Vienna. Berlin. 1933. London. Toronto. Rhinebeck. 2024

Chaim was a tall, gentle man who owned a cubby-hole of a bookstore on Basel Street in Tel Aviv. His shop was situated at the far end of Basel Square, a bougie area in what is known locally as Old North Tel Aviv; one charming boutique and café after another. This is where you come for fine wine, pastries, fancy baby accoutrements and clothes. The book shop was a destination which I discovered by accident. It was close to my favorite shoe store.  

The inventory was Hebrew-heavy, understandably, except for one area reserved for the English speakers, of whom there are many in Tel Aviv. Shelves from floor to ceiling, maybe three feet wide were jammed with offerings for babies and up, covering every genre and topic imaginable. With one caveat. Chaim was a true intellectual. This was not the place to pick up a trashy bestseller.  

He introduced me to two writers who have had a huge impact on me in the last decade: Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth. I am a touch embarrassed to admit that I was unfamiliar with either one. But Chaim only carried things he considered worthy of one’s time. On the day that he introduced me to Stefan Zweig, he very generously gave me a short, fascinating talk, ten or fifteen minutes, on why his work was important and worth the effort. He had the entire Zweig canon that had been translated into English and offered a starting recommendation. From then on, I took all of Chaim’s suggestions, unquestioningly.

(Sadly, Chaim passed away a few years later in his mid 60s. Cancer, I was told. Very quick and tragic.) 

Not long after our Stefan Zweig moment, Chaim introduced me to Joseph Roth.   

Joseph Roth in Paris as a young man.

I have been recalling Joseph Roth a lot lately. Born in 1896 in present-day Ukraine, he left his wretched, dysfunctional family to study in Vienna in 1914. After a short stint in the military in WWI, he relocated to Berlin, very much a magnet for intellectuals, as was Vienna. But Berlin was also legendary for its decadence and more avant garde scene. The latter traits, of course, infuriated the growing bands of national socialists. To them, the nightclubs, sexual debauchery, cabarets, and what they considered to be morally corrupt artistic and intellectual scenes, existed and flourished because of the Jews. In their minds, Jews were genetically destructive and predatory.  

At the time, these extreme right wing national socialists were dismissed by most people – including institutional elites - as fringe lunatics who met up in beer halls in Munich, had a good rant and went home. The thought of them ever ruling Germany would have been – and was – disregarded as being nonsensical by the pundits, intellectuals and institutional class.  

Until, suddenly, they were the rulers of Germany. This parade of criminals and misfits took power on January 30, 1933, when Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor.  

Adolf Hitler greets President Paul von Hindenburg in Potsdam, Germany, on March 21, 1933.

Joseph Roth recognized immediately how dreadfully serious - no, epochal – was the ascension of the Nazis. He did not allow himself to pretend that their rule would pass quickly, as so many Germans did, Jews and non-Jews. We tend – in our collective ignorance of history - to focus on all of Germany as a monolith but the country was deeply divided between committed communists and fascists, and there were many “normal” Germans who just wanted to get on with their lives and did not adhere to one or the other extreme political view.  

But in the end, the Nazis prevailed. While many in organized Jewish leadership promoted the “keep your head down and it will pass” approach, Joseph Roth was built of different stuff. On the day that Hitler took over the Reichstag, Roth resolved to leave Berlin. There are different versions of what actually happened next. The more dramatic variation has him leaving Berlin on January 31, 1933. Other reports state that he departed in March of that year. The point was, he saw what was coming and had no desire to stick around. Roth left his schizophrenic wife, Frederike, who had been institutionalized since 1930. She was murdered in the Nazi “euthanasia” program in 1940.  

As a journalist, Roth was considered to be very successful during his Berlin years. His work was quirky, exploring people and places that mainstream German society and media treated as being invisible; the poor, Jewish immigrants from the East, contemptuously referred to by the more established community as “Ostjuden”. Roth frequented soup kitchens. He brought to life the economic desperation that was roiling German society but that the institutional power brokers and elites preferred to ignore. 

 Once in Paris, Roth became one of those he had written about in his Berlin years. He sank into penury and alcoholism and died in May, 1939. The official cause was a lung infection. But I think it more likely that despair nurtured his chronic alcoholism, which made him unhealthy and weak. In his soul Roth intuited that Europe was on the brink of madness and he consciously opted out of life.  

I consider him lucky to have taken his leave just before the whole continent darkened, especially for Jews. But Roth would not have been at all surprised. Not by any of it.  

As he wrote in February, 1933, in a letter to Zweig, who had been something of a mentor to him:  

You will have realized by now that we are drifting towards great catastrophes…I  won’t bet a penny on our lives. They have succeeded in establishing a reign of barbarity. Do not fool yourself. Hell reigns. 

Is there a person among us, today, who does not have this same sense of foreboding and dread? 

And that is why I find myself thinking of Joseph Roth so often these days. Because I know that if he walked among us now he would forewarn of the same level of danger as he saw in 1933. Whether it happens in a month or five years is just a detail. 

To anyone paying attention, it is clear and obvious. 

Throughout history, Jewish people have served as an early warning system for the broader population. When Jews are persecuted it tends to be a warmup act for the main event. If we look at WWII, there’s no question that the Nazi ideology was obsessively focused on ridding the planet of every last Jew. Making Europe, and the world, Judenrein – free of all Jews - was a core Nazi tenet. 

Jews were considered to be a biological race by the Nazis; a fallacy but one that was very effective in convincing the masses to support the party and do unconscionable things. Developing a “scientific” approach to antisemitism was a Nazi innovation.  In previous millennia Jews had been hounded and demonized for having killed Jesus Christ, among other imagined transgressions. But this was the first time that science was invoked to justify mass murder and persecution. Nazism was a godless regime. So, they had to come up with something. Jews, the hack Nazi scientists and physicians declared, were measurably different and shared distinct biological DNA that caused them to be subversive, spread disease, weak and contemptible. In short, as the Nazis stated clearly, they were “subhuman.” Once that was established then it became much easier to treat them like the vermin they apparently were. 

For many reasons, the German population proved to be extremely receptive to this propaganda and quickly became fanatical adherents of all aspects of National Socialism. Grotesque films were made of “doctors” measuring skulls and noses of Jews which “proved” that they were racially corrupted; programmed to spread disease, indulge in every perversion imaginable, all while controlling the world financially. It’s quite something that no one ever stopped and said: “Hmmm. If these Jews are so all-powerful then why do they keep getting the shit kicked out of them?” 

America’s Jewish community has long seen itself as being big, bold and indomitable.  

When David Ben Gurion solicited financial and political support for his vision of establishing a sovereign Jewish state in the biblical land of Israel, American Jewish leaders and establishment were disdainful. They actually opposed the possibility of an independent Jewish state, because they were concerned that it may cause their compatriots to question their national loyalty.  

“We have a country,” many said at the time. “The Goldene Medine.” America. The Promised Land. 

Chasing the American Dream was the post WWII dopamine. The growing and prosperous Jewish community could not conceive of the possibility that their idealized newfound fantasy country may mutate into something more sinister. And, in fairness, they had earned a stretch of tranquility. They did not want to think it possible. Not here. Not in America.  

October 7^th unleashed a madness that has engulfed America, among other countries.  

Who among us has not wondered how the Jews of Europe could have been so – complacent. Why did they not see what was coming? And in Europe of the 1930s, the hatred spread at a glacial pace compared to what we see today. There was no internet.  

A few days ago, I received a message from a friend living in a swank area in upstate New York. He said that his family was moving to Israel. I was shocked and asked what had happened to cause them to make the decision.  

“This.”  

He sent me a photo of a sign that had been put up in a restaurant window in his local town, Rhinebeck. 

F Israel. F AIPAC. F Netanyahu. F Biden for sure. F killing children. F justifying killing children. F Debra Messing. F white phosphorus. F pretending it was unintentional. F fake apologies. F only caring about white deaths. F seeing Palestinian blood over and over again. F the smirks of the IDF. F the Arab League. F the Zionist propaganda machine. F Balfour. F targeting civilians, babies, embassies, places of worship, ai convoys, embassies, schools. F those trying to say this is all Netanyahu and not Israel. F the New York Times, BBC and CNN. F the evangelicals. F every single person that hasn’t spoken out against this genocide. But most of all, F Zionism. 

That was the breaking point for his family.  

Le Petit Bistro in Rhinebeck

For those unfamiliar with the area, Rhinebeck is a very upscale bubble in the Hudson River Valley in upstate New York; where the super-rich and celebrities go to live a “normal” life. This is not Appalachia country. Or some tin foil town in a deep red state. No. It doesn’t get much swankier and self-satisfied than Rhinebeck.  

Many people will shrug off the F-heavy screed as the rantings of a crazy person.  

Which is exactly what so many said of Adolf Hitler. But we can see that there is much more going on than signs in restaurants. Quite literally overnight, Jews went from feeling like equal citizens in many countries to being vulnerable targets of extremely well-financed and organized antisemitic terror. Many, like my friends in upstate New York, believe that western society has crossed a Rubicon and the way back is uncertain, if even possible.¹

As a family member in Toronto recently asked me: “How much time do I have?”  

“Well,” I said. “I have no idea. But I’m pretty sure that it’s not going to get better with time.” 

“It” has already begun. Even the “progressive” Jews who march alongside Queers for Palestine and other Hamas offshoots, they will be implicated and pilloried along with the rest of us. A few days ago there was an incident reported on the University of British Columbia campus in Vancouver, where a “progressive” Israeli graduate student went to speak with the pro Hamas encampment leaders. They refused him entry to their “encampment.” He pleaded that he just wanted “dialogue.” He is for peace. Let’s talk, he implored. 

Protesters erected tents on MacInnes Field, outside the UBC Alma Mater Society building.

They, of course, would have none of it. For them, Israel should cease to exist. Be wiped off the map. That’s their code for the murder of all Jews. Because we – Zionists and Jews – are the embodiment of irredeemable evil. Just as the restaurateur in Rhinebeck put it. He could have saved a lot of space and just written: “F the Jews.”  

Among the saddest images from WWII are photos of old German men in the “soft” concentration camp of “Theresienstadt”, which served as a way station to Auschwitz and a wonderful public relations stage for the Nazi regime. These old, Jewish war veterans would proudly walk around in that hell hole, certain that the Iron Crosses they pinned to their jackets would save them. They weren’t like the “others.”  

In the end, they were marched into the gas chambers at Auschwitz and elsewhere, clinging desperately to the belief that the medals awarded them by the German Kaiser for heroism in serving Germany in WWI would actually save them. That it was all a terrible mistake and they just had to get the attention of the right person and then they would be separated from the human misery and saved. But the story never ended like that. Not once.  

How did we get here? 

There are many contributing factors, among them the organized Jewish communities of North America. Something has gone very wrong. And it did not begin on October 7^th.  

The entrenched elitism. The way in which community values and authority defer to “wealthy donors” and disregard everyone else. This has not exactly fostered, well, community. In fact, this unvarnished snobbery mirrors the way in which larger, sophisticated European communities managed themselves during the 30s and, in some locations, into the 40s.  

Take Berlin, for example. It was the undisputed apex (even displacing Vienna by the early 30s) of enlightened Jewry. They were post Enlightenment Jews who had cast off the ghetto residue and assimilated successfully into mainstream society. Jews were quite comfortable in virtually all facets of professional, academic and commercial life. Until they were no longer so. 

1933 hit hard. 1938 came quickly. 

And throughout the increasingly vicious persecution of German Jews, the Charlottenburg types – the wealthy, established tribe – held their noses at the mere mention of the Ostjuden in the East; the poor, more religious and less educated Jews who had recently made their way to what they hoped would be a better life with more opportunity; certainly more than was possible to achieve in small Polish towns. They wanted more and, as with immigrants everywhere, their sacrifice, they hoped, would benefit their children. But they were shown nothing but contempt by the “real” German Jews. 

The organized Jewish community of Berlin took pains to demonstrate to the new Nazi rulers how reliable and helpful they could be. How “different” they were from the “others.”  

But it was all for naught. Like the earnest Israeli post-graduate student on the campus of University of British Columbia, and like so many others, in the end, to them? We’re all the same.  

Just ask the restaurateur in Rhinebeck. 

Ask yourself.  

What would Joseph Roth say if he were alive today? 

1. An article written in the local newspaper about the uproar and outrage can be read here. Unfortunately, the article is paywalled. I have read it. The journalist reporting offers the owner/chef of a local restaurant who posted the comments ample opportunity to explain his statement. Bottom line? He sees himself as a First Amendment freedom fighter who, unlike most Americans, has the courage to stand up to “Zionists”.