Entering the New Year 2024 with Great Trepidation, and Wishing It Was Not So

Upon the coming of the new year, for several years, I felt the need to write about my mother’s mantra that was uplifting and hopeful. See previous post, “. . . New Year’s Resolutions Focusing on Feelings That Span A Lifetime Will Bring Us Joy.”

This year that post is not helping me meet the new year.  It is not that I am not proud and grateful to be a naturalized American, but as an American Jew, I enter the new year, 2024 with great trepidation, and wishing it was not so.  

I did not personally experience the horrors of five concentration camps that my mother survived during the Holocaust. However, with the war in Israel raging at the start of the new year, the horrors remain with me too and are now amplified, as Hamas used the same playbook, burning babies alive and more, as my mother experienced.  I remember the beginning of my mother’s book and her story. In the blog post of her Holocaust experience, there is the preamble to my mother’s book, which says to look forward, and not backward to the evil of the Nazis and the trauma of the Holocaust.

My Father, a Holocaust survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and Treblinka uprisings, said that when he got off the boat at Ellis Island, he bent down and kissed the ground of America.  He, patriotic to his core, raised my brother and me with the American dream, and that we could be anything we wanted to be in America. All it took was hard work, focus and desire. In America, we did not have to hide that we were Jewish. In fact, we did not have to hide at all like both of my parents did during periods of time in the Holocaust.

Not that I, as a child of Holocaust survivors, did not grow up with fear. When I was a young child, on walks with my father, he would stop by a nearby marina and tell me to remember where this was in case we were thrown out of America. He said we could take a boat and leave. The generational trauma of being a child of Holocaust survivors left me with a nagging sense that I, as an American Jew, might have to worry about having to leave America.

That is where Israel comes in. As a Jew, I always wanted America to support Israel and always wanted Israel to exist. JUST IN CASE.  There were only about 250,000 survivors of the Holocaust, but every Jew feels the Holocaust within them.

What does that mean for me?

October 7, 2023, the trauma that existed within me has exploded to levels that I did not know could overtake me. 

I was a staunch supporter of DEI, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. I did not understand the concept of oppressors and oppressed, and that somehow, being oppressed Jews, who have been oppressed in every country, and every generation, and every era, would be characterized among the oppressors now. It seems that all of the younger generation raised with DEI have never been taught that the Jews are among the most oppressed people in the world.  Most do not know of the Holocaust or even believe it really happened.  The younger generation is now seeking destruction of Jews and favoring terrorists.  This is too hard for me to internalize.

Add that to the second thing that I was most ignorant about, the long-term campaign of the Arab countries to turn Americans against the Jews. Their enormous wealth allowed them to foment antisemitism in America, create Islamic studies programs in American universities by funding them completely, and putting anti-Semites as chairs of the programs, and even paying for antisemitic students to attend them.

I am sure these are not the only reasons why antisemitism is rampant again. We Jews always know there is ‘Jew Hate.” We Jews know that most Americans have never met a Jew, but have heard all of the tropes and stories of and about Jews, and they are not pretty. What is strange and unknown causes fear. Again, this is not the only reason for antisemitism. It has been in existence since the beginning of time.  I will never understand it but accept it exists.

There are less than 15 million Jews of the nearly 8 billion people in the world. We are raised to be the people of the book, the people to be a light on the world, and leave the world a better place.  My father also raised me that we must be educated because everything has been taken from us as Jews and can be taken from us, except our brains. According to Wikipedia, “[o]f the 965 individual recipients of the Nobel Prize and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences between 1901 and 2023, at least 214 have been Jews or people with at least one Jewish parent, representing 22% of all recipients.  Jews comprise only 0.2% of the world’s population, meaning their share of winners is 110 times their proportion of the world’s population.”

I don’t need to go into all the contributions of Jews, throughout the history of mankind, however I do smile at the Instagram and TikToks, and like that list what anti-Semites should do without if they hate the Jews, such as life saving drugs and more.* See below for one of the posts of unknown source reprinted that lists the medical breakthroughs by Jews.

As a proud American, I have donated my life to giving back to America for the opportunities and safety my family and I have enjoyed as Jews in America. However, the world is suddenly different and “Jew Hate” has overcome rationality.

This new generation of unknowing Americans and the Arabs’ long-term plan of fomenting antisemitism, including of manipulating the United Nations, America, and the world, is coming to fruition. I believe that once Saudi Arabia was coming close to an agreement with Israel in October 2023, Iran and Hamas and other terrorists of the world realized that if they didn’t do something completely outrageous to the Jews, all their efforts to get rid of Israel, and the Jews of the world would no longer be on the forefront of the Arab world.

So we come to October 7, 2023. When I learned of the Jewish babies being burned, the people, savagely and brutally massacred and tortured and kidnapped and held prisoner, I had flashbacks and nightmares to my parents’ stories. The fact that Nazi materials were found among the Hamas terrorists cannot be just a coincidence.

The reaction of the American government made me feel safe as an American Jew. Our country is supporting the only democratic country in the Middle East that happens to be a Jewish state. As a matter of fact, it is the only indigenous Jewish state where Jews have been there for thousands of years no matter how much the terrorists and the like try to characterize Jews, as newcomers, colonizers, and oppressors.  Where is rationality? Hanukkah came, which celebrates Jews fighting and restoring the second temple in Jerusalem, in Israel, thousands of years ago. Christmas came, which celebrates the birth of Jesus, a Jew, in Bethlehem, in Israel, thousands of years ago.  And so we Jews just arrived in 1948? It is really that we returned as a country in 1948, after being expelled and expelled and expelled, Jews returned to recreate Israel.

I believe that the result of “Jew Hate” is that, again in 2023 and going forward, nobody else really wants the Jews. My father said we were safe in America because it was a melting pot and there were so many groups of people that were diverse that we would not be targeted for persecution.   I am glad he is not alive to see what is happening on college campuses, on city streets, on public transportation, in the media, among prominent people, where Jews are being persecuted in America.

The difference now is that my country, America, is strong and supportive of Israel. Israel is now strong, has a powerful army and very committed soldiers fighting for their families, their children, their grandchildren, their homeland, and the very existence of the Jewish people.

So my fears and angst? People are fickle. People have short memories.  Ignorant people do not care. People are anti-Semitic everywhere. Will this overtake the strengths? Will the hatred of Jews get worse in America?  Will my father’s prediction come true?  Will I and my family have to leave America?

I quote the conclusion of The New York Times editorial by Brett Stevens, “Why I can’t stop writing about October 7,” December 20, 2023.

“ too often in Jewish history, our zenith turns out to be our precipice. Too often in world history, that precipice is also the end of pre-society itself. Antisemitism is a problem for democracy, because hatred for Jews, whatever name or cause it travels under, is never a hatred for Jews only. it’s a hatred for distinctiveness: Jews, as Jews and Christians; Israel, as a Jewish state in Muslim lands. Authoritarian seek uniformity. Jews seek difference….. but, if there’s one lesson of Jewish history, it’s that nothing good stays – and why we still say, at the end of every Passover Seder, “next year in Jerusalem.”

I am entering the New Year 2024 with great trepidation, and wishing it was not true.

I am wearing a Jewish star around my neck for the first time since I was a child. I am a proud American Jew. I have religious freedom in America. I am waiting to see if I am attacked, if I am yelled at, if I am threatened, if I am injured, even threatened with death in America.

Welcome, 2024, I am not hiding who I am.

Mema

*”Encouraging Moslems to boycott Jewish medicines” Unknown Origin

“A short time ago, Iran’s Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei urged the Muslim World to boycott anything and everything that originates with the Jewish people.

In response, Meyer M. Treinkman, a pharmacist, out of the kindness of his heart, offered to assist them in their boycott as follows:

“Any Muslim who has Syphilis must not be cured by Salvarsan discovered by a Jew, Dr. Ehrlich. He should not even try to find out whether he has Syphilis, because the Wasserman Test is the discovery of a Jew. If a Muslim suspects that he has Gonorrhea, he must not seek diagnosis, because he will be using the method of a Jew named Neissner.

A Muslim who has heart disease must not use Digitalis, a discovery by a Jew, Ludwig Traube.

Should he suffer with a toothache, he must not use Novocaine, a discovery of the Jews, Widal and Weil.

If a Muslim has Diabetes, he must not use Insulin, the result of research by Minkowsky, a Jew, who demonstrated the role of the pancreas If one has a headache, he must shun Pyramidon and Antypyrin, due to the Jews, Spiro and Ellege.

Muslims with convulsions must put up with them because it was a Jew, Oscar Leibreich, who proposed the use of Chloral Hydrate.

Arabs must do likewise with their psychic ailments because Freud, father of psychoanalysis, was a Jew.

Should a Muslim child get Diphtheria, he must refrain from the “Schick” reaction which was invented by the Jew, Bella Schick.

“Muslims should be ready to die in great numbers and must not permit treatment of ear and brain damage, work of Jewish Nobel Prize winner, Robert Baram.

They should continue to die or remain crippled by Infantile Paralysis because the discoverer of the anti-polio vaccine is a Jew, Jonas Salk.

“Muslims must refuse to use Streptomycin and continue to die of Tuberculosis because a Jew, Zalman Waxman, invented the wonder drug against this killing disease.

Muslim doctors must discard all discoveries and improvements by dermatologist Judas Sehn Benedict, or the lung specialist, Frawnkel, and of many other world renowned Jewish scientists and medical experts.

“In short, good and loyal Muslims properly and fittingly should remain afflicted with Syphilis, Gonorrhea, Heart Disease, Headaches, Typhus, Diabetes, Mental Disorders, Polio Convulsions and Tuberculosis and be proud to obey the Islamic boycott.”

Oh, and by the way, don’t call for a doctor on your cell phone because the cell phone was invented in Israel by a Jewish engineer.

Meanwhile I ask, what medical contributions to the world have the Muslims made?”

The Global Islamic population is approximately 1,200,000,000; that is ONE BILLION TWO HUNDRED MILLION or 20% of the world’s population.

They have received the following Nobel Prizes:

Literature:

1988 – Najib Mahfooz

Peace:

1978 – Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat

1990 – Elias James Corey

1994 – Yaser Arafat

1999 – Ahmed Zewai

Economics:(zero)

Physics:(zero)

Medicine:

1960 – Peter Brian Medawar

1998 – Ferid Mourad

The Global Jewish population is approximately 14,000,000; that is FOURTEEN MILLION or about 0.02% of the world’s population.

They have received the following Nobel Prizes:

Literature:

1910 – Paul Heyse

1927 – Henri Bergson

1958 – Boris Pasternak

1966 – Shmuel Yosef Agnon

1966 – Nelly Sachs

1976 – Saul Bellow

1978 – Isaac Bashevis Singer

1981 – Elias Canetti

1987 – Joseph Brodsky

1991 – Nadine Gordimer World

Medicine:

1908 – Elie Metchnikoff        

1908 – Paul Erlich

1914 – Robert Barany

1922 – Otto Meyerhof

1930 – Karl Landsteiner

1931 – Otto Warburg

1936 – Otto Loewi

1944 – Joseph Erlanger

1944 – Herbert Spencer Gasser

1945 – Ernst Boris Chain

1946 – Hermann Joseph Muller

1950 – Tadeus Reichstein

1952 – Selman Abraham Waksman

1953 – Hans Krebs

1953 – Fritz Albert Lipmann

1958 – Joshua Lederberg

1959 – Arthur Kornberg

1964 – Konrad Bloch

1965 – Francois Jacob

1965 – Andre Lwoff

1967 – George Wald

1968 – Marshall W. Nirenberg

1969 – Salvador Luria

1970 – Julius Axelrod

1970 – Sir Bernard Katz

1972 – Gerald Maurice Edelman

1975 – Howard Martin Temin

1976 – Baruch S. Blumberg

1977 – Roselyn Sussman Yalow

1978 – Daniel Nathans

1980 – Baruj Benacerraf

1984 – Cesar Milstein

1985 – Michael Stuart Brown

1985 – Joseph L. Goldstein

1986 – Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini]

1988 – Gertrude Elion

1989 – Harold Varmus

1991 – Erwin Neher

1991 – Bert Sakmann

1993 – Richard J. Roberts

1993 – Phillip Sharp

1994 – Alfred Gilman

1995 – Edward B. Lewis

1996- Lu RoseIacovino”