Hard times

Sometimes it’s hard to know what to say.

It’s been a bruising election season, filled with more insults, childish invective, and pure hatred than any of us can remember, because there has been nothing like it in this country in living memory. Yes, it’s now it’s over, but the polarization, distrust, and ill will it evoked will be with us for a very long time.

Meanwhile, it seems that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has taken advantage of the world’s focus here rather than there to fire his defense minister, Yoav Gallant; you do not have to be a military strategist to wonder about the wisdom of that move, in the middle of a war. Not surprisingly, Israel now is even deeper in crisis than it had been before, a crisis that is unavoidable, given the polarization in the country, but one that is particularly unwelcome in wartime, with the hostages still unredeemed.

There is perhaps some historic irony in realizing that next week will be the anniversary of Kristallnacht, that night of broken glass that was one of the signs that even worse hatred, destruction, and death was coming for the Jews of central and eastern Europe.

I have told this story before, but it seems fitting to retell it now. I knew a woman, a very elegant, cultured older woman who had been a small child in Germany. Her family was wealthy — her father was a judge — and she lived in comfort and style.

Her parents got the family out immediately after Kristallnacht, and they settled down to life in New York.

She had been a small child, so she forgot about Kristallnacht. It was buried in her memory.

But then she was downtown on September 11, 2001, and the sounds of broken glass tore down the barriers of self-protection her brain had installed. She remembered. And perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, she died just a few years later.

We are nowhere near Nazi Germany here. There are no analogies. But all these current events and historic anniversaries coming together should serve as a warning.

We will get through this. Of course we will. We — we Americans, we Jews — always have. But it won’t be easy, and it will have significant costs.

Let us hope that the country — and the world — comes to its senses, and that better times are closer than they seem to be right now.

—JP