May 9 in Brighton and response to Locke

Oi, rebyate, sorry again on long absence. I know bloggers are supposed to file almost every day, sort of casual riffs, even if they dont have coherent essays formed, but unfortunately, even though I approve of said philosphy in principle, it goes against my 30 plus years training as a journalist, and its hard for an old dog to learn new tricks. Hopefully, I'll get better at it, because I realize my extended absences slow down the forum. Anyway, with that said, a few thoughts on a May 9 celebration at the National Restaurant by the New York Association of Holocaust Survivors, and then a belated response to Locke..

What is their secret? As on past occasions, I was at a celebration of the New York Association of Holocaust Survivors, and there were several hundred people in their 70's and 80's, most happily married couples with both partners still very much alive and seemingly in love, eating, drinking and dancing to a medley of Israeli/ Jewish hits (the Russian singers, clearly not Jewish, always say "shalom aleihem", completely missing the 'ch' thing) and sentimental Russian songs, both modern and from the World War II era. They radiate health and vitality; these sturdy men and women who survived death camps and ghettoes where they lived behind barbed wire surrounded by sadistic German or Romanian guards, or who served in the Soviet Army during those years, many of them, the whole four years right up to and including the liberation of Berlin. Having survived all of those horrors, and then 40 years or more of Soviet power after the war--with all of its mean anti-Semitic attitudes and unwillingness to acknowledge Hitler's attempted genocide against the Jews, they now find themselves in their golden years, living in a strange new land, the longstanding enemy of the Soviet Union, but one which allows them to celebrate their Jewishness and survival of Jews.

So what is their secret? How do they balance it all? I didnt get a full answer when I asked many of them, except that if you could fight your way through 1941-45 physically and mentally in one piece, the rest was bound to be a relative piece of cake. And of course, they feel great nachas about their lives in America today and especially about the lives of their children and grandchildren, filled with excitement and opportunity.

The unofficial leader of the organization is the indominable Fira Stukelman, herself a ghetto survivor, who in her 70's has become one of the Russian community's treasures; a consummate community leader and political operative. Fira, who positively vibrates with energy and purpose, played a key role in electing Alec Brook-Krasny last year; putting on the line her own popularity in the Russian pensioner community--a majority of which backed B-K's rival, Ari Kagan. She faced much criticism during the campaign, including a break with her former close friend and political ally, Kagan, but, convinced of the righteousnes of the cause, she stuck with it and delivered enough elderly voters to B-K to help elect him in a razor-thin vote. Fira and I dont agree on every issue (though certainly on most), but she is someone who cares deeply for her community, is deeply concerned about problems of housing, crime and poverty, especially among the elderly--and is having a positive impact on allieviating those problems through her involvement in the political process. Take a bow, Fira Stukelman.

I would also like to thank State Assemblyperson Alec Brook-Krasny for presenting a certificate of appreciation to my partner, Tatyana Rapaport, NYANA's Director of Acculturation, for her support of the New York Association of Holocaust Survivors. Alec spoke warmly of Tanya, saying how deeply she deserved the honor for her years of quiet but effective work on behalf of NYANA in the Russian community. Tanya was characteristically modest in her response, but I was brimming over with pride, so a big thank you to Alec and Fira for that classy gesture.

Alec took the occasion during his remarks to condemn Estonia for recently removing a monument to the Soviet army liberators of Tallinn from a central square in that city, an action that led to rioting by ethnic Russians in Tallinn, harrassment of Estonian diplomats in Moscow and the hacking of Estonian government websites, allegedly by Russian operatives. Alec's point during his speech was that the Soviet soldiers who died reconquering Estonia from the Nazis in 1944, and whose remains have now been unearthed from beneath the momument and reburied elsewhere in the city, were not responsible for Stalin's atrocities against the Estonian people, either in 1940-1941 or in the aftermath of the 1944 liberation, and should not have been dishonored in that way.

I agree that the digging up of the monument was a counter-productive gesture by the Estonian government. Yet, while Alec did mention something about Stalin having resembled Hitler, nowhere in his remarks do I recall an explicit acknowledgement that the Soviet dictator exiled hundreds of thousands of Estonians to Siberia and brought a similar number of Russians into Estonia in order to russify the little country. place. Nor do I recall any mention of an ongoing Soviet effort right up to the end of the 1980's to quash the identity of the Baltic peoples or to acknowledge the Soviet Union's guilt for crushing the right to self-determination of the Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian people.

Alec's remarks won only tepid applause from his audience of Holocaust survivors and veterans, even though they knew very well and must have been refecting that a considerable number of Estonians, and many Latvians and Lithuanians, collaborated with the Nazis and even formed brigades to kill Jews. Perhaps, despite all of that, the survivors and vets may have been uncomfortable with an excoriation of Estonia at a time when the Putin regime uses bullyboy tactics to harrass Estonians in Moscow, relentless steps up its rhetoric against the U.S. and drives more nails into the coffin of Russian democracy. Whatever one can say in condemnation of the Estonian action, the same, and much, much more, can and should be said about the way Putin's Russia is behaving these days.

And now to Locke's recent essay on this forum. Presenting himself as a classic 19th Century liberal who adovcates freedom of speech, individual rights, unfettered free-enterprise, Locke writes, "So far so good. This is liberalism as seen by the original Locke, by
Presidents Jefferson and Washington and Lincoln and the first Roosevelt
from the Pro position, and by Governor Wallace and Senator Thurmond from
the Con. This is my liberalism. Affirmative action and school busing are
quite thoroughly anti-liberal: once you trample the rights of one concrete
individual in search of the nebulous concept of social justice, you
redefine liberalism into something it is not. You might say I have a
conservative view of liberalism: I want to conserve classical liberalism
that informed the idea of the land of opportunity. Social justice, the
keystone of "new liberalism", reminds me of a tailor who made all the
underwear with room for one testicle after proving, mathematically, that
that's how many the average American has."

Well, excuse me, Locke, but Gov. Wallace and Sen. Thurmond trampled all over the basic human and political rights of not one person, but many millions of people, simply because of the color of their skin, just as much as Hitler, Stalin and Brezhnev trampled on the rights of the Jews. Wallce, who shouted, "Segregation Forever" was, of course, much more vicious toward blacks than Brzhnev was to Jews; Jews might have had to endure curses of "zhid" on the tramvei of Moscow, but they were not required by law to ride in the back of the bus. Jews were not prevented from sitting with Russians in restaurants, or forced to use special bathroom facilities (which I witnessed with my own eyes on a trip to Virginia as a child in 1959), or denied the right to vote, or forced to go to special Jewish elementary or high schools, (though of course, Soviet Jews were kept out of universities and institutes).

Of course, it was not just Wallace and Thurmond but a whole apparatus of official segregation by the federal government that was not brought down until the 1960's. Locke is apparently saying that his liberalism upholds the right of a white bigot owner of a restaurant or motel to keep black people out of a public facility simply because they were black. That is not even a correct reading of the 19th Century liberalism he claims to support, which as he points out, included, "freedom of thought for individuals, limitations on power (especially of government and religion), the rule of law, the free exchange of ideas, a market economy that supports free private enterprise, and a transparent system of government in which the rights of all citizens are protected". OK, so what about protection of the basic human rights of black Americans to use a restaurant or bathrooom, to vote, to be protected from a crazed white citzenry who could hang them from a tree at any time with the connaivance of the police? Earth to Locke, those basic rights of African-Americans were consistently denied by the United States from the date of its founding until 1965. So it feels to me that your so-called 19th Century liberalism is really an endorsement of American racism pre-1960's.

Dalche, you say that 'social justice' is counter-productive for the weaker members of society. Yes, no doubt, average Americans would be grateful to follow you back to the late 19th Century when there was no minumum wage or limit on how many hours an employer could demand; when children were sent to work in mines and factories from the age of seven or eight; when factories and workplaces were extremely dangerous for workers and government did nothing to protect them from accidents or provide them with any compensation for losing a a hand, arm or leg; when there were no laws to prevent corporations from fouling the environment or selling dangerous drugs to people; when a few oligarchs with names like Rockefeller and Carnegie built monopolies and controlled the entire economy, when the rich got much, much richer and the poor lived miserable Hobbesian lives--in short the very world the Bush Administration is trying so hard to take us back to and to which the American people said a belated 'no' to last November. Sorry, Locke, but I don't trust the oil or pharmacudical companies to put my health and welfare above their own obscene profits.
They have a very poor track record in that regard.

As for universal health care, you give us reasons it supposedly can't be done. All I can say is I lived without health insurance for two years, and as a result I didnt take care of my growing prostate in time before it closed up, causing me exquisite pain and forcing me into the hospital two months ago when, Thank God, I did have health insurance. But what about the nearly 50 million Americans, men, woman and children who dont have it? I know you love children, but what about the millions of American children, who, through no fault of their own, are denied needed trips to the peditrician because their parents can't afford to pay for it? What the hell, under your gospel of 19th Century liberalism, everyone has the right to make a good living and to have superb health care on one hand or to go hungry and avoid going to the doctor on the other. Sorry, but we need to leaven that system with some good old social justice--a lot more than we have today.

As for the Russian debacle of the 90's, you blame the failure of the Russian masses to discern they were individuals and to start acting as such; to seize the time and the resources the way Berezovsky, Gusinsky and company did. Well, it was utterly unrealistic to expect a couple of hundred million people taught to think collectively for 70 years and hundreds of years of serfdom before that, could instantly make an abrupt U-Turn and revolutionize their thinking. What was needed was a turn to social democracy not Adam Smithian capitalism; and the insistence of the idealists to give us the latter brought the oligrachs to power, discredited Yeltsin and democracy and now has given us the dictatorship of KGBnik Putin.

Anyway, many thanks for taking the time to reply, and lets get together over some stakanee in the nearest budishee where we will make a serious, if doomed, effort to change each others' respective vzglads.