Give Me A Yellow Star

Yellow Jewish star, which all Jews were forced to wear by the Nazis and their allies.

In a departure from using my own words, I am posting a strong letter-to-the-editor written by an Israeli, voicing my outrage over the new wave of anti-Semitism sweeping Europe and which has long reached USA's academic world.

 DOWN WITH THE YELLOW STAR

By Eitan Chitayat (Edited by Dr. Chaim Bernard)
               

             Give me a yellow star. A dreary, cloth patch sewn in the shape of a Star of David that every Jew was forced to wear in Nazi Germany along with every country the Germans conquered; every country in Europe, some even allied with Germany ; every culture looking to expose the hated Jew.
            A yellow star worn by both my parents, while you, Europe, were standing by. That's what I am to you: The guilty Jew. The filthy Jew. The stealing Jew. The disgusting Jew. The less-than-human Jew. The Jew that can only do wrong – bomb innocent Muslim children - for that is, of course, all we do, all we ever aspired to as a nation, a race.
            The yellow star was forced on us. Rammed down our throats. It stood for dishonor and was associated with anti-Semitism as you probably know. It was to be a badge of shame like Hawthorne’s Scarlet letter. But 6 million times worse.
            Give me a yellow star. I want to wear a yellow star above my left breast where six million of my brothers and sisters were forced to don one. I want to walk around with a yellow star on every solitary piece of clothing I own. On my Armani suit, my Nike sweatshirt, Ralph Lauren sweater, my Champion hoodie, my Diesel jeans, my South Beach biker jacket. I’ll even wear it at the beach on my bare chest if I have to.
            I want to walk down the streets of Paris near Le Marais and be seen by you European anti-Semites. Outside the Great Synagogue of Stockholm, the Torah Center in Brussels, the Anna Frank Memorial in Amsterdam, the Holocaust Museum in Berlin, outside the Sigmund Freud House in London.
            I want all of you to see me with it and hear you say, ‘Hey, here comes the Jew’, he’s not just like the rest of us .
He’s just a dirty Jew.
A mass murderer.
He kills Muslim children and then uses their blood for matzah, just like the rest of the Jews.
They carpet bomb innocent people.
They are useless except for their knowledge, their Nobel prizes, and their success.
They kill children, those Jews.
Don’t you know? It’s the Jews who own Hollywood, the media, the banks.
They’re the scum of the earth.
They steal.
Hitler was right.
Let’s go spray-paint swastikas on his grandparents’ graves.
Let’s go beat him up.
Let’s kill him.
Let’s murder a rabbi in Miami or Brussels.

That'll teach them--to exist.

            I want that yellow star. Europe, to me that yellow star is a symbol of almost everything I stand for. It’s a symbol of surviving evil. It’s heritage and knowledge. Tolerance and optimism. It’s strength and confidence in the face of the weakness and insecurity of those not being taught well enough what their mothers should have taught them.
            That yellow star is education, resilience. It’s right over wrong, and it is life. It is testament to all who tragically died wearing it, so that their future surviving brothers and sisters know to never be afraid of who they are again. To never be silent again, not apologize for surviving. Thanks to them and indeed, for them, this yellow badge ceased being a badge of shame a long time ago. It's my badge of honor. I survived your indifference, your stupidity, your inhumaneness, your hatred, and your ignorance.
            For me, it’s a yellow F**k-You-Europe-Star.
            It’s a star that blinds out any other emblem that preaches hatred. It drowns out the form, shape and color of swastikas, the black flags of ISIS and Al Qaeda, and the green of Hamas or the yellow of Hezbollah.
            Before being herded off to the gas chambers around 70 years ago, Jews wearing their yellow star were hearing ‘Kill the Jews’, ‘Heil Hitler’, ‘The only good Jew is a dead Jew’, ‘Stealing Jew!’ – and all that before being ostracized from their communities, stripped of their belongings, property, identities, humanity and eventually, their lives.
            They were hearing words. It happened in many other countries too. Like my father’s country. A country he was expelled from for being a Jew. For being a dirty Jew. It. Always. Begins. With. Words. The same kind of words we’re hearing now here on your social media. On your streets. At demonstrations. In conversations. Words that have nothing to do with Israel. Palestine. Politics. The Middle East or anything.
            You might not be all too happy with ISIS and Hamas, but if you aren’t trying to expose them for who and what they are, then you’re not part of the solution but part of the problem. You know nothing about your own history, nothing about the Islamic conquest of Europe from the year 626 until this very day – the holy Jihad.
            The world’s abuzz right now with anti-Israel and anti-Semitic words. Anti-Semitic words that Jews like myself are used to. I’m talking to you, Dieudonné. Mel Gibson. Roger Waters. And the rest of you ignorant Jew-haters. And I’m talking to you, Radical Islamic leaders, standing behind your pulpits preaching lies and hate and division in the name of Allah. And to you – innocent bystanders in Europe.
            I’m talking to you, supposedly liberal minded people – friends of mine, even – who spend way too much time talking about Israel fighting for its existence in a defensive war, “disproportionally” ( as if the bombing of Dresden, the killing of Bin Laden, the invasion of Berlin by the Russian Army never happened) but very little talking about hundreds of thousands being murdered in Syria. In Iraq. About people being murdered for being followers of any other religion save Islam. Very little talking about ISIS taking over the middle east and putting heads on spikes, shooting people in ditches by the thousands, beheading a journalist on YouTube. Very little time talking about Syrians being gassed or a semi-literate peasant turned Turkish Prime minister spewing the kind of virulent anti-Semitism which ends with only one thing. And don’t forget 9/11, London’s 7/7, Spain’s Madrid train bombings or the Boston Marathon while you’re at it.
            Take a good hard look at my yellow star. Look at where it came from. Look what was done after we, the Jews, were forced to wear it and then ask yourselves, are we doing the same to others? Us Jews? Us Israelis? Are we Jews hellbent on exterminating people? Is that really what we want? Or are others doing that which you think we’re doing – others you refuse to be vocal about nor condemn with a simple post or click of your Like button.
            Here is what the German cleric Pastor Martin Niemöller wrote: “First they burned their books and their synagogues, and I didn't speak out. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me”. He wrote these lines in 1933 - too late – and he referred to the Nazis. But these words ring equally true in view of over 10% of the Muslim population in France, over 8% in Germany, over 6% in England, the neo-nazis in virtually every European country, or the Nazi Udo Voigt holding a seat in the Civil Rights Commission of the European Parliament.
            I, for one, Europe, am not going anywhere. Never again.Though some might wish it, NEVER AGAIN. For anyone else reading this from afar who might agree with what I’m saying, Jews and non-Jews alike, don’t feel sorry for me, my family, my friends. Don’t feel sorry for us. We’re fine and we’re not afraid, and we're here to stay. Don’t be afraid Europe, because I’m not intending to be a victim. None of us are. And I hope you aren’t either. My yellow star is staring extremism in the face.
           Am I cool with the yellow star? You’re damn right I am, totally.
--Eitan Chitayat

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Public Thoughts To be Read At The Passover Table

Passover 2013

By Talia Carner            
             

            This Passover, as we celebrate our ancestors’ freedom from slavery, we reconnect through our most important holiday with our centuries-long traditions. It is incumbent upon us to contemplate the broader concept of freedom and what it means to us as individuals, as members of our immediate communities, and as members of the community of Jews across the globe.             
            Throughout history, Passover has also been the time of increased blood libels and pogroms against Jews. While Jews celebrated freedom, they were being reminded that they were hated to the point of being killed by the dozens, thousands, and millions. As a new wave of anti-Semitism is sweeping over the globe, landing right in Manhattan's UN building, its Jew-hate festival has metastasized into leading universities, mainstream media, and civic organizations. The tale of the Haggadah we read at the Seder stands to remind us that hate comes knocking on our door first with words, then with economic and academic boycotts, then with biased UN resolutions, and, as in the past, it may end with guns, bombs and incinerators.            
            Passover also marks the Spring in our ancient agrarian society, a beginning of a cycle of life, with the blooming of trees and the planting of vegetables and flowers. The fresh start of spring also stands to remind us that our friends and fellow Jews are watching with angst the rise in anti-Semitism in countries from Venezuela to Spain. And while these past sixty-five years Israelis—civilians and soldiers—have helped every Jew everywhere walk tall and proud, their existential threat from Iran is real.     
            “Every Jew should consider himself as if he was freed from slavery,” says the Haggadah we’ll read tonight, retelling the story of Exodus. In today’s climate we should add that “Every Jew should consider himself as if he’s just escaped a terrorist bomb.” There but for the grace of God and twist of history, we would not have been spared the wrath and bombs of a Palestinians or extreme Muslim murderers taking shelter in our sacred freedom on these shores. Let’s give our prayers and charity to the over 6,000 injured Israelis forever coping with embedded nails, burned faces, or missing limbs. And as we do that, let us search within ourselves whether we have done all we could for them and for the Israeli soldiers who take the first bullet for us.
            The tradition of Passover also calls us to invite to the Seder table any Jew who does not have one. Let’s invite—at least in our thoughts—all our Jewish brethren in countries that do not offer the freedom and protection that the USA guarantees us. For them, we can raise our collective voice with indignation and outrage and use our collective power to fight tyranny and fanaticism that calls for our—and their—demise.

Therefore, as we move into the Spring, let us bless all the good things the world has given us. This Passover we are not alone at the Seder table. Neither should any Jew be.

Amen.

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Novelist Talia Carner lives in New York. Her latest novel, JERUSALEM MAIDEN (HarperCollins, 2011) deals with the struggle between freedom and faith. (www.TaliaCarner.com)          

The Day The World Took Notice

By Talia Carner

Having been a supporter of counter-terrorism intelligence in the United States, I attended in January 2001 a closed-group briefing by Richard Clarke, at the time US Counter-Terrorism Coordinator at the National Security Council and a chief counter-terrorism adviser to four USA presidents. He told the attendees about a man called Osama Bin Laden, a Muslim billionaire hiding in Afghanistan who had trained thousands of militants to attack the West. Bin Laden was the man behind the USS Cole attack and others, Clarke reported. The man’s overarching plan was to take over the West, the world of infidels.

Furthermore, Clarke pointed out, Bin Laden had already planted six-hundred highly trained militants in the US. Some of them were known to the security authorities, many were not.

The media would not report about any of it, Clarke explained, not because they did not believe the credible threat supported by mountains of evidence, but because editors did not wish to sound “alarmists.” Their perception was that their respective audiences did not wish to hear about looming catastrophes.

As a fiction writer, I decided to use the idea in my new novel, which I started in August 2001. At a dinner in New York with my agent and her husband, I outlined the story’s premise. I had barely finished delivering the first paragraph when I saw their eyes glaze over. “You seem to see a Muslim behind every tree,” my agent wrote to me later, ignoring my explanation about Extreme Muslims—not all Muslims—who pose a major risk to America.

Three weeks later, on September 11, at around 9 AM, I started my car at my beach house in Bridgehampton, Long Island, two-hours east of New York City. I had a writing group meeting later than evening at my home in Port Washington, twenty miles outside the city, a place known on literary maps as East Egg. I inserted a “book-on-tape” cassette into the slot and set on the road. Forty-five minutes later, the cassette ended. As it was ejected from the console, the radio took over.

I heard that two planes had just hit the Twin Towers.

I thought of Sesnas and small commuter planes which I always distrusted. But two? The hair rose on my arms. The gears in my brains shifted. The synopsis clicked. This was a terror attack.

I pulled to the shoulder of the highway and called my husband back in Bridgehampton. “Turn on the TV. Now.”

When he did, he started screaming. He was incoherent.

“Tell me what do you see?” I shouted. “What is it?”

“Come back!” was all he managed to utter. “Turn around right now!”

“I can’t. I have my writing group tonight. What are you seeing?”

His screaming got under control only enough to tell me that the first building was crumbling. “The city will be closed. Long Island Expressway will be closed. You won’t be able to come back later,” he insisted.

The feeling of déjà vu--the events I've witnessed in Israel from close and far—settled on me with some strange remoteness. The wait was over. It had finally happened. I turned my car around at the first possible ramp and stopped again, heart pounding. We had children in New York City. “This is the moment that would change my life, our life, the world’s life,” I thought as I looked at the quiet blue skiy, the pulsating green of the grass and trees. I was too calm. I should panic. Something was terribly wrong with me.

I could not reach any of the children.

I called my husband again.

“Oh, my God!” he suddenly called out. “Oh, my God! The Building is falling down.”

“What do you mean ‘falling down?’ It’s just a small plane—”

“It’s a jetliner!” On the radio they told of a fire ball thirty stories high.

“This is the beginning of a war,” I said as I restarted the car. That was how things worked in Israel. Nothing was absurd anymore. Not if the World Trade Center tower fell down. Fell down? I still thought that only the top floors had collapsed, from the spot where the plane had hit, and upward.

How far could this attack go? Richard Clarke’s warnings banged in my head. My imagination in the novel I was working on hadn’t gone far enough. I hadn’t conjured anything like this….

One more plane had crashed in Pennsylvania, I now heard on the radio. I pulled to the side of the road yet again, and reached my youngest daughter. Her office was in the basement of an uptown building, and she shared a wall with one of the largest, busiest subway stations.

“Get out of the office and don’t come back,” I instructed her. There was no question of getting her out of the city as I did not want her taking the train. “Stay in your apartment.”

An hour later, I huddled on the couch with my husband, both of us in complete shock. We had supported investigators of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, an event that had left “only” six dead, too few to ring the alarm bells in the public’s consciousness. I now watched, horrified, as bodies hurled themselves off the buildings’ windows.

We got the news that our son-in-law walked across the bridge to Brooklyn, from where he hitchhiked home. My husband’s niece, a mother of three—the youngest only four months old—worked in the building across the street from the WTC. She managed to flee when her office was hit hard by debris. In the confusion and black cloud, she found herself on the Staten Island ferry, shoeless and bagless, and was taken into the home of a collegue. Ron’s two cousins who work on the 80th floor of the World Trade Center happened to be out of the office: one was away on a business trip, the other took their father to the eye doctor that morning! The old man’s progressive blindness had saved this son's life....


A few days later, at my local train station, I looked at the parking lot filled with unclaimed cars of people who went to work on September 11 and never came back.

In the coming months, I helped a friend who has been involved in fund-raising for social and psychological services for families of the deceased.

Ten years later, while I and the rest of the world have resumed our lives, there are over three thousand children in Long Island who suffer the irreversible, irrecoverable loss of a parent.

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Author Talia Carner’s latest novel, JERUSALEM MAIDEN, was just released by HarperCollins. Please see http://www.taliacarner.com/ .