The Jewish Question

Anti-Semitism Is on the Rise

Yes, it’s a clickbait headline. I am glad you clicked. When you get to the bottom of this, you will understand why.

One of the things you do when you run for office is meet people. Fortunately, I love to meet people. I was raised in the Presbyterian church, and I am a Christian. I am extremely dismayed at the far left turn the American mainline protestant church hierarchy has taken. I go to church to learn about salvation and forgiveness, not who to vote for in November, and not to become a political activist for big government.

Last night, my wife and I attended the Republican Jewish Coalition Hanukkah event. As I mentioned to people there, I have done Passover with friends before. My daughter found the afikoman for what it is worth. I had never been to a Hanukkah celebration.

The speeches for the evening, of course, spoke of how we need to be “lights” for the world. However, there was more urgency this year, and the speakers said as much.

Victor Davis Hansen writes about the rise in worldwide anti-semitism here.

Bondi Beach in Australia and the murders at Brown are just the latest. There is a long litany of violence against Jews going back in human history. I remember when people were saying that “Jews had space lasers”. I said if they did call the Mohel, I am converting!

I met a young high school student, Ethan Cohen. His parents are fellow Illini! Ethan worked with the legislature to pass the first-ever statewide antisemitism bill in the United States, which defines what it is. Ethan is interested in finance, and I hope he pursues it.

Given what VDH wrote, we cannot rely on the notion that if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. There have always been antisemitic people on the far left, but now it has become an integral part of center-left politics. An unspoken plank in the Democratic Party’s platform. That’s a serious problem. Except now, we are seeing a rise in antisemitism on the far right. People like Nick Fuentes cannot be tolerated. At all. Period.

If you don’t mind, I’d like to tell you how my consciousness was raised about antisemitism.

Where I grew up, there weren’t any Jewish people. The universe of people I knew in my Chicago suburb at the time was mostly Irish, Italian, German, and Polish. There were WASPs like myself, but almost everyone was Catholic. Seth Greenberg was the assistant coach at Columbia University in NYC, and I think he was the first Jewish person I ever had a long conversation with when he recruited me.

One of my friend’s fathers liberated Dachau. He was one of the first troopers in. He couldn’t talk about it. As a young GI, he didn’t know what he was walking into.

My high school had an avant-garde English class taught by Ralph Amelio and John Mostacci. It was called Cinema, and it was wildly popular because both Ralph and John were very personable people. Plus, you got to watch movies! Easy A for sure, right? Wrong. Watching movies was the hook, but Ralph and John had ulterior motives. They used that class to teach you how to write. Not only that, they used that class to get you to think about themes. By using film, you discovered themes differently.

One of the films they showed was called Night and Fog. I had been exposed to the Holocaust, of course. But, only in books. History books are generally matter-of-fact. The photos and the words wash over you, and you remember statistics. Six million were killed and things like that. Movies make it real.

Night and Fog affected me. It changed the way I looked at the Holocaust.

I went to college and wound up on the CME floor. In Chicago, there were three major exchanges: CME, CBOT, and CBOE. CBOE was where the math geeks went. CBOT was the original, and it was considered the “Irish exchange”. CME was originally the butter and egg exchange. Guess which ethnic group was in the egg business? Jews. Hence, CME was the “Jewish exchange”.

I traded, made friends, and interacted with lots of Jewish guys who were just like me. We competed and tried to make a buck. At the same time, I became friends with Leo Melamed, who was a mentor. Leo didn’t mentor me on trading. He mentored me on business.

If you know Leo well, and a lot of traders who read this will laugh, I used to show him the blue side of a trading card. Leo loved to be short any market.

Since Leo invented financial futures, everyone on the exchange floor owed their career paths to him. But, more than that, I loved to talk to Leo. He was a lawyer initially and thought like a lawyer. I was a part of the CME PAC. We gave 50/50 to both sides of the aisle, and the exchange built relationships with the Senate Finance and Ag committees, along with the House Financial Services and Ag committees. We had people come to CME from DC, and I would show them around the floor. Somewhere, I have an old photo of Las Vegas mayor Shelley Berkley and me.

My kids attended Francis Parker School in Chicago, where many of the students are Jewish. My kids did the bar/bat mitzvah circuit and had a blast. One daughter could do the “allie ahs”, and they still have close friends who are Jewish. We are friends with the parents.

I joined the National World War Two Museum Board of Trustees. Of course, the museum covers the Holocaust. It covers the rise of Hitler. However, because it’s the American museum, it tells that history the way Americans of the time learned about it. During my time on the board, Mark Rubin joined the board.

Mark was a Holocaust survivor. He was imprisoned in Auschwitz as a young boy. If you visit the Liberation Pavilion at the museum, he tells his story of the day he was liberated.

This is where the Hanukkah “be a light” in the world I wrote about above ethos comes full circle.

I loved Mark almost immediately upon meeting him and his wife. Mark and I would eat lunch together and chat. Mark was one of those human beings who, when you met him, you felt this inner light that radiated from him. It was a warmth, an inner calm.

Yet, Mark experienced and saw some of the worst of humanity in human history. Blows your mind, doesn’t it? If Mark can be that way, so can we all.

Recently, I met with national Jewish leaders and discussed the rise of antisemitism. The discussion made me uncomfortable, and that’s a feature. When the cause of a problem is some group you oppose, like left-wing Democrats, it’s a lot easier to shoot the breeze about. When you have to confront it in the fringe elements of your own group, your initial response is not to believe it. Your second response is shock at how stupid people can be. Your third response is anger.

Anger is a good short-term motivator, but it cannot sustain a movement.

It is not enough to say we want to stop antisemitism. We have to take action, each and every day, in whatever way we can, to stamp it out. It’s a pox on civilization. Of course, we do that knowing that it has been around for at least 1500 years, and we will probably never stamp it out. However, we can put it into the darkest corners of the world where it never sees the light.

It is time for all of us to take action. Are you with me?

Added:

I should have mentioned that we had armed guards stationed at the private establishment in a gated community, so nothing would happen, and people felt safe. Ahem, we are in AMERICA.