Day 132 of Nat'l Emergency: Lawn Sign for Justice, Petty President, Will Trump Take a Shot

We have proudly joined the woke lawn sign brigade. Designed by Gilda, our sign displays an illustration of eight children of various ethnicities next to a Martin Luther King Jr. saying, “Injustice Anywhere Is a threat to Justice Everywhere.”

Presidential adviser and not-too-secret white supremacist Stephen Miller notwithstanding, Jews have been at the forefront of civil rights activism. We believe in the legitimacy behind the Black Lives Matter movement but have been repulsed by the open antisemitism and anti-Israel stances of some of its leaders and followers, made all the more reprehensible by the organization’s failure to call out repression and discrimination common in Arab Moslem lands. 

Our sign already has won approval from neighbors. We’re at the end of a cul de sac so the sign will get limited exposure. But it’s the sentiment that counts, not the number of eyeballs that see it.

Petty President: The pettiness, the mean-spiritness of Donald Trump continues to know no bounds as it continues to amaze. His latest denigration of the office of the president involves the removal of the official portraits of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush from a public viewing area and their placement in a non public room of the White House.

He couldn’t remove Barack Obama’s portrait because it has not been officially unveiled in deference to the longstanding animosity Trump has toward his immediate predecessor.

One has to wonder how Trump will be treated by his successor, an especially trenchant thought if it is Joe Biden in 2021 or a different Democrat in 2025. Will he be invited to ceremonial functions? Will he be shunned by the members of the exclusive Past Presidents club? 

Will foreign governments welcome him, not that he was an avid jet-setter before his election? As he was not overly complimentary to most foreign leaders while in office, his options for frequent flyer points are limited. Okay, he could visit Turkey, Russia, Brazil. And Israel. Perhaps his good buddy Kim Jong-un will invite him to a deeper visit inside North Korea. Or Xi Jinping might want to show him China’s biological warfare labs that Trump is always talking about.  

Will He Take the Shot? Should an anti COVID-19 vaccine be introduced while he is still in office, will Trump display presidential leadership by publicly taking the shot, or will he punk out and reinforce the cautionary call of the anti-vax brigade that rejects all types of inoculations? Perhaps he will claim an exemption to the injection because of a flareup of his bone spurs.

The current fight over wearing a mask to contain the pandemic’s spread will be child’s play compared to the opposition anti-vaxers will wage, especially if anyone administered the vaccine becomes infected (https://nyti.ms/2OAxMM1). 

It is truly a sad time when the health care system once touted as the best in the world has become a shell of its former prominence. 

Feds vs. States: Where does federal vs. state responsibility begin? States’ rights vs. federal authority. 

During the coronavirus pandemic, Trump has chosen to push responsibility for containment of the virus to governors, except when he sees political gain advocating opening up the economy and schools. He is trying to strongarm states to do his bidding even as case numbers and deaths rise. But his bottom line is that states, not he, are responsible for the pain the country is experiencing.

On the other hand, having clearly lost his bid to be a successful wartime general in the battle to beat COVID-19, Trump has shifted gears to be the law and order president by sending in federal troops to Portland, OR, to arrest and control Black Lives Matter and related protesters. No state or local official asked for federal troop assistance. Indeed, they have vociferously rejected their presence.

But Trump doesn’t care because this narrative fits the image he wants to project to his base and to voters who might feel threatened by the protesters. 

Day 47 of Nat'l Emergency: Help Save American History, The Tenement Museum

Donald Trump’s grandparents were immigrants. Melania Trump is an immigrant. So is Trump’s first wife, Ivana. Marla Maples, his second wife, is a descendant of immigrants. Stephen Miller, consigliere behind much of Trump’s anti-immigration policies, is from immigration stock, as is Steve Bannon, another of Trump’s Katie-bar-the-door claque. 

Trace the lineage of any anti-immigration exponent and you’ll find an ancestor who came to America—legally or not— from foreign soil. Regardless of what xenophobic nationalists would like America to be, we are a nation of immigrants. 

It has not succumbed to the caprice of the coronavirus, but the Tenement Museum at the corner of Orchard and Delancey Streets on Manhattan’s Lower East Side is close to being on life support (https://nyti.ms/2yvNVO9). It needs everyone’s help to survive. Please join me in contributing to this worthwhile institution dedicated to our shared history. Here’s a link to donate: 

https://secure.givelively.org/donate/lower-east-side-tenement-museum/help-the-tenement-museum-survive.

It is during times like these, when we are barred from visiting museums, that we fully appreciate how they impart the culture, history and experiences of our forbearers. Unlike almost all other museums, The Tenement Museum commemorates the lives not of the famous and gifted but rather those of the huddled masses welcomed by the Statue of Liberty. 

The Lower East Side was a haven for freshly landed immigrants. Irish, Italian, Jewish, German, Eastern European, Puerto Rican, Chinese and more—in separate, sometimes contiguous, waves they and other ethnicities crammed into stifling apartments. They shared bathrooms down the hallways of five story tenement buildings. Orchard Street and the surrounding streets were not paved in gold, as many had been led to believe. For the industrious, upwardly mobile immigrant, however, they were springboards toward assimilation into the American experience.

No one in my family, to my knowledge, lived in a tenement on the Lower East Side. But my family is forever linked to Orchard Street, next to the very location where the Tenement Museum stands. My father, who came to America in January 1939 from Poland, rented second floor space for his wholesale lingerie business at 99 Orchard Street, next door to what became the museum’s 97 Orchard Street address. (Since the museum’s expansion and renovation over a decade ago the front of 97 and 99 Orchard Street has been replaced with a modern, mostly glass facade.) 

It must have been after Kopel Fuersetzer had been discharged for medical reasons from the U.S. Army in August 1943. He was in his early 30s. As I wasn’t born until 1949, and my brother and sister were too young to know about his Orchard Street store, I enlisted two of our older cousins for details of his business three-quarters of a century ago.  

“I can recall the store, up a flight of metal stairs and on the left side. There was a back room with a table, a few chairs and a toilet,” said Norman Latner. “The store itself was lined with shelves, stacked with cardboard boxes which contained ladies panties and bloomers, with the sizes clearly marked on the outside. Your father was a wholesaler who sold to retail establishments.  

“I remember sweeping the floors, dusting the shelves and making deliveries. Your mother was never in the store, at least when I was there.”

His older brother, Herb, filled in more about one of his first jobs. 

“I think I was about 10 years old, on summer vacation from school and looking for a job, which was almost impossible to find, as precious as gold.  My mom’s “rich” cousin Kopel hired me (in my family, anyone with a car and phone was rich). 

“He had a store at 99 Orchard Street, a few doors down from Delancey Street, and even within walking distance from home so I did not have to pay carfare. 

“It was a busy, crowded area, with many clothing stores, both retail and wholesale. Kopel’s store, like the three other stores, was wholesale. His store dealt with ladies’ undergarments. We did not refer to them as lingerie, but simply bloomers and panties. At first, I was a bit embarrassed in handling the merchandise, but I got used to it.

“There were two stores on the street floor of this tenement building and two others right above them, one flight up a long narrow metal stoop. We were upstairs, on the left side. Nearly all the storekeepers were Jewish at that time. It was a wholesale store, and we sold items only in dozen lots or more.

“It surprised me that all the storekeepers were so friendly to each other, in spite of the fact that they were in competition. It may have had to do with Kopel’s warm personality; his neighbors often chatted with him, asked his advice, and often deferred to his opinions. Even as a young boy I sensed he was a leader.

“I think I was paid the minimum wage of the time—65 cents an hour. I thought it was great and thrilled to be working. My job was to do whatever was needed. Watching the store when Kopel went out, sweeping up, packing and unpacking goods, getting coffee or lunch, or whatever I was asked to do. I remember doing it cheerfully.

“It was summer and hot and humid and none of those little stores then had air conditioning yet, so we smelled and sweated. I remember Kopel would often get us a refreshing cup of lemon ices or cold drink; he was very generous. I learned a lot about working and what was required, and had a good teacher.   

“Kopel worked hard and was ambitious. He’d boast about having as a customer Blumstein’s, a big department store at the time located in Harlem, then still a bit of a Jewish neighborhood. 

“Some days when he’d visit customers in his car he would take me with him, and I was thrilled to be riding in a car with him. Wow!

“Orchard Street was still solidly Jewish and most of the businesses were also Jewish. Sundays the area was mobbed with shoppers, with thousands of folks coming to shop for bargains from all over town. It was long before discount stores and computers. But we were closed since we were not retail but wholesale. 

“As I got older, Kopel hired cousin Ted Schreier and my brother Norm, who he’d jokingly call “Mr. Natan, what are you waitin,” after the name of a popular song of the day.”

The aftereffects of the COVID-19 pandemic threaten to erase many treasured locations within New York, be they bars and restaurants, theaters, local service establishments such as shoemakers or cleaners—all part of the tapestry that makes the city vibrant as a whole but personal in a neighborly way. 

It would be tragic if the Tenement Museum became a casualty of COVID-19. Please do your part to see that doesn’t happen. 

Sharing Voices in a Chorus

On the eve of the 10th day from Wednesday, April 10, Jews the world over will sit down to a seder commemorating the exodus from Egypt more than 3,000 years ago. It has become a festival of nationhood, a symbol of freedom from oppression and bondage, a reminder that they should treat the strangers among them with dignity and fairness because, as it is written in Deuteronomy 10:18-19, God “befriends the stranger, providing him with food and clothing. You too must befriend the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

How far we Americans—Jews and non Jews—have come from this biblical ideal. 

Days after celebrating Purim, the holiday that rejoices in the foiling of Haman’s plot to annihilate all Jews inside the Persian empire because they were different, and days before the Passover holiday when Jews became refugees seeking a new life, the Trump administration has vigorously renewed its attack on legal asylum seekers. 

Trump has claimed there is no room in the United States for all the asylum seekers. He made that argument before a gathering of the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas (on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, of all days). Of course, his facts were wrong (https://nyti.ms/2UpZ1hF).

Reportedly, the purge of officials at the Department of Homeland Security in favor of those who would implement a more repressive immigration policy has been championed by Stephen Miller, himself a great grandson of a Jewish refugee fleeing pogroms in Belarus. How shameful. Miller is a modern day Torquemada, whose medieval family converted from Judaism to Catholicism. Torquemada became a priest and led the Spanish Inquisition against Moslems and Jews who converted but were suspected of less than complete adherence to Catholic practices.

Facebook and Twitter are enlightening sources. Here’s a post from Jackie Calmes. Above a picture of Jewish refugees aboard the MS St. Louis in 1939, Calmes wrote, “Never thought an audience of Jews would cheer words like Trump’s in NV on Sat against asylum, labeling migrants fleeing violence as threats & saying US is ‘full.’”

Under the picture, a link to an article in Smithsonian Magazine recounting the State Department’s long history of anti-Semitism. The headline: “The U.S. Government Turned Away Thousands of Jewish Refugees, Fearing That They Were Nazi Spies” (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/us-government-turned-away-thousands-jewish-refugees-fearing-they-were-nazi-spies-180957324/#V6QqrCfvfc4Ktrpo.03).

Lee Clark on Twitter wrote, “Trump went to Las Vegas and in front of the Jewish people used the same analogy against the South Americans that the country used against the Jews in 1939, the country was full and could not take in any more refugees. Refusing to let the Jew in sending them away Hitler killed all of them. The same thing Trump is doing to the South Americans.”

Words matter. Why is it that when Trump talks about Puerto Ricans or Jewish Americans it sounds like he does not consider them to be American citizens. Speaking to the Republican Jewish Coalition, he referred to Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu as “your prime minister,” suggesting that the Jews he was speaking to were not American citizens but rather Israelis, that their loyalty was, at the very least, divided.

The case is being made by some Jews that it is in their best interest to abandon the Democratic Party in favor of Republicans. It’s called “Jexodus”  https://nyti.ms/2Yc2yhO. 

I’m not buying it. I’m not turning my back on millennia of Jewish ideals, like support for human rights, equality, equality of opportunity, support for education, civil rights, community, respect for scientific knowledge.  

The noted astrophysicist Carl Sagan, in his 1995 book, “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark,”  forecast the type of existence we find ourselves in today. Here’s a Twitter post of Sagan’s thoughts from his book from Dan Kaminsky via a Bret Thorn retweet:

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

“The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”

We deserve a leader who would help us reverse the decline, yes, to make us great again, not by dividing us into competitive camps but by uniting us toward a common goal. 

Instead, we are faced with the reality of another Sagan quote from his book: “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” 

Going beyond The Times for Daily News

The New York Times is considered by many as the newspaper of record. Naturally, I try to read it as much as I can. But one of my more quirky, informative reads is the US Daily Mail, from which I offer several examples from Monday’s news feed (there will be lots of links to click on, but well worth your time). 

Paris Public “Pissoirs:” Ever have the urge to go, just a tinkle, mind you, while out in public? In Paris, it seems, men have no compunction about urinating in the street. So the city fathers are assessing a radical idea: Public street-facing urinals disguised as flower-boxes, reports The Daily Mail. For more on this fluid story, click here: https://dailym.ai/2vG2GcH

Weaponizing Planes? Is a plane the new weapon of choice for suicide and/or murder? We all have heard about the worker who stole a plane from Sea-Tac Airport and ultimately crashed to his death. But how many are familiar with the story of a disgruntled husband who tried to kill his estranged wife and her son by crashing a plane into their home? They survived. He didn’t: https://dailym.ai/2B4B4Dg

Black Like Me? Not: Here are several examples of what it is like being black. 

I wonder how many pregnant white women have had the same experience as this black lady: https://dailym.ai/2P47XmB. 

Or how many white campers encountered this reaction during a field trip to an aquarium: https://dailym.ai/2MJAXOO

Ageless in Vermont: Vermont has given us Bernie Sanders, a septuagenarian who wants to be president. Now the Green Mountain state has a 14-year-old legitimately running for governor. Check him out: https://dailym.ai/2P2mor8.

Chain Migration: First Lady Melania Trump’s parents just became U.S. citizens thanks to chain migration, an immigration rule Donald Trump and his creepy acolyte Stephen Miller want to do away with, now that their families have benefitted from it. 

If you haven’t seen it, Miller’s uncle on his mother’s side wrote an impassioned piece in Politico addressing his nephew’s cold rejection of the lifesaving rule that saved their family from extermination by Nazi Germany. Here are two links, a news story from The Daily Mail (https://dailym.ai/2B9Wijk) and the full essay from Politico (https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/08/13/stephen-miller-is-an-immigration-hypocrite-i-know-because-im-his-uncle-219351).

Family Values: Someone needs to get it through to the Trump Administration that family values really do matter, that separating children from parents is not what America stands for. Here’s the latest outrage, as The Daily Mail headlined: “Married US gov workers told adopted Peruvian daughter will be DEPORTED: https://dailym.ai/2vFvPEP.

Bear Facts: Finally, some uplifting news—several Ussuri brown bears have been released from tiny cages in Japan after 17 years or more of captivity. They were brought to Britain to an animal sanctuary. That’s the good news, though you may wonder why they were so maltreated in the first place: https://dailym.ai/2MDvnxD. 

Sometimes, you have to look elsewhere for “all the news that’s fit to print.”

To Legitimize the Dreamers, Fund the Wall

When the Branch Davidians holed up in their compound outside Waco, Texas, the federal government pleaded with cult leader David Koresh to release the children inside the building. They, after all, were too young to differentiate right from wrong, the wrong being the Davidians alleged sexual abuses and illegal weapons violations. The  children should not suffer any consequences for actions taken by their parents. Nineteen children were evacuated before the 51-day siege turned into a conflagration that killed 76 Davidians. That was in 1993. 

For the most part it has been the position of our government, at all levels, to absolve children for the misdeeds, alleged and real, of their parents or elders.

Even the U.S. Supreme Court has recognized that juveniles should be treated differently than adults. It ordered a review of mandatory life sentences handed out to youths. Included in the fallout from that ruling is Lee Boyd Malvo, the teenage accomplice of the Beltway shooter whose killing spree totaled 10 victims around Washington, DC, in 2002. https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/local/beltway-sniper-lee-boyd-malvo-granted-new-sentencing-hearings/2017/05/27/e252529c-4300-11e7-b29f-f40ffced2ddb_video.html?utm_term=.f0622a41d5fc

According to Allen Weintraub, an attorney involved in asylum law, “The Trump  immigration policy is … denigrating American ideals of justice and fairness by the administration’s refusal to recognize the long-standing  common law tradition, codified in many state and federal statutes, differentiating the application of the law between minors and adults. In civil law, any contract entered into by a minor is void on its face; and in criminal law there are major differences in determining the guilt and sentencing for a minor. In no way are the DACA minors complicit in violating U.S. immigration laws. They cannot be punished for the illegal acts of the adults who brought them into the U.S.”

The sympathy, if not benevolence, of the federal government seems to have dissipated under Donald Trump. His vacillating stances on the fate of youngsters (median age 6) brought to America illegally, mostly by their parents, have become conflicting chapters in an ongoing saga of venality as Trump uses the precarious position of the so-called “Dreamers” to push Congress to fund a southern border wall with Mexico. 

Last year Trump vacated DACA (the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program initiated by President Obama), setting March 6 as the day deportations could begin if Congress didn’t pass enabling legislation to grant the near 800,000 Dreamers enrolled in DACA renewed residency rights. 

(March 6 happens to be my birthday. I have always comically associated the date with the fall of the Alamo to Mexican forces. How ironic that Trump could exact revenge on Mexico—for the Alamo and for rejecting any suggestion it would pay for the border wall—by beginning deportation procedures on March 6 as 79% of DACA recipients are from Mexico. Here’s a statistical profile of young undocumented immigrants brought here: https://nyti.ms/2xN3tIu.)

Folklore would have you believe America was always a welcoming country. Not so. Our past is speckled with eras of discrimination against the Irish. The Chinese. Southern Italians. Eastern European Jews. Even in the face of death our shores were not open to those yearning to breathe free from persecution.

Trump has cut by more than half the number of legal immigrants permitted to enter the United States each year. It is 45,000, the lowest since the 1970s, an especially harsh number given the unprecedented volume of refugees around the globe. 

Pushed by zealots such as presidential advisor Stephen Miller, Trump says he wants to restrict immigration to an educated, professional class that could integrate smoothly and quickly into the country’s manpower needs and all but erase entry based on family ties beyond spouses and children. 

Miller apparently has forgotten his family history. A descendant on his mother’s side of the Glosser Brothers retail company of Pennsylvania, Miller’s ancestors fled pogroms in Russia. He and other members of his extended immigrant family started a successful, but now defunct, chain of department stores (http://jewishjournal.com/opinion/rob_eshman/214361/stephen-miller-meet-immigrant-great-grandfather/).  

My father, as well, came from Eastern Europe in 1939 when he was 28, with little beyond initiative and moxie, to become a successful small manufacturer who, if memory serves me right, supplied Glosser Bros. with lingerie. As for Trump wanting only the highly skilled and educated, my father, again, had no more than a sixth grade education. He spoke little English when he arrived on our shores. I shudder to think where I might be if Trump’s Draconian immigration measures were in place decades ago.

But enough of my personal story. How about the poster boy for the value of benign immigration? 

As many others have pointed out, imagine if Trump’s restrictions on Muslim immigrants were in place in the early 1950s. The biological father of Steve Jobs of Apple fame, a Syrian leaving Lebanon because of political unrest, would have been denied entry into the United States. He would not have met Jobs’ biological mother. They would not have spawned the co-founder of the richest company in the world.

The question remains, why do all immigrants have to be skilled? Or rich? Or from Caucasian countries? Is there something wrong with immigrants serving in the home health care field, or in foodservice, or in agriculture, or in any field open to those with less than a college degree? 

Late Thursday afternoon the White House packaged sweeping changes to immigration law tied to the possibility of a path to citizenship for 1.8 million illegal immigrants (https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/25/white-house-presents-immigration-plan-with-path-to-citizenship-for-18-million-369457?lo=ap_a1).

Hailed as a compromise that could get 60 votes in the Senate, the White House is mum on prospects for passage in the more conservative House where the prospect of amnesty is anathema to hardliners. 

Should Democrats sign on, even though it includes $25 billion for a southern border wall and other security measures as well as changes to our traditional immigration policies?

I’d have to say, yes, as it represents the only avenue Dreamers have to legitimize their lives in the United States. Let Republicans be the guilty party if the proposal dies in Congress. 

Our heritage is as a nation of immigrants. Through quotas and discrimination we have grown stronger because of our open doors. Overwhelmingly, according to surveys, Americans favor granting residency to Dreamers. We should not let a vocal minority, a repressive, self-centered minority, change the criteria upon which the best values of our country rest.