On the eve of New York's mayoral election

New York City is the most Jewish city in the world outside Israel. Somewhere around 12-14 percent of residents are Jewish; that's over 1.3 million residents of the metropolis.

Zohran Mamdani's successful candidacy for mayor has brought focus on the fears and hopes of that constituency. How can a Muslim who is anti-Zionist be poised to win the job of mayor in New York, most likely with solid support of younger New York Jews?

Perhaps he stands for a hope for their city which that old sleaze former state governor Andrew Cuomo and a GOP perennial joke candidate don't offer. I don't live in New York though I once did and have long had family in the city. But I appreciate the observations of Jewish writers who live in the midst of the fray.

Israel's war on Gaza prompted Brookynite John Ganz to reflect broadly on antisemitism and Zionism. He identifies mirroring varieties of racist corruption in the service of power over others.

I want to make one other remark about Zionism and antisemitism. Both confuse cause and effect to a dangerous degree and begin processes unchained from history and common sense. In the radical Zionist worldview, antisemitism is eternal and endemic; hatred of the Jews preexists any Jewish behavior, so Jewish behavior then doesn’t matter. This is how you get the nihilism and denial that allows the Jewish state to indulge in the very types of criminal activities that led to its creation. “They hate us anyway.” This belief engenders a totally irresponsible and immoral attitude. The existence of antisemitism, the Holocaust, and all the historical suffering of the Jews does not make a permanent moral exception of the Jewish people. Accepting that nihilism is to conspire with antisemites in the creation of antisemitic propaganda. 

The antisemite has a remarkably similar logic, but reversed: the Jews are intrinsically, eternally a criminal species; no historical explanation or context is possible or necessary, because the answer is always there: the Jews are evil itself. Does Zionism come out of a particular historical situation? No, it is just one more emanation of this evil. Does Hamas or Palestinian resistance arise out of a particular historical situation and context? No, it is just one more emanation of this evil. 

Both cut themselves loose from historical time and causality and replace it with a mythic world of eternal racial struggle. In such a conception lies the utter devastation of humanity.

Both Zionism and anti-Zionism often try to hide the ball of racism while taking advantage of its emotional appeals. Zionists often rely on propaganda appeals based on preexisting prejudices that hold their enemies to be subhuman savages and barbarians, and anti-Zionists’ propaganda appeals often try to take advantage of or deepen preexisting prejudices against Jews. They both try to distinguish themselves from intrinsically racist discourses but are parasitic upon them. 

And it’s unclear to me if either can be separated from them. At some point, argue long enough, and they will both exclaim, “They are just a different breed!” They are lower, more evil, more prone to violence, etc. 

The ascendancy of Donald Trump's neo-Nazi fans make clearer thinking about the persistence of vicious antisemitism all the more essential.

• • •

Peter Beinart comes to New York's electoral moment full of passion. For him, the dismissal by some older Jewish leaders of Mamdani reveals a form of idolatry. I don't usually post longer [8 minutes] videos here, but I strongly recommend experiencing Peter's heart-filled little sermon: What Will Establishment Jewish Leaders Sacrifice to Defeat Mamdani?

Doing what could be done when the worst came

At a mass meeting in San Francisco working on responses to the Trump presidency last March, I was hanging about in the back of what felt like a repetitive session. A man who I recognized from many such gatherings and demonstrations, but had never spoken with, approached me to chat. He turned out to be Bruce Neuburger; he handed me a card about his recently released book Postcards to Hitler: A German Jew's Defiance in a Time of Terror, published by Monthly Review Press. This is a small press book very much worth searching out. 

A print copy can be found from Powells, an audiobook (that's what I read) from Audible. The San Francisco Public Library was also my source for a copy. 

Bruce Neuburger has created a vivid history of the life and fates of his grandparents. Benno and Anna were prosperous middle class Jews living in Munich. Benno had served honorably, if without enthusiasm, as an over-age draftee in the German army in World War I. After that war, he built a business and invested in land. The family lived through the terrible postwar inflation of the 1920s and the political instability of the Weimar Republic. Times were sometimes bad -- and sometimes better -- for Germany's Jews and for Germans at large. When Hitler's Nazi movement came to power in 1933, the family could hope this was just another turn in twenty years of both prosperity and sporadic insecurity. 

Nazi rule proved enduring and lethal for Jews. Jewish life -- both business and family -- was forced into smaller and smaller crevices of the society. Some of the younger generation quite rapidly decided to flee the looming catastrophe. Benno and Anna's children were among the very few who escaped to real security in America -- the U.S. in the 1930s was not a welcoming destination for Jewish refugees. 

Benno held out a long time before listening to the entreaties of his children to join them across the Atlantic. By the time he was ready to uproot himself in 1939, German Jews had been forced into ghettos. Germany then invaded Poland, western Europe, and eventually Russia. Benno expressed his secret confidence to his friend that Germany would lose the war -- but he had lost all chance of escape.

And so he performed the one solitary act of resistance he could imagine: he wrote postcards denouncing Hitler and the Nazis and dropped them in the postal stream. This wasn't effectual, or even meant to be -- there were no addressees. But Benno had found a tiny way to speak his necessary truth. The book offers an imagined account to the first time he dared to do this:

At the corner, a young woman appeared. Benno looked down. He had an urge to turn away but thought that would look suspicious. The woman looked at him as she passed the corner. 

Did she see the star? [the mandatory star of David sewn on his jacket] All he was sure of was that the mark was doing what it was meant to do -- rob him, rob Jews, of their last remnant of dignity. ... 

[Benno Neuburger] looked down at the words he'd written in large letters where an address would normally be: "THE ETERNAL MASS MURDERER, HITLER, I SPIT ON YOU!" He put the card in the mailbox, turned, and walked back to his apartment. 

It took nearly a year for the Nazi postal service to figure out who was carrying on this treacherous practice. But he was caught, imprisoned, tortured, and, perhaps because of his veteran status, brought to trial rather than being summarily shot. A full judicial record survived which formed some of the raw material for his grandson's book.

The Nazi judicial records from the Berlin People's Court concluded:

Benno Israel Neuburger has been executed on Sept. 18th, 1942. The convicted offender denigrated the Fuhrer, and the National Socialist government and committed high treason against the German Reich.

The Reich Ministry of Justice ordered fifty bright red posters announcing the execution of Benno Neuburger to be put up at visible locations in Munich. 

Anna was killed the next day at the death camp at Treblinka, Poland. Bruce Neuburger makes no suggestion that the date of her murder had anything to do with the date of Benno's. The machinery of extermination just ground on for them both.

• • •

The author/grandson, Bruce Neuburger, makes no pretense of writing a conventional academic history. He certainly consulted as many sources as he could find. The reunification of Germany after the 1990 collapse of the East German Soviet-aligned state led to release of the judicial and other records which enabled him to discover particulars about his grandparents' murders in 1942. Neuburger canvassed surviving family members. Recent German historians have also found many lost details of German Jewish resistance to Hitler. 

On this information, Bruce Neuburger wrote a novelistic account of life and tragedy that honors the experience of his family and so many like them. He explains his aim and defends telling his family story his way:

In my effort to bring to life the people whose stories are told here and the social environment in which they lived, I have necessarily imagined situations and relationships beyond the facts that I acquired directly [through historical sources.] I have sought to use the knowledge I gained through extensive historical research and travel to reconstruct the drama of those times. I can promise you, the reader, that I have taken care to reflect the historical moments recounted here as accurately and truthfully as I can.

Ever wonder what it was like to live under, stand against, and die under Nazi rule? This is a book to be read, experienced, and pondered.

U.S. religious landscape 2021: white Christian insurrectionists and fellow travelers

The storming of the Capitol on January 6 made white Christian nationalists all too visible. Lauren K. Kerby has been observing these folks for years.

At the siege, the presence of white conservative Christians was unmistakable. The Proud Boys stopped to pray to Jesus on their march toward the Capitol, and the crowd held signs proclaiming Jesus Saves and God’s Word Calls Them Out. One flag read Jesus is my savior. Trump is my President. In the Capitol, an insurgent stopped to pray outside a room where Senator Mitch McConnell’s staffers hid behind barricaded doors. She asked God for “the evil of Congress to be brought to an end.”

But Kerby notes, this time they weren't the only crazies in the crowd:

Not all of the January 6 insurrectionists were white Christian nationalists. Some represented themselves as pagan, while others were later identified as Orthodox Jews. Many came because they were inspired by QAnon conspiracy theories. But they were all united by the idea that the establishment should be overthrown and the nation returned to its founding principles, an idea white Christian nationalists have been promoting and normalizing for decades.

People who study fringe religious enthusiasms and conspiracy theories are struggling to explain the melding of these oddball fantasies into violence on behalf of Trump's false election claim. There's a considerable stretch between your everyday Christian evangelical believer who assumes the Bible requires her to follow the leader, militia gun nuts spoiling for an heroic final battle, QAnon believers obsessed with internet "research" into establishment Satanism, and a handful of ignorant fantasists dreaming of an imagined Nordic paganism. 

That long time chronicler of right wing Christianity, Sarah Posner, tries to sort out the conjunction of these quite disparate strands at the Capitol in an interview:

Q: the guy in the horns. What was that about?

Well, he’s a fairly well-known QAnon figure from Arizona who just misappropriates a bunch of different cultural symbols to dress up in this weird outfit. You see a lot of that at right-wing events—people who’ll either dress up in some Viking outfit or some other kind of medieval figure, Knights Templar, that sort of thing. They attempt to claim that Vikings or other figures from the Middle Ages represent whiteness and white supremacy and justify reviving white supremacy in 21st century America. ...

I think QAnon was a significant driver of a lot of the people who showed up there. It crosses different realms of the right. It crosses over into evangelical Christianity. It crosses over into these openly Nazi and white supremacist realms, and in a lot of ways it was the common thread. The woman who was shot and later died trying to break into the speaker’s lobby, Ashli Babbitt—she was an avid QAnon adherent, believing that there is a deep state that was out to get Trump, of Satanic pedophiles who were trying to undermine Trump’s presidency and who stole the election from him. ....

... a lot of this rhetoric is being put out there by Christian right organizations or Christian right leaders or evangelical pastors or televangelists and so forth. That the election was stolen was an article of faith—literally—for months. And because the Christian right has seen Trump and created this iconography around Trump that he is a divinely anointed president whose enemies are literally Satanic. This is why the QAnon conspiracy theory played so prominently among evangelicals, why it was so easy for them to absorb it. The idea that the enemies of their anointed leader were Satanic or pedophiles, which is something that they have long thought about Muslims and homosexuals, fit very easily into their worldview. 

... Anti-Semitism has always been a key part of these white supremacist and neo-Nazi movements in the United States that we now lump together as the alt-right. Their central idea is that diversity is causing white genocide, and one of their big grievances is that Jews get so much advantage from that: “They get to say that Hitler tried to wipe them out, but what about us? We’re the ones who are being deprived of our homeland.” That morphs into Holocaust denial. ... 

... A lot of evangelicals who have fallen for the QAnon conspiracy theory would not recognize that it is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory because they’re just not familiar with, say, the blood libel. I mean, the blood libel is the heart of the QAnon conspiracy theory: That Christians, or righteous people, righteous Americans, are being prevented from holding power by people who literally abuse and murder children. ...

Diana Butler Bass is an historian of Christianity and an advocate for progressive Christianity. She has her own intriguing theories about the religious trends visible among the insurrectionists. She contends that in the late 20th century, denominational allegiances which once defined differences between Christian groups were replaced by cross-denominational right and left alliances.

... people on each side — especially conservatives — were crossing denominational lines and joining forces with like-minded folks in other religious groups, forming two super-alliances of faith and politics. Thus, conservative Catholics, Jews, and Protestants formed common cause around certain issues; likewise liberals formed the same. One of the results of this political restructuring of American religion was — and this was a new phenomenon at the time — a liberal Baptist had more in common with a liberal Catholic and a liberal Jew than she did with a conservative Baptist; and a conservative Presbyterian found comradeship with a pre-Vatican II Catholic or an Orthodox rabbi rather than a liberal Presbyterian.

The insurrection revealed a new alignment:

... On January 6, we did not witness the old Religious Right at the Capitol. Instead, we saw three streams of religion, forging a new alliance.

They weren’t “conservative” per se (even if certain familiar conservative issues [-- abortion, LGBTQ inclusion, and women’s rights --] were in play). Instead, they were hyper-authoritarian, nationalist, and apocalyptic versions of white Catholicism, white evangelical Protestantism, and white pre-Christian European folk religions joined together to advance a shared vision of American identity and political power. And together they represent a kind of cleavage within the old Religious Right, one that is similar to the split in the Republican party.

In a discursive but interesting video discussion with the Rev. Ed Bacon, formerly of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, Butler Bass muses on the faux Nordic neo-pagan and white supremacist strain in emerging rightwing U.S. religion -- these folks see the path to hell being carved by white people betraying their race.

In Rolling Stone, reporter Kim Kelly meanwhile points out that more disciplined and perhaps authentic neo-pagans loath what the Q folks are making of their tradition.

Understandably, many actual pagans are horrified at the way white supremacists have co-opted their religious and cultural icons and twisted them into symbols of hate. Talia Lavin, who explores the concept in her recent book, Culture Warlords, says that neo-Nazis’ Viking fetish harkens back to their obsession with both traditional European conceptions of masculinity and whiteness itself. “Neopagan symbols offer the hypermasculine aesthetic sheen of the Viking,” she explains via text message. “But we can also see a desire to ground their white supremacist ideology in a purportedly timeless myth, a desire to reach back to an anachronistic, ahistorical ‘perfect’ whiteness, thus grounding their violence in an idealized past, in white nationalism as in any other form of nationalism.”

Funny how the worst of these quasi-religious byways in the United States always come back to whiteness among their white adherents.

• • •

U.S. religious landscape 2021:

What is sacred?

Evangelical Christians: but how can they?  

Roman Catholics in sunlight 

White Christian insurrectionists and fellow travelers

A coming out for liberal religion

On community and hate

In the wake of the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, Tara Isabella Burton posed the question "Why [do] extremists keep attacking places of worship?" Before this crime, there were the murders at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, the attack on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, the 2008 shootings at Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church ... the list goes on.

In these days of frantic campaigning, my quick reads of coverage of even the most dire events are little more than a skim. But I was struck by this:

... the attack on Tree of Life is part of another, wider, and no less worrying trend: the degree to which places of worship have become targets for acts that could be classified as domestic terrorism. In the past decade, houses of worship — from synagogues to Christian churches to Sikh temples — have increasingly become targets for extremist violence. Many of these attacks have been explicitly white supremacist or right-wing in nature, targeting perceived liberals, ethnic minorities, or women.

In each case, the attacks have been designed to maximize emotional effect. By targeting a house of worship, rather than a private home or business, the attacker has committed a powerful symbolic transgression: profaning a space that is both sacred and communal. Attacks on places of worship double not just as attacks on worshippers, but as attacks on the community itself.

In my haste, I read that last sentence as simply attacks on community itself -- not exactly what Burton is saying, but an implication very much there in her thought.

Do angry shooters vent their rage on people gathered in community because, somewhere in the reaches of their hate-addled brains, community itself is the enemy? People coming together for a purpose -- whether as a bowling club or to worship as they choose -- form communities, webs of human connection that sustain and enrich their humanity.

When rage comes to define individuals, human connection becomes difficult, maybe impossible. When elements of the cultural context excuse, even validate, white supremacy, anti-Semitism, and religious bigotry, do those who for whatever reason feel themselves outside community feel the need to attack community itself?

So it seems.

Evil leaders mobilize lonely losers for their own purposes. That's how we get fascism -- when the losers for whom community has long failed or been broken accept the leadership of one who offers the false community of shared resentment and hatred. Our webs of human connection, of communal purpose, are our deepest defense against collective evil.