Year: 2026

I Know They Mean Trump=Hitler, but I Think the Larger Point About Democracies Is Valid

I’m a German Citizen in 1933, and Is It Just Me or Is It Really Hard to Get Any Work Done Right Now?

by Lia Woodward and Leah Folta

– – –

Guten tag. I’m just wondering if anybody else can relate to this feeling I’ve been having that I just can’t shake. It’s only Tuesday, but what a week, huh? Just when we thought yesterday was another regular Monday, the Reichstag burned down, and it sounds like Chancellor Hitler is going to permanently suspend more of our rights. Crazy, right? Never thought that would happen here. My real problem, though, is that it’s my job to finish tuning this glockenspiel in time for the big concert tomorrow, and I just can’t seem to focus.

It’s only been a day since the fire, but it feels much longer. They said the communists are planning a violent uprising, so we need the Reichstag Fire Decree. Apparently, it’s going to suspend the right to assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and other important-sounding stuff in our German constitution.

Should we do something? It feels like we should do something. Hopefully, I’ll feel more like I can dedicate the brain space to that just as soon as I finish my work, which is tuning this glockenspiel.

I haven’t had the chance to read this decree yet, because I’m forcing myself to get at least one piece of this glockenspiel to sound right in the next hour. Honestly, though, it has been such. A. Slog. Is something wrong with me, or does anybody else feel like they’ve been moving through molasses since yesterday?

They can’t do that, can they, all this stuff they’ve been doing since the fire? Surely, we have emergency brakes to stop these kinds of things. Someone will intervene. I would look into who that is supposed to be exactly, but this glockenspiel isn’t going to tune itself.

If you’ve been able to get stuff done in the last twenty-four hours, I’d love your tips, because this inability to stay on task is really stressing me out. My friends keep saying that I just need to do more of die selbstpflege, or “self-care” as they say in America. Bingeing Wagner on the radio hasn’t distracted me as much as it used to, especially with all the pro–Chancellor Hitler undertones. I’ve been trying out mindfulness lately, but that hasn’t helped. I even went outside just to feel the wind in my hair, but something about the vibe is just off. I’m trying to focus on what I can control—the only constant is change.

Honestly, this is an especially annoying time for all this bad news, because I’m trying not to drink this month. If the chancellor could stop being bonkers until I can have beer again, that would be great.

Work at the shop is even harder than usual because I used to be able to blow off steam with my friends about the news and the latest wild, unprecedented thing the chancellor said, but I think everyone’s sick of talking about it. I mean, how much of our time are we really supposed to dedicate to politics? Is it even healthy? At a certain point, I’ve just been tuning it out. Tuning is what I do, after all, haha. On top of it all, I have to figure out what I’m doing for my birthday this month. I can drink for that, right?

My boss has no sympathy for me either. In fact, Karl won’t let us talk about the news at the shop anymore. He keeps saying that he feels discriminated against in our workplace because he loves the chancellor, and it’s like, what do you want from us, man? Your guy is winning, everyone has his haircut. I mean, come on, Karl. I’m just trying to do my job, which is tuning this glockenspiel, and not say anything—even when he insists that the chancellor promised to make the economy strong again.

All right, I’ll make a deal with myself—I can think about the Reichstag and all the fallout as much as I want for the next five minutes, and then I’ll get right back to crushing this glockenspiel.

Whatever helps us stay productive is what really matters right now. There’s still plenty of time left for 1933 to be our year. Politics will come and go, but I’m sure when I look back on this period, what I’ll remember most will be the work that I completed on schedule.

From McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, here.

Rabbi Avigdor Miller: IDF=House of Shame!

Q: Why isn’t unified support for Israel today encouraged by all Orthodox Jews?

A: And the answer is because it’s the opposite of Orthodoxy. Now, I’ll have to explain that.

Suppose somebody would make a big movement to take in all Jewish girls and to teach them to be harlots. Would you say that it’s justified by any purpose under the sun? Let’s say you wanted it for the purposes that their wages should go to support a kollel.

The State of Israel drafts girls. And they state openly in their writings, they have authorities who say what their reason is. They want to create a cultural rebuilding of the Jewish people; which means they want to teach the girls immorality, and the army is one of the best means for doing it.

The truth is, that a great part of the abortions are performed on girls in the army. A great many abortions are performed on girls in the army! Now, abortions don’t come from learning Rambam and Mesilas Yesharim.

And there are a lot of girls who don’t have to make abortions because they are using precautions. So the question is, can we approve of such a state? To us, it’s the greatest contradiction to the Torah.

Not only for Jews. Even if it was a gentile state, we would be violently opposed to such an order. Let’s say, suppose Japan were to draft girls, we would hate them for it! Japanese girls should all become harlots? If they want to become, let them do it voluntarily. But to force them into an army?! So how could anybody who is Orthodox or is a little bit decent think it’s a necessity to support the State of Israel?

Of course if they’re attacked by others who are trying to endanger the lives of the Jews there, we have to speak up. But we have to be opponents of that regime.

Now the present regime is one of the best that they ever had up till now, but still despite all the improvements, it’s still so wicked, it’s still so opposed to what we stand for that we can never make peace with such a state. It’s a huge bordello into which girls are forced to come and learn to sacrifice the principles for which the Jewish nation stand.

(December 1981)

Read it here.

Shemos: How Tyrants Use Scapegoats to Avoid Overthrow (hmm…)

Parshas Shemos – The Origins of State Anti-Semitism

Parshas 

By Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein | Series: 

The Origins of State Anti-Semitism1

He said to his people, “The…children of Israel are more numerous and stronger than we. Come, let us deal wisely with it, lest it become numerous and it may be that if a war will occur, it, too, may join our enemies, and wage war against us, and go up from the land. So the appointed taskmasters over it…

The storm clouds that form over the Jewish people at the beginning of Chumash Shemos have not dissipated in over three millennia. We find in Paroh’s treatment of the Jews parallels to the methods and attitudes that would be applied to us during the centuries of our exile under the thumb of similar despots. Within the space of a few pesukim, we see treachery, cunning, avarice and ambivalence – items that would mark our bitter galus.

The first thing we notice is how contrived was the campaign against the Jews was! Paroh had no substantive complaint about Jewish conduct; if he had, he would not have to urge dealing covertly with the Jews. He could have encouraged or simply allowed the Egyptians to act on their hatred of the detested foreigners. In fact, they did not hate them, because the Jews gave them no reason to. Paroh had to incite hatred. Moreover, he had to find a pretext, and the best that he could find was that they were having too many children.

It is not hard to understand his thinking. The Parohs had subjugated the entire Egyptian populace into oppressive serfdom. It takes diabolical cleverness to keep a nation subjugated. Paroh hit upon a way to get downtrodden Egyptians to feel good about themselves. He created an under-class of people whom Egyptians could look upon with contempt, rather than look upon them themselves with self-loathing. When a population sees itself as having hit bottom, of having no options and nothing to lose, its monarch is in danger of looking at a popular insurrection or palace revolt. Giving them a scapegoat for their anger conveniently deflects their anger from royal heads.

What we see is anti-Semitism elevated to a tool of the power elite to maintain their own authority. The masses are deliberately incited from on high to find a whipping boy in a Jewish people whose real conduct was beyond reproach.

What was Paroh’s plan? Did Paroh want to be rid of the Jews, or to keep them? Is the going up from the land the desired consequence of dealing wisely with the Jews? Or is departing from Egypt one of the calamitous effects of not dealing wisely with the Jews that Paroh is attempting to thwart? The difficulty we have in parsing the first pasuk may suggest that he meant a bit of both.

We would have had an easier time making up our minds, had the internal punctuation of the pasuk been different. If the esnachta, the pause that divides a pasuk into two distinct phrases, come after the word “numerous,” we would have understood Paroh to have feared a Jewish demographic bomb. Worried about the explosive growth of this colony of foreigners in Egypt’s midst, Paroh proposed severe, repressive measures. If the Jews could be made to feel uncomfortable enough, they would surely seize the first opportunity – such as provided by the all-too-common outbreaks of war – to ally themselves with Egypt’s enemies, and flee her borders. Paroh would bid them a good riddance!

The Torah, however, does not make things so simple for us. The esnachta comes earlier in the verse, in a way that leaves room to see the going up from the land as something Paroh wanted to avoid, rather than encourage. He urged his subjects to deal craftily with the Jews. Failing to do that might mean that the Jews would emigrate – and that would be intolerable! The pasuk quite possibly indicates that his plan was to stave off emigration, rather than stimulate it.

We do not immediately understand why this concern loomed large on Paroh’s mind. They had not yet become his chattel, his slaves? Why should their loss be of any consequence? We must conclude that the Jews had already established themselves as useful and beneficial to Egypt. If their numbers could be kept in check – manageable and reasonable – it paid for Egypt to use them for their own interests. They chafed at the idea of their becoming too numerous and visible. It is likely, then, that going up from the land did not mean leaving Egypt. Rather, it meant leaving the Jewish enclaves that contained them, and spilling out into proper Egyptian neighborhoods. The Egyptians wished to make use of the Jews from a distance – but not to have them as neighbors. Jews are good to have around – to a point.

(If this is what Paroh meant, however, the reference to war makes little sense. The Egyptians would protest the flooding of Egypt with Jewish undesirables no matter when or how that occurred! Probably, Paroh meant both. He projected upon the Jews the same loathing for the other that he encouraged the Egyptians to feel for the Jews. Since the Jews were clearly the enemy, they represented an unreliable fifth column in Egypt’s midst, poised to join with any foe that would wage war against her. Should that not happen, they still needed to be dealt with, lest their growing numbers pose a “Jewish problem,” a threat against the purity of Egyptian culture. )

Beyond the campaign to “educate” the Egyptians about the evils of the Jews, the first concrete step that Paroh took against them was predictable. By appointing taskmasters over them, he turned the Jews into cash cows, sources of revenue who could be made to pay for the very air they breathed. The Jews would be suffered the right to live – so long as they could be squeezed to enrich the coffers of the State.

How familiar all of this became in the course of our wandering from country to country! How little has changed since the time Hashem first introduced us to the harsh realities of Jewish history, and gave us the tools with which to endure them.

1. Based on the Hirsch Chumash, Shemos 1:9-11

From Torah.org, here.