Seeking Answers

On December 1, 1989, while taking a walk in my hometown of Silver Spring, Maryland, an idea flashed into my mind.  I would create the Trial of Adolf Hitler.

What would cause me to embark upon such a bizarre journey?   I needed answers.

I purchased a copy of MEIN KAMPF (Hitler’s manifesto).  As I began to read, I felt dissatisfied with my level of comprehension.  I decided to type the entire text into my computer.  Two years, 700 pages and 25,000 pattern searches later, I concluded the following:

• First: That Mein Kampf was, in reality, a historical roadmap stretching back through two millennia; that the gruesome ideologies and myths about the Jewish people that were documented in Mein Kampf were not the ravings of a lunatic (Hitler), but a final repository of the accumulated anti-Jewish mythology representing 2000 years of evolution and development.

• Second: That various historical personalities referred to in Mein Kampf (Luther, Shakespeare, Wagner, Ford) were transmitters of these anti-Jewish myths and were guideposts for Hitler in the development of his anti-Jewish polemic.

• Third and most importantly, we have the miracle of Jewish survival. For the Jewish people to have survived this ferocious assault on identity through the last two millennia is one of the great wonders of the world.  To call oneself Jewish is a heroic statement.

On December 13, 2009, twenty years will have passed since I began this journey. Along with our passengers and guests, I will cast my eyes out to sea at the location where the SS St. Louis was turned away from the Miami Beach coastline 70 years ago.  Perhaps tearfully, I will feel the despair of the passengers as they were refused safe haven in America.  But on this day, I will join with them in commemorating and honoring our survival and the preciousness of our Jewish heritage.