NOTE: A GREAT Piece by Vic Rosenthal. Really, click through to read the entire article. Very well put.
I have been the editor of our local Jewish Federation newsletter for several years. Now that I am about to leave and go back to Israel, I wrote a “last editorial,” a letter to my (liberal) Jewish friends. I think it might be of broader interest, so I am reproducing it here.
By Vic Rosenthal
This will be the last Federation Focus that I will edit. Some of you know that after almost exactly 26 years, Lise and I are moving back to Israel. It’s a strange feeling – on the one hand I’ll be with two of my three children and 7 of 8 grandchildren; but on the other, Fresno will always be my home.
This part of my life, in a place where I found a great deal of warmth and friendship from Jewish and non-Jewish people, is ending and a new one beginning. At times like these my thoughts turn beyond my personal concerns, to history and to our people.
I was born in the US during WWII, which means that I grew up in one of the most remarkable places and times, an environment in which, among other things, a Jew didn’t have to worry about being murdered for being a Jew. It doesn’t sound like much, but it has been quite special in Diaspora history. By the time I was 20, barriers to Jews in various occupations, quotas at universities and real estate restrictions were virtually gone. A Jew in America could be an American and a Jew.
The horror of the Holocaust stunned Americans like General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who saw death camps with his own eyes in 1945. This, they felt, was the natural outcome of Jew-hatred, and they vehemently rejected it. Since then, traditional Jew-hatred has been marginalized in America, along with all forms of racism and ethnic prejudice. It is simply not acceptable, at least in polite society.
But something else took its place.
Around 1968, Yasser Arafat took over the PLO, an organization dedicated to ending Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East. Until then, the PLO’s rhetoric was the usual “throw the Jews into the sea” variety, which – especially after the Holocaust – didn’t go over very well in the West. So Arafat sought out, and received, advice from the masters of propaganda at the Soviet KGB.
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