I was born in the Displaced Persons camp of Bergen-Belsen in Germany in 1948. I am the son of two Polish Jews who survived the Nazi death and concentration camps of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. I was stateless for the first 14 years of my life and settled in the United States with my parents at the age of 10 after we had lived in Switzerland for eight years.
One of the unique qualities of this country, I always believed, was that from the day I became a naturalized US citizen in 1962, I have been as much an American as anyone whose family has lived here for generations. The same is true for so many others of us who have come to the United States from foreign shores "yearning to breathe free."
As a child in Montreux, Switzerland, I knew that I was, if not a stranger, certainly an outsider. My Swiss classmates belonged. I did not and never would. This was a simple, incontrovertible reality.
This is not to say that the New York City of my adolescence was free of discrimination. Far from it. There were buildings on Fifth and Park Avenues that did not let in Jews. And African-Americans lived in their own neighborhoods, and not by choice.
But still, my new home was light years away from the largely homogeneous Switzerland. While WASP grandees named Harriman and Rockefeller occupied the governorship of New York, Jacob K. Javits, a liberal Jewish Republican who had grown up on the Lower East Side, was one of New York's US Senators, and another liberal Republican Jewish politician, Louis Lefkowitz, was the New York State Attorney General. Across town, an African-American, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., was an influential member of the US House of Representatives.
This was at the outset of the civil rights movement, before the women's rights revolution, and before what was supposed to be the crumbling of the remaining walls of intolerance and bigotry.
It is depressingly disconcerting, therefore, to hear the cacophony of voices from the political right accusing the President of the United States of not being "American," of being somehow foreign. Republican US Representative Mike Coffman of Colorado comes to mind. He said earlier this year that "in his heart," President Obama is "not an American. He's just not an American." Rush Limbaugh echoes these sentiments when he brays that President Obama "hates this country."
Every time the patriotism of President Obama or a member of his administration is put into question, we turn the clock back to the McCarthyite era.
Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham are among the very few on their side of the ideological divide who are willing to publicly repudiate reprehensible attacks on the "other" by the likes of Limbaugh and Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann. When President Obama is publicly derided as a "monster" at a Republican campaign rally, it is woefully inadequate for Governor Romney to say only that, "That's not a term I would use."
All of which brings me back to my own experience of becoming an American. My parents sent me to the Ethical Culture-Fieldston Schools in New York City. There, I discovered that being truly American meant to be inclusive, to be tolerant of other backgrounds, of other views.
Addressing the student body at the 1997 Founder's Day, Dr. Matthew Ies Spetter, the long-time head of Fieldston's Ethics Department, recalled that the Schools' original mission was "the care for human beings; their dignity; their chance to build better lives. Those are still our ideals, seeking to build justice and to affirm hope. . . . People have to meet each other with openness so that they can seek what is the best in themselves and thereby they create something that is sacred, that is holy."
Our teachers at Fieldston imbued us with an appreciation of ethical behavior. History department chairman John A. Scott was an English-born, Oxford educated scholar who had received both a Purple Heart and US citizenship while serving in the US Army during World War II. He was also an early activist in the civil rights movement. The redoubtable Frances Grant, who taught us Latin, had been the first African-American woman admitted to Phi Beta Kappa at Radcliffe College. She also completed the New York Times crossword puzzle every day in pen. English teacher Irwin Kafka had previously been a member of the New York Police Department. My Spanish teacher Magda Woss fled to the United States from Vienna after Hitler's 1938 annexation of Austria. English teacher Ida Shimanouchi, born in 1916 in Oakland, California, to immigrants from Japan, had been "relocated" by the US Government to an internment camp for Japanese Americans following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Dr. Spetter had been a member of the Dutch underground during World War II and had survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
As far as I and, I daresay, most of my classmates were concerned, these and our other teachers collectively embodied what it meant to be "American." They taught us, in words and by example, to respect those who are different from ourselves, and they helped to shape our moral and political consciousness.
Sixty-two years ago, at the height McCarthyism, Republican Senator Margaret Chase of Maine declared that, "Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism."
The tolerance and fundamental decency my elementary and high school teachers taught us epitomize "the basic principles of Americanism" to which Senator Smith referred. The politicians and commentators who vilify President Obama as not being sufficiently "American" pervert the meaning of the term.
Menachem Z. Rosensaft teaches about the law of genocide and World War II war crimes trials at the law schools of Columbia, Cornell and Syracuse universities.
Matthew Chapman: Gun Control, Rio De Janeiro, Colorado, and the USA
Nina Burleigh: The American Intelligence of Michele Bachmann
Brian Levin, J.D.: Islamophobia Threatens American Values and National Security
Jim Graves: It's Time for Ms. Bachmann to Leave Washington
President Obama is not "foreign", but his ideas and agenda is foreign to American ideas and values.
He has put more people out work than anyone before him. He fails to keep his promises and is 100% partisan with no room for compromise. His calls for compromise are just a manifestation of his Orwellian mindset, seeming to believe that as long as he preaches tolerance and cooperation, he doesn't really need to act in those ways and he does not.
During the ACA debate, he repeatedly took to the microphone to order congress to pass his bill and compromise. But there was no compromising with the GOP: No GOP amendment made it into ACA. It turns out that it was Democrats arguing, negotiating and bribing each other, to get a compromise among themselves. His administration is permeated with an Orwellian style of governance.
Re: INTOLERANCE
I am NOT intolerant when I weigh the costs and benefits of immigration and come down on the side of less immigration.
I am NOT intolerant when I hear the arguments for gay marriage and reject them.
I am NOT intolerant when I vote for my economic interests.
I am NOT intolerant when I see disgusting things in the Koran and speak out about them.
I am NOT intolerant when I turn off the TV when the Kardashians come on.
Re: DISCRIMINATION
I have a duty to discriminate against ideas that threaten me, my country, and my family.
Obamaism is such a threatening idea.
You're intolerant.
Good or bad is the question.
America can evolve and try to constructively change for the better, or the pseudo-conservatives and neo-GOP extremists can block change until the system collapses into a revolution, at which point all bets are off. On the long-term average, the changes have been for the better, but we don't get to live on the long-term average.
At this point I think America has only a tiny hope for evolutionary survival. President Obama should turn his back on Romney and campaign almost exclusively against the neo-GOP extremists in Congress. The neo-GOP should be forced to pour their vast riches into defending the indefensible, and Romney should be dragged along for the ride.
An Obama presidency with an obstructionist Congress is futile. We've seen several years of that. Romney is promising to make things even worse, so the best we can hope for is that he's lying again and as usual.
The problem comes in with what, exactly, Progressives believe is "better". For the most part it seems they want government control of people's lives and that is a failing proposition. It has never worked throughout human history and will not work in the future.
"neo-GOP extremists"
Ahh, a new label for the smart people to use. Great. This let's everyone know what you are about.
"An Obama presidency with an obstructionist Congress is futile. We've seen several years of that"
We've seen under two years of that. You don't even know what you are ranting about.
"Romney is promising to make things even worse,"
Worse? I did not know that making job creation a priority would be worse. I look at all the formerly middle class Americans who have lost their jobs, homes and savings to neo-Democratic extremists in Congress and the Whitehouse whose jobs plan is 'stay home and collect unemployment'
"so the best we can hope for is that he's lying again and as usual."
There is lying on one side that we know of, and it isn't the GOP.
That is patently false. The GOP agreed with Dems when they voted for welfare reform, going to war and cutting everyone's taxes under Clinton and under W.
"Affordable Care Act is far from being what is needed in the way of health care reform in this country, "
Ah, something we can agree on. ACA will destroy the healthcare system and then a new one, run entirely by the government, will emerge and create millions of Democratic clients; as it is intended to do.
I am conflicted in my feelings about it to.
Should someone in America be allowed to take a drivers test in any other language but english? If you get hit by someone will you be able to speak with them? I feel like if you come here to be American you should be American. That doesn't mean you have to get rid of your culture - but I am also tired of justifying the American culture - many people think it doesn't exist.
America was started by immigrants but they kept their culture but still kept American ideals, flew an American flag and learned english. I don't know what the answer is for me. I want to have more understanding and compassion but as it grows so does my frustration with it.
Can we look forward to a time when neither religion, nor race, nor national identity are separative factors? This idea that we have some special quality which we have to spread around the globe (capitalism labeled democracy) is bleeding the life out of our economy and environment.
Perhaps the spectacle of yet another financial scandal, yet another mass shooting, yet another record breaking day of heat, will help us to become "inclusive" enough to no longer be separated from any people, anywhere in the world.
People have a tendency to say that ours is the best system in the world. Maybe. But is it good enough to fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence?
Not yet.
I appreciate Mr. Rosensaft for being willing to open the doors he's opened.
The entire narrative is nonsense. You cannot list one GOP Senator or Representative who is bigoted. You are repeating the Democratic Party talking points; put out there to keep their client voters in check. e.g., if you vote GOP you are a bigot. That is how that works.
It's time to get a mind of your own. Find out what your values are and look at people running for office who would really represent you. What we have now is a gang in DC who are looking out for themselves by pitting average Americans against each other and giving special treatment to their friends and supporters.
Most Americans are not Communists, or leftist radicals. Most Americans don't recognize Obama's world view as American.
Thank you so much for this thoughtful and thought-_provoking_ piece. I especially appreciated this sentence: "Every time the patriotism of President Obama or a member of his administration is put into question, we turn the clock back to the McCarthyite era."
Very accurate...but what I find depressing is that are so few voices out there to counter these outrageous claims; so few to demand "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"
Except that no one is doing that.
You guys are too easy and that is how the Democrats survive politically.
Ignorant, selfish, and obese?
H
Eventually, America will become overpopulated. That's pretty much inevitable, unless there's a massive plague, famine or war to claim a large percentage of our population. But even without immigration in place, the descendants of the people who are already here will one day number over 1 billion+ (unless birth rates drastically decline, or we institute a one-child policy).
Immigration only hastens that inevitability. And the reality of one billion Americans on this planet would be harsh, exceedingly so. So, more than anything, when I say we need to halt immigration, or even reverse it by exiling criminals, it has nothing to do with Obama's birth certificate, or prejudice towards Mexicans, or what have you. It's all about the numbers. If someone can prove to me that adding more people to our population will not increase it, then I might change my mind about that.
Set aside the changing demographics and consider how this country has been built on immigration. It's all good. These people come here to work and pay taxes. They enrich our culture. There is no downside. Having lived in heavily Hispanic LA for 50 years I found no group of people with stronger family values and a better work ethic. Moreover, if you're a Republican you must be horrified by your party's war on abortion and birth control. It makes your overpopulation concern more likely.
It's not clear where you got this idea, but I can tell you that the birth rate is in decline in America while abortions have wiped out over 50 million lives in America since 1973.
People are becoming more selfish as each day passes and all want something for nothing, they want someone else to pay for whatever they want or need, and they want to use their time on their terms. Children are expensive and time consuming and their are too many parties, camping trips, bars and shopping malls to be tied down with a kid (or two).
With that said, I have to disagree. This country is not going to be overpopulated for a long long time.