We’re All Human Beings

Cleveland Jewish News: When Donald J. Trump announced a proposal for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until the country’s representatives can figure out what is going on,” criticism poured in.
The condemnation came swiftly from his fellow candidates, from national organizations – and from local rabbis.
One example was Rabbi Richard A. Block, senior rabbi at The Temple-Tifereth Israel in Beachwood and Cleveland, who took to Facebook with strong feelings about the New York business magnate’s proposal.
“In a political season when a leading presidential candidate advocates the exclusion of Muslims from our country, we understand anew the importance of the Torah’s commandments to ‘love your neighbor as yourself’ and to ‘love the stranger,’ and of Hillel’s teaching that ‘what is hateful to you, do not do to another. That is the whole Torah. All the rest is commentary. Go and learn,’” Block wrote. “How many radicals will (Trump) inspire to commit mass murder? If we remain silent in the face of Trump’s despicable proposal to ban Muslims from entering the U.S., we become complicit in it.”
For Rabbi Rosette Barron Haim, also of The Temple-Tifereth Israel, Trump’s proposal hit home – as in her family’s ancestral home in Turkey, where her family had many Muslim friends.
“I’m just very much aware that not all Muslims feel the same way about any given issue really,” Haim said. “It’s never good to lump all people, all minorities into any one category. I think that’s as true for Muslims as it is for people of Jewish background. That’s what they did in the countries where they wanted to persecute the Jews was that they made a generalization from an experience with perhaps just a few people and made policy that way.”
…Block said Jews might be extra sensitive to Trump’s proposal, recalling how Jews attempting to flee Nazism were kept out of the United States, including the famed case of the MS St. Louis, a ship with nearly 1,000 refugees forced to turn back toward Europe.
“I believe that the Jewish people’s experience with bigotry, persecution and rejection should stimulate special sensitivity to discrimination against other minorities,” Block wrote in an email. “We still recall with bitterness that the doors of the world were shut in the face of Jews attempting to flee Nazism. The vast majority of American Jews are the descendants of immigrants. The Torah reminds us more than 30 times that we were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
It’s hard to find a parallel for Trump’s proposal in American history – a time when an entire race or religious group was denied entry into the United States.
Certainly, Jewish refugees from Europe during World War II were denied entry due to a “nativist movement tinged with hysteria about hidden spies,” according to Jay Geller, Samuel Rosenthal Professor of Judaic Studies at Case Western Reserve University. Geller noted “active anti-Semitism” in the State Department and that officials had “carte blanche” to refuse German Jews. In that case, however, there were already quotas in place from the Immigration Act of 1924, which aided American efforts to prevent immigration of undesirables.
“America at that point simply needed to admit far more German Jews than the law stipulated they could and there was no widespread movement among non-Jewish-Americans to revise the quota or make an exception,” Geller said.
The idea of keeping out a seemingly dangerous minority then is not new. Still, his proposal is fairly unique in American history.
As a result, it’s also difficult to imagine how it would work. How would American authorities be able to figure out if someone was Muslim?
“The very first thing I thought was how would border control in this country even know who’s Muslim,” Geller said.
Geller said that the Germans solved that problem by putting a big red “J” on the passport of Jewish citizens, allowing other European countries like Switzerland to easily deny them. Most countries, however, including the United States, don’t put religion on one’s passport.
“I think the important thing is to remember that they’re all human beings,” Haim said. “We’re all human beings.”