There are moments of decision that come to each of us when a moral choice must be made. Most of the time, those decisions have no great impact and we can make them easily without worrying about the risks such an action would carry for us or for the people near and dear to us. But there are other times in which our actions do have significant consequences and risks for us and our dear ones, and that our actions will define us for better or worse.

This blog was inspired (or better – provoked) by President Trump and his administration’s ongoing efforts to bully large swaths of America’s citizenry and bend to his will government workers, the Justice department, politicians, educators, scientists, legal firms, universities, cultural, artistic, racial, and immigrant groups, and most recently six members of Congress – all respected veterans and former intelligence officials – who urged in a video disseminated widely that all members of the military not to obey unlawful orders, per the military code. President Trump’s irascible threat that they should be charged with treason and punished with execution is the most recent and stunning outrage.

Some have compared what is happening now in the United States to Germany in the 1930s when all democratic norms were destroyed in Hitler’s rapid and irrepressible march to dictatorship and the persecution and murder of Jews and others who resisted the Nazis. I don’t know if this claim is an accurate comparison or not. I have my doubts given the complexities of American democracy and the independence of federal, state, and local centers of authority that still exist, and given the noble actions of many judges at every level and of hundreds of attorneys who have filed law suits against Trump’s unconstitutional actions, though Trump is following the autocratic playbook closely, per Project 2025. I will leave the comparison to historians.

Without a doubt in my reading of history, however, the most extreme acts of moral courage, resistance and defiance against a murderous regime were taken by the many thousands of rescuers who hid or helped Jews during the Holocaust at great personal risk to themselves, their families and communities.

Years ago I read The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe – What Led Ordinary Men and Women to Risk Their Lives on Behalf of Others? by Samuel P. and Pearl M. Oliner with an Introduction by Rabbi Harold Schulweis (New York: The Free Press, 1988). Rabbi Schulweis, a moral giant in his generation,........

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