Endnote to Red Anemones Readers

The heart of Charlotte Barlow, aka Rachael Rebekkah Rosenthal’s story, inspired by real people and circumstances, is antisemitism – it’s costs and its consequences across generations of a German-American immigrant family. It is also a story about fear-fueled denial of self, of heritage, of culture and spiritual beliefs, and of identity. As I was doing background research for this story, I discovered that Jewish denial was not terribly uncommon among the Greatest Generation, or even the one after that. These were Jews who emigrated early in the 20^th century hoping for a better life and instead encountered an America that was at least as ugly, if not uglier, than it is now and soon realized that a great deal of that vitriol was directed specifically at them. If denial was a plausible possibility for a Jew, a lot of the time, it made sense to do it – for their own safety and security. It also made sense from the opportunistic perspective. After all, they were living in the land of endless opportunity, for Christian whites, and if denying one’s Jewish heritage automatically opened doors that would’ve otherwise been slammed in their faces, why not do it? But, as Charlotte Barlow’s life illustrates, that decision came at a high emotional cost. 

I never really grasp the concept of fear in an identity sense until recently, when I began to realize that America’s current political climate invites people, both as individuals and in groups, to say and do very ugly things to each other. Especially vulnerable is anyone who is not mainstream white Christian. This new white Christian nationalist American reality has been very difficult to digest because early in my career, when I was a naïve young sociologist, I wanted to believe that everyone, while capable of doing bad things, is basically good, and that we had moved beyond the violent, deadly racism that permeated America’s earlier history. As time passed, this assumption dissolved into an awareness that while most people prefer behaving in ways that, if not good, at least do no harm, this isn’t true of everyone, and doesn’t necessarily apply to everyone, including Jews. Ultimately, I was forced to conclude that the enduring hatred the Jews have experienced throughout recorded history remains alive and thriving, due to the sustained efforts of supposedly God-fearing Christians. Sometimes I seriously wonder if there aren’t a lot of people in the world who just need to hate someone, and the Jews won that lottery.

Christianity’s erroneous, yet deeply entrenched belief, based upon fairy tales manufactured by New Testament gospel writers, that Jews are collectively guilty of deicide is the gasoline fueling the flames of antisemitism’s gigantic bond fire. The major world religions, especially Catholicism, have actively perpetuated this myth for more than two millennia. As falsehoods go, this particular one, backed by the wealthiest institutionalized religion on the planet, has enjoyed amazing staying power, and an institutionalized moral structure based upon a series of lies is not only meaningless, it has an unlimited ability to do great harm, as any Jew will attest. 

Another confusing reality about the relationship between Christianity and the Jews is that Jesus was a Jew who Christians view as their messiah, their savior, their god, and someone whose teachings they revere. In other words, the savior of all Christians was a Jew, yet Christians hate Jews, which creates a huge intellectual and emotional disconnect between reality and perception. Instead of hating the Jews, logic suggests Christians would be eternally grateful to us for sending one of our own with a message so profound it has resonated with them throughout the common era. However, when I point this out to my Christian friends, they change the subject.

Theologian John Dominic Crossan, a former Catholic priest, has labeled the accusation that the Jews killed Jesus the “longest lie” in the history of humankind. He challenges Christians to call this wrong-headed propaganda what it is, but so far, no Christian religion has been willing to do that, preferring instead to not rock the boat containing two thousand years historically unproven claims against the Jews. Admittedly, it would be very difficult to acknowledge that your belief system, extending across twenty centuries, has flowed from a false premise, but that’s still no excuse to continue perpetuating it. 

Christianity’s relentless commitment to continually flaming the fires of antisemitism in countless incendiary ways is extremely disturbing especially because, as a sociologist, I firmly believe that the most important function of institutionalized religion is to set the moral tone that defines civil society. As such, religion has a unique, very major role to play in how humans both collectively and individually treat one another. No other social institution has the power to clearly define right, wrong, good, or evil in the same way organized religion does, and these concepts need to be defined, understood, and widely accepted if society is to flourish.

Unfortunately, religion as a force for good can just as easily become religion as a force for evil – witness Hitler’s well-documented, mutually beneficial relationship with the Catholic Church at the same time he was murdering Jews for no reason other than they existed in the world as bearers of five thousand years of Jewish tradition and spiritual beliefs that didn’t square with Christianity’s falsehoods.

America’s current antisemitic wave took on greater intensity in 2016 when the nation elected an unqualified president whose popularity exploded from hate-filled rhetoric promising he was going to “Make America Great Again” by getting rid of all the bad actors which, in his mind, included everyone who wasn’t white. Even more astonishing, the evangelical Christian right climbed right on his bandwagon, blowing trumpets and beating drums in rhythm to the MAGA theme, bolstering it with massive amounts of financial and rhetorical support from the pulpits. 

In early 2017, the new president refused to denounce several thousand Christian white nationalists who marched on Charlottesville Virginia chanting “the Jews won’t control us”. Instead, he pronounced that “there are good people on both sides” – seven words that sent chills through every American Jew, now forced to face the shattering reality that their country no longer has their backs. 

In many respects, this should not have been too surprising. In a deeply disturbing threat of history repeating itself, America’s highest ranking Roman Catholic prelate, the cardinal archbishop of New York City, home to the largest Jewish population in the country, came out in support of this new president who harbored no respect for the rule of law and was refusing to condemn the obvious hatred against the Jews. Even though this chapter of Jewish history had already been written in 1930’s Germany, it was being rewritten again in 2016. The only difference was the politician was American president Donald Trump, not German chancellor Adolph Hitler, and the Catholic prelate was Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, not the

Eugenio Pacelli, Archbishop of Munich, who was to become Pope Pius XII, whose reign spanned all of World War II and the Holocaust, beginning in 1939 and enduring until his death in 1958. 

As America faces a presidential election year in 2024, the front-runner for the republican nomination is the same man who declared there were good people on both sides of the Charlottesville demonstrations against the Jews. He has ramped up his bullying and hate speech on a wide variety of human conditions further than most Americans, even his supporters, ever thought possible. Nothing – not diversity, equity, inclusion, race, sexual orientation, gender, or national origin is off limits or safe from his dog whistle politics. Although he was defeated in his re-election bid in 2020, he stands an even chance of being elected again in 2024.

Even after the horrors of the Holocaust and a massive social effort to bend the hearts of non-Jews worldwide away from antisemitism and toward truth and justice, thousands of years of antisemitic hate still stands on solid footing. In twenty-first century America, neo-Nazis march openly, Jews are murdered in their synagogues, Holocaust deniers thrive, and vocal antisemitism has infiltrated our institutions of higher learning, traditionally considered the safest environments for the thrashing out opposing ideas. 

Although the reasons have varied, since the beginning of time Jews have been the world’s favorite scapegoat and are the first people who come to mind whenever anyone is looking for someone to hate, to blame, or bully in order to make themselves feel better about who they are. We have been suffering this indignity for fifty centuries, and yet, we’re still here. Jews are still making vitally important contributions to medicine, law, politics, music, art, and every other aspect of social culture and modern life. Perhaps this remarkable ability to survive in spite of efforts to destroy us is precisely why the Jews are so hated – we are seemingly indestructible. Six million of us were mass exterminated less than one hundred years ago, and we’re still here. This simple fact, while instilling a great deal of self-assuredness in us, seriously frustrates our enemies. 

All of this said, I honestly admit that in 2024, for the first time in my life, I understand how fear can be so deep and so pervasive it causes someone to deny who they are. Sadly, being afraid of unintentionally doing something that invites ugly experiences and hateful people into one’s life makes sense to me now in ways it never has before, and I never believed it could. I realize this kind of fear demands respect, never condemnation. 

Until recently I never believed that the unimaginable could happen to the Jews again, but since the 2016 presidential election, I’ve changed my mind. Another Holocaust is not inevitable, but absent constant vigilance and strong pushback against the antisemitic vitriol that has gained a foothold both worldwide and in America, the nation widely considered to be the land of the free and the leader of the free world, it’s not impossible, either. The Shoah didn’t begin with Auschwitz, it began with words, and with good people closing their ears and remaining silent in the face of the evil staring back at them. 

In this context, it’s not surprising that, as a matter of safety and survival, some Jews are again choosing whatever means possible, including denial, to become invisible to the hostile world surrounding them, Regardless, the world would do well to remember that no matter what choice a Jew makes in a particular circumstance, their Jewish light is never extinguished, it just becomes a secret waiting for the right opportunity to illuminate itself again.