This is still Steve’s blog, and I only have the privilege and duty of keeping it going in his absence. I’m not Jewish, as he was. I can’t help it; I wasn’t born Jewish. I’ve had Jewish friends and acquaintances, but I can’t say that I know much about the religion. I’ve never even looked at a Torah. I went to a Jewish wedding once. I’ve visited a Jewish cemetery. My knowledge of Judaism isn’t a whole lot greater than that. And he told me that there’s also a Jewish culture, to which even atheists belong, which I knew. But again, I don’t know a lot about it. So new postings under the “Jews” tag abruptly ended upon Steve’s death in March 2020. I can’t bring that part of him to this blog.
I once was having dinner with Steve and his wife at their home when the Holocaust came up in the course of a legal consultation about the photographs his father took at Buchenwald. He choked up and couldn’t speak. For readers of this blog who may not know this, Steve’s father was an Army doctor who, in the closing days of World War 2, stumbled upon Buchenwald with his medical team, apparently the first Americans to arrive there. The guards were gone and camp prisoners were aimlessly wandering in nearby woods and fields. Steve gave me a copy of a letter his dad wrote to his wife in April 1945 describing it, which I have in my possession.
For Steve, the Holocaust was personal partly because of this, but I believe mostly because his family is Jewish and this happened to his people and culture. I can’t speak for his people, or even weep for them as he did, because I lack his direct connection to them. I weep for them as best an outsider with human feelings can. I’ve read Nobel Peace Prize-winner Elie Weisel’s “Night,” a famous eyewitness account of Nazi persecution of Jews. It isn’t fun to read, and can’t be; it’s a book you read for awareness. Because as Santayana said, “Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.” It could happen again. The human nature that propelled it is unchanging across geography and generations.
Human nature doesn’t always operate on a logical or rational plane. It often does not. The Holocaust was driven by emotions of hate and fear, stoked to white heat by ignorance, bigotry, and propaganda. Frictions among people are inevitable in any society, but such social dysfunction doesn’t naturally arise from the normal conflicts of daily life; someone goes out of their way to create it. Hitler saw the people he murdered as racially imperfect, or imperfect in other ways (his genocides were also directed against non-Jews including Slavs, Romani, disabled and mentally ill people). It took a war costing more than 50 million lives to defeat his ideology. Having paid that terrible price, we’re conditioned to be extremely wary of demagoguery, ethnic nationalism, and racism, because we don’t know how far it will go; it could go there again.
The other night, in his acceptance speech, Joe Biden called upon our better angels and talked about empathy, hope, and love. The next day Trump angrily retorted, “The Democrats held the darkest and angriest and gloomiest convention in America history.” This is the same man who described neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us!” as “fine people.” I think of the “Ghandi” movie scene in which Ben Kingsley’s Ghandi character tells taunting youths, “You’ll find there’s room for all of us.” This is the truth.
Steve was not just a brilliant scientist, but also a good and decent person. Trump rubbed him wrong, and me too, and this blog reflects that. Trump doesn’t frighten me. By himself, he’s merely a repulsive little child-like man. It’s the fact he has a large following that frightens me. I see in their mindless belligerence echoes of the same impulses that has led the world into darkness before. Human nature is human nature, and its brakes can fail. Safety lies in being cautious about following anyone unquestioningly. Trump isn’t a Hitler. The worry is that he might summon similar demons. That’s why his dark, angry, and gloomy demagoguery should make us nervous.