Today, I read with ongoing dismay a profile of Stephen Miller, for me one of the most odious and noxious characters of the Trump entourage. I had initially thought that Steve Bannon with his admiration for Julius Evola https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/10/world/europe/bannon-vatican-julius-evola-fascism.html
would be the flag-bearer of disaster, but Miller has proven far more invidious.
It is so sad for me, as I identify strongly with my Jewish cultural heritage and inspired by its prophetic ideals, to realize and acknowledge that this man has Jewish origins, though he has already repudiated by members of his family and his rabbi. To know he is not fazed by the scenes of forcible family separations and refugees in US detention camps, but rather eager to promote such policies as an alleged deterrent, is mortifying.
Similarly, I am astounded and horrified by the news that members of high school varsity water polo teams in Orange County CA celebrated their victories with the sieg heil and the playing of Wehrmacht songs.
However, I also continue to be surprised at my own naive reaction, since I now recognize there are many millions of my fellow citizens who subscribe to racist nationalist thinking, and with the fecklessness of a degraded, slavish, sycophantic GOP, I no longer wonder how the Weimar Republic succumbed to Nazi control in the 1930s. My nightmare is that I am living through such times.
A few days ago, I saw the following quote, which has been widely circulating, and I imagine that many of you have as well:
“Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come back from school to find that their parents have disappeared. Women return from shopping to find their houses sealed, their families gone.”
Though they describe scenes now tragically familiar to us in the aftermath of the recent ICE raids, these words are not from contemporary ties. They are chillingly an excerpt from the diary of Anne Frank.
Iris and I just saw the film Who Will Write Our History? at the Am HaYam Havurah Film Festival in Wellfleet, documenting the courageous life of Emanuel Ringelblum and other Nazi-resistors in the Warsaw ghetto. It chronicles their effort to record that desperate episode of the Holocaust through documenting their quotidian life in stashes of secret buried archives.
The film has astounding relevance for today, particularly in the manner in which the Nazi propaganda machine portrayed the Jews in despicable racist terms. The role of Jewish police in the roundup and deportation in the Warsaw ghetto is portrayed as a pathetically misguided act of desperation by individuals hoping to save their lives and their families. What horrid choices were presented by the Nazis in such extreme circumstances.
That we now have members of our own Jewish community such as Kushner or Miller is so demoralizing, and calls for strenuous counteraction. “Never Again,” must mean “Never Again to Anyone.”
I think the Mass Association of Social Studies teachers should include this film in their curriculum.
I began my Institute’s Inquiry high school program in 1999 when I was asked by teachers who were affiliated with Educators for Social Responsibility (now Engaging Schools), based in Cambridge, to address a meeting of their membership and the general membership of the MASST about the curriculum I instigated for the 1998 EPIIC Covert Action and Democracy year. We created a curriculum for the Association. It was written by my good friend Professor Steve Cohen, who I soon thereafter hired as Inquiry’s first coordinator. Its researcher was Heather Barry, my EPIIC student in 1998 , who is currently the Institute’s Associate Director.