Kristallnacht: The Act of A "Cultured Society" »By Rabbi Yaakov SpivakOn November 9, 1938, 71 years ago today, the society that gave us Bach and Beethoven, Goethe and Schiller, morphed into a raging, bloodthirsty mob, smashing Jewish businesses and screaming for the death of the “farfluchtene Juden.”
The event shook up a German Jewry that, only days before, was confident of its future in the Fatherland. No, it would not happen there.
The lesson to be learned is that of how mercurial, how fickle a society can be in relation to scapegoating. None of the cultured background of the country succeeded in soothing German nerves. When grandmothers lost their pensions it was blamed on the Jews, and, of course, the Jews were going to pay for it.
No, America is not Germany. Not yet. Germany had been through a Versailles Treaty that depleted it of its resources. Germany had known the humiliation of defeat, the hunger pangs of an out-of-work society. Germany was ready to listen to an irrational Austrian paperhanger.
America has exhibited a far more resilient economy.
But America is far more vulnerable in the atomic age, far more vulnerable with inner turmoil.
We are still free, still capable.
But vigilance is needed more than ever.
Read more:
http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/flashpoint/2009/11/kristallnacht-the-act-of-a-cul.html#ixzz0WW9urxFQ