner and dedicated in 1963) wraps around the corner of Wilkins and Shady Avenues, or by the modern stained-glass windows. 

No, it was all the items left on one side of the religious site—a grim reminder of the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history that occurred exactly a year ago today.

I took this photo to remind myself what I saw on my brief visit, and how my heart sank in that moment.
 

In these past 12 months, Americans have had to ask some very hard questions about how a gunman (I refuse to dignify him by providing a name) slaughtered 11 people on the site. The social media have managed to provide a forum for a hatred that, while perhaps no longer as casual and widespread as before WWII in the United States, is perhaps more insidious, virulent and murderous.

As described by Mahita Gajanan in this Time Magazine article, the congregation of Tree of Life is now considering the nature of the synagogue after its anticipated reopening. But, while the structure can take a new form, the atmosphere in American society requires a longer, more intense detoxification. 

This came home to me in unmistakable fashion a few weeks ago, when a friend, describing a recent day supervising a small after-school library, explained how she came upon a nine-year-old accessing hate messages via the computer. The child had not happened upon it on his own or through friends, she explained, but had been directed to it through his parents. Seventy years after Rodgers and Hammerstein explained the nature of prejudice, it remains the case that the young must be “carefully taught” to hate and fear.

Part of this detoxification, I’m convinced, must involve preserving memory—an effort that now includes, among others, Eric Lidji, who, as director of the director and only permanent staff member of the Rauh Jewish History Program and Archives, has been gathering programs, artwork, and stones left outside the Tree of Life. (See a description of his work in this fine article in The Atlantic by Emma Green.)

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”?