The Jews Best Friend

By Barry Farber

These observations are likely to make some American Jews feel uncomfortable and most American Christians feel good about themselves.

I can envision American Jews saying to me, "Sha, Sha. Keyn ayn horeh." (Hush, hush. Don't bring down the evil eye!) And I imagine American Christians will have a hard time understanding my compliment.

One of the remarkable aspects of the Holocaust is the bewilderment that comes back at you when you praise those who rescued the Jews at great risk to their own lives. Those heroes from Denmark down to Bulgaria and Albania and scattered through every country occupied by the Hitler forces, including Germany, are not faking modesty when they return those compliments unopened. I've known enough of them from all of those places long enough to know they mean it.

"We don't deserve praise just for helping those who needed help," they say in deflecting the grateful praise of surviving Jews. Maybe they'd have a point if the help were changing a flat tire or lending carfare to a stranger who'd lost his wallet. The kind of help these people rendered was, "If the Germans discover I'm hiding you in my attic we both die!"

Still, they fail to see why they should be praised for taking the ultimate risk to help Jews threatened by the Nazis. Let them keep on being stubborn. I intend to keep on praising.

American Christians, thank God, never had to rise to that level of risk and sacrifice to help threatened Jews. Nonetheless, I think the time has come to cut American Christians in on their rightful share of the glory.

You know how your blood stops, your body freezes stone still, and you hold your breath and your ears when you expect a big explosion. I have many times, as an adult Jew, suspended heart and pulse beats in expectation of engulfing riptides of anti-Semitism to lash out across America.

I've feared thunderclaps. I've never gotten more than a butterfly's belch.

Go back to World War II itself. Look how easy it might have been for American anti-Semites to portray that war as a Roosevelt (They called him "Rosenfelt"!) scheme to send American boys to go fight and die "for the Jews." After all, it wasn't the blond, blue-eyed Germans who bombed us at Pearl Harbor that Sunday morning. It was the Japanese. Like a would-be terrorist who couldn't manage to get the dynamite, the fuse and the blasting cap inside the casing right, the American anti-Semites never scored even a firecracker pop on that one.

Jump to 1973. Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on Yom Kippur. The Arab oil states cut off supplies to the United States. The tacit proposition went out from the oil part of the Arab world to American anti-Semites: "Look, fellows. We're going to hand you a petroleum cutoff. There will be gas lines complete with fistfights and shootouts at American gas pumps. Prices will skyrocket. Shortages will intensify as winter approaches. And we're going to blame everything unambiguously on the Jews. You've got all the time you need. You've got an unlimited budget. Now get out there and produce anti-Semites."

The Arabs delivered on every promise and every prediction. They hoped to manufacture anti-Semites across America like North Carolina manufactures cigarettes. And what did they get for it? Absolutely nothing except a few bumper stickers here and there that said "We need oil, not Jews!"

When Al Gore named Joe Lieberman as his running mate in 2000 the liberal media, of course, hailed it as the new pole-vault high in brotherly political inclusion. The interesting thing was, there was no backlash to the contrary from the vastly more conservative American heartland. I, Jewish, voted for Bush-Cheney. Many Christians voted for Gore-Lieberman. What a setup; "a Jew one heartbeat from the Oval Office?" And the anti-Semites were too inept to translate that into even a ripple among American voters.

The Gore-Lieberman loss has been attributed to chads, butterfly ballots, machine counts, police roadblocks, a Florida secretary of state, and the U. S. Supreme Court.

Anti-Semitism never even got honorable mention.

And now, the Clinton pardons.

We know there are groups and individuals, girded with passion, who hate Jews. We see their Web sites. They do not conceal their feelings. One of them sprayed the lobby of a California Jewish Center with automatic weapons fire. Why haven't they been able to ignite even a tiny bonfire with kindling like Mark Rich (Jewish) and Pincus Green (Jewish) getting pardoned by Clinton with the help of Ehud Barak, prime minister of Israel, plus a raft of letters from pardon-friendly Jewish friends and dignitaries? Not even Clinton's attempt to blame the pardon of Rich and Green on Israel seemed to clench a fist or even raise an eyebrow.

Nice going, Christian America. You have refused every invitation and incitation to surrender to Jew-hatred. You didn't even give off a shudder of reaction when the Jewish head of the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the largely Jewish board of directors permitted an art exhibit portraying the Last Supper with Jesus Christ as a black woman naked.

In our 5,000-plus years of history we Jews have encountered many enemies. We all know well who they are. We've also encountered many friends: the Danes, Swedes, Bulgarians, Albanians, Finns, Moroccans (King Hassan saved as many Jews as he could), Spaniards (Believe it or not, Francisco Franco did all he could to save the Jews in Europe during World War II), Japanese (Japanese Consul Sugihara in Lithuania gave visas to hundreds of threatened Lithuanian and Polish Jews who were able to flee before the German tanks arrived and cross the Soviet Union to spend the war peacefully and protected in Japan).
In all those 5,000 years, history will verify that the very best friend the Jew ever had was the AMERICAN CHRISTIAN!

If it were not for the American Christian there would be no state of Israel and there'd be no Jew alive, except those who might successfully manage to masquerade as non-Jewish.

What gives me the right to utter such an extraordinary statement? Easy. When America entered World War II Britain and the Soviet Union were two beaten elephants dangling over a cliff with their tails tied to the same daisy. America's entry was the "swing vote" that made victory possible. Our unbounding energy and unbombable industry and well-trained troops turned tired Allied blood into sparkling burgundy.

American fighting men marched uncomplainingly into battle against Hitler. Those American armed forces were 97 percent non-Jewish, because the American population itself was 97 percent non-Jewish. The combination of Britain and the Soviets reinvigorated by America's fresh momentum led to the victory that made Israel and Jewish survival possible.

I've long treasured the little story – true or not – about the European Jew who was hectoring the American Jew about the condition of Jewish life in America. "You American Jews aren't really Jewish," complained the European Jew. "You're assimilated. You spend all your time showing how non-Jewish you can be. Your children play high school football on Friday night. You eat ham sandwiches followed by milk shakes.

"We European Jews," the tirade continued, "were holding regular services before Columbus even discovered America. We have the great synagogues, the great rabbis, the great liturgical collections.

"What," demanded the European Jew, "do you American Jews have better than we European Jews?"

Without hesitation the American Jew replied, "Christians! We American Jews have the absolute best Christians Jews have ever been privileged to live among." Bullseye, Buddy.

And that's why we still have European Jews!