ANTI-SEMITISM

I was sitting by myself in a Florida Costco the other day, enjoying my hot dog and taking in this huge enterprise. Costco just exudes success. There's everything you would want in the way of food, packaged for volume and great salmon from Seattle. Like Walmart and Target and KMart, it has everything from soup to nuts and the kitchen sink besides. It is airy, well lit and the checkers are pleasant and efficient.

I remembered that a Christian friend of mine told me that this was yet another example of Jewish enterprise. It never occurred to me that Costco was Jewish. To me it was just another retail store, but with a lot of clever marketing and promoting ideas. It was the kind of thing that blossomed in America, part of free enterprise and the land of opportunity. Why did my friend have to tell me it was a Jewish business?

The fact that it was a Jewish business reminded me that a Muslim acquaintance of mine told me that he was supporting and encouraging a boycott of Jewish businesses. Why, I asked. Because Jewish businesses contribute to the Zionist war against his Palestinian brothers. Jews were killing Arab babies. I told him that Arab terrorists were hiding behind Arab babies and brainwashing them to become suicide bombers. He told me that it was just a matter of time before the Muslims took over the world and defeated the Jewish-American crusade to destroy Arabs and steal their oil.

I'm thinking about all this, eating my hot dog in Costco, when an old guy sits down and asks may he join me. The usual in Florida, old guys asking where are you from, getting a life story in fifteen minutes. I told him I was from the Bronx. You know you are getting warm when the other guy asks, which part. I said it was halfway between Bronx Park Zoo and Crotona Park. He said he used to play soccer in Crotona Park. I say I never knew anybody played soccer in the Bronx, let alone Crotona Park. We are off to the races.

I asked where did he come from. He said originally, Germany. I asked when did he come to America. He says 1940. I quickly made a few calculations and said that was when Hitler was in power. He said that's right. I said you just got out in time. He said he is the only surviving member of his family. He told a harrowing tale of him at age 13 and his little sister, jumping off the cattle car and walking to Holland, hiding from the Nazis and finding relatives who would eventually get them visas to come to America. He said that because he worked on a cattle farm he knew how to open the gates of the cattle cars. He told the other people to escape and get away, but they were afraid of getting shot.

Imagine a 13 year old and a 10 year old, jumping off the cattle car to Auschwitz and finding their way to America in 1940! He said he is one of the few remaining Holocaust survivors. I told him I knew about their stories from the Holocaust Memorials in Washington DC and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and from seeing such movies as �Sophie's Choice,� �Schindler's List,� �It's a Beautiful World,� and recently, �The Pianist.� It was horrible to see Jews spit upon, humiliated and beaten, shot in the head, babies ripped out of their mother's arms and their heads dashed against brick walls. This was done by people who celebrated Easter and Christmas?

I never would have thought that after World War II, after Eisenhower was horrified and said we will never forget, that anti-Semitism would continue to flourish. It is being revived again in the Muslim world and especially in France and Germany.

Even in the United States, noted academics are equating Bush and Sharon with Hitler and the Israeli Defense Force with the SS. American flags are burned and the Star of David as well. A friend of mine said to me of 9/11 that now the U.S. and Israel are in the same boat, both targets of Islamic terrorists, calling for a jihad against Americans and Jews. All because of the unresolvable conflict in Israel and America's support of Israel.

But Arab antiSemitism predates the U.N. partition of Palestine by many years, actually centuries and millennia. Why? What is this curse upon the Jewish people?

Anti-Semites are prone to believe a fraudulent document called �The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.� When I say it is a fake, I am told to read it and see that everything in it has come true. When I read it, it speaks of the amazing success of the Jews, their cleverness and clannishness. And then it explains Jewish success on an international conspiracy in which wealthy and powerful and unscrupulous Jews aim to take over the world, by taking over the banks, the media and ultimately governments. Despite a 'liberal' left wing American press, critical of Israel, sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinian refugees, anti-Semites believe that the American press and the American government is controlled by the Jewish lobby, the Jewish-Israel lobby. The Bush administration is being taken in by the Elders of Zion.

That is such rubbish that I have come to the conclusion that ardent anti-Semites are deranged, are mentally ill. Many of them are paranoid and really are under the delusion that there is a Jewish conspiracy and that all the troubles of the world, and all his personal troubles, are because of Jews. They say it is too bad that Hitler didn't finish the job. They align now with the Arabs who want to destroy Israel and kill Jews.

I realize that I was ruminating about Costco being a Jewish business, while innocently eating my kosher hot dog because my Christian friend told me that Costco was a clever Jewish business. I didn't know it was Jewish. I didn't care. Why does anyone care? This old Holocaust survivor told me that the original big retail business was... I never knew it... Sears and Roebuck. He says they were German Jews. German Jews were very successful way before the mass immigration of Russian and Polish Jews. The German Jews were anti-Semitic! They were threatened by the horde of Eastern European peasants, while they adopted an aristocratic veneer. There is no end to prejudice, bigotry, intolerance, envy and hatred!

Why was I thinking about Costco being a Jewish business while eating my hot dog? It is because 65 years ago, when I was a kid on the sidewalks of the Bronx, I was the target of antiSemitism. I can't tell you how many times I went crying to my mother, asking why they were hitting me and calling me names and spitting on me. She told me that Christ was a Jew. She told me that the Jews were few and the Gentiles were many. The Jews were like a drop of oil on the ocean. No matter how small we were, just a drop in the ocean, like oil we would rise to the top and you could see rainbow colors in the sun. Stories like that helped me to survive and cope.

Yes, Jews rise to the top. We are highly represented among Nobel Prize winners, among scientists, doctors, lawyers, economists, engineers, inventors, musicians, artists. Why? First of all, it is in our culture to study, to learn. We are called, even by the Muslims, People of the Book. We work hard and save our money. We are honest and keep our word. We are trusted by big business and government as counsel and advisers, as cabinet members and justices of the Supreme Court.

When I was teaching psychiatry, an Arab student asked me bluntly, �How come the Jews are so smart?� The hostile and ingenuous question took me aback and I could only answer, �They killed all the dumb ones.� He never asked me another question. He skipped all of his remaining classes... to the detriment of his education.

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