Let's Write about antisemitism history and the Jews of New Orleans

This essay describes Jewish experiences I am unfamiliar with.

Although I am Roman Catholic, I have followed the evils of antisemitism and Holocaust denialism for decades. The Pittsburg Platform of 1885* is new information to me.

Nicholas Lemann is a professor of journalism at Columbia University, a staff writer at The New Yorker, and the author of “Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries.”

Echo essay published in the Boston Globe:

In a golden age for many American Jews, my family was uncertain about its identity. How our story resonates in this difficult moment.

I grew up in a highly particular corner of the American Jewish world in New Orleans: among the descendants of Jewish immigrants from Alsace and southwestern Germany who had come here in the early 19th century, usually alone, and had started out as backpack peddlers in the rural Deep South. 

By the time I was born, just past the midpoint of the 20th century, we were established and prosperous. We belonged to one of two grand, vaguely Moorish sand-colored Reform temples on St. Charles Avenue. We were brokers and owners of medium-scale department stores, intergenerationally headed out of business into the professions.

But there was something distinctly provisional about our place in the world. We were cautiously liberal, more so than most native-born white people in the South, but we knew the location of the political boundaries that we would be unwise to cross. We were barred from full membership in the local social elite. Mainstream American Jews — descended from Eastern European immigrants who had come here later than us, and who were more proudly ethnic and tribal — made us nervous. They wouldn’t have fit in as Southerners, and their visibility, we thought, made it harder for us to fit in.

When I left the South, I encountered a version of American Jewishness that was far less cautious. Many of my new friends in New York and Boston felt they had achieved full acceptance. 

In New Orleans, we followed the precepts of the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, the founding document of American Reform Judaism, which was meant to scrub the separateness and strangeness from Judaism: no bar mitzvahs, no dietary laws, no Zionism. But now, at least on the East Coast, Jews could be proudly Jewish without sacrificing either their status as real Americans or their identity as Jews.

In the long sweep of Jewish history, this was quite an unfamiliar place for Jews to be. The 19th-century Germany that we left was full of debates about “the Jewish question”: How much of the completely separate and self-contained world we inhabited would we have to renounce in order to be fully emancipated from the many restrictions that others had always imposed on us❓✡️

It’s worth remembering, for example, that as the 19th century began most of us, including my own family, didn’t have last names.

Non-Jews battled over these questions — “the Jewish question” wound up being resolved by the Nazis — and so did Jews. 

In pre-Nazi Germany and then in the United States, we split into subtribes defined by how observant to be and how strongly to embrace or resist assimilation. Had it now become possible that these quandaries no longer presented themselves❓ That Jews ✡️could live anywhere, work anywhere, and not have to think about the need to dial down the way they presented themselves, lest it be too culturally Jewish, and therefore limiting❓

I was raised to believe the answers to those questions would never be yes, and I now see many of my friends who had more mainstream Jewish upbringings wrestling with them, painfully, in ways they never expected. What set this off was Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s brutal military retaliation in Gaza. The psychological package of confident and untroubled American Jewish identity included the idea that Israel was broadly admired, for being a liberal, democratic, remarkably successful new nation built with miraculous speed by refugees from oppression. Believing this always required a degree of willed unawareness of the attitude toward Israel in the overlapping Arab, Muslim, and post-colonial worlds. Now, unawareness is impossible. The Gaza war, and now the Iran war, have brought into view a fierce hatred of Israel, first on the left and then on the right. Around the world, the Jewish state is despised — not, it has become clear, just for its behavior and its policies but for the basic terms of its existence.

This is a painful time for American Jews. In many places, it’s officially OK to be Jewish, but it is definitely not OK to be “Zionist.” What had seemed like a comfortable fit between Jewishness and Zionism isn’t comfortable any longer. Many congregations, many individual families, are in a state of deep internal, often intergenerational, conflict over Israel, between defenders, reformers, and renouncers. And because outside the Jewish world it has become difficult to avoid being asked whether you’re a Zionist, in a way that makes clear what the acceptable answer is, it’s no longer even theoretically unproblematic to be Jewish.

The distinctly German-Jewish world I grew up in is gone now — assimilated out of existence. One of our core precepts, essential to our anti-Zionist stance, was that we were Americans who happened to have a lightly held ethno-religious identity; we were most definitely not members of a Jewish people who collectively longed for and deserved a homeland. I see a resurgence of this attitude all around me, as identification with Israel has gone from being something easy to something highly charged for American Jews.

In my own life, I have embraced peoplehood**. Nearly half of us Jews live in Israel — a proportion that is likely to increase. Saying that Israel has nothing to do with me isn’t an option. Israel’s challenges, internal and external, are my challenges, too.

* Pittsburg Platform of 1885:  a pivotal 1885 document in the history of the American Jewish Reform Movement that called for Jews to adopt a modern approach to the practice of their faith. While it was never formally adopted by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC) or the Central Conference of American Rabbis founded four years after its release, and several rabbis who remained associated with Reform in its wake attempted to distance themselves from it, the platform exerted great influence over the movement in the next fifty years, and still influences some Reform Jews who hold classicist views to this day.

** Peoplehood: Used to describe the feeling of belonging to a specific group, such as "Jewish peoplehood" which connects diverse individuals through shared history and destiny.

Let's write about the failed Italian World War Two history

Echo essay published in History Defined:

(Although not being a historian, the take away lesson after reading this interesting essay is that Germany's alliance with Italy likely contributed to the reason why the Nazis and Hitler lost the campaign to invade Russia and therefore stopped Germany's 

Blitzkrieg method to take over of Europe.)

Why was the Italian Army so Ineffective During WW2?
By Carl Seaver

Military historians who observe the Second World War have long observed that the turning point in the conflict in Europe was the decision by Nazi Germany to invade Soviet Russia in 1941.

Johannes Erwin Eugen Rommel (1891-1944) was a German field marshal during World War II. Popularly known as the Desert Fox, Rommel meets Italian General Italo Gariboldi in Tripoli, February 1941. 

Before this, the Nazis had conquered all before them. But, when their armies stalled outside Moscow and Leningrad in the winter of 1941, the war turned inexorably against them.

After the last push to seize the city of Stalingrad in 1942, the Red Army began driving the Wehrmacht back westwards towards Berlin.

In assessments of this, it is often noted how close the invasion of Russia, codenamed Operation Barbarossa, came to victory before the Russian winter set in. Perhaps, many have suggested, if Hitler had begun the invasion in the middle of May 1941, as originally intended, rather than in late June, as eventually occurred, the course of the whole war would have been different.

The reasons for that delay in the summer of 1941, the necessity of diverting German resources to the Balkans to aid Benito Mussolini’s Italy in its floundering efforts to conquer Greece and Yugoslavia, have been afforded great importance in the course of the overall war.

And this was not the only time the Germans had to step in to help the Italians. The same was already occurring in North Africa in 1941, and would transpire in 1943 once the Allies invaded southern Italy. 

So the question is, why was the Italian Royal Army so utterly ineffective during the Second World War?

Italian Military Production and Equipment

A basic answer to this question can be found in the economic bases of the major powers. Italy, simply put, was a poor country by comparison with, for instance, Germany, Britain, and the Soviet Union.

These had huge resources available to them. Nazi Germany could rely on companies like Volkswagen, Mercedes, IG Farben, and Siemens to drive large parts of its industrial war machine.

In Britain, companies like Rolls Royce and Jaguar were repurposed to produce fighter plane engines and battleships for the RAF and Royal Navy. At the same time, the Soviet Union could bend its command economy entirely towards the war effort when the regime’s very existence was threatened.

Italy did not have this economic base to rely on. Fiat, the only company that stands out for its status as a domestic economic heavyweight in Italy, played a massive role in producing Italian tanks. Still, even these were inferior to the German Panzer tanks and others produced by the other Axis and Allied powers.

All of this meant that the allies outmatched the Italians regarding armored divisions, the core of any army during the Second World War. For instance, some elements of the Italian Royal Army in the Balkans in 1941, and Italy in 1943, used the Fiat 3000 Tank.

This monstrosity of an armored vehicle had inadequate guns and very poor maneuverability. The Italian army began using it in 1921, so it was hopelessly outdated.

Why was the Italian army so unprepared?

Another critical issue was the lack of military preparedness on Italy’s part. It is a popular misconception that Italy joined the war on Germany’s side in the autumn of 1939. This was not the case. Mussolini was wary of jumping into the war too soon, and the Italian military was utterly unprepared to do so in the late 1930s.

Indeed some of the senior commanders of the Italian military at the time said it would take until 1943, or 1944, before the Italian military would be fully ready for war.

As such, Benito Mussolini employed a cautious approach in 1939. What changed was the swift manner with which Germany conquered Denmark and Norway in the spring of 1940, and then France and the Low Countries in a lightning-quick campaign in the summer of that year.

With all of Central and Western Europe effectively under Nazi control and only Britain challenging Germany in Europe, Mussolini determined much to be gained by joining the war. 

So, regardless of the Italian military’s lack of preparedness, Italy entered the Second World War on Germany’s side in June 1940.

After Italy entered the war, it faced further problems. Mussolini had two geostrategic objectives. One was to build up a latter-day version of the Mediterranean empire of the Romans by conquering the Balkans regions.

The Italian Royal Army faced stiff opposition from committed Greek and Yugoslav partisans. As a result, Italy’s 1940, invasion turned into a disaster that necessitated German aid diverting to the Balkans early in 1941.

Poor planning played a significant role here and highlighted another problem of the Italian Royal Army, its poor standard of leadership amongst generals like Sebastiano Visconti Prasco, Ubaldo Soddu, and Ugo Cavallero.

Each of them successfully led the Italian forces in the Balkans from the commencement of the war but were dismissed after just weeks in command, due to their incompetence. As the war effort in the Balkans went poorly, morale amongst the Italian rank and file declined dramatically.

Italy in North Africa

Finally, the Italians ran into problems in North Africa for several reasons. First, the front here had a strategic significance within the broader war, unlike the Balkans, effectively a sideshow. The Italians wished to drive east from Tunisia and Libya into Egypt and secure the Suez Canal, a strategically important target for Italy and Germany.

Soon after, the British won their first major tactical victory in early 1941, when Operation Compass drove the Italians back into Libya and destroyed the numerically superior Italian 10th Army.

Consequently, the Italians were also forced to call on German aid, which arrived in the shape of Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps, some weeks later. Thus, the Italian armed forces in North Africa proved ineffective as the Allies prioritized that front early in the war, particularly following the US’s entry into the war in December 1941.

Maintaining control over the Suez Canal became a major tactical priority for the British in 1940, and 1941. As a result, even as Britain was suffering from the Blitz by Germany as the German Luftwaffe tried to bomb Churchill’s government into submission, London dispatched extensive resources to Cairo.

In conclusion, there was a wide range of factors involved in the ineffectiveness of the Italian armed forces during the Second World War. These included the relative weakness of the Italian war economy and the incompetence of many of Mussolini’s generals.

Moreover, the Italians faced unexpected opposition in the Balkans and North Africa. But ultimately, the key issue was that the Royal Italian Army was not adequately prepared for war in 1940. Italy should never have entered the war and attempted what it did.
Sources

John Gooch, Mussolini’s War: Fascist Italy from Triumph to Collapse, 1935–1943 (London, 2020); Philip Jowett, The Italian Army, 1940–45 (Westminster, 2001).

James J. Sadkovich, ‘Italian Morale during the Italo-Greek War of 1940–1941’, in War and Society, Vol. 12, No. 1 (May, 1994), pp. 97–123.

James J. Sadkovich, ‘Of Myths and Men: Rommel and the Italians in North Africa’, in The International History Review, Vol. 13, No. 2 (1991), pp. 284–313; Vincent P. O’Hara, Struggle for the Middle Sea: The Great Navies at War in the Mediterranean, 1940–1945 (London, 2009).

Let's write about the Holocaust Remembrance Day stories from survivors

 This essay echo about "Remembering Jewish Salonica: The beauty and fragility of a pluralistic metropolis", was published in the Rotary International Magazine, written by Carl Gershman.

When I attended nursing school, before I achieved my academic degree with a major in nursing, my learning experience was in a Jewish hospital. I met Holocaust survivors who were patients in the hospital and all of them still had tattoos branded on them by the Nazis.

From Rotary International Magazine Rosanna Tasker

Obviously, I am very emotionally moved when I read about Holocaust survivors and this particular essay was about a place most people probably never heard of and have no idea about its long history.

Carl Gersham nurtured a special interest in Thessaloniki, the northern Greek city on the edge of the Balkans, since I traveled there in 1996 to attend a conference on rebuilding democracy and civil society in the Balkan region after the breakup of Yugoslavia. While in Thessaloniki, I decided to take the opportunity to learn something about the city's rich Jewish history, particularly under the Ottomans when it was called Salonica.

I had read Balkan Ghosts by Robert Kaplan, who traced the modern history of the region, from the assassination that triggered World War I to the ethnic warfare in Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia. And the organization I headed, the National Endowment for Democracy, supported civil society groups working against such brutalities in the Balkans. But exploring Thessaloniki's Jewish past offered new perspectives on the region's history. I met with Rena Molho, president of the Society for the Study of Greek Jewry, who ran a bookshop on Tsimiski Street that Kaplan had called "the lone thriving remnant of Jewish Salonica." She told me about her efforts to preserve the memory of Salonica's Jewish community that was nearly destroyed in the Holocaust.

Memories of that visit came flooding back in February 2021, when I listened to an interview with Albert Bourla, the CEO of Pfizer, about his family's Jewish roots in Thessaloniki and how his parents survived the Holocaust. Bourla was in the news frequently then, talking about the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. But it was that interview about his family story that captured my attention and gave me a much deeper understanding of the Jewish experience in Thessaloniki. His story has important lessons today for all of us in our very troubled world.

Albert Bourla was born and raised in Thessaloniki, Greece

Bourla's ancestors were among the tens of thousands of Sephardic Jews who took refuge in the Ottoman Empire after they were expelled from Spain in 1492. Along with 20,000 other Jewish refugees from Spain, they settled in Salonica, where the Jewish community soon blossomed into such a thriving center of Spanish-Jewish learning and commerce that Salonica became known as "the Mother of Israel." The community's rabbis, lawmakers, and poets were famous throughout the Diaspora, attracting students and Torah scholars from many cities. The beautiful hymn "Lekhah Dodi," still sung by Jews throughout the world to welcome the Sabbath, was written by one of the most prominent Salonican rabbis of the 16th century, Solomon Alkabez.

By 1900, about 80,000 Jews lived in Salonica, where they made up nearly half the city's population. They were not just the city's lawyers, physicians, teachers, and merchants but also its dockworkers, fishermen, firemen, and hamals (porters). They were a well-organized, diverse, and dynamic community that, more than any other group, shaped the spirit and life of the city. They maintained 33 synagogues, a rabbinical school, Zionist and intellectual clubs, their own schools that offered vocational as well as academic training, an orphanage, a psychiatric hospital, sports and scouts clubs, organizations that provided poor families with basic necessities, and many other institutions. Between 1865 and 1940 they published 50 newspapers representing all political tendencies in the city.

The importance of the Jewish community in the life of Salonica was perhaps most apparent on Saturdays when the port and virtually the entire city would shut down for the Sabbath. Robust as the Jewish presence was in Salonica, though, it was but one dimension of a bustling, multiethnic metropolis whose population also consisted of large minorities of Turks and Greeks, as well as lesser numbers of Bulgarians, Armenians, and Serbs.

Salonica's diversity was destroyed in the last century by two momentous events that signaled the arrival of a new era of nationalism and ethnic hatred in the Balkan region and beyond. The 1923 Lausanne Treaty that ended the Greek-Turkish war called for the forced population exchange of Greek Orthodox Christians and Muslims that drastically altered the city's pluralistic character — and gave rise to a new name, Thessaloniki. Many Jews emigrated to Western Europe, the Americas, and Palestine, and by the time of the second momentous event, the Nazi occupation of Thessaloniki in 1941, only 50,000 Jews remained, making them a minority in the city for the first time in centuries.

The Holocaust in Thessaloniki was overseen by Adolf Eichmann, and it eliminated 97 percent of the Jewish community. The Nazis did not murder the Jews immediately. They first confiscated all the contents of the community's libraries and archives as well as other treasures and shipped them to Frankfurt for a planned "Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question." They demanded a ransom for the release of 10,000 Jewish men who had been sent to forced labor camps. The Jewish community in Thessaloniki collected money but was forced to turn over its ancient cemetery of a half-million graves to the municipality in lieu of the total sum. The Nazis accepted the money and property but later reneged on the deal, and many Jewish men died of exhaustion and disease in the camps. Meanwhile, the cemetery, a sacred monument to the uninterrupted Jewish presence in the city for more than four centuries, was promptly despoiled, its gravestones used to pave roads, repair buildings, and build a swimming pool for the German army.

The end came in March 1943, when the Nazis herded the remaining Jews into a neighborhood bordering the old railway station that had been built in the 19th century by Baron de Hirsch, the German Jewish philanthropist, to house thousands of refugees from the pogroms in the Russian Empire. What had once been a refuge for persecuted Jews thus became a transit camp from which their descendants were shipped in livestock cars to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Holocaust Remembrance Day January 27, the anniversary of the allies liberation of Auschwitz. On the morning of 27 January 1945, the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps still held some 7,000 prisoners. Over a million people deported to Auschwitz perished there. It is estimated that six million Jews were exterminated in the death camps.

Among the 2,000 survivors were Bourla's parents, who were teenagers at the time and hadn't yet met. Bourla's father, Mois, fled with his brother to Athens just before the Nazis transported Thessaloniki's Jews to Auschwitz. 

In Athens they were given forged identity papers by the city's police chief, acting upon a call by the local Greek Orthodox archbishop to help Jews and they lived there until the end of the war.

Bourla's mother, Sara, was sent to another city by her father to live with her older sister, who had moved when she married a Christian and converted. Sara was safe there because no one recognized her, but that changed when her brother-in-law was transferred back to Thessaloniki. She hid in her sister's house all day long, but one day, when she surreptitiously ventured outside, she was spotted and arrested.

Sara's sister and brother-in-law, Kostas Dimadas, were aware that a truck would arrive at the local prison every day around noon to take some prisoners to a location where they would be executed. 

Dimadas knew that the head of the Nazi occupation forces, Max Merten, had a reputation as an extortionist, and so he paid him a large ransom to spare Sara. Her sister didn't trust the Germans, and so she went every day to the prison to make sure that Sara was not among the doomed prisoners.

As she feared, one day she saw Sara being taken from the prison and put on a truck. She immediately informed her husband, who angrily called Merten and tried to shame him for not keeping his word. The next morning, just as Sara was lined up against a wall to be shot with the other prisoners, a soldier arrived on a motorcycle and handed some papers to the German in charge of the firing squad. Sara and another woman were removed from the line, and as they were being driven away, they could hear the machine gun fire. According to Bourla, it was "a sound that stayed with her the rest of her life."

Bourla's parents both returned to Thessaloniki after the war. They met through family connections, got married, and "built a life filled with love and joy," as Bourla put it when he told this story publicly for the first time on International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2021.

Unlike Holocaust survivors who found it too painful to speak about the horrors they had endured, Mois and Sara would often tell their stories because they wanted their children to remember all the lives that had been lost and to understand what can happen if evil and hatred are allowed to spread unchecked. Most of all, Bourla said, they wanted their children to appreciate the value of human life. He stressed that they never spoke about their experiences with anger or a desire for vengeance. They had "stared down hatred" and wanted to "celebrate life and move forward." Bourla wanted to share their story, he said, in the hope that it might have special meaning at a time "when racism and hatred are tearing at the fabric of our great nation."

Their story continues to have special meaning today as Russia's invasion of Ukraine — along with other genocidal crimes that have been committed in recent decades in other parts of the world — has awakened memories of the Nazi scourge that we thought was no longer possible. With the virus of hatred having returned, it is incumbent upon us all to do whatever we can to ensure that the story of Bourla's family is never repeated and that their values are remembered and preserved. May we summon the courage to rise to this awesome challenge.

Carl Gershman served as president of the National Endowment for Democracy from 1983 ,to 2021.