Why Trump supporters lack character; the conservative voice of the 'Boston Globe'; manga's Jewish masterpieces; more from Tablet Magazine of New York, New York, United States "Behind the Klan’s endorsement of Trump" for Thursday, 3 November 2016Thursday, November 3, 2016
Who Goes Trump?
JAMES KIRCHICK
What ultimately determines support for the GOP nominee isn’t race, class, or political ideology. It’s character.It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Trump. Having gone through the experience many times, I have come to know the types: the born Trumpkins, the Trumpkins whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would go Trump.
It is preposterous to think that Trump supporters are created by economic or regional characteristics. The rural white working-class may be more susceptible to Trumpism than most people, but I doubt that preference is inherent. Hispanics are barred, but that’s an arbitrary, circumstantial ruling. I know lots of Hispanics who are born Trumpkins and many others who would support Trump tomorrow morning if given an opening to do so. Trumpism has nothing to do with class, ethnicity, or even gender. It appeals to a certain type of mind.
Let us look around the room. The gentleman standing beside the fireplace with an untouched glass of whiskey beside him on the mantelpiece is Governor A, a man with homes in the country’s finest ZIP codes. The son of a Republican governor of Michigan, he has been married to the same woman for over 40 years, and raised five enviably accomplished and attractive young men; has had a classical education but has not a touch of snobbery in him; is full of humor, courtesy and wit. He left a highly lucrative career in private equity to rescue a failing Olympic bid in the city of Salt Lake, and later ruled as a moderate Republican governor in one of the country’s bluest states, earning a high approval rating from his Democratic constituents. He is modest, a staunch friend, and a man who greatly enjoys the company of his dozens of grandchildren.
Beside him stands Mayor B, a man who showed remarkable heroism and leadership after the terrorist attacks against New York City 15 years ago. He is a good fellow and was extremely popular. He had gay roommates and enjoyed dressing in drag. But once his party began to go Trump, he joined up. Why? Why the one and not the other?
Senator C, a Midwestern Republican, spent most of the past four years leading the charge against the Iranian nuclear deal negotiated by President Barack Obama and endorsed by his former secretary of state and likely successor, Hillary Clinton. “Tens of thousands of people in the Middle East are gonna lose their lives because of this decision,” he has said, characterizing it as “the greatest appeasement since Chamberlain gave Czechoslovakia to Hitler.” Yet even his fervent opposition to the signature foreign-policy achievement of the Democrats was not enough to persuade him to go Trump, a man he has denounced as a “malignant clown.” Senator C is a veteran and since recovering from a stroke some years ago, has embraced a new, more altruistic outlook on life. “I promised myself that I would return to the Senate with an open mind and greater respect for others,” he said after triumphantly ascending the Capitol steps to the applause of his colleagues. He despises Trump.
Former Speaker of the House D has risen beyond his real abilities by virtue of his cunning, intelligence and unscrupulousness. Like Mayor B, he is on his third wife; the first he served divorce papers to while she lay in a hospital bed stricken with cancer. He fits easily into whatever pattern is successful. That is his sole measure of value—success. Trumpism as a minority movement would attract only his scorn. As a movement likely to attain power, it attracts his endorsement.
Mrs. E would go Trump as sure as you are born. That statement surprises you? Mrs. E seems so sweet, so clinging, so cowed. She is. She is a masochist. She is married to a man who never ceases to humiliate her, to lord it over her, to treat her with less consideration than he does his dogs. Mrs. E, who married him very young, has convinced herself that he is a genius and that there is something of superior womanliness in her utter lack of pride, in her doglike devotion. She speaks disapprovingly of other “masculine” or insufficiently devoted wives. Her husband, however, is bored to death with her. He neglects her completely, and she is looking for someone else before whom to pour her ecstatic self-abasement. She will titillate with pleased excitement to the first popular hero who proclaims the basic subordination of women, which is why she is so infatuated with Mr. Trump.
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The above is adapted, in some places word-for-word, from a 75-year-old Harper’sessay titled “Who Goes Nazi?” Written by Dorothy Thompson, the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany, the article presents readers with the aforementioned “macabre parlor game” in which she secretly assesses which guests at a random social function might “go Nazi” given the proper political and social conditions. As Thompson keenly observed from her time in Germany, there was no single demographic “type” of Nazi supporter; workers and businessmen and intellectuals and landed gentry all backed Adolf Hitler’s political movement, just as workers and businessmen and intellectuals and landed gentry opposed it. There were even Jews, Thompson wrote, “who have repudiated their own ancestors in order to become “Honorary Aryans and Nazis.” Nazism, Thompson argues, “appeals to a certain type of mind,” not a rigid composite. As such, her article is a timeless analysis of the authoritarian mentality and makes for disturbingly relevant reading today.
Since Donald Trump declared his candidacy for president 16 months ago, it has become a lazy journalistic trope to attribute his rise to the economic travails of the white working class in an era of globalization. Contrary to popular conception, however, the median household income of a Trump primary voter is a healthy $72,000 a year, well above the $62,000 national average and higher than the median incomes of those who supported both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Meanwhile, 44 percent of Trump voters have college degrees, far more than the 29 percent of the general adult population. According to a Gallup working paper based upon interviews with some 87,000 Trump supporters over the past year, the most exhaustive statistical analysis of the Trump phenomenon completed thus far, “There appears to be no link whatsoever between exposure to trade competition and support for nationalist policies in America, as embodied by the Trump campaign.” The same study also found “little clear evidence that economic hardship predicts support for Trump, in that higher household incomes tend to predict higher Trump support.”
What does drive enthusiasm for Trump? According to the American National Election Survey, the best determinant of whether someone is a Trump supporter—even more than Republican Party affiliation—is if they think President Barack Obama is a Muslim. Eighty-nine percent of those who believe this racist conspiracy theory will have a higher opinion of Trump than Clinton. A Pew poll, meanwhile, reports that Republicans who believe America’s impending non-white majority is “bad for the country” are overwhelmingly positive toward Trump, while a qualified sample of 10,000 Trump Twitter supporters finds that a third follow white nationalist accounts.
Support for the Republican nominee, then, seems to hinge upon a mix of racial resentment and pining for strongman rule. Matthew MacWilliams, a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of Massachusetts, says that the only statistical variable predicting support for Trump is a voter’s authoritarian inclinations. “It is time for those who would appeal to our better angels to take his insurgency seriously and stop dismissing his supporters as a small band of the dispossessed,” he writes. “Trump support is firmly rooted in American authoritarianism and, once awakened, it is a force to be reckoned with.”
As Dorothy Thompson demonstrated 75 years ago with National Socialism, gauging sympathy for Trump is less a matter of class or ideology (for Trump doesn’t really have one) than it is one of individual character. The best way to understand the Trump phenomenon isn’t by reading Hillbilly Elegy, the widely praised memoir about the Appalachian underclass, but through something more prosaic: personal integrity.
Ask yourself: Among the men you know who support Trump, are they unlikely to be bothered by their candidate’s lecherous musings and admitted sexual predation because they view women in a similarly odious fashion? As for the women who support Trump: Are they the kind who gravitate toward abusive men? Is the uncle or work colleague who always puts an emphasis on the president’s middle name backing Trump? “Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi,” Thompson observed. “But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis.” Much the same can be said of those who go Trump.
Characterological defect as an explanation for Trump support is even more pronounced among the candidate’s elite enablers; people in positions of power and influence who, unlike Trump’s less-economically secure supporters, cannot appeal to their pitiable life station as justification for backing the most unqualified person ever to win the presidential nomination of a major political party. From Roger Stone to Roger Ailes to Steve Bannon and the bigots at Breitbart, the cast of characters composing Trump’s inner circle is, without exception, a collection of loathsome—some might say deplorable—individuals. The significance of personal character becomes especially clear when one contrasts a Trump-supporting public figure with his or her non-Trump supporting peer.
Take Eric Metaxas and Erick Erickson. Both are evangelical Christian conservative media personalities, the former a Trump supporter, the latter a mainstay of the #NeverTrump movement. Reading Erickson over the past year, one witnesses a fundamentally decent man grappling with what it means to be a Christian in the face of a Republican nominee who so wantonly disregards fundamental biblical teachings. For speaking out against Trump, Erickson and his family have been subject to constant death threats from the nominee’s supporters.
Contrast Erickson with Metaxas, a Trump proponent and what passes these days for a conservative evangelical “intellectual.” Metaxas is a biographer of abolitionist William Wilberforce and anti-Nazi pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christians of heroic moral conscience and courage who are also heroes to the country’s liberal elites. Writing recently in The Wall Street Journal, Metaxas audaciously likened voting for the fascistic Trump with Bonhoeffer’s joining the Valkyrie plot to kill Adolf Hitler. Metaxas can make this claim with a straight face because, like many other Trump supporters, he has been peddling a form of apocalyptic political extremism that sees the Democratic Party as hell-bent on a mission to destroy America. “The fascistic globalism of HRC/Obama is similar to the threat that German fascist nationalism was in Bonhoeffer’s day,” Metaxas recently tweeted in the style of a doomsday prophet. “Both are anti-God.” Metaxas’s calling the bloodlessly centrist Clinton “Hitlery” is thus the logical conclusion of this catastrophizing mode of ex cathedradiscourse. He is Elmer Gantry in a nicer suit.
Turning to conservative talk radio, consider Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. Both men have played a role in poisoning our political discourse with their uncompromisingly partisan ranting that demonizes political adversaries as traitors. But it is only Beck who has reflected upon his past divisiveness and repented for it. “I think I played a role, unfortunately, in helping tear the country apart, and it’s not who we are,” he remorsefully told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly in 2014. Today, not coincidentally, it is Beck who opposes Trump, while Hannity serves as his most loyal mouthpiece.
David Horowitz and Ron Radosh have experienced similar life trajectories as Jewish, ex-radical-leftist historians who eventually made their homes on the right. Radosh, however, has always been a mensch—a gentle soul who still likes to play the folk music he learned at the feet of the Stalin-loving Pete Seeger. Horowitz, by contrast, remains the thug he was five decades ago when he was cavorting with the Black Panthers, still a Stalinist but of the right-wing variety. Guess which septuagenarian Jewish conservative is the Trump critic and which the pro-Trump fanatic?
While we’re on the subject of Jewish Trump supporters, Thompson made an interesting observation about the unlikeliest of Nazis. “I know lots of Jews who are born Nazis and many others who would heil Hitler tomorrow morning if given a chance,” she wrote. Reflecting upon some Jews of my acquaintance who have twisted themselves into supporting Trump, a candidate whose campaign has stirred anti-Semitic passions to a degree unlike anything in recent American political history, I can claim a similar familiarity. Can I really profess surprise that the admirer of Meir Kahane I’ve known since high school backs Trump, a man who, like the late Jewish fascist, promises to ethnically cleanse his country of millions of people? Elsewhere, back in January, David P. Goldman, a Tablet contributor who sometimes writes under the pseudonym “Spengler,” was asked by an Israeli politician to characterize Trump. “Imagine if Hitler had liked Jews,” he replied. I couldn’t have put it any better myself. Today, Goldman has come around to support the man he described, less than a year ago, as a philosemitic Hitler.
More than any book I’ve read or lecture I’ve attended, the Trump phenomenon has explained the 1930s for me. Witnessing so many otherwise rational people fall for the lies of a demagogic con man who promises that he “alone” can “fix” all of our country’s problems and bleats about throwing his opponent in jail (when he’s not urging his raucous crowds to kill her), one begins to fathom how a modern, educated, advanced country like Germany went Nazi. You already see the stirrings of a nascent fascist movement in America. The parallels between the GOP’s amoral cowards willing to do anything to achieve power and the German leaders who thought Hitler could be “controlled” are as pathetic as they are frightening.
Not long ago, I was conversing with the chief of staff of a former high-ranking congressional Republican, the epitome of an “establishment” politician, who explained his support for Trump on purely partisan lines. Trump was the party’s nominee, after all, and as a loyal Republican, it was this man’s duty to support him. If the GOP nominated a bona fide Nazi, I asked incredulously, would you support him, too? Yes, he replied.
We spend too much time attacking Trump’s person, fooling ourselves into thinking he’s just a sui generis figure, without listening to those who support him. Plenty of people who voted for the Nazi Party weren’t motivated by anti-Semitism but other, worthier concerns like rampant inflation, an atmosphere of violent political chaos, and Germany’s diminished place in Europe. Like Trump supporters, these Germans wanted to regain a sense of individual and national respect that they felt had been lost. Weimar Germany was awash in distrust, fear, and resentment, feelings that, while not nearly as acute, characterize much of America today.
It’s true that some Trump supporters loathe the man’s behavior and more outré positions, but nonetheless see him as something of a savior figure. They are willing to put their faith in a sociopath because they have convinced themselves that the alternative will literally destroy the country. On the other hand, many, perhaps most, Trump supporters aren’t voting for him in spite of his talking like a thug, demeaning women, and hurling racist insinuations at the country’s first black president, but because he does these things.
“Believe me, nice people don’t go Nazi,” Dorothy Thompson wrote. “Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them. Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi.” Trump supporters are people who, were he to become president, would explain away the mosque firebombing or Attorney General Chris Christie’s “opening up the libel laws” against The New York Times, just as passive Nazi voters looked away from the “Don’t buy from Jews” graffiti spray-painted on the neighborhood grocery store. These people are lacking “something in them,” a moral code, and their very large numbers are a troubling indicator of a rot in the American soul.
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James Kirchick, a fellow with the Foreign Policy Initiative, is a columnist at Tablet. He is a former writer at large for Radio Free Europe based in Prague and a Robert Bosch Foundation Fellow based in Berlin. His Twitter feed is @jkirchick.
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PODCASTS / UNORTHODOX
It’s Almost Over
Unorthodox breaks down the neverending 2016 election with Gen. Tom Hill, ‘Boston Globe’ columnist Jeff Jacoby, and NPR’s Jeremy Hobson
This episode of Unorthodox was recorded in front of a live audience at Hebrew College in Newton, Mass.
Our first (!) Jewish guest is Jeremy Hobson, co-host of NPR’s “Here and Now.” He tells us about recording a daily show during an election when the news cycle changes at the speed of a tweetstorm, and why Trump supporters he’s interviewed around the country are supporting the candidate.
Our second Jewish guest is Boston Globe op-ed columnist Jeff Jacoby, the lone conservative voice at the newspaper. He explains the damage wrought by Trump’s candidacy on the conservative movement, and why he’s voting for Gary Johnson.
Our Gentile of the Week is General Tom Hill, a highly decorated combat infantryman and diplomat who retired from the U.S. Army after 36 years of active service to the nation. He tells us about growing around Jews in El Paso, TX, his issue with the phrase “there are no atheists in foxholes,” and why high-ranking military officers shouldn’t involve themselves in presidential elections.
We’re also joined by our in-house Jewbadour, Jim Knable, who debuts several new Unorthodox-themed songs.
Our friends and fellow podcasters at Israel Story are performing live in New York on November 9 and 10! Tickets here.
We love hearing from you! Email us at Unorthodox@tabletmag.com with comments or questions, or just to say hi. We may share your note on air.
Today’s episode is brought to you by Harry’s. For a great shave at an affordable price, go to Harrys.com and use promo code UNORTHODOX at checkout to get their free trial set and post-shave balm.
Today’s episode is also sponsored by Primary, offering stylish basics for babies and kids in fun colors and soft fabrics, all under $25. Go to primary.com/unorthodox and use the promo code UNORTHODOX to save 25 percent off your first purchase, AND free shipping!
Unorthodox is a smart, fresh, fun weekly take on Jewish news and culture hosted by Mark Oppenheimer and featuring Stephanie Butnick and Liel Leibovitz. You can listen to individual episodes here or subscribe on iTunes. Unorthodox is part of the Panoply podcast network.
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BOOK REVIEWS / RAZ GREENBERG
Unorthodox breaks down the neverending 2016 election with Gen. Tom Hill, ‘Boston Globe’ columnist Jeff Jacoby, and NPR’s Jeremy Hobson
This episode of Unorthodox was recorded in front of a live audience at Hebrew College in Newton, Mass.
Our first (!) Jewish guest is Jeremy Hobson, co-host of NPR’s “Here and Now.” He tells us about recording a daily show during an election when the news cycle changes at the speed of a tweetstorm, and why Trump supporters he’s interviewed around the country are supporting the candidate.
Our second Jewish guest is Boston Globe op-ed columnist Jeff Jacoby, the lone conservative voice at the newspaper. He explains the damage wrought by Trump’s candidacy on the conservative movement, and why he’s voting for Gary Johnson.
Our Gentile of the Week is General Tom Hill, a highly decorated combat infantryman and diplomat who retired from the U.S. Army after 36 years of active service to the nation. He tells us about growing around Jews in El Paso, TX, his issue with the phrase “there are no atheists in foxholes,” and why high-ranking military officers shouldn’t involve themselves in presidential elections.
We’re also joined by our in-house Jewbadour, Jim Knable, who debuts several new Unorthodox-themed songs.
Our friends and fellow podcasters at Israel Story are performing live in New York on November 9 and 10! Tickets here.
We love hearing from you! Email us at Unorthodox@tabletmag.com with comments or questions, or just to say hi. We may share your note on air.
Today’s episode is brought to you by Harry’s. For a great shave at an affordable price, go to Harrys.com and use promo code UNORTHODOX at checkout to get their free trial set and post-shave balm.
Today’s episode is also sponsored by Primary, offering stylish basics for babies and kids in fun colors and soft fabrics, all under $25. Go to primary.com/unorthodox and use the promo code UNORTHODOX to save 25 percent off your first purchase, AND free shipping!
Unorthodox is a smart, fresh, fun weekly take on Jewish news and culture hosted by Mark Oppenheimer and featuring Stephanie Butnick and Liel Leibovitz. You can listen to individual episodes here or subscribe on iTunes. Unorthodox is part of the Panoply podcast network.
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BOOK REVIEWS / RAZ GREENBERG
The God of Manga’s Jewish Masterpieces
On Osamu Tezuka’s 88th birthday, a look at the many ways the Japanese master told Jewish stories, and influenced the Jewish storytellers of America’s own comics boomThe mammoth 928-page volume of The Osamu Tezuka Story: A Life in Manga and Anime (recently published in English by Stone Bridge Press), opens with a provocative question: How have manga—Japanese comics—become an integral part of Japanese society, read practically anywhere, by all age groups, and touching every imaginable subject and genre, when, despite their global fame, American comics never reached the same cultural magnitude even in their own country? The answer that the book offers is simple: American comics never had Osamu Tezuka.
To be sure, it’s not just a simple, but also a simplistic explanation (mainstream manga never had to endure anything similar to the Comics Code Authority that American comics had to endure for decades, for example). Yet it is true that the uniqueness of Japanese comics culture is strongly tied to the uniqueness of Osamu Tezuka (1928-1989), widely known as Japan’s “God of Manga.” The title itself implies this uniqueness—do we have a “god of comics” in America? How about France? In Belgium, the legendary Georges Remi, better known as Hergé, can be said to hold a cultural significance that is somewhat similar to that of Tezuka in his native country, but Hergé is almost exclusively associated with a single title—The Adventures of Tintin—whereas Tezuka has created dozens of iconic characters that became a part of Japan’s popular culture, in an output that’s estimated to be 150,000 pages that he drew in his rather short lifetime. Tezuka found time for other things as well: He graduated from medical school and was licensed to practice as a doctor; produced hundreds of hours of animation in both films and television shows, putting Japan on the global animation map and making animation one of his country’s leading cultural exports; published weekly film reviews; and appeared in television advertisements. Tezuka was also an obsessive reader, and his vast knowledge of literature, history, science, and philosophy often echoes in his artworks. This intellectual quality takes Tezuka’s global influence deeper than that of most of his Japanese colleagues’: The most famous case of such influence may be the inspiration that his animal adventure series Jungle Emperor Leo (known in English as Kimba the White Lion) provided for the Disney hit film The Lion King.
With the rise in popularity of manga among Western readers, the 21st century saw a surge of interest in Tezuka in the English-speaking world. Not only were readers treated with many translations of his works, but scholarly studies of these works also began to appear: Frederik L. Schodt’s The Astro Boy Essays (2007) traces the history and cultural influence of one of Tezuka’s most beloved heroes; Helen McCarthy’s The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga (2009) is a lavishly illustrated coffee-table guide to Tezuka’s works; and Natsu Onoda Power’s God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-World War II Manga (2009) is a study of the influence of stage-theater on Tezuka’s style.
The Osamu Tezuka Story: A Life in Manga and Anime, which now joins that list, is something of a different animal. Written and illustrated by Toshio Ban, who worked as one of Tezuka’s chief assistants, the book is a biography of Tezuka in a graphic-novel format. It tells the story of Tezuka’s life, from his birth through his adolescent years in the shadow of World War II to his great postwar success up to his death. Though I am sure most of the book’s potential readers are already familiar with his biography, Ban’s book tells it in an unparalleled detail, both visually and narratively. Interestingly enough, the book keeps a constant low-key tone, even when approaching the different personal and artistic conflicts that Tezuka has encountered throughout his career. But there is something misleading in the book’s subtitle: A Life in Manga and Anime is definitely more about Tezuka’s life and less about his comics or animation. The book is mostly about the many twists and turns in Tezuka’s career as a comics artist and animation producer (devoting a lot of space to the great suffering publishers had to endure while waiting for Tezuka to deliver his weekly pages), with occasional brief discussions about the content and the style of his works.
Yet even in these brief discussions, readers can find surprising links that lead from Tezuka’s works to Jewish culture and history. In his youth, when Tezuka began shaping his personal style of drawing and storytelling, introducing traits that accompany the mainstream manga industry to this very day (characters with large round eyes, cinematic page layouts, and frequent use of silent pages with no text), he drew influence from fellow Japanese artists along foreign sources of inspiration, most notably Disney. Often overlooked, however, is the equally important influence that Disney’s greatest rivals, the brothers Max and David Fleischer, had on Tezuka with their Betty Boop and Popeye the Sailor cartoons that reflected (and sometimes even directly referred to) their creators’ background as Jewish immigrants in urban America. Even less well-known (though nicely referred to in Ban’s book) is the important influence that Tezuka drew from Yiddish cartoonist Milt Gross and his silent graphic novel He Done Her Wrong, which also strongly reflected its author’s Jewish heritage.
Works drawn by Tezuka toward the later part of his career—decidedly darker and more pessimistic in comparison to his immediate postwar works—show an increasing interest in Jewish life and history, an interest that made it to the narrative of some of his most acclaimed works. His 1970 series Apollo’s Song is a grim tale of a violent young man forced to learn the meaning of love through living the different painful ordeals of tragic figures. One such figure is a Nazi officer who accompanies Jewish prisoners on a train to a death camp and falls in love with a Jewish girl during the journey. The portrayal of the Holocaust in the story feels more like a portrayal of abstract evil rather than concrete history, but another element of the story, the horror of war, feels very concrete and real.
As demonstrated in The Osamu Tezuka Story: A Life in Manga and Anime, Tezuka had plenty of personal experience to draw from when it came to the horrors of war, with his adolescent years dominated by the destruction brought by Allies’ bombings and the sight of dead bodies scattered in the streets becoming something of a daily routine. While some may find this connection troubling given the nature of Japan’s involvement in WWII, it appears that for Tezuka, the Holocaust and his own personal experience were symbolic of just how far human cruelty can reach.
A deeper understanding of Jewish history can be found at Dawn, the eighth volume of Tezuka’s epic Phoenix cycle of historical and futuristic stories that follow the human race’s destructive quest for immortality. Published in the mid-’70s, Dawn is a science-fiction tale of a woman named Romy who finds herself abandoned on a distant planet and eventually attempts to make her way back to Earth. During her journey, Romy compares herself to the Jews who were exiled from their homeland for thousands of years, yet never gave up the hope of returning to it, eventually doing so and re-establishing it as their national state. But just how fruitful is this process of return, given that both the Jewish people and the state of Israel (we are to assume) no longer exist as separate cultural/national categories in the distant future in which the story takes place—or, for that matter, that Romy’s own return to her home planet proves to be a tragic affair? While Tezuka does not give a direct answer to this question in Dawn, he does provide it in one of his final works, A Message to Adolf.
Serialized in the mid-1980s, A Message to Adolf is considered among the greatest masterpieces of not only Tezuka’s works but of Japanese and global comics as well. The series tells the story of people who share the same first name—Adolf Kamil, the son of a Jewish family that found refuge from Nazi Germany in the Japanese city of Kobe, and Adolf Kaufman, the son of a senior Nazi diplomat who lives in the same city. The story begins in the 1930s, as both protagonists become friends after being bullied by local Japanese children who treat them as dangerous foreigners. But their friendship turns into bitter hatred as greater events place them on the opposing sides of history over the course of six decades—from the deadly battlefields of Europe and Asia in WWII through the Holocaust all the way to Israeli-Arab conflict.
Although much wider in scope, A Message to Adolf places the Holocaust in the same context as Apollo’s Song did, that of WWII, hence sharing the weakness of the former work—treating a systematic form of mass-murder of innocent people as the ultimate manifestation of war, even a cruel one, rather than a unique affair. However, A Message to Adolf also extends the context significantly. If Apollo’s Songdealt with the horrors of war, A Message to Adolf claims that these horrors are rooted in a greater evil: nationalism.
Throughout the series, Tezuka draws parallels between the path that led from German nationalism to the crimes of Nazism and the Holocaust and those that led from Japanese nationalism to the crimes committed by Imperial Japan toward its own citizens and the people of Asia. It is here that Tezuka reveals his complex perspective of the Jews as people: He expresses his admiration for The Wandering Jew, who has no country, no army, and therefore does not declare war upon others. The very same argument used by anti-Semites about the lack of national roots among the Jews, an argument leading to suspicion toward their thriving in different countries and cultures, was seen by Tezuka as ideal existence, one that is not plagued by the same dangers that nationalism is bound to deteriorate into. When Kaufman offends a Jewish violinist on a death march, saying that all Jews are “cockroaches,” the violinist responds:
What is it that you “humans” hate so much about cockroaches? … No other species seem to mind them the way you do. And besides, cockroaches will inherit the Earth long after your so-called human race is extinguished.
With this, Tezuka has brilliantly turned an anti-Semitic insult on its head: the ability of cockroaches to survive under the harshest circumstances is not unlike that of the Jews. The fact remains that the stateless Jews have managed to survive and maintain their own identity while established nation-states have crumbled to ashes.
This deep ambivalence finds its ultimate expression in the concluding chapters of A Message to Adolf, in which Tezuka mourns the fact that the Jews have embraced the same nationalism by creating their own state. Yet I would hesitate to label Tezuka as an anti-Zionist, at least not in the way the term is widely perceived today; Palestinian national inspirations are harshly criticized in the series as well. Tetzuka summarizes the Israeli-Arab conflict in this painfully accurate description: “The Jews fought to protect their new homeland, and the Arabs fought to drive out their Jewish enemies. Each people upheld their own concept of justice.”
The Israeli-Arab conflict was, for Tezuka, a manifestation of the never-ending tragedy of national conflicts and national states.
Of course, Tezuka could express this worldview from a comfortable position: His own country, in which he was born and lived throughout his entire life, had to give up its military aspirations following WWII, but not its national identity; like most Japanese, he never experienced the hardships of immigration, certainly not of the kind endured by people who had no homeland of their own to go back to. Nonetheless, A Message to Adolf remains a deep exploration of the meaning of the Holocaust and Jewish culture, which in the field of comics is second only to Art Spiegelman’s Maus.
Apollo’s Song and A Message to Adolf demonstrate the depth that Tezuka has brought not only to Japanese comics but to the art of comics as a whole, and they do this far better than the flattering portrayal of the artist in The Osamu Tezuka Story: A Life in Manga and Anime. Nonetheless, Ban’s book provides an interesting detailed look into Tezuka’s own life story, and many episodes in this story go a long way in explaining why he was attracted to Jewish history and culture.
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You can help support Tablet’s unique brand of Jewish journalism. Click here to donate today.
Raz Greenberg is a teaching fellow at the Hebrew University. His articles and reviews have appeared in Haaretz, YNET, Strange Horizons,and SF Signal, among other publications. He has been a member of The Israeli Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy since 1997.
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Why Trump supporters lack character; the conservative voice of the 'Boston Globe'; manga's Jewish masterpieces; more
Tablet Magazine
What Does Donald Trump Mean to the KKK?
Attention, mostly. And validation. by Armin RosenThe Ku Klux Klan’s endorsement of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump appeared online earlier this week, prompting Trump’s campaign to repudiate the hate group’s support. The October issue of The Crusader, the Harrison, Arkansas-based Klan newsletter that carried the endorsement, includes a second notable item as well: Thomas Robb’s eulogy for Klan leader Willis Carto, the white supremacist author and Nazi enthusiast whose newsletters once reached 400,000 subscribers, and whose writings and ideas have inspired half-a-century’s worth of politically engaged racists. Robb, citing a line from book of Proverbs, praised Carto as “a wise son who faithfully listened to the instructions of his fathers.”
Carto was a towering figure on the white nationalist fringe, but a shadowy one. “The slippery eels of our bigoted id swim below the surface, but they occasionally surface,” Tablet’s Mark Oppenheimer wrote in November of 2015, after Carto’s death. “Carto, who was allergic to personal publicity, would have been a tough profile to write, but I wish someone had tried. I wish I had.”
Carto’s cameo alongside the Klan’s official Trump endorsement is a reminder that concerned citizens no longer have the luxury—or maybe never had the luxury—of ignoring the beliefs and activities of the ever-encroaching political fringe. Trump clearly means something to America’s white nationalists: “Make America Great Again!” trumpets the headline topping the front page The Crusader, with the Republican candidate flashing a thumbs-up just inches below.
The white supremacist predilection for Trump’s campaign, and the candidate’s occasional failures to sufficiently distance himself from their support, has been a recurring theme of this election season. As The Daily Beast reported this week, the Trump campaign hasn’t returned all of the donations it received from William Johnson, a white nationalist organizer who funded a recent series of homophobic pro-Trump robocalls. Trump, who disavowed former KKK Imperial Wizard David Duke’s support earlier this year, also denounced this endorsement. But the candidate’s repudiations can’t mask the fact that America’s racists see something of themselves in him.
As the noted extremism scholar John Berger recounted in a deeply researched storyfor Politico on the attitudes of white nationalists towards Trump’s presidential campaign, the nation’s most committed and politically-engaged bigots were initially skeptical of Trump, and weren’t fully convinced of his racialist bonafides until deep into the Republican primary. Yet Trump “slowly but relentlessly overcame widespread distrust and contempt, as white nationalists came to believe he was their candidate—or at least the best candidate they could realistically expect.” Thanks to Trump’s “steady, consistent push for an anti-immigration platform, one of the central policy pillars of the nationalist right…white-nationalists began to rally around Trump as its closest political ally in a generation” and “began to detect what members called ‘wink-wink-wink’ communications from the candidate.” White nationalists believe that Trump has given them the mainstream acknowledgement and validation that they’ve always craved.
Some residual skepticism persists in The Crusader’s endorsement issue: a story on page 11 claims that neither Duke nor Robb, who authored the front-page article, has formally endorsed Trump yet, but lauds the candidate for “moving the dialogue forward” on the Klan’s suite of issues. Even the front page story expresses some lingering doubt as to whether Trump really grasps the stakes of America’s ongoing race war: “Making America great again…is not dependent on a Trump presidency but whether you and I can regain the spirit of our forefathers,” Robb’s article reads. “I am afraid most conservatives (including Trump) have no understanding of this racial time bomb that is ticking.” But in Robb’s view, Trump at least motions towards making America great again—which is enough for people who see a clear connection between America’s greatness and its racial composition. As Robb writes, Trump’s slogan “appeals to people who are sadly realizing that something has happened to America. And it’s not good!” Trump isn’t one of us, Robb is saying—but hey, close enough.
The Crusader also offers a rich, if deeply unedifying, contextualization of Robb’s mindset. Racism is a family affair: just try and count the number of Robbs who appear in this issue, or the number of times that a member of the Robb family is mentioned. (This nepotism could be a logical extension of the Klan’s blood-and-soil-obsessed politics, but it’s possibly also a sign of the movement lacking in new membership). The Crusader is flush with mundane details about Klan life: “As a Klanswoman in the Knights, I wanted to thank you for accepting my son and daughter into the Crusader Youth Corps,” Laura from San Diego writes on page 2. The paper betrays a candid self-awareness of the Klan’s profound branding problems: “We fully recognize the disadvantages that sometimes comes with the name KKK,” one article notes. The photos from the 2016 Faith and Freedom Conference could document any wholesome church retreat, if you just ignore the Confederate flags, or the fact that the founder of Stormfront appears in one of them.
The Klan projects their own prejudices onto their opponents: “Mothers of the Movement are perhaps one of the highest profiled [sic.] hate groups in America today,” we learn of the Black Lives Matter-affiliated organization, on page 3. The Crusader is scornful of “non-white immigration,” and of any conceivable racial or sexual minority. But only the Jews get the full-page treatment: George Soros’s Jewish origins are noted on page three; an item connecting Jews to Bolshevism takes up a page-and-a-half. The Crusader is a Christian-nationalist publication, and the Jews are its go-to racial-theological enemy.
But there’s one weird source of potential encouragement (if you can really call it that) within the morass of this issue, and it has to do with Carto. The godfather of white nationalism kept a low profile, but in The Crusader, we get a reminder of where his earthly remains ended up, at least: Arlington National Cemetery. Carto earned a Purple Heart after being injured fighting in the Philippines in World War II, but as The Huffington Post reported, he later joked that he had been fighting on the wrong side of World War II, and wanted to be buried in Arlington for the irony: “‘I’m probably America’s biggest Hitler fan, but I’ll be buried alongside all these World War II vets,’” one of Carto’s colleagues recalled him saying. No matter: In America, even virulent, unapologetic racists with an openly scornful relationship towards their own country can be interred in the nation’s most sacred ground, so long as they’ve served the country honorably. The head of the Klan can even give the eulogy.
One can debate the merits of this weirdly egalitarian policy, which enabled the grotesque spectacle of a professional Klansman lauding the achievements of a professional Nazi sympathizer mere meters from John F. Kennedy and the Unknown Soldier. It’s perhaps a sign of America’s civic weakness that it still has to encompass and contain such deep and galling contradictions—but a sign of its health, perhaps, that it can even encompass them at all. Of course, that might not remain true forever. Election day is in less than a week, after all.
Armin Rosen is a New York-based writer. He has written for The Atlantic, City Journal, andWorld Affairs Journal, and was recently a senior reporter for Business Insider.
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The Republican Jewish Coalition Is Cutting Off Donald Trump
In 2012, 87 percent of RJC’s board donated to Mitt Romney. In 2016, 81 percent have refused to donate to Trump. by Yair RosenbergOn the surface, the Republican Jewish Coalition has been a good soldier this election. Officially, the group supports its party’s nominee for president, Donald Trump, despite his overwhelming unpopularity among nearly every Jewish conservative intellectual of note. But if one follows the money, as JTA’s Ben Sales has, it tells a very different story.
On Osamu Tezuka’s 88th birthday, a look at the many ways the Japanese master told Jewish stories, and influenced the Jewish storytellers of America’s own comics boomThe mammoth 928-page volume of The Osamu Tezuka Story: A Life in Manga and Anime (recently published in English by Stone Bridge Press), opens with a provocative question: How have manga—Japanese comics—become an integral part of Japanese society, read practically anywhere, by all age groups, and touching every imaginable subject and genre, when, despite their global fame, American comics never reached the same cultural magnitude even in their own country? The answer that the book offers is simple: American comics never had Osamu Tezuka.
To be sure, it’s not just a simple, but also a simplistic explanation (mainstream manga never had to endure anything similar to the Comics Code Authority that American comics had to endure for decades, for example). Yet it is true that the uniqueness of Japanese comics culture is strongly tied to the uniqueness of Osamu Tezuka (1928-1989), widely known as Japan’s “God of Manga.” The title itself implies this uniqueness—do we have a “god of comics” in America? How about France? In Belgium, the legendary Georges Remi, better known as Hergé, can be said to hold a cultural significance that is somewhat similar to that of Tezuka in his native country, but Hergé is almost exclusively associated with a single title—The Adventures of Tintin—whereas Tezuka has created dozens of iconic characters that became a part of Japan’s popular culture, in an output that’s estimated to be 150,000 pages that he drew in his rather short lifetime. Tezuka found time for other things as well: He graduated from medical school and was licensed to practice as a doctor; produced hundreds of hours of animation in both films and television shows, putting Japan on the global animation map and making animation one of his country’s leading cultural exports; published weekly film reviews; and appeared in television advertisements. Tezuka was also an obsessive reader, and his vast knowledge of literature, history, science, and philosophy often echoes in his artworks. This intellectual quality takes Tezuka’s global influence deeper than that of most of his Japanese colleagues’: The most famous case of such influence may be the inspiration that his animal adventure series Jungle Emperor Leo (known in English as Kimba the White Lion) provided for the Disney hit film The Lion King.
With the rise in popularity of manga among Western readers, the 21st century saw a surge of interest in Tezuka in the English-speaking world. Not only were readers treated with many translations of his works, but scholarly studies of these works also began to appear: Frederik L. Schodt’s The Astro Boy Essays (2007) traces the history and cultural influence of one of Tezuka’s most beloved heroes; Helen McCarthy’s The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga (2009) is a lavishly illustrated coffee-table guide to Tezuka’s works; and Natsu Onoda Power’s God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-World War II Manga (2009) is a study of the influence of stage-theater on Tezuka’s style.
The Osamu Tezuka Story: A Life in Manga and Anime, which now joins that list, is something of a different animal. Written and illustrated by Toshio Ban, who worked as one of Tezuka’s chief assistants, the book is a biography of Tezuka in a graphic-novel format. It tells the story of Tezuka’s life, from his birth through his adolescent years in the shadow of World War II to his great postwar success up to his death. Though I am sure most of the book’s potential readers are already familiar with his biography, Ban’s book tells it in an unparalleled detail, both visually and narratively. Interestingly enough, the book keeps a constant low-key tone, even when approaching the different personal and artistic conflicts that Tezuka has encountered throughout his career. But there is something misleading in the book’s subtitle: A Life in Manga and Anime is definitely more about Tezuka’s life and less about his comics or animation. The book is mostly about the many twists and turns in Tezuka’s career as a comics artist and animation producer (devoting a lot of space to the great suffering publishers had to endure while waiting for Tezuka to deliver his weekly pages), with occasional brief discussions about the content and the style of his works.
Yet even in these brief discussions, readers can find surprising links that lead from Tezuka’s works to Jewish culture and history. In his youth, when Tezuka began shaping his personal style of drawing and storytelling, introducing traits that accompany the mainstream manga industry to this very day (characters with large round eyes, cinematic page layouts, and frequent use of silent pages with no text), he drew influence from fellow Japanese artists along foreign sources of inspiration, most notably Disney. Often overlooked, however, is the equally important influence that Disney’s greatest rivals, the brothers Max and David Fleischer, had on Tezuka with their Betty Boop and Popeye the Sailor cartoons that reflected (and sometimes even directly referred to) their creators’ background as Jewish immigrants in urban America. Even less well-known (though nicely referred to in Ban’s book) is the important influence that Tezuka drew from Yiddish cartoonist Milt Gross and his silent graphic novel He Done Her Wrong, which also strongly reflected its author’s Jewish heritage.
Works drawn by Tezuka toward the later part of his career—decidedly darker and more pessimistic in comparison to his immediate postwar works—show an increasing interest in Jewish life and history, an interest that made it to the narrative of some of his most acclaimed works. His 1970 series Apollo’s Song is a grim tale of a violent young man forced to learn the meaning of love through living the different painful ordeals of tragic figures. One such figure is a Nazi officer who accompanies Jewish prisoners on a train to a death camp and falls in love with a Jewish girl during the journey. The portrayal of the Holocaust in the story feels more like a portrayal of abstract evil rather than concrete history, but another element of the story, the horror of war, feels very concrete and real.
As demonstrated in The Osamu Tezuka Story: A Life in Manga and Anime, Tezuka had plenty of personal experience to draw from when it came to the horrors of war, with his adolescent years dominated by the destruction brought by Allies’ bombings and the sight of dead bodies scattered in the streets becoming something of a daily routine. While some may find this connection troubling given the nature of Japan’s involvement in WWII, it appears that for Tezuka, the Holocaust and his own personal experience were symbolic of just how far human cruelty can reach.
A deeper understanding of Jewish history can be found at Dawn, the eighth volume of Tezuka’s epic Phoenix cycle of historical and futuristic stories that follow the human race’s destructive quest for immortality. Published in the mid-’70s, Dawn is a science-fiction tale of a woman named Romy who finds herself abandoned on a distant planet and eventually attempts to make her way back to Earth. During her journey, Romy compares herself to the Jews who were exiled from their homeland for thousands of years, yet never gave up the hope of returning to it, eventually doing so and re-establishing it as their national state. But just how fruitful is this process of return, given that both the Jewish people and the state of Israel (we are to assume) no longer exist as separate cultural/national categories in the distant future in which the story takes place—or, for that matter, that Romy’s own return to her home planet proves to be a tragic affair? While Tezuka does not give a direct answer to this question in Dawn, he does provide it in one of his final works, A Message to Adolf.
Serialized in the mid-1980s, A Message to Adolf is considered among the greatest masterpieces of not only Tezuka’s works but of Japanese and global comics as well. The series tells the story of people who share the same first name—Adolf Kamil, the son of a Jewish family that found refuge from Nazi Germany in the Japanese city of Kobe, and Adolf Kaufman, the son of a senior Nazi diplomat who lives in the same city. The story begins in the 1930s, as both protagonists become friends after being bullied by local Japanese children who treat them as dangerous foreigners. But their friendship turns into bitter hatred as greater events place them on the opposing sides of history over the course of six decades—from the deadly battlefields of Europe and Asia in WWII through the Holocaust all the way to Israeli-Arab conflict.
Although much wider in scope, A Message to Adolf places the Holocaust in the same context as Apollo’s Song did, that of WWII, hence sharing the weakness of the former work—treating a systematic form of mass-murder of innocent people as the ultimate manifestation of war, even a cruel one, rather than a unique affair. However, A Message to Adolf also extends the context significantly. If Apollo’s Songdealt with the horrors of war, A Message to Adolf claims that these horrors are rooted in a greater evil: nationalism.
Throughout the series, Tezuka draws parallels between the path that led from German nationalism to the crimes of Nazism and the Holocaust and those that led from Japanese nationalism to the crimes committed by Imperial Japan toward its own citizens and the people of Asia. It is here that Tezuka reveals his complex perspective of the Jews as people: He expresses his admiration for The Wandering Jew, who has no country, no army, and therefore does not declare war upon others. The very same argument used by anti-Semites about the lack of national roots among the Jews, an argument leading to suspicion toward their thriving in different countries and cultures, was seen by Tezuka as ideal existence, one that is not plagued by the same dangers that nationalism is bound to deteriorate into. When Kaufman offends a Jewish violinist on a death march, saying that all Jews are “cockroaches,” the violinist responds:
What is it that you “humans” hate so much about cockroaches? … No other species seem to mind them the way you do. And besides, cockroaches will inherit the Earth long after your so-called human race is extinguished.
With this, Tezuka has brilliantly turned an anti-Semitic insult on its head: the ability of cockroaches to survive under the harshest circumstances is not unlike that of the Jews. The fact remains that the stateless Jews have managed to survive and maintain their own identity while established nation-states have crumbled to ashes.
This deep ambivalence finds its ultimate expression in the concluding chapters of A Message to Adolf, in which Tezuka mourns the fact that the Jews have embraced the same nationalism by creating their own state. Yet I would hesitate to label Tezuka as an anti-Zionist, at least not in the way the term is widely perceived today; Palestinian national inspirations are harshly criticized in the series as well. Tetzuka summarizes the Israeli-Arab conflict in this painfully accurate description: “The Jews fought to protect their new homeland, and the Arabs fought to drive out their Jewish enemies. Each people upheld their own concept of justice.”
The Israeli-Arab conflict was, for Tezuka, a manifestation of the never-ending tragedy of national conflicts and national states.
Of course, Tezuka could express this worldview from a comfortable position: His own country, in which he was born and lived throughout his entire life, had to give up its military aspirations following WWII, but not its national identity; like most Japanese, he never experienced the hardships of immigration, certainly not of the kind endured by people who had no homeland of their own to go back to. Nonetheless, A Message to Adolf remains a deep exploration of the meaning of the Holocaust and Jewish culture, which in the field of comics is second only to Art Spiegelman’s Maus.
Apollo’s Song and A Message to Adolf demonstrate the depth that Tezuka has brought not only to Japanese comics but to the art of comics as a whole, and they do this far better than the flattering portrayal of the artist in The Osamu Tezuka Story: A Life in Manga and Anime. Nonetheless, Ban’s book provides an interesting detailed look into Tezuka’s own life story, and many episodes in this story go a long way in explaining why he was attracted to Jewish history and culture.
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Raz Greenberg is a teaching fellow at the Hebrew University. His articles and reviews have appeared in Haaretz, YNET, Strange Horizons,and SF Signal, among other publications. He has been a member of The Israeli Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy since 1997.
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Why Trump supporters lack character; the conservative voice of the 'Boston Globe'; manga's Jewish masterpieces; more
Tablet Magazine
What Does Donald Trump Mean to the KKK?Attention, mostly. And validation. by Armin RosenThe Ku Klux Klan’s endorsement of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump appeared online earlier this week, prompting Trump’s campaign to repudiate the hate group’s support. The October issue of The Crusader, the Harrison, Arkansas-based Klan newsletter that carried the endorsement, includes a second notable item as well: Thomas Robb’s eulogy for Klan leader Willis Carto, the white supremacist author and Nazi enthusiast whose newsletters once reached 400,000 subscribers, and whose writings and ideas have inspired half-a-century’s worth of politically engaged racists. Robb, citing a line from book of Proverbs, praised Carto as “a wise son who faithfully listened to the instructions of his fathers.”
Carto was a towering figure on the white nationalist fringe, but a shadowy one. “The slippery eels of our bigoted id swim below the surface, but they occasionally surface,” Tablet’s Mark Oppenheimer wrote in November of 2015, after Carto’s death. “Carto, who was allergic to personal publicity, would have been a tough profile to write, but I wish someone had tried. I wish I had.”
Carto’s cameo alongside the Klan’s official Trump endorsement is a reminder that concerned citizens no longer have the luxury—or maybe never had the luxury—of ignoring the beliefs and activities of the ever-encroaching political fringe. Trump clearly means something to America’s white nationalists: “Make America Great Again!” trumpets the headline topping the front page The Crusader, with the Republican candidate flashing a thumbs-up just inches below.
The white supremacist predilection for Trump’s campaign, and the candidate’s occasional failures to sufficiently distance himself from their support, has been a recurring theme of this election season. As The Daily Beast reported this week, the Trump campaign hasn’t returned all of the donations it received from William Johnson, a white nationalist organizer who funded a recent series of homophobic pro-Trump robocalls. Trump, who disavowed former KKK Imperial Wizard David Duke’s support earlier this year, also denounced this endorsement. But the candidate’s repudiations can’t mask the fact that America’s racists see something of themselves in him.
As the noted extremism scholar John Berger recounted in a deeply researched storyfor Politico on the attitudes of white nationalists towards Trump’s presidential campaign, the nation’s most committed and politically-engaged bigots were initially skeptical of Trump, and weren’t fully convinced of his racialist bonafides until deep into the Republican primary. Yet Trump “slowly but relentlessly overcame widespread distrust and contempt, as white nationalists came to believe he was their candidate—or at least the best candidate they could realistically expect.” Thanks to Trump’s “steady, consistent push for an anti-immigration platform, one of the central policy pillars of the nationalist right…white-nationalists began to rally around Trump as its closest political ally in a generation” and “began to detect what members called ‘wink-wink-wink’ communications from the candidate.” White nationalists believe that Trump has given them the mainstream acknowledgement and validation that they’ve always craved.
Some residual skepticism persists in The Crusader’s endorsement issue: a story on page 11 claims that neither Duke nor Robb, who authored the front-page article, has formally endorsed Trump yet, but lauds the candidate for “moving the dialogue forward” on the Klan’s suite of issues. Even the front page story expresses some lingering doubt as to whether Trump really grasps the stakes of America’s ongoing race war: “Making America great again…is not dependent on a Trump presidency but whether you and I can regain the spirit of our forefathers,” Robb’s article reads. “I am afraid most conservatives (including Trump) have no understanding of this racial time bomb that is ticking.” But in Robb’s view, Trump at least motions towards making America great again—which is enough for people who see a clear connection between America’s greatness and its racial composition. As Robb writes, Trump’s slogan “appeals to people who are sadly realizing that something has happened to America. And it’s not good!” Trump isn’t one of us, Robb is saying—but hey, close enough.
The Crusader also offers a rich, if deeply unedifying, contextualization of Robb’s mindset. Racism is a family affair: just try and count the number of Robbs who appear in this issue, or the number of times that a member of the Robb family is mentioned. (This nepotism could be a logical extension of the Klan’s blood-and-soil-obsessed politics, but it’s possibly also a sign of the movement lacking in new membership). The Crusader is flush with mundane details about Klan life: “As a Klanswoman in the Knights, I wanted to thank you for accepting my son and daughter into the Crusader Youth Corps,” Laura from San Diego writes on page 2. The paper betrays a candid self-awareness of the Klan’s profound branding problems: “We fully recognize the disadvantages that sometimes comes with the name KKK,” one article notes. The photos from the 2016 Faith and Freedom Conference could document any wholesome church retreat, if you just ignore the Confederate flags, or the fact that the founder of Stormfront appears in one of them.
The Klan projects their own prejudices onto their opponents: “Mothers of the Movement are perhaps one of the highest profiled [sic.] hate groups in America today,” we learn of the Black Lives Matter-affiliated organization, on page 3. The Crusader is scornful of “non-white immigration,” and of any conceivable racial or sexual minority. But only the Jews get the full-page treatment: George Soros’s Jewish origins are noted on page three; an item connecting Jews to Bolshevism takes up a page-and-a-half. The Crusader is a Christian-nationalist publication, and the Jews are its go-to racial-theological enemy.
But there’s one weird source of potential encouragement (if you can really call it that) within the morass of this issue, and it has to do with Carto. The godfather of white nationalism kept a low profile, but in The Crusader, we get a reminder of where his earthly remains ended up, at least: Arlington National Cemetery. Carto earned a Purple Heart after being injured fighting in the Philippines in World War II, but as The Huffington Post reported, he later joked that he had been fighting on the wrong side of World War II, and wanted to be buried in Arlington for the irony: “‘I’m probably America’s biggest Hitler fan, but I’ll be buried alongside all these World War II vets,’” one of Carto’s colleagues recalled him saying. No matter: In America, even virulent, unapologetic racists with an openly scornful relationship towards their own country can be interred in the nation’s most sacred ground, so long as they’ve served the country honorably. The head of the Klan can even give the eulogy.
One can debate the merits of this weirdly egalitarian policy, which enabled the grotesque spectacle of a professional Klansman lauding the achievements of a professional Nazi sympathizer mere meters from John F. Kennedy and the Unknown Soldier. It’s perhaps a sign of America’s civic weakness that it still has to encompass and contain such deep and galling contradictions—but a sign of its health, perhaps, that it can even encompass them at all. Of course, that might not remain true forever. Election day is in less than a week, after all.
Armin Rosen is a New York-based writer. He has written for The Atlantic, City Journal, andWorld Affairs Journal, and was recently a senior reporter for Business Insider.
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The Republican Jewish Coalition Is Cutting Off Donald TrumpIn 2012, 87 percent of RJC’s board donated to Mitt Romney. In 2016, 81 percent have refused to donate to Trump. by Yair RosenbergOn the surface, the Republican Jewish Coalition has been a good soldier this election. Officially, the group supports its party’s nominee for president, Donald Trump, despite his overwhelming unpopularity among nearly every Jewish conservative intellectual of note. But if one follows the money, as JTA’s Ben Sales has, it tells a very different story.
“A JTA survey of federal campaign contribution records shows that more than 80 percent of the RJC board has declined to donate to its party’s presidential nominee,” reported Sales. “The numbers stand in stark contrast to previous election cycles. In 2012 and 2008, the vast majority of the current board members donated to Mitt Romney and John McCain, respectively, with many giving the maximum direct donation of $5,000.”In a nutshell, whereas 87 percent of the board’s active donors backed Romney and McCain with their wallets, 81 percent have refused to back Trump, an astonishing and revealing reversal. Notably, Sales finds, many of these same donors who spurned Trump have readily donated to Republican congressional campaigns, making quite clear the specific source of their distaste.
Sales’s reporting is consistent with previous work by The Wall Street Journal and Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, which both found that traditionally stalwart Republican Jewish donors were cutting off Trump. In May, WSJ found that while “Republican Jewish Coalition board members gave $16.5 million to Romney in 2012… They gave $5400 to Trump through May.” In September, an analysis by two political science professors in FiveThirtyEight determined that while 70 percent of Jewish donor cash went to Obama in 2012, 95 percent has gone to Clinton in 2016, due to conservative Jewish donors rejecting Trump.
In this regard, Sheldon Adelson, who has given $30 million to the Trump campaign, is essentially the exception that proves the rule (and even he has fallen far short of the $100 million he originally promised).
The RJC board’s telling cold shoulder to Trump’s campaign coffers is yet another example of how many Jewish conservatives have marshaled resistance to the Republican nominee, despite some ill-informed claims to the contrary.
Previous: No, Jewish Conservatives Haven’t Been Silent on Trump
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Brandeis University Hosts Historic Lenny Bruce ConferenceAcademics and fans of Lenny Bruce gathered in Waltham, Mass., last week to let out some analytical laughs and celebrate the legedary comedian by Stephen SilverA comedian as transgressive as Lenny Bruce would may very well not be welcomed on college campuses, were he alive today. But his spirit, and his unique and uninhibited brand of comedy, was welcomed to Brandeis University last week for a two-day conference dedicated to his legacy, “Comedy and the Constitution: The Legacy of Lenny Bruce.”
Poster for Lenny Bruce’s last series of performances at The Fillmore in San Francisco on June 24 and 25, 1966. (Wikimedia)Brandeis is in many ways, a natural place for a Lenny Bruce conference. It’s a Jewish-sponsored university, named for a First Amendment stalwart, which in recent years has been a frequent battleground for fights over political correctness. The first-of-its-kind conference doubled as the formal opening of an exhibition of Bruce’s papers and personal effects—a deal made possible in 2014 by a gift from the Hugh M. Hefner Foundation—coming just a couple of months after the 50th anniversary of the comedian’s death.
Hefner’s daughter, Christie, was on hand to deliver a keynote address, and Bruce’s daughter Kitty Bruce cut the ribbon—two women whose fathers were major cultural figures of mid-century who fought titanic free-speech battles, with very different outcomes. “We need more Lenny Bruces,” Kitty Bruce said. “My father caused some people to become very uncomfortable, because he poked around their core belief systems. My father said: Let me tell you the truth.”
To say this wasn’t a typically dry academic conference would be an understatement. There was, for one thing, a lot more cursing—one presenter began his paper by reciting George Carlin’s “Seven Dirty Words,” an act no doubt inspired by Bruce—and a lot more Yiddish: It’s probably the first academic forum in history to include use of the phrase “the knish versus the schlong,” as mentioned by Brandeis professor Joyce Antler while presenting a paper called “From Sophie Tucker to Sarah Silverman: The Subversive Potential of Jewish Women’s Humor.”
There was, of course, much analysis of Bruce’s comedy itself, along with the work that both influenced him and was influenced by him—at various times, academic viewpoints and analyses were backed up by clips from Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Sarah Silverman Program, and Seinfeld. In all, it was a two-day deep dive into about a century of Judaism, humor and subversion. There were multiple instances in which a presenter quoted an old Allan Sherman song or Mel Brooks routine and the crowd finished the sentence along with them. At one point, a presenter asked the audience to name the lone Yiddish term in Sarah Silverman’s 2005 concert film Jesus Is Magic. The (correct) answer soon emerged: Tuchas!
As pointed out by Alexander Wohl in a paper called “Not Your Mother’s Borscht: Lenny Bruce and the Yiddishization of American Comedy,” Bruce never shied away from his Jewishness. He spoke Yiddish on stage, which at one point was a way for comics to sneak material past censors. He performed routines like “How Negroes and Jews Became Entertainers” and “Jewish vs. Goyishe.”
Speakers included several non-academics, including the pioneering TV writer Susan Silver, and Cantor Jeff Klepper, who performed Bob Dylan’s eponymous song about Bruce. Lewis Black, another noted Bruce comedy heir, spoke at the conference’s dinner. Bruce’s longtime lawyer, Martin Garbus, pointed out that Bruce may well have been horrified by the notion of a conference celebrating his work.
Vox Vault: Divine Comedy
Related: Lenny Bruce Everywhere
Stephen Silver is a journalist in the Philadelphia area whose work has appeared in Philadelphia Magazine, CSNPhilly.com, Splice Today, Screenrant.com, New York Press, and the Good Men Project. Follow him on Twitter @StephenSilver.
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