Our huddled masses: E Pluribus unum, one from many

By Elliott B. Oppenheim, MD, JD, LLM Health Law, Florence

I am terrified. In the upcoming 2020 election, I predict that there will be extensive bloodshed and deaths. Take heed! America is in an incendiary state. The American government has collapsed and we, as a nation, are in a racial civil war analogous to 1861. There will be blood.

I really should be doing something else, tending chickens perhaps or writing my novel, but I was distracted, profoundly so, by the Bitterroot Star letter to the editor by Ms. Dee Gibney of Hamilton, noted to be *unedited (p. 4, Bitterroot Star, 17 July 2019). 

First, I applaud Victoria Howell, the editor, whose decision it was to publish this. That decision took editorial courage and restraint. Her admirable restraint came in not tossing Gibney’s letter into a summer campfire. Most publications would have not published that. I think that all points of view are hearable, even ones which I find abhorrent and repulsive, as I did this letter. As a Jew and as a community activist and leader, I have to speak out.

I think the President was very wrong in not stopping the rally rant and in not calling a national news conference to decry this hate-filled speech. 

The Gibney letter to the editor was an ignorant, racist and bigoted rant concerning immigration and immigrants. I am not going to repeat what she said. You know what it is if you have been following the news or even existing in modern America. It is impossible to avoid. This hate is like poisonous gas over the nation.

Here, however, is my story. In the Spring of 1905, in the village of Piotrków, Gubernia, Sosnowice, Poland, near Krakow, Mancha and Frandla (Openchejm) Zacharjasz, these two Ger Hasidim, Lubavitchers as we are known, my grandparents, created Lippman (later Leopold, later Leon) Zacharjasz, my father, born on 17 December of that year. At Ellis Island, giving into pressures, when the family immigrated to America, they westernized my grandmother’s last name, so far as one can secularize and remove Jewishness from Openchejm to Oppenheim. My dad was one of six other siblings. The eldest was Miriam, who, in 1913, on the eve of WWI, escaped the murdering and pillaging of their shtetl and came to America, through Ellis Island. 

Miriam worked very hard sewing uniforms for the US Army in the garment district of New York City and, in 1921, she brought the entire family to America. Miriam saved my family. All of these children, our parents, have died but those of my generation, my cousins, and there are many, became productive Americans. Our children, and now our grandchildren, have worked hard to make America great. 

In the 1950’s and 60’s my sister and I assimilated, leaving our Jewish roots, flourishing in Levittown, Pennsylvania, a development dependent upon America’s melting pot of immigrant labor for US Steel and various chemical conglomerates like Thiokol and Strick Trailer, makers of trucks. Christians threw rocks at us when we walked to Friday night services and yelled “Dirty Jews,” as we went to pray. I recall the feeling of the stones hitting us. They taunted us over wearing “beanies,” our yarmulkas, in Yiddish, or kepa, in Hebrew. We were ridiculed about speaking in languages other than English. I tell this so that the reader will understand how close what is now happening in America is to what happened not long ago in America. I heard “go back to Poland” from schoolyard taunters who did not know that I was born in the Bronx. 

I know what “send her back” feels like.

As I grew up, I noticed treasured family pictures in Christian homes that went back generations, and bibles dating into the times when their ancestors came to America. It is not uncommon for these families to trace their honored roots back hundreds of years. “Where is our family?” I asked my parents. They never answered but eventually I found out.

Over the years, I have been told that various positions I sought were closed to Jews, that I could not buy property in a certain area because Jews were prohibited by local rules, and that the Jewish quota was filled. I experienced that nose wrinkle with a comment, “You’re Jewish?” then nothing more. 

Overcoming all obstacles, I practiced medicine and graduated from law school and took a big and productive bite from America’s apple. I raised my family and the social scene changed so that Jews seemed to gain acceptance. Antisemitism is, sadly, far from sentiments of the past.

I was gratified recently when US Magistrate Judge Jeremiah Lynch called The Daily Stormer publisher Andrew Anglin’s behavior reprehensible and atrocious in telling his internet followers to unleash a “troll storm” on Jewish Tanya Gersh, her husband and her 12-year-old son in 2016. The judge awarded $14,000,000. I felt as if I were the Gershs’ twelve-year-old son. That was me when I was that age, when we were stoned on the way to synagogue. 

I remember the ridicule I endured when I missed school for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. I was ashamed to tell my teacher and fellow students my reason for absence and my mother lied in my parental excuses to teachers in order to save me the torments. Why did I have to hate who I was? Why did I have to hate being a Jew? Why did we have to lie?

Decades have passed and I am an old man and finally understand whattheheckhappened. I have now spent over a decade and a half reconstructing my family. The reason we had no inter-generational family pictures on our walls or family generational records, as did the Christians, was that everyone who remained in Poland or Hungary was murdered by the Nazis. Sosnowice was near Auschwitz where my Polish and Hungarian ancestors were taken in cattle cars, poisoned by Zyklon B gas, hydrogen cyanide, killed like vermin, and incinerated. The Nazis exterminated two-thirds of the Jews in Hungary  and millions were killed in Auschwitz, the majority were Jews. My family was gone. To me, this remains, and will forever remain, modern history.

The hate Ms. Gibney displays in her letter will digest her soul like Drāno in her internal sewer disguised as a human being. Hate, I have heard, is like taking poison, hoping that it will kill someone else. Her editorial was hate-filled and racist and must be condemned. Bigotry is “obstinate or intolerant devotion to one’s own opinions and prejudices.” In her editorial, nothing she said is based in fact… none of it. I encourage her to engage in education and discover what is truthful and accurate. Immigrants are the suffering masses yearning only to be free. I encourage the Bitterroot Valley to condemn these views.

Unfortunately, one characteristic of racism and bigotry is that nothing anyone will do or say will alter the speaker’s opinion… and Ms. Gibney has a right to her opinion, no matter how untruthful or malignant it is. She has an absolute right to be ignorant and stupid. I am glad to see her ideas in print. I know her thoughts and here she can know mine. 

What holds the world together, the glue that binds us, is love and tolerance and compassion, not animosity and hate and fear against what we do not know or understand. How could our Hanukah menorah offend Christians? In those years, it did. 

In the past few years in the Bitterroot folks have come together to celebrate the eight days of Hanukah and to experience the warmth from the lighted candles.

America has a long and shameful tradition of not accepting different people; different thoughts. Slavery is a start. Look, too, at what happened during the McCarthy Era where the government took a terribly wrong turn… or the Korematsu decision, Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944), looked upon now as ““an odious and discredited artifact of popular bigotry” and as “a stain on American jurisprudence.” We have made this mistake before. Dare we repeat it?

How often have we heard that “it can’t happen here?” At one time, that may have been true, but our legal system has crumbled, and the rule of law is being replaced by mob rule, by populism: what “the people want.” I hear “Jews will not replace us” in my dreams and listen for the pounding sounds of stormtrooper jackboots coming for us.

“Send her back” is reminiscent of Arbeit Macht Frei, the slogan at Auschwitz. That fact is, that we are all at risk. Where does the division begin and end? Either this is one country under G-d, of the people, for the people, by the people, with everyone enjoying inalienable rights, or it is not. Either The New Colossus Poem on the Statute of Liberty applies to all of us, or it does not. It cannot apply only to some:

“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Gibney’s stones hit me hard, bruised me, battered my soul in disappointment. In her letter to the editor, Gibney befouls what is America, the essence of America. Ms. Gibney’s illogical paranoid rant and tantrum is similar to what I have heard and experienced as a physician when I admitted patients from the Emergency Room to locked wards in the mental hospital. What she wrote was impulsive and out of control, poorly thought out.

Rabbinical teachings advise us to combat darkness with light … education. “Be kind to strangers. You never know when you will be one,” is good biblical advice. How important it is to “love one another.” None of us should be so distracted by these troubling matters. It is time to get back to the serious work, to tending our chickens, to writing our novels, to creating an America of which we can all be proud. 

What kind of America do you want? Celebrate our differences and values and consider the 1776, Great Seal of the United States of America  which states E Pluribus unum, one from many. This motto means more now than ever. I quake at what I feel is about to happen in 2020 America, land that I love.