Did Yesterday’s D.C. Rally Explain Gaza?

I was born and raised in Washington, D.C. We belonged to the conservative synagogue, B’Nai Israel on 16th Street, which is now the 19th Street Baptist Church right outside Rock Creek Park.

This was the 1950’s, and D.C. was still an entirely segregated town. The public schools were segregated, the neighborhoods were segregated, the ballpark where the Senators played baseball was segregated (blacks could sit in the left-field bleachers) — that’s just the way things were.

We knew about the Holocaust in Europe because there was a book in the house which had pictures of some of the concentration camps. We went to the synagogue on the High Holy Days — Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur — and my brother and I went to what we called ‘Hebrew school’ at B’Nai Israel on Wednesdays after public school, although we didn’t learn any Hebrew at all.

What we did learn was that there was a country called Israel somewhere in some place called the Middle East. We also learned to keep our mouths shut about being Jewish except when we were in the synagogue or at home.

The first time I saw a man wearing a yarmulke in the street was in 1954 when I visited relatives in New York and some guy with a yarmulke got on the subway. The yarmulke was something you wore in the synagogue. You didn’t walk around advertising your Jewishness…