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Isadore Greenbaum, the Jew Who Tried Singlehandedly to Take on American Nazis

Oct. 20 2017

In 1939, some 22,000 members of the German-American Bund—a pro-Nazi group—flocked to a rally in Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden, ostensibly to celebrate George Washington’s birthday. Isadore Greenbaum, a twenty-six-year-old resident of Brooklyn, snuck in to hear what was being said. At some point during a speech by the Bund’s leader, Fritz Kuhn, Greenbaum became so incensed by the anti-Semitic rhetoric that he rushed the stage, yelling “Down with Hitler!” As Philip Bump recounts, he was swarmed and beaten by a group of uniformed thugs until rescued by the police, who promptly arrested him. Video footage can be seen here:

When the U.S. entered World War II, Greenbaum joined the Navy, in which he served for the duration of the conflict. He recalled the Madison Square Garden incident in an interview with Stars and Stripes in which he claimed, apparently falsely, to have landed a punch on Kuhn.

Read more at Washington Post

More about: American Jewish History, Anti-Semitism, History & Ideas, Nazism

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic