My father used to tell a story of riding in a transport vehicle at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York in the 1970s. The box-like vehicle took passengers from the terminal to board a flight from New York to Israel. A Holocaust survivor, finding himself in the enclosed and isolated space of the transport vehicle, began to panic. The nightmares of his experiences in Europe welled up.
“They have us trapped,” the man cried out in Yiddish. “They’ll kill us.”
“It’s all right. It’s all right,” my father assured the stranger in Yiddish, “This is America. You are safe here. No one will harm you.”
This was the standard under which I and a generation of American Jews were raised.
“This is America. We are safe here.”
Yes, there was discrimination. Yes, people would sometimes say nasty things to you. Yes, there was a barrier to getting a seat at some highly selective universities, medical and law schools or being offered employment in some banks and insurance companies. In America, however, there were no government-sanctioned riots or pogroms, like in Czarist Russia.
In America, unlike in Nazi-controlled Europe, they weren’t going to round you up and send you to death camps. On the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashana and on the Day of........