The Only Way to Fight Hate
TIME Magazine November 1. 2018
By Nancy Gibbs
Hate, among all our base instincts, is the most distinctly human. In animals, violence and venom are tools of survival; in humans, of supremacy. Small, scared people hate, self-hating people hate, bullied and betrayed people hate, as though hate will make them large and safe and strong. The twisted writings of this latest class of attackers suggest they felt called to their hatreds as a duty. Robert Bowers allegedly blamed Jews for their outreach to refugees and vowed to repel “invaders” moving north through Central America as he set off to the synagogue: “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered,” an account matching his name posted, like a martyr dispatched to a massacre. Accused mail bomber Cesar Sayoc stalked George Soros, the billionaire Holocaust survivor and Democratic donor, who conspiracy theorists claimed was funding that invasion–never mind that those armed invaders were nearly a thousand miles away and the main thing in their arms was their children. “Whites don’t kill whites,” a witness quoted Gregory Bush as saying; he was arrested in the murders of two black shoppers at a Kentucky grocery store, allegedly having failed to get into a predominantly black church nearby.
We’re having a master class on hate because we’ve no choice; it has moved from the part of our character we work hardest to suppress to the part we can least afford to ignore. Hate slipped its bonds and runs loose, through our politics, platforms, press, private encounters. And the further it travels, the stronger it grows. People unaccustomed to despising anyone, ever, find themselves so frightened or appalled by what they see across the divide that they are prepared to fight it hand to hand. Calls for civility are scorned as weak, a form of unilateral disarmament. President Trump calls for unity in the same breath that he undermines it, demonizing adversaries, minimizing threats, trivializing trauma. He didn’t consider canceling a political rally out of respect for the slain; he considered it, he said, because he was having a bad hair day.
So much attention is paid to the President’s lies that we can miss his radical honesty. He didn’t see any need to call the former Presidents in the wake of assassination attempts; “I think we’ll probably pass,” he said. That mail-bomb spree was a shame, he argued, because it slowed Republicans’ midterm momentum. His tweets of sympathy for the victims of the synagogue shooting were followed by color commentary on the World Series. The solution to such shootings, he suggested, was to bring back the death penalty: How better to fight violence than with more violence? And if there is a rising of dark and dangerous forces in the land, he believes, it means that “the Fake News Media, the true Enemy of the People, must stop the open & obvious hostility & report the news accurately & fairly.”
Likewise, the evidence of his utter lack of empathy belies his great gift and political advantage–this ability he has to sense our darkest instincts and call to them, coax them out of hiding, when we’d much prefer not to see them at all. Of all the norms he violates, this is among the most disturbing: that Americans will always seek leaders who lift us up and bring us together rather than drag us down and tear us apart. Make America Great Again has been a brilliant, aspirational slogan for the resentful and aggrieved; but that road to greatness turns out to run through the smoking wreckage of institutions, values and national honor. Gone is the joy that comes from political battle that is not a fight to the death. When politics becomes blood sport, people actually die.

Students from the Yeshiva School pay their respects as the funeral procession for Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz passes their school in Pittsburgh on Oct. 30. Gene J. Puskar—AP/Shutterstock
Here then is the challenge: our normal responses aren’t working. The spread of conspiracy theories as the “real truth” at least presumes that truth matters, even as the theories undermine it. Social networks designed to connect friends turn out to be expertly designed to create enemies. Fact-checking makes no difference; tribes trump truth. When reporters try to hold the President accountable for inflaming the hatred, he attacks them for bias, for fueling division. When partisans on the left call for fighting fire with fire, they validate the tactics that debase our discourse.
Caught in the cross fire is a public not so much enraged as exhausted, at a loss to explain or escape the ugly, intellectually barren fever swamps that now pass for our public square. Conspiracy theories flourish as a substitute for the hard work of actual knowledge. They grant those who embrace them a shortcut to superiority: average people believe what they hear on the evening news or read in the papers, but you are smarter, you know better, you see the patterns and plots behind these events, the “globalists” pulling the strings, the “deep state” undermining your mission. You can’t be fooled, you won’t be puppets, you know better, you know the truth.
So what to do? The most eloquent politicians who warn of the toll this is taking are mainly the ones departing the scene. Where will we find moral leaders in an age of abdication, when “elites” of all kinds are suspect, whether teachers or preachers or scientists or scholars?
If our past is a guide and comfort, it comes from where it always comes from. Look left, look right, not up or down. Leadership lies with the spirit of the Tree of Life synagogue, where victims included the dentist who offered his services at the free clinic, the brothers who had “not an ounce of hate in them,” as their rabbi said at their funeral, the couple married there more than 60 years ago, all mourned by the thousands who came out to stand vigil in silent solidarity. It lies with the postal workers going about their work even as more mail bombs turned up, and the neighbors in Kentucky who, in the wake of the grocery-store shootings, held a community meeting to discuss race and violence.
If the opposite of love isn’t hate but indifference, then the antidote to hate is engagement. It comes from the people who spent the weekend knocking on doors and staffing phone banks to get out the vote on Election Day. From the enterprise of technologists looking for ways to drain some of the toxins from our information streams. From employees who are letting their bosses know what kind of humane, sustainable culture they expect in one of the richest countries on earth. From church groups and civic clubs and marchers raising money for clothing drives or breast-cancer research or tree plantings. From teachers staying after school to tutor and coaches teaching their players about the difference between an opponent and an enemy, so they can take that wisdom with them into a public space that feels less like a sport than a war. Leadership will come from uncountable individual decisions to model kindness, to fight alienation, to get offline and into the streets or the classroom or the sanctuary and help someone in trouble.
This much is clear. Whatever happens on Tuesday, no one is coming to save us. We’ll have to do this ourselves.
Nancy Gibbs, a former writer and editor in chief at TIME, is Visiting Edward R. Murrow professor, Harvard Kennedy School. She is the co-author, along with Michael Duffy, of two best-selling presidential histories: The President’s Club: Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Fraternity and The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House.
This appears in the November 12, 2018 issue of TIME.
Are U.S. Jews Still More Safe Than the Jews of Europe?
Dear Friends,
Are U.S. Jews Still More Safe Than the Jews of Europe?

A police officer stands guard outside Temple Sinai before Friday evening Shabbat services on November 2, 2018 in Pittsburgh, PennsylvaniaAFP
The Jewish community and allies come together for a candlelight vigil for victims of the synagogue shooting at the Tree of Life in Pittsburgh. White House, D.C. October 27, 2018AFP
File photo: White nationalists march in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, August 12, 2017.Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
Trump Needs to Demilitarize His Rhetoric

JULIAN E. ZELIZER is a historian at Princeton University and a CNN political analyst. He is the author of The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society, and Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974.
With Shabbat, Pittsburgh begins to heal a week after the Tree of Life massacre
By Moriah Balingit and Kellie Gormly
Washington Post November 3, 2018

Myriam Gumerman, 69, right, reads a prayer as she joins with her daughter, Karen Kantz, center, and friend, Machiel Keestra, left, as they celebrate the Shabbat with her at her home on Friday. (Justin Merriman/For The Washington Post)
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To read more and view 76 image photo gallery CLICK HERE
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Email From Polish Ambassador to Switzerland
Thank you for your time and consideration,
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From: Kumoch Jakub <Jakub.Kumoch@msz.gov.pl>
To: HaitiHolocaust@aol.com <HaitiHolocaust@aol.com>
Cc: jeffrey cymbler <jkcymbler@gmail.com>; Uszyński Jędrzej <jedrzej.uszynski@msz.gov.pl>; Markus Blechner <polconsul.zurich@gmail.com>
Sent: Mon, Oct 29, 2018 2:44 am
Subject: Forged Haitian passports from Berne, Switzerland
Let me introduce myself. I’m Polish Ambassador to Switzerland and for many months my diplomats and I have been conducting a broad research into the so-called Latin American papers from Berne, Switzerland. The passports of Paraguay, Honduras, Haiti and Peru which indeed helped rescue around 1,5 thousand human lives during the Holocaust, were products of what we called Bernese Grouphttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernese_Group , a clandestine network of Jewish organizations and Polish diplomats in Berne. I am sure you will find interesting the document in attachment – it’s the minutes of interrogation of Abraham Silberschein. He explains how he acquired a number of Haitian passports from the honorary consul of Haiti in Switzerland. We have also localized other documents, among others, the response of Haiti to the Polish and American requests to recognize the documents issued to our Jewish citizens.
But first of all we’ve been working on the full list of Survivors. What interests us is Haitian passports forged in Berne in 1943.Unfortunately we know only fifty names of people who were in possession of such passports. In our researches we’ve been co-operating with many Jewish historians and Survivors and we’ve been supported i.a. by the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Memorial Museum.
Best regards,
NYT: The Nazi Downstairs: A Jewish Woman’s Tale of Hiding in Her Home
A search for a lost masterpiece uncovered a woman’s harrowing account of escaping deportation, and possibly death, while spying on a Nazi at close range.
She later secretly moved back in. Credit via Sotheby’s
Elsa Koditschek was living in a prosperous section of Vienna, near the foothills of the Alps, when the Nazis, who had annexed Austria, confiscated her home in 1940. A German officer, a squad leader in the SS, soon moved in.

Egon Schiele’s “City in Twilight (The Small City II),” painted in 1913, was owned by Mrs. Koditschek. Credit via Sotheby’s
Mrs. Koditschek’s Schiele was ultimately sold during the war, while she struggled to survive, and it has been sold several times since.
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But her letters, handwritten on onionskin and intact after having been carefully packed away in a relative’s basement, helped the Koditschek family and researchers at Sotheby’s piece together the provenance of the painting. So this fall in New York, when it goes up for auction with an estimated value of $12 million to $18 million, Mrs. Koditschek’s heirs will share in the proceeds with its current owners.
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“It’s so unusual to have a victim of Nazi theft or expropriation who writes everything down,” Lucian Simmons, the worldwide head of restitution at Sotheby’s, said. “Usually you’re trying to join the dots, but the dots are far apart.
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“Mentions of the Schiele painting in the letters buttressed the provenance research by Mr. Simmons, who had approached the family in 2014 after independently finding indications that it had lost an important painting during the war. What followed were several years of negotiation with the current owners of the Schiele, Europeans who had bought it in the 1950s, that led to an agreement that will govern the sale next month of the work, “City in Twilight (The Small City II)” painted in 1913.
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“It’s an important painting with a wonderful revolutionary abstract form,” Mr. Simmons said.
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Perhaps more remarkable than the painting is the tale that accompanies it: the account of woman made vagabond by the Nazis who ended up returning to the very house from which she had been evicted, and living out the war there, just feet above one of her persecutors. Mrs. Koditschek survived the war, and related her account in many letters to her son, who died in 1974. But he seldom discussed those experiences in any detail, so relatives have only recently begun to unravel Mrs. Koditschek’s history by sifting through the correspondence. (Sotheby’s provided translations of excerpts from the letters.)
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Their tone deepens as events evolve, according to Sarah Whites-Koditschek, a great-granddaughter, and turns grim in 1941 when the deportation order arrives. At that point, Ms. Whites-Koditschek said, “She’s just writing about whether she can find any way to escape.”
Update on Fascism by Yale Prof. of Philosophy
Dear Friends,
Best,
Harriet and Bill
If You’re Not Scared About Fascism in the U.S., You Should Be
When fascism starts to feel normal, we’re all in trouble.
- Oct. 15, 2018
Prince William unveils statue for spy who saved Jews from Holocaust
MI6 agent Frank Foley used his cover job as a passport officer in Berlin to freely issue British visas to German Jews in the 1930s
thousands of Jews from the Nazis during the Holocaust, September 18, 2018 (YouTube screenshot)
Merkel visits Holocaust memorial and vows to fight anti-Semitism
RTE/ Thursday, 4 Oct 2018 18:42

She said Germany had a responsibility to confront anti-Semitism and never to forget the Holocaust.
The visit comes against a backdrop of resurgent nationalism and far-right violence in Germany which has beenfuelled by anger at Ms Merkel’s decision to welcome more than one million mostly Muslim asylum seekers in 2015.
She also said she agreed with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Iran, Israel’s arch-enemy, should never be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons but that they differed on how to achieve that objective.
Ms Merkel began a day of meetings between Israeli and German government officials with a visit to Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust memorial, where she laid a wreath on a stone slab that contains ashes of death camp victims.
“Almost 80 years ago, on the pogrom night of November 9, Jews in Germany faced unimaginable hate and violence. This was followed by unprecedented crimes against civilisation in the form of the Shoah,” speaking German and using the Hebrew word for Holocaust, she said at Yad Vashem.
“Germany has a perpetual responsibility to remember those crimes and to confront anti-Semitism, xenophobia, hate and violence,” she said, after arriving for a 24-hour visit as part of annual government-to-government talks between German and Israeli ministers.

Following discussions in Jerusalem with Mr Netanyahu, Ms Merkel addressed Middle East issues in a joint news conference with the Israeli leader, who praised what he described as her consistent stance against anti-Semitism.
Germany remains party to a 2015 nuclear pact between Iran and world powers that Mr Netanyahu opposed and from which US President Donald Trump pulled out in May.
“We are very convinced and strongly share Israel’s position that everything must be done to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Where we are not always united is on the path to this goal,” Ms Merkel said.
At the United Nations General Assembly last week, Mr Netanyahu accused Europe of appeasing Iran and said he would prevent Tehran from entrenching in Syria and arming Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas.
Ms Merkel, at the news conference, described Iran’s military presence in Syria and Lebanon as a threat to neighbouring Israel.
On the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, she reaffirmed her support for a two-state solution and concern about Israeli settlement expansion in occupied territory where Palestinians seek for a country of their own.
Such activity, she said, “makes the two-state solution difficult to achieve”.
Ms Merkel said that Mr Netanyahu urged Germany to encourage the Palestinians to return to negotiations that collapsed in 2014, adding: “I will do this”.
There were no plans for Ms Merkel to see Palestinian leaders during her brief visit.
Source: https://www.rte.ie/news/world/2018/1004/1001007-merkel-israel/
Stephen Miller’s Childhood Rabbi Harshly Denounces Him In Rosh Hashanah Sermon
Forward.com September 11, 2018 By Dave Goldiner
The childhood rabbi of Stephen Miller denounced the divisive White House aide during Rosh Hashanah services at the synagogue where he once worshipped.
Rabbi Neil Comess-Daniels devoted much of his High Holidays sermon to a rebuke of Miller for spearheading President Trump’s right-wing attacks on immigrants — and especially his unpopular policy of separating families at the border.
“Mr. Miller, you’ve set back the Jewish contribution to making the world spiritually whole,” Comess-Daniels told the congregation at Beth Shir Shalom, a Reform temple in Santa Monica, according to The Guardian. “(It’s) obvious to me that you didn’t get my, or our, Jewish message.”
The rabbi even admitted that fellow rabbis have questioned whether he somehow failed to teach Miller the Jewish values of respect for others.
“What I taught is a Judiasm that cherishes, wisdom, values … wide horizons and an even wider embrace,” the rabbi said. “[Separating families] is completely antithetical to everything I know about Judaism, Jewish law and Jewish values.”
The rabbi insisted it was his responsibility to speak out against Miller, especially on one of the most sacred days on the Jewish calendar.