How Divided Are We Today- By A Schindler Jew’s Son
I couldn’t feel more certain the world today probably has never been more racially and culturally divided than since the Holocaust. If we just consider what immigration today has now become for a land that has been opening its arms to people of every country for over 200 years. Honestly what’s engraved on the bronze plaque inside the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal back in 1903 feels meaningless these days – Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” How much better can that be seen than the immigration bans by the Trump Administration to restrict, partially restrict or ban immigration to the United States from 39 countries. It also doesn’t account for the deportation operations of ICE that have broadened significantly from targets of undocumented immigrants to include workplace raids, street stops and sweeps of immigrant communities.
But the increasing divide I’ve watched has also systemically penetrated into my own religion that I’ve had to watch. It’s often felt unconscionable, knowing that I was told growing up the Jewish people are unified and finally learning I was the son of a “Schindler’s List” survivor. A non-Jew, who was a Nazi that saved Jewish lives, including my mother’s during the Holocaust. He saw Jews as no different than anyone else.
What has happened has probably not been more visible than the toll of racial / cultural divide amongst Jewish people. The deep contrast of feelings towards Israel as the Jewish homeland, the Gaza war and post-war settlement of the Palestinians in Gaza and Israel’s recognition of their racial sovereignty in the West Bank and Israel. It all rests amidst unrelenting debate of the “two-state solution.
I was raised Orthodox by my mother, a “Schindler” Jew because that’s how she was raised as a child before her teenage life was transformed by the Holocaust. She only hoped to survive the darkest period in history that the world has ever known. I am no longer Orthodox, both my wife and myself are conservative, but we probably lean more reform than many conservatives. I’ve included some background for my religious observance to let others see how Judaism has evolved within me, including denominations for religious observance. But despite the differences in my practices for Judaism, unity was never a question. Except today, from what I continue to watch, it’s clear unity only exists for those on the same side of a position. It couldn’t be more different from what I remember growing up that Jews had always bonded. I guess that I can understand why I’ve never been more nervous, feeling certain that Judaism stands at a pivotal crossroads.
There have always been some differences, particularly for Jewish people’s views towards Israel as the Jewish homeland. The positions run the spectrum depending upon political ideologies, and sometimes due to religious observance. But after the attack by Hamas of Israel on October 7th, I feel the divide in the Jewish religion has turned exponential. It’s nothing but shocking and heartbreaking to watch. I’ve felt particularly what Ben Gurion in 1948 called for with the Declaration of Independence for the State of Israel was a guarantee of complete equality of social and political rights regardless of race, religion, creed or sex.
But today, never more than maybe ever before I see the Jewish religion dividing itself, with lines drawn in the sand that haven’t been deeper. Besides the contentious debate of the left and right, including the Gaza war and ethnic sovereignty in the West Bank, most recently is the piercing escalation of division over the Iran War.
I feel the severed positions these days have become normalized, with each side feeling the need to be heard to voice the inhumanity of the other’s. But it seems that it’s only fulfilling even irreconcilable reconciliation, that’s now reaching fanatical ideology.
On the one hand, the mere debate that Zionism could stand for antisemitism, if only considering how it was represented by Ben Gurion when Israel was being formed is nothing but frightening, without any literal standing. There are also the conservative coalitions within the government of Israel, other right- wing movements in Israel, let alone the US and the rest of the world calling for unilateral Israeli sovereignty, with conviction to do whatever it takes to reach that intention. But each side’s voice being much too polarized doesn’t bring us to unity but only moves us further apart. That potential only further leads to me feel the divide may never let us reconcile, at least enough to find a unilateral resolution.
I guess my only question is can we learn from how Oskar Schindler, who was penetrated by Nazi ideology and found humanity in the midst of the Holocaust to save my mother and over 1200 other Jewish lives. If nothing else, how can the scale of doing what he did even be measured, when many throughout Europe were indifferent to what was happening in back then, in a world that didn’t feel differently. Isn’t that the learning we need today, understanding that “what brings us together can overcome what pulls us apart?”
I didn’t learn my mother was a “Schindler” Jew until five years after she passed away. My father told me in synagogue on Yom Kippur day, 1993. The Rabbi’s Yom Kippur sermon was the story of “Schindler’ List” due to the film’s debut in the next six weeks. At the end of what the Rabbi said, my father who was sitting next to me told me six words I would never forget – “Your mother was on that list.”
The memoir I’ve written – “In the Midst of Darkness” is what I know of my mother’s teenage life as a “Schindler” survivor, which confronts generational trauma due to the Holocaust manifested in racial hatred. Her unconscionable hatred for my German stepmother and every other German was due to what she went through in the Holocaust. It included the loss of her family, four sisters and a brother, who were murdered in the gas chambers of the Auschwitz and Belzec death camps.
The hatred she felt only compounded and couldn’t have done more to her after my father left her for a German woman being pregnant seven months pregnant with me. We were living in one of the largest Jewish communities in Chicago, filled with Holocaust survivors. But she always reminded us growing up one of the most sacred values in the Jewish religion is “that we must never hate.” But the unrelenting irony is my brother and I learned how to hate Germans from my mother when we were only children, never knowing that her life and the indelible number of other Jewish lives that were saved by a Nazi German.
How can we not, as Jews and a world, especially seeing the divide today, not want to act more like those amongst the righteous during the Holocaust – people like Oskar Schindler, Irena Sendler and Raoul Walberg – non-Jews who saved Jews from a genocide? But Schindler, apart from the others needed to see inhumanity to come back to humanity. As we’ve seen from each of them, they weren’t influenced by others who were convinced of what they heard being the truth. It’s our responsibility to act like they did that will help bring back the unity that I remember to the Jewish religion, let alone the rest of the world.