If Germany’s great national atrocity is The Holocaust, America’s is the genocide of the Native Americans and slavery.  The Native Americans have been so thoroughly decimated and marginalized there is almost no possible way for the United States to offer meaningful reparations. At best we can try and mitigate the damage and save those that survive.

Slavery, however, is a different story. Gerrymandering and redistricting, the repeal of the Voting Rights Act, the political battles raging today, still being fought along racial lines – all of these are the legacy of slavery.

Where Germany waged war on the world, America waged war on itself, tore itself apart in a Civil War over the moral crisis of slavery.

In Germany, the Jews are noticeable primarily through their absence. After the Holocaust there were almost no Jews left and even today, though Jews are returning, they exist more as historical legacy than living citizenry.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

On the other hand, African-Americans have continued to be a visible presence in the everyday life of American society, they are in many ways the beating heart of American culture, some of the greatest contributors to our intellectual and creative legacy. And yet they remain outsiders, prejudiced against and disenfranchised.

You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is that Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African-American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and history that – that doesn’t go away.

Where Germany’s path to redemption has been through repentance and restitution to a mostly-absent victim, America’s path to redemption is a constant negotiation with an ever-present people, people who are legally equal but to this day, even with an African-American president, must continue to fight for their right to live in a just and equitable society.

The Jews have done remarkably well in America. So well that most of us have forgotten the misery of the Jewish condition until just over a century ago. We have done so well that most of what remains of our cultural memory are the fictional, idealized stories of shtetl life and the memory of the brief flourishing of the Jewish Enlightenment in Western Europe, both destroyed by the The Holocaust. In our comfort we forget the deprivations from whence we came.

In Alan Berliner’s moving documentary, Nobody’s Business, there is a wonderful sequence where he interviews his extended family of cousins, first and second generation immigrants, asking them where the family is from. “Russia? Poland? Berlin?” Nobody actually knows and his father tells him to stop asking, “Why should I care about that?”

This is a picture of my grandfather, Moe, as a young man with his grandfather Shmuel Groynim, taken in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1913, when Shmuel visited America, before returning to Minsk:

My grandfather Moses with his grandfather Shmuel in 1913

Imagine a world where the past and the future could so starkly coexist in one family, separated by a single generation?

Prior to Emancipation, Jews in Europe were subject to numerous restrictions including requirements to wear special clothing, make special oaths of loyalty, and pay special taxes. They suffered restrictions on their freedom to practice their religion; they were not allowed to vote and were subject to frequent violence. They were confined to ghettos where they were frequently locked in at night, only to have the gates opened during times of civil unrest when rulers would foment pogroms to distract the Christian citizenry.

The word “ghetto” comes from the name of an island near Venice where Jews were forced to reside in the 16th Century. It was originally the site of a foundry for artillery; a dirty, toxic, segregated part of the city where Jews could be kept out of site but still be available when needed. It is the setting for Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice where Shylock memorably declaims:

“…He hath disgraced me, and
hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses,
mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my
bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine
enemies; and what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath
not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as
a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison
us, do we not die?”

This might well have been risible to an audience that believed Jews to be subhuman agents of the Devil who consumed the blood of Christian babies for Passover and were responsible for the death of Christ.

The Jews were expelled from England in 1290, from Spain in 1492. Norway and Sweden, among others, prohibited the entry of Jews into their borders. They were often not allowed to own property and were prohibited from most trades, except moneylending, as Christian doctrine forbade the charging of interest between Christians. Thus the origin of the European imagination of the wily, usurious, wandering Jew, loyal to no nation, living off the labor of the honest, man of the earth, memorialized in the virulently anti-Semitic Nazi-funded film Jud Süß that premiered at the Venice Film Festival, winning the top award and becoming a huge popular hit.

still image from Jud Süß (1940)

After the end of slavery, African-Americans were systematically disenfranchised from voting, property owning, education and many trades. They were forced by violence, economics or circumstance to live physical segregated from the mainstream of society, allowed only to travel to their jobs as servants before returning to their ghettos. One can speculate that the illicit trades practiced in the ghettos – drugs, gambling, prostitution and other vices – are not unlike the Jews’ relegation to moneylending. The black, the Jew – the Other – must take on the sinful earthly tasks associated with commerce and the flesh to enable the white Christian mainstream to maintain the illusion of purity and grace.

Racist Poster for the film “Native Son”

Earlier I mentioned the American bargain of material comfort and safety. If you come to America you can keep most of your identity as long as you opt in to The American Dream. The question of course arises, what is that dream and at what cost?