Yesterday and today are the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, also known as the Night of the Broken Glass. It was a national pogrom against the Jews of Germany, sort of the official opening of the sweeping, years-long genocidal international pogrom that would come in retrospect to be known as the Nazi holocaust. On the night of November 9-10, 1938, homes, stores, synagogues and other sites were attacked, about a hundred Jews were killed, and some 30,000 were rounded up for deportation to concentration camps. It must always be noted, too, that trade unionists, socialists and other progressives, as well as gay men, were among the first, indeed were crucial, targets of the Nazi regime as the fascist state tried to wipe out the working-class revolutionary current that had such deep roots in Germany.
Part of my background, one-quarter, the Ettingers, were German Jews, but my paternal grandfather had emigrated from Germany well before Hitler's rise. My other three grandparents came here around the turn of the century from Lithuania and Russia as part of the great wave fleeing the pogroms of the 1890s and 1900s. They all came to New York and New Jersey but none of them, I'm sorry to say, became socialists or trade unionists or any kind of progressive activist as did so many others of their generation of Jewish immigrants. (Many books, fiction and nonfiction, cover this ground. One of the more recent, which I've been meaning to read for some time, is A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York.)
It seems to have skipped a generation or two in my family, but I'm proud to have stepped forward to uphold the fine Jewish tradition of revolutionary class struggle. Cue soundtrack. While we're still in election week, I've got to also say I'm so happy that the Jewish vote resisted the racist appeals against Obama.
And finally, to restate as well my unwavering solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and disassociate myself from the Zionists' phony claim that somehow the crimes the Jews endured under the Nazis justify the theft of Palestine and the horrific terror campaign against the Palestinian people. The wonderful book Our Roots Are Still Alive lays out the history masterfully.
