By: Rabbi Dov Fischer
A person applies for admission to college or grad school. Or to the federal or state or municipal government for a Small Business Loan or other program to help promote commerce. Or for a job at most anywhere. The résumé is submitted and is competitive. Or the business loan paperwork is in perfect order. Or the job applicant is able-bodied and dependable. Time passes, and a decision is made as to whom to admit, or who gets the government business benefit, or who gets the job. And it turns out that the decision went to someone based on race. The person with lesser credentials won because of his (male) or her (female) or their (whatever other gender they got) race.
That is racism. Of course it is racism. It is an “ism” derived from and based on race. If the English language still has any words not yet deconstructed by the Left, that is the very definition of racism: admitting people to schools, supporting businesses, hiring for work … based on race. It is racism, and racism is the theological sacrament of the Left.
We now are half a century into “Affirmative Action.” As with all Left initiatives, words are distorted to mean things they are not because the Left refuses to call the Truth by the truth. When an Arab Muslim terrorist murders Americans at a military base, the Left calls it “workplace violence.” Obamacare is called the “Affordable Care Act” even though it gyrated health-care prices through the roof and forced many to lose their preferred doctors and health plans. Likewise with “Affirmative Action.” Instead of honestly calling it “Quotas,” they call it “Goals and Timetables.” But it is quotas. Here is why.
The government tells an entrepreneur that they will leave her alone if Albanians comprise at least 18 percent of her workforce. (Why Albanians? Why not?) They add, of course, that she should know that America is fair (wink, wink), and she of course will not necessarily get into any trouble if Albanians comprise fewer than 18 percent of her workforce, but the government then might just need to come in and take a peek in her books to figure out why she had so much trouble finding enough qualified Albanians to hire.
She sits down with her husband or her lesbian life partner or whatever else they got and asks herself, “Do I want the government poking around my life, auditing my Widgets business, and do I want to have to fill out dozens of papers explaining why 18 percent of my employees are not from Albania and proving that I am not anti-Albanian and that I reached out to Albanians?” Only an idiot would say, “Yes, please, I want Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch and all the others to come in and poke.” So here is what happens: She double-checks on the “Affirmative Action Goal” that the government has “recommended,” and she sees that they recommend she hire a workforce that is at least 18 percent Albanian. She understands that if she treats the “goal” as a “quota” and hires the necessary quota of Albanians, she will be left alone. So she does. Thus, the “goal” inexorably becomes a “quota.”
Meanwhile, someone else has a job opening and has the perfect candidate for the job. Maybe the entrepreneur knows the guy personally from having served with him under fire in the military. Or maybe he once before worked famously with the guy. Or maybe that potential hire has been recommended by the entrepreneur’s colleague. The problem is that there is “Affirmative Action” for Albanians. And no one wants Eric Holder or Loretta Lynch poking around. So here is what the entrepreneur does: He advertises in Albanian publications, solicits Albanians wherever he can find them, and he interviews 10 or 20 of them — with absolutely no intention to hire any of them.
So these Albanians take time off from work, change their schedules, buy airline tickets and fly to interview for a job they will not get. The entrepreneur takes three days out of his life and productivity to interview 10 or 20 Albanians he never will hire. Each interview runs between 30 to 45 minutes. Maybe he also takes each Albanian out to lunch. He also arranges for two or three others in his mid-level management to interview the unsuspectingly hapless Albanians. He then carefully documents each time-wasted interview copiously, documenting for the government agency that will poke around, and then he hires the guy he wanted to hire three weeks ago. Everyone’s time is wasted. People’s hopes are raised falsely.
Or a white guy has a business. He wants to get a business loan or benefit from some other government business-supporting program. He finds out that his business has all the needed qualifications, except for two small problems: (i) he is White, and (ii) he is … a he. So he finds himself a woman … who is … Blue or Green or Purple or Whatever Color the Government Wants … and even better if she is an Albanian … and he makes a deal: “You be the president of my company, or whatever title the government requires, and I will pay you ‘x’ amount of dollars per year for allowing me to use you as my Front to get the government loan.” Now he is a “minority-owned business.” So he qualifies — er, she qualifies — for the government program.
This all is racism in a society that no longer is racist. Fifty years after “Affirmative Action,” we now are in the third generation; that should be more than enough time to shift any imbalances. Look at the immigrants who came here in the 1880s from Germany, Italy, Poland, Ireland, Russia — even Albania. After 50 years there still was some prejudice. For example, American-born Jewish people who descended from Jewish immigrants who arrived here legally from Russia between 1881 to 1914 still could not get into the Ivy League in the 1940s and 1950s because of the Ivy League’s anti-Semitic admission quotas.
The few who did slip in, say to an Ivy League law school, could not get hired by any respectable law firm in America. So the Jews had to start their own law firms or practice bankruptcy law because the elite major law firms needed some attorneys who specialized in bankruptcy work but found the practice area too greasy and grimy to touch themselves, so they told the Jews to do it if they wanted in. Jews could not get high-level executive positions in American banks or other such corporations, so they had to found their own companies and industries.
And so it went with continued latent discrimination against Irish Americans, Italians, Poles, Germans, and others who had arrived here legally, worked hard and honorably, saw their kids still facing discrimination half a century later, but now could not be stopped from achieving great things because they had worked their way into the American dream through honor, honesty, ethics, and hard work. Asian-Americans particularly got the short end of the stick. We encouraged Chinese to come here to build the western half of the Trans-Pacific railroad, and then we passed the Chinese Exclusion Act to deny them citizenship through World War II. We interned 110,000 Japanese Americans. Yet that did not stop their descendants from attaining their slice of the American pie, even in the face of new anti-Asian quotas in the Ivy League and at other major universities.
Fifty years of government programming to offset imbalances is ample. With Affirmative Action, many Americans in newly burned-out neighborhoods now can look outside the window and see what it has wrought. Fifty years of correcting an imbalance. Fifty years of assuring that goals and timetables have been met. Fifty years of college and graduate school degrees. Fifty years of government programs, government loans, government food assistance, government housing programs. Fifty years, paid with taxes collected from the “Haves” on all sides of the spectrum. Fifty years of systemic largesse. If you live in Minneapolis, Chicago, St. Louis, or even down the block from Macy’s at Herald Square — look outside the window.
The only racism in America that is systemic — deeply ingrained into the system — is on the left. It is so disgusting that it is hard even to speak about it. It is shameful, and it exists for one reason only: for White leftists to grab votes, to attract more viewers to their television channels at a time that no Malaysian planes are missing so as to increase advertising revenue, to claw for power in whatever field they practice. How low will they grovel to get power? They will kneel on the floor. They actually will kneel on the floor, groveling for power.
Of course, as Nancy Pelosi just found, she kneeled so long that she could not even get back up. You think she was kneeling to Jesus? Nancy Pelosi is America’s leading Catholic proponent of abortion — though Joe Biden, Andrew Cuomo, and a boatload of other Democrat Catholics would take great offense at Nancy Pelosi getting all the credit for funding the killing of fetuses, especially in the Black community. That Pelosi is kneeling to Jesus?
And who, pray tell, was Schumer kneeling to? He claims to be Jewish, so he is not kneeling to Jesus. But wait! It is a core tenet of Judaism that kneeling is forbidden except on Yom Kippur during the recitation of the Kohen service that occurred at the Holy Temple in Jerusalem during Talmudic times. Otherwise, it is so fundamentally against Judaism to kneel that every Jewish child learns the story associated with Talmud Tractate Gittin 57b of “The Woman and Her Seven Sons.” During anti-Jewish persecutions, an evil Emperor ordered each of the woman’s sons, one by one, to show fealty to the foreign gods by kneeling since he knew that, as a core tenet, Jews are forbidden ever to kneel. None of the sons would kneel; therefore each was executed. Jews do not kneel. Perhaps nowhere in the Bible is that core Judaic tenet more dramatically central and underscored than in the Book of Esther, Chapter 3:
2 And all the king’s servants that were in the king’s gate bowed down and prostrated themselves before Haman because the king had so commanded concerning him. But Mordecai would not bow down nor prostrate himself before him.
3 Then the king’s servants who were in the king’s gate said unto Mordecai: “Why do you transgress the king’s command?”
4 Now it came to pass, as they spoke daily to him and he did not hearken to them, that they told Haman — to see whether Mordecai’s words would stand, because he had told them that he was a Jew.
5 And when Haman saw that Mordecai would not bow down nor prostrate himself before him, then was Haman full of wrath.
6 But it seemed contemptible in his eyes to lay hands on Mordecai alone for they had made known to him the people of Mordecai; wherefore Haman sought to destroy all the Jews, the people of Mordecai, that were throughout the whole kingdom of Ahasuerus.
So to whom was Schumer kneeling? Why, the Senate Minority Leader was not kneeling at all. Rather, he was groveling, groveling for votes from Black voters and perhaps kneeling to firebrand racist Al Sharpton. And, oh that cultural appropriation, donning that kente fabric that is unique to the culture of Ghana! Interesting. I searched the internet for a photo of Schumer ever wearing a Jewish prayer shawl. Nope. Just a kente.
The Left kneels. They grovel. They bow down to others, as Obama — then holding the office of president of the United States — bowed down to Arab Muslim oil sheiks. That is their way. They bow. They kneel. They grovel.
And they hate.
If one wants to find systemic hate in America, you will find it among outliers on the right and within the very core and system of the left. The hate that has been shown in burning down even minority-owned drug stores and clothing stores. The looting and the physical violence that awaits us all if the Left and its Ocasio-Hyphen anarchists ever attain their dream of defunding ICE at the border and the police in our cities. And when the mob strikes, nowhere do they let their hate demonstrate itself more manifestly than when they go after the Jews. First they go after the Jews who will not bow, just as Stalin did. And eventually they get to the Schumers and Bernies just as Stalin got to the anti-Semitic Jewish apostates of another time like the Trotskys, Kamenevs, and Zinovievs.
The Left media have been so enthralled covering a few troubling but isolated cases of police roughness that they conveniently have refused to cover the anti-Jewish pogrom that took place in Los Angeles in the name of “Black Lives Matter.” The Black Lives Matter Pogrom saw attacks on Temple Beth El, Baba Sali Congregation, the Kosher Mensch Bakery and Kitchen, Cong. Beth Israel, Cong. Beth Tivereth Avi/Morasha, Shaarei Tefilah Synagogue, Shalhevet Yeshiva High School for Girls, and a Shul wall on which were spray-painted anti-Semitic and anti-Israel slogans. The Black Lives Matter pogromists even — get this! — defaced a statue of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who lost his life during the World War II era by leveraging his diplomatic status to save thousands of Hungarian Jews from being gassed and cremated by Hitler’s Nazis in Auschwitz.
Wallenberg issued thousands of falsified Swedish passports to Hungarian Jews and rented 32 buildings in Budapest, declaring those edifices to be extraterritorial Swedish national property protected by diplomatic immunity. He hid thousands of Jews safely inside them. The haters of Black Lives Matter attacked Raoul Wallenberg’s memory during their anti-Jewish pogrom. Did you see that on social media? Do you remember Don Lemon, Wolf Blitzer, Jake Tapper, Chris Cuomo, Brooke Baldwin, David Axelrod, Erin Burnett, Anderson Cooper, Van Jones, Robin Meade, Brian Stelter, Fareed Zakaria, Lester Holt, David Muir, Norah O’Donnell, Morning Joe, or Rachel Maddow reporting or commenting on the Black Lives Matter Nazi pogrom? No? Neither do I.
Know that the Black Lives Matter Pogrom was so violent and vicious that it even scared the Rabbinical Council of America, the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, and Yeshiva University into silence. In the aftermath of the pogrom, each issued mollifying milquetoast statements that were targeted carefully at not getting the Black Lives Matter pogromists and Nazis angry. There was even a non-kosher “Jewish deli” that decided, in light of all the destruction all around them, to put a “Black Lives Matter” sign in their window and to hand out bottles of water to the anti-Semitic Black Lives Matter pogromists and Nazis. Their cowardice worked; their structure was not burned down. Only the Zionist Organization of America had the courage to speak out unequivocally.
The Left is systemically racist. And we see that they welcome as brothers in arms those who are pathologically hateful. They see everyone and everything in racial, gender, and ethnic categories. They cannot simply see people as people. Their hate and violence reveals itself most manifestly when their target is history’s perennial canary in the coal mine — the Jews. The coal miner watches the canary die of a lack of oxygen and knows who is next. When Stalin went after the Jews, it was predictable what would come next for the rest of the USSR.
When Hitler went after the Jews, it was not long before he targeted Holland, France, England, and even America, engulfing the entire world in flames and mass death. Bernie Sanders can waltz with Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, Schumer can kneel and grovel, the whole Democrat apparatus can wear those African kente scarves like they are doing a TV ad for the United Colors of Benneton. But let us all know what would come about if the Antifa-Ocasio-Ellison anarchists and their Pelosi enablers ever defund ICE and the police. Inasmuch as most American Blacks do not walk around all day like Eddie Murphy in Coming to America, those kente cloths will just make Pelosi, Schumer, and their whole murder of crows easier to target after Black Lives Matter’s pogromists and Nazis finish with the Jews.
The writer is adjunct professor of law at two prominent Southern California law schools, Senior Rabbinic Fellow at the Coalition for Jewish Values, congregational rabbi of Young Israel of Orange County, California, and has held prominent leadership roles in several national rabbinic and other Jewish organizations.
