TV Quote of the Day (‘The Twilight Zone,’ on ‘Weapons That Are Simply Thoughts’)

Rod Serling [Closing Narration]: “The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.”— The Twilight Zone, Season 1, Episode 22, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” original air date Mar. 4, 1960, teleplay by Rod Serling, directed by Ron Winston

Photo of the Day: Tree of Life Synagogue, Pittsburgh PA—One Year Later

It was only a little over a week ago that, while being driven in an SUV through the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, I saw out the window the Tree of Life Synagogue. 

I wasn’t struck simply by the way the building (designed by architects Alfred Marks and Elkan Avner and dedicated in 1963) wraps around the corner of Wilkins and Shady Avenues, or by the modern stained-glass windows. 

No, it was all the items left on one side of the religious site—a grim reminder of the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history that occurred exactly a year ago today.

I took this photo to remind myself what I saw on my brief visit, and how my heart sank in that moment.
 

In these past 12 months, Americans have had to ask some very hard questions about how a gunman (I refuse to dignify him by providing a name) slaughtered 11 people on the site. The social media have managed to provide a forum for a hatred that, while perhaps no longer as casual and widespread as before WWII in the United States, is perhaps more insidious, virulent and murderous.

As described by Mahita Gajanan in this Time Magazine article, the congregation of Tree of Life is now considering the nature of the synagogue after its anticipated reopening. But, while the structure can take a new form, the atmosphere in American society requires a longer, more intense detoxification. 

This came home to me in unmistakable fashion a few weeks ago, when a friend, describing a recent day supervising a small after-school library, explained how she came upon a nine-year-old accessing hate messages via the computer. The child had not happened upon it on his own or through friends, she explained, but had been directed to it through his parents. Seventy years after Rodgers and Hammerstein explained the nature of prejudice, it remains the case that the young must be “carefully taught” to hate and fear.

Part of this detoxification, I’m convinced, must involve preserving memory—an effort that now includes, among others, Eric Lidji, who, as director of the director and only permanent staff member of the Rauh Jewish History Program and Archives, has been gathering programs, artwork, and stones left outside the Tree of Life. (See a description of his work in this fine article in The Atlantic by Emma Green.)

Quote of the Day (Reinhold Niebuhr, on Race Pride as ‘A Perennial Corruption of Man's Collective Life’)

“If we imagine that race pride is only a vestigial remnant of barbarism, which civilization is in the process of sloughing off; if we do not understand it as a perennial corruption of man's collective life on every level of social and moral achievement, we are bound to follow wrong policies in dealing with specific aspects of the problem. An engineer who dammed up an ocean inlet under the illusion that he was dealing with a mountain stream would be no more foolish than our social engineers who are constantly underestimating the force and the character of the social stuff that they are manipulating.” — American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, edited by D. B. Robertson (1957)

Quote of the Day (Bernard Malamud, on Anti-Semitism and the ‘Unpolitical Man’)

"There's no such thing as an unpolitical man, especially a Jew. You can't be one without the other, that's clear enough. You can't sit still and see yourself destroyed."—American short-story writer and novelist Bernard Malamud (1914-1986), The Fixer (1966)

As a teenager, few books left a deeper impression on me than Bernard Malamud’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a Jewish handyman or “fixer” unjustly arrested on suspicion of murder of a Christian boy in Czarist Russia. An ordinary man with no prior interest in politics, Yakov Bok becomes, by necessity, all too aware of injustice—and, through his refusal to give up, ennobled in his struggle to prove his innocence.

Though set in pre-Communist Russia, The Fixer had obvious applications to the U.S.—not merely in the casual but widespread anti-Semitism in this country throughout the last century, but more virulently, in a deep, tragic miscarriage of justice: the lynching of Jewish factory owner Leo Frank, for a crime he did not commit—the 1913 murder of his 13-year-old employee Mary Phagan in Atlanta. 

Malamud’s novel was not just an examination of prejudice, particularly anti-Semitism, but a call to action against it wherever it appeared. That lesson needs to be re-learned today in this country. Many of us desperately want relief from the shrieking outrage of political partisans on cable news and social media, but I’m afraid it’s a useless cause. 

Whether we like it or not, we are being called to make a stand, as John Adams, at the time of the American Revolution, did when he wrote, "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy." These days, we have to make war against hatred. As much as I want to, no matter how hard I try to turn away from the outrage of the day abetted by the White House, it finds me. The times leave us no choice.

Atlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGill, in a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial on the bombing of a temple in his city 60 years ago, could not have been more precise in tracing the origins of this act of terror—and how, like a deep moral stain, it could—and did—spread: 

“You do not preach and encourage hatred for the Negro and hope to restrict it to that field. It is an old, old story. It is one repeated over and over again in history. When the wolves of hate are loosed on one people, then no one is safe.”

Charlottesville…Pittsburgh…Which city will be next? More important, who will be held to account for encouraging this real “American carnage”?

Quote of the Day (Martin Luther King, Jr., on the ‘Shackles of Prejudice’)

“There is little hope for us until we become toughminded enough to break loose from the shackles of prejudice, half-truths, and downright ignorance...A nation or a civilization that continues to produce softminded men purchases its own spiritual death on an installment plan.”—American civil-rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), Strength to Love (1963)

In memory of the 11 Pittsburgh synagogue massacre victims…Never again…

Quote of the Day (Eric Hoffer, on Why ‘The Ideal Devil is a Foreigner’)

“Finally, it seems, the ideal devil is a foreigner. To qualify as a devil, a domestic enemy must be given a foreign ancestry. Hitler found it easy to brand the German Jews as foreigners. The Russian revolutionary agitators emphasized the foreign origin (Varangian, Tartar, Western) of the Russian aristocracy. In the French Revolution, the aristocrats were seen as ‘descendants of barbarous Germans, while French commoners were descendants of civilized Gauls and Romans.’ In the Puritan Revolution the royalists ‘were labeled “Normans,” descendants of a group of foreign invaders.’”— American moral and social philosopher Eric Hoffer (1898-1983), The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951)

 No movie or fiction will scare me this Halloween quite like this analysis of political fanaticism. Thirty-five years after its author's death, it bears rediscovery and reflection...