Ardy’s World (Commentary)

By Ardy Friedberg

It may not have been Moses, but someone in his time said, “A war in the defense of Israel is a war for the survival of the entire Jewish people wherever they live.”

I’ve been saying for quite a while, and maybe it’s my background working for the Anti-Defamation League, that surviving a second Trump term will be dangerous for American Jews and other minorities as well.

Many German Jews didn’t see the warning signs when Hitler and his thugs came to power. Those warning signs are here and now. The thugs following Trump (okay they aren’t all thugs) are foaming at the mouth. He is confirming their hatred of “the other” and Jews and Blacks and browns and gays are the others.

A website called The Tablet has excerpts from letters written in 1933 by Jews to relatives in the U.S. giving warnings that were largely ignored.

The elites were dismayed but felt their economic and social position would protect them. Of course, they were wrong.

Here is a sample from one letter that describes Nazi thugs defiling stores along Berlin’s 5th Avenue:

“These young devils like a lot of hungry wolves let loose … with buckets filled with red paint and with large paint brushes, rushed from one shop window to another and not satisfied with having put huge posters against the Jews thereon, printed in huge letters at the side of the posters JUDE [underlined in the original]. These were followed by other troops with white paint buckets who hastily painted a large Shield of David [underlined in the original] on the same windows. It was a concerted action, completely organized so that one atrocity followed upon the other. Up and down these devils flew, across the wide streets over to the opposite side while the crowds of people (there was scarcely a Jew to be seen on the streets, they were mostly at home, being afraid to venture out), looked on, some with serious faces—many (and mostly the bourgeois type, the kind of women one could imagine in France during the revolution) grinning and smiling approvingly as though it was a huge joke! Can you imagine my feeling? Large shops and small ones, shops that no one ever knew that they were owned by Jews… lace houses that have been in the same shops for 50 years—coffee houses and fine restaurants. Hundreds and hundreds of stores, delicatessen shops, the finest Berlin has, were all, without exception smeared up in this way. And what a sight! And what deep misery in the wake of this dastardly, cowardly outbreak. On some stores which from the name one would never think owned by Jews they had smeared “Geborener Jude” [born a Jew]. And on many, oh so many, in large white letters they printed “Ich bein Jude” [I am a Jew]… The ready-to-wear shops—and there are many—on the main street, Leipzigerstrasse, were all full of these signs. Well, my dears, my heart ached and bled and it was all I could do to keep the tears back. … Throughout the entire breath and length of this long, long, Kurfurstendam [sic] we never saw one single policeman [underlined in the original], not one officer of the law to protect any outrage that might have occurred. … Can you imagine a civilized land condoning such atrocities? Can you imagine in the twentieth century that troops of young snips should have the right to perpetuate such horrible deeds as the smearing of respectable shops with all these dirty epithets? Juda-Juda everywhere. Kauft nicht bei Juden-kauft nur bei Deutsche. (Don’t buy from Jews buy only from Germans).”

Scares me. Maybe I’m over reacting, but maybe not. That’s why I’ve been researching how an American can move to Spain, Mexico, Chile or Argentina.

According to the CIA Factbook, these countries are friendly to American expats.

Our passports are in order. Check yours.