Chicago — The powerful human drive to boil everything down to simple terms is useful because it enables us to cope. War, however complex and tragic in its causes and ramifications, compels us to hoist banners of simple explanations.
So here goes a simple explanation of what America winning its war in the Middle East means to me. It has to do with being an American Jew.
My paternal grandmother’s flight from persecution in Europe to freedom in this country began 100 years ago in the wake of the Kishinev Pogrom, one of many murderous assaults on innocent Jews. After arriving on these shores, she met my grandfather, who fled from Czarist Russia in 1912.
My maternal grandparents arrived following World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. My grandmother had been imprisoned as a young woman in Lithuania for belonging to Hashomer Hatzair, a fledgling Zionist organization.
In this country my grandparents struggled and scraped, learned English, eked out a living and worked ardently for the Zionist cause. Anti-Semitism hadn’t ended with arrival in America. Every day my father would fight after school with other children of immigrants — Irish, Polish and Ukrainian kids — who attacked him on his way home from Hebrew school because he was a Jew. During World War II he went on to fight with those kids — on the same side.
After the war my parents raised their children to love Israel, to question authority and never to doubt that they or anyone else — be they African American, a Mexican immigrant, anyone — was less of an American than the children of the Daughters of the American Revolution with whom we went to school. We were taught that racism, anti-Semitism, sexism and anti-immigrant bias were un-American.
Throughout the ’60s and ’70s, the ideals of openness and equality, the founding principles, became mainstream realities. My mother, of blessed memory — a writer, civil rights and anti-war activist and leader of the International PEN (Poets, Editors, and Novelists) Freedom to Write Committee — was not imprisoned, tortured or exiled for her beliefs, like so many of the Soviet, Iranian and African writers she helped to defend. Instead she received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Today my daughter studies Hebrew in a public high school and publicly wears a Star of David. My congregation celebrates the Fourth of July, because the Fourth of July celebrates us — our freedom to hold our own beliefs, to be different.
I vote, and among the candidates I can vote for are African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, Catholics, Muslems and Jews. I live in a society that upholds the rule of law, and whose justice system prosecutes hate crimes.
This is no utopia, and there is much about America I’d like to change. But God-forbid I would ever see the values I have described diminished, let alone lost.
I am not at all convinced that the war being waged is simply a contest over different values — “ours” and “theirs.” But I do know this: Most of the regimes in the region where we are now engaged fear and loathe our values.
History teaches that we can ill afford to yield ground to any force for which torture, murder, bigotry, intolerance and disenfranchisement are the order of the day.
At our Passover seder this year, my family will see ourselves as though we came out of Mitzrayim, the place of constraint and bondage. I have only to look at my grandparents’ lives to know that this in fact is true.
Also we will pray that the rest of humankind may come to experience the blessing of freedom that privileges us here. Let that be what it means for America to win.
Aaron B. Cohen is executive editor of the JUF News and president of the American Jewish Press Association.
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