Will Someone Help Me Make Sense of This?

There are Jewish Americans who are making plans to flee the country, fearing a wave of anti-Semitic persecution which they perceive is a moral danger to them and to their families.  The absolute awfulness of coming to grips with the fact that American Jews, American Jews, are facing a renewal of something that humanity should have completely wiped off the face of the earth at the end of World War 2 literally makes my stomach churn.  

As a history teacher and amateur historian with a strong interest in the Second World War, I never found it easy to get past the way that history books handled things like the National Socialist and Fascist movements in Europe, anti-Semitism and the holocaust, and the political developments leading to the strange set of alliances that led to the precipitation of war.  It was very difficult to discover that the United States used a set of frustratingly pernicious and bigoted immigration laws and policies to literally close the doors in the face of Jews fleeing persecution.  Many of those in Congress and in the cabinet either did not believe the reports of arrest, rounding up and persecution of Jews in Germany, and then the accounts of trains taking millions to gas chambers and death.  It was late in the war before the United States shook off the malaise of anti-Semitism and, because of incontrovertible evidence of a massacre beyond imagination, finally allowed itself to be a limited refuge for the few Jews who could still reach the shores.  

So we were not the place for the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to be free if those masses were Jewish and from Europe.  And I have never been able to understand that.  

Nor can I understand the bigotry and anti-Semitism that I see which still pervades our culture.  I was raised in a small Baptist church, Southern Baptist, where the inconsistency between what the Christian gospel teaches about the nature of God and the words and actions of many of the church members never made sense.  They could read those places in the gospels and epistles of the New Testament where no distinction is made between human beings when it comes to the application of the love of God, but at the same time, voice the opinion that people who weren't white were inferior and not entitled to the same consideration, because their theology somehow excluded those people, on that basis, from themselves. 

Somehow, I came out of that with a Quaker worldview when it comes to humanity and equality, except that I have real difficulty stuffing down the angry feelings when I hear people being ignorantly racist and bigoted.  I had to walk away from a discussion about the upcoming Mayor's race in Chicago, when two people who were part of a group with whom I'd been invited to eat lunch determined that they didn't have much of a chance to get a "white" mayor, once it became known that one of the two candidates was African American.  The insinuation that African Americans aren't capable enough to run a city like Chicago was too thick for me to tolerate.  

How does any of that make any sense at all?  I don't see it.  And I won't apologize for not engaging that in conversation.   

This Isn't a Coincidence

I doubt that very many Americans make any kind of realistic distinction between Ukrainians and Russians.  But those who seem to be more sympathetic to the Russians, and who use the excuse of the cost of providing aid to Ukraine as an excuse for their position, also seem to be many of the same anti-Semitic bigots and racists when it comes to African Americans and Jews, at least, those involved in government seem to be that way.  

Maybe my circumstances are different.  I live in a neighborhood with a lot of Eastern Europeans, with Polish being the predominant nationality, but in which there are a fair number of Ukrainians, enough to have a large, and architecturally grand, Ukrainian Catholic church in the neighborhood.  The Ukrainians I know and talk to are friendly, most of them professionally employed, and very much able to distinguish themselves from Russians.  Similar, yes, but unique in many ways, and very happy with the freedom they now have, and their democracy, modelled after ours, reflecting our values as Americans.  

An American who isn't supportive of that is one who doesn't understand his or her own patriotism and who takes liberty for granted without understanding how it is secured.  So it is not a coincidence that indifference toward what Russia is doing in Ukraine, and toward persons who are of a different race or religion, is being expressed by the same people who are anti-Semitic and racist.

Republicans and other conservatives can rant about "baby killing", about abortion, about extending rights to LGBTQ persons, and about their conservative values forever, but if they're not bothered or moved by images of civilian residences, hospitals and infrastructure that provides basic human needs being blown to smithereens by Russian missiles, and by stories of Ukrainian kids murdered for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and because they identify as Ukrainian, and not Russian, all their ranting is meaningless.  

And so is whatever faith they think they are practicing.