Here's to Helen Thomas

Hellen Thomas

1920-2013

Now let us praise famous women, and in specific, Helen Thomas. I have heard her voice all my life. That dry, clear delivery, “Thank you, Mr. President…” and then a perfectly phrased, succinct and pointed question that will direct all those that follow. Lyndon Baines Johnson did not like her at all. He didn’t have to be polite to her but he couldn’t help it.  Liz Carpenter and Bill Moyers just had to grin and bear it. Ron Ziegler, the face of the Nixon Administration, tried to ignore her but the rest of the press corps would not talk to him until he’d talked to her. Sweet Jesus, Helen Thomas was so good. And, with all honor and respect to your father, Helen Thomas was not an Anti-Semite. Thomas simply didn’t believe in the state of Israel, and neither do I.

I have loved Judaism since I was 13, when my mother, with terrifying prescience, gave me a copy of A Day of Pleasure by I. B. Singer. Judaism was the first religion I ever studied, even before Buddhism. I started reading Gershom Scholem in junior college and have never stopped. I know that Judaism is not a race, it is a religion, one of the primary religions of the world. It is the source of Christianity and the child tried to kill the mother. That is the history that I live with every day. The Church Temporal tried to destroy Judaism. That simple fact of history has formed my heretical theology. At the end of WWII, Europe and the United States had to face the blood and madness of the Holocaust. We as a nation had to face our sin of exclusion. We did not open our doors. 

We wanted to believe that a single man could make the most cultivated nation on earth crazy. We did not want to see our own common hatred of Judaism. It was looking us full in the face. 

So, when the camps were liberated, we wanted to put the survivors away from our guilt, from our blindness and cruelty. The British began the putting-away with the Balfour Declaration in 1917. A place to put the Jews, it would be so easy. Just put them in Palestine, and after the Zionist movement and the early kibbutzim, it sounded so nice. Europeans in the Middle East! Here comes democracy, the rule of law and so on. But, it was, indeed, all a lie. Palestine was populated, there were people living there.

If one were an Ashkenaz, and specifically, a secular, or even better, non-believing Ashkenaz, then one was a real Jew. One could be Hagana or Irgun, blowing up hotels and police stations and mowing down families and villages to clear the ground for incoming refugees. But because the people who lived in Ramallah listened to Hitler’s imam in Cairo and the poison coming out of Damascus, we have ever since accepted that Palestinians are unworthy of their own land. And so it has gone, for the last 60 years. Palestinian kids have gotten crazier and crazier, with no chance of college or jobs, cant’ fix the house, and nothing to do but blow themselves up and take as many people with them as possible. This is madness.

The Ashkenazim are Europeans. Helen Thomas was right and Europe would have been much better off if it had been required to deal with its own citizens after the War. The great communities could have been rebuilt and the Christian Poles, Czechs, Germans and all would have had to deal with their own guilt and fix their own societies. We Americans would have had to face our own complicity with the Holocaust. Now, 60 years later, we just bark, hey, we support Israel, that’s all we need to do.

Helen Thomas was not an Anti Semite, and neither am I .