It’s Not Over Yet

The #MeToo movement has revealed deep fault lines in modern society, between those who persist in accepting and engaging in traditional male domination of women and those who reject and condemn those behaviors. It may seem as if this split has suddenly developed, but we have been approaching this moment of reckoning for many years. The current crisis of gender behavior means that the tipping point has at last been reached.

The controversy over whites costuming themselves as black represents the racial side of the same phenomenon. What was once accepted as normal white behavior can now cost prominent people their exalted positions.

It was never okay for men to use their social power to coerce sex from women or for whites to amuse themselves by lampooning the racial subordination of blacks. Sexism and racism have always been moral transgressions. But in the American society in which I grew up, these transgressions were ubiquitous, rarely challenged, and socially accepted. They were wrong, but normal.

The challenge to normality, the recognition that not just individuals, but society itself was immoral, has been a shock to my generation, to anyone who learned how to behave before, say, 1970. The fact that these lessons were long overdue, that they reflect obvious ethical and religious precepts, has not made them easier to absorb.

I excuse no form of racist or sexist behavior, then or now. But I understand the wrenching difficulty of realizing that we were taught to emulate inhumane behavior, to acquiesce in a deeply flawed system, to perpetuate the denigration of our fellow human beings. When I remember the jokes I laughed at, the derogatory names I repeated, the lines of thinking I followed, the attitudes I carried around as I grew up and went to high school and college, I am ashamed. But it was not easy to stand apart from the culture of male superiority and the distinct, but overlapping culture of white supremacy, to see the undeserved privileges they conferred on me and the pain they caused those on the outside.

I believe I was helped toward enlightenment by being Jewish. Not that Jews are smarter or better. But our position as not quite insiders, subject to occasional reminders that we were never safe from racism, helped me perceive other forms of social condescension embedded in daily life. My rejection of normal antisemitism made rejection of sexism and racism easier, more logical. When I realized that there was a profound difference between Jews joking among ourselves about ourselves and Christians laughing at Jewish jokes that they made up, it was an easier step to recognize how male jokes about blondes proclaimed permanent sexual supremacy.

But I could never have made this transition from complicity to awareness by myself. I had to learn hard lessons from female and black friends, from writers, filmmakers, singers, and countless others who have been teaching these truths for years.

It is nevertheless difficult for anyone to give up a learned superiority. The implications of undeserved superiority go beyond language, the so-called “political correctness” that retrograde voices lament, because they don’t want to change. Men still continually interrupt women. Whites still view unfamiliar blacks as potential criminals.

The categories deeply embedded in our subconscious do not dissolve even when we consciously agree that they are inappropriate. I don’t remember how I learned the concepts “woman driver” and “slut”, but they were already firmly planted in my thinking by the time I was 15. Even though I haven’t used those words to explain what happens around me for decades, the concepts still rattle around in my head, unbidden, unwelcome, fundamentally misleading, but impossible to erase.

The consequences of centuries of assumptions about who is superior and who is inferior reach into every corner of our minds and lives. Just one example: there are several recent news stories about how adults, including doctors, take women’s and girls’ pain less seriously than male pain. This can lead to delayed or incorrect diagnoses. This subtle bias may have contributed to the ability of serial abusers like Dr. Larry Nassar to get away with assaulting girls for years after they first began to complain about him.

Right behavior is easy to define, but harder to practice. A right society does not yet exist and its details are not yet fully imagined. We don’t yet know all of the changes we will need to make in our attitudes and actions in order to create full social equality. The work will be difficult, but the goal will be glorious.

Steve Hochstadt

Berlin

February 19, 2019

Did the Holocaust Happen?

I am not a Holocaust denier. Of course, the Holocaust happened. It remains one of the most important events of the 20^th century, of modern history, perhaps of human history.

But if someone never heard of the Holocaust, doesn’t know that it happened, then history doesn’t matter. The event is wiped out of history, not by denial, but by ignorance.

Some of the most populous states passed laws between 1985 and 1995, covering nearly one-third of the US population, requiring the teaching of the Holocaust in public schools. In each case, the law specified that knowledge about the Holocaust ought to be connected to human rights issues. Prejudice and discrimination must be identified with genocide, leading to an emphasis on “the personal responsibility that each citizen bears to fight racism and hatred whenever and wherever it happens” (New Jersey) and “encouraging tolerance of diversity” (Florida). As the wording of these laws demonstrates, teaching about the Holocaust is a political act. Because encouraging diversity and fighting prejudice are politically controversial, Holocaust education is a partisan political act, and always has been.

Despite such laws, ignorance about the Holocaust is widespread in America, especially among young people. The millennial generation should have been exposed to Holocaust teaching in schools, especially in those states that require it. But they know little about the Holocaust. Two-thirds of millennials do not know what Auschwitz was; half cannot name one concentration camp; about 40% believe that fewer than 2 million Jews were murdered; 20% are not sure if they have ever heard of the Holocaust.

Ignorance about the Holocaust is a worldwide problem, even in Europe where it happened. In a recent poll, one-third of Europeans said they know little or nothing about the Holocaust.

There is overwhelming popular support for more teaching about the Holocaust. The same survey that showed the gaps in knowledge also found that 93% of Americans agreed that “All students should learn about the Holocaust while at school.”

Politicians are responding. Legislatures in Kentucky and Connecticut with unanimous votes recently passed laws to require teaching about the Holocaust in public schools. In 2017, the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect got commitments from legislators in 20 states to introduce bills to mandate Holocaust education, the beginning of its effort to get all 50 states to require Holocaust education.

But there are political problems for some in the implications of Holocaust history. The focus on human rights, the disastrous consequences of racial prejudice, the victimization of other minorities including gays, the hyper-nationalism of fascism and its deadly attacks on all leftists all can lead to a critical stance against typical conservative political positions, and in particular, against current policies of the Republican Party. Absorbing the moral significance of the Holocaust might well lead students to believe that monuments to Confederate white supremacy should be taken down, that denigration of immigrants is wrong, that loud claims that America is the greatest country ever sound like “Deutschland über alles”.

Holocaust deniers, avowed Nazis, self-proclaimed antisemites, and supporters of white supremacy appear occasionally on the fringes of the Republican Party, or even among Republican congressmen. Some Republican candidates in the recent midterm elections used antisemitic images against their Jewish opponents. David Duke, former KKK leader and former Republican legislator in Louisiana, said about Trump’s 2016 election, “This is one of the most exciting nights of my life.”

American conservatives sometimes use the Holocaust to spread inappropriate partisan messages. On Holocaust Remembrance Day two weeks ago, the Harris County (Texas) Republican Party posted a Facebook message with a yellow star-shaped badge and these words: “Leftism kills. In memory of the 6 million Jews lost to Nazi hatred in the name of National Socialism. We will never forget.” The Texas Republicans explained that they were connecting the name of the National Socialist Party with “leftism”, even though the extreme right-wing Nazis killed every socialist they could get their hands on.

The use of the Holocaust to argue against restrictions on gun ownership has a long history. Wayne LaPierre, executive director of the NRA, Ben Carson when he was a Republican candidate for President, and the senior Republican in the House have all claimed that Jews were killed because they had not armed themselves.

Some people on the left also have trouble with teaching the Holocaust. Because the Israeli government and many Jews across the world have used the Holocaust as a justification for the existence of Israel, supporters of the rights of Palestinians sometimes claim that there is too much emphasis on the Holocaust.

Sometimes leftists are criticized, because they can be linked with other people who would like to see less attention paid to the Holocaust. For example, the two women who just became the first Muslim women elected to Congress, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, are often accused by Republicans of being antisemitic, because of their criticisms of Israeli policy. Their comments do sometimes veer towards condemnations of Jews as a group, and Omar just had to apologize for some of her tweets. But their criticisms of Israel are echoed by many Jews. I find such conservative attacks misleading, but I am one of those Jews who is critical of Israeli treatment of Palestinians.

Nevertheless there are some on the left who do not wish to push more Holocaust education, because more sympathy for Jews can lead to support for Israeli occupation policies and discrimination against Palestinians.

But the facts of the Holocaust are clear and they lead inexorably to important moral and political conclusions, which can be discomforting to ideologues of the right and left. Antisemitism has always been based on false ideologies, and it leads to discrimination and eventually murder, like all ethnic hatreds. Extreme nationalism is the twin of ethnic hatred, and leads to war. It is always important to juxtapose the authority of governments or leaders with basic moral precepts, to question authority.

Holocaust education is necessary. The Holocaust is one of the most significant events of our recent global past and was an important determinant of the contemporary European and Middle Eastern world. Its moral implications, lessons if you will, have universal significance. Learning about the Holocaust makes everyone uncomfortable. That is why we must keep teaching it.

Steve Hochstadt

Berlin

February 12, 2019

Happy Birthday, Jackie!

January 31 was Jackie Robinson’s 100^th birthday. Thinking about him always brings tears to my eyes. Let me try to figure out why.

I was born a Brooklyn Dodgers fan. Like most kids, I didn’t have much choice about whom to root for. My parents were Dodgers fans, and so was I. I was born in Manhattan, spent two years in Queens, then moved out to the Long Island suburbs. I never asked them why they didn’t root for the great Yankees or for the Giants.

Was it my mother’s choice? She grew up in Queens, a girl athlete before girls were allowed to be athletes. She taught me how to throw a ball, play golf and tennis and ping-pong, and shoot pool. I don’t think she ever was allowed to be on a team, until she became captain of adult women’s tennis teams in California in the 1970s. Did she learn to root for the Da Bums, just a couple of miles away at Ebbets Field, who had not won a World Series since 1890 and sometimes presaged the clownish ineptitude of the early Mets, who inherited many of their fans? She never explained her Dodger love.

It might have been my father, who probably had never heard of the Dodgers until he arrived in New York alone at age 18 in 1938, just escaping when the Nazis took over his home in Vienna. He grew up playing soccer and never was able to smoothly throw a baseball. Did my father hear of Jackie’s college exploits when he sold men’s hats in Los Angeles in 1939 and 1940? Jackie led the NCAA in rushing and in punt returns on the undefeated 1939 UCLA football team. He also lettered basketball, baseball, and track, the first athlete to letter in four sports in UCLA history. He won the NCAA championship in the long jump in 1940, and would have gone to the Tokyo Olympics that year if they hadn’t been cancelled due to the outbreak of war.

I was born the year after Jackie played his first game for the Dodgers in 1947. By the time I understood anything about baseball, he was already a superstar with a super team: Rookie of the Year in 1947, MVP in 1949, All-Star every year from 1949 to 1954, leading the Dodgers to six World Series in his ten-year career.

My brother and I have puzzled over many of our parents’ ideas since they died. But I don’t think that their fondness for the Dodgers was about success. Although they never talked about it, I believe race was at the heart of their preference.

I doubt if my father ever met a black person growing up in Vienna. But the Nazis taught him about the evils of white supremacy as he was growing up and later when he returned to Europe with the US Army, interrogating prisoners of war and seeing concentration camps. In our home, Jackie Robinson was a moral hero, as was Branch Rickey, general manager of the Dodgers, for signing him in 1945. We were excited to watch catcher Roy Campanella, who entered the majors in 1948, and pitcher Don Newcombe, who was Rookie of the Year in 1949. When most major league teams were still all white, the Dodgers fielded three black men, all of whom played in the All-Star game in 1949.

I must have seen Jackie play in many games on our little black-and-white TV and listened to Vin Scully’s play-by-play on the radio. But Jackie retired when I was 8. I remember him more vividly in connection with Chock full o’ Nuts, that “heavenly coffee”:  “better coffee a millionaire’s money can’t buy.” Another enlightened white businessman, William Black, hired Robinson as vice president for personnel right after his baseball career ended. Chock full o’ Nuts was the Starbucks of the mid-20th century, with 80 stores in New York, most of whose staff were black. Robinson’s political activism for civil rights was fully supported by Black.

I understood little about the civil rights struggle and was too young for coffee, but I knew about Jackie’s role as business executive.

Jackie Robinson was a Republican. He supported Richard Nixon against John F. Kennedy in 1960 and worked for Nelson Rockefeller’s 1964 presidential campaign. My parents were Democrats and I’ve wandered further to the left since then. But partisanship mattered much less in those days than morality, and Jackie came to represent for me the high moral calling of activism for equality, not just in politics, but in life. I was born into a family that assumed that racial discrimination was immoral. It was immoral in Europe against Jews and immoral in America against blacks.

When I was young, I didn’t know about Jackie Robinson’s life before the Dodgers or about my father’s life before he left Vienna. I didn’t learn in school about either the Holocaust or segregation. I grew up in an antisemitic and anti-black society in the 1950s and 1960s, but barely realized it until I went to college. Even at an Ivy League university in the late 1960s, lessons about American prejudice and discrimination were not a regular part of the curriculum. Over the past 50 years, life and the study of history have taught me the facts behind my family’s moral certainties. Jackie Robinson has accompanied me along the way, as inspiration, role model, hero.

To see 100 photos of Jackie’s life, go to: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/31/sports/jackie-robinson-photos-100th-birthday.html. If you’re like me, have a handkerchief ready.

Happy Birthday, Jackie.

Steve Hochstadt

Berlin

February 5, 2019