(The cover of 14th Sentry Edition of Mein Kampf, published by the Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, Mass; originally in 1943, with copyright renewal in 1971. Translated by Ralph Manheim. All quotes of Hitler’s writings, are taken verbatim from this edition, with pages indicated.)

Donald Trump is celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the publication of Adolf Hitler’s “ Mein Kampf” a year early, by plagiarizing Hitler’s hate-filled screeds, written by the deranged sociopath and mass murderer, while the Nazi leader served time in Landsberg Am Lech Fortress Prison in Germany, for attempting to overthrow the government of Germany. Trump’s repeated uses of Hitler’s phrases “poisoning the blood” and “vermin,” are directly from the propaganda playbook of the most evil enemy the United States has ever faced, responsible for slaughtering six million Jews, and encouraging violent acts against millions more, from 1933-1945, through Europe and around the world.

Hitler’s quotes are directly from Mein Kampf, while the juxtaposed Trump quotes are from speeches, interviews and articles from June, 2015 through this past weekend of December 16, 2023.

From Page 327, Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler: 

“ In heedlessly ignoring the question of the preservation of the racial foundations of our nation, the old Reich disregarded the sole right which gives life in this world.  People which (sic) bastardize themselves, or let themselves be bastardized, sin against the will of eternal Providence, and when their ruin is encompassed by a stronger enemy, it is not an injustice done to them, but only a restoration of justice.  If a people no longer want to respect the Nature-given qualities of its being which root is in its blood, it has no further right to complain over the loss of its’ earthly existence….A new spiritual rebirth can come, AS LONG AS THE BLOOD IS PRESERVED PURE.”

September 27, 2023, Donald Trump in a video interview posted on the conservative website National Pulse:

“Nobody has any idea where these people are coming from, and we know they come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions and insane asylums. We know they’re terrorists. Nobody has ever seen anything like we’re witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It’s poisoning the blood of our country. It’s so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have .”

From page 289, Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler, on “Blood Poisoning:”

  “All great cultures from the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.” 

December 16, 2023, Whittemore Center Arena, Durham, New Hampshire, Donald Trump on “Blood Poisoning.”

“They let — I think the real number is 15, 16 million people into our country. When they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” That’s what they’ve done. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America, not just to three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world. They’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.”

From page 286, Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler, on mixed-race “defilement of the blood.”

“Historical experience offers countless proofs of this.  It shows with terrifying clarity that in every mingling of Aryan blood with that of lower peoples the result was the end of the cultured people.  North America, whose population consists in by far the largest part of Germanic elements who mixed but little with the lower colored peoples, shows a different humanity and culture from Central and South America, where the predominantly Latin immigrants often mixed with the aborigines of a large scale.  By this one example, we can clearly and distinctly recognize the effect of racial mixture.  The Germanic inhabitant of the American continent, who has remained racially pure and unmixed, rose to be master of the continent; he will remain the master as long as he does not fall a victim to the defilement of the blood.”

November 12, 2023, Veterans Day Speech, Claremont, NH, Donald Trump on “vermin:”

“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections.”

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, on dehumanizing Jews:

•    “ All who are not of good race in this world are chaff.” (pg. 296);
•      “If the Jews were alone in this world, they would stifle in filth and offal.” (pg. 302)
•      “He (the Jew) is and remains the typical parasite, a sponge who like a noxious bacillus, keeps spreading as soon as a favorable medium invites him.” (pg. 305)
•      “ He (The Jew) is the “scourge of God.  In the course of a few centuries they have come to know him , and now they feel that the mere fact of his (the Jew’s ) existence is as bad as the plague.”  They are “eternal blood suckers.” (pg. 310)
• “The Jew poisons the blood of others, but preserves his own.” (pg. 316)

June 16, 2015, Announcement of Candidacy Speech for President, Donald Trump:

“When Mexico sends its’ people, they’re not sending their best; they’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing their problems with us. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists…And, its coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and from the Middle East…”

From page 562, “Mein Kampf,” Adolf Hitler on “Jews as Black parasites:”

“Bear in mind the devastations which Jewish bastardization visits on our nation each day, and consider that this BLOOD POISONING can be removed from our national body only after centuries, if at all.  Consider further how racial disintegration drags down and often destroys the last Aryan values of our German people…THIS CONTAMINATION OF OUR BLOOD, BLINDLY IGNORED BY THOUSANDS OF OUR PEOPLE IS CARRIED OUT SYSTEMATICALLY BY THE JEW TODAY.  SYSTEMATICALLY, THESE BLACK PARASITES OF THE NATION DEFILE OUR INEXPERIENCED YOUNG BLOND GIRLS AND THEREBY DESTROY SOMETHING WHICH CAN NO LONGER BE REPLACED IN THIS WORLD.”

January 11, 2018, Donald Trump in Oval Office Meeting discussing immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and African countries: (as reported in Washington Post, by Josh Dawsey):

“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here? Why do we need more Haitians? Take them out.”

From page 325, Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler on Blacks and Jews defiling Germany:

“With Satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in the wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people.  With every means he tries to destroy the racial foundations of the people he has set out to subjugate.  Just as he himself systematically ruins women and girls, he does not shrink back from pulling down the blood barrier for others, even on a large scale.  It was and is Jews who bring the Negroes to the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought and clear aim of RUINING THE HATED WHITE RACE by the necessarily resulting bastardization, throwing it down from its’ cultural and political height, and himself rising to be its’ master…And so, he tries systematically to lower the racial level by a continuous poisoning of individuals.”

All we want for Hanukkah is a ceasefire in the Hamas/Israel War, the release of the Hostages, and an end to to slaughter of civilians in Gaza, on the West Bank, and in Israel.

The Non Profit Quarterly gives a detailed and compelling explanation of our Jewish Call for Peace. As we light the remaining Hanukkah candles over the next few nights, THIS is what we asking.

Organizing a Jewish Call for Ceasefire: A Conversation with Jewish Voice for Peace

We light our Hanukkah candles for a ceasefire.

Israel

Peace

My mother’s birthday and World AIDS Day dovetailed each other for years, until her death at age 92, in 2007.

During her final years, I was grateful to be working for a national HIV/AIDS organization—life-affirming work which required me to travel across country in early December, to spread the message about HIV prevention, treatment & care. An added bonus was getting to celebrate my mother’s birthday with her, in person, each year.

She lived a grace-filled life, battling Polio for all of her existence, raising and diapering four children with “only one good arm,” and preparing homemade pasta for a steady flow of family and friends who traveled miles for her incomparable cooking.  It was remarkable to watch her manipulate the pasta dough, with her one strong hand, as she kneaded it tirelessly on the flour-covered macaroni board.

She rarely complained, loved to play the digital slots with her lightening fast “good hand,” at the casino, and lived with the disease as an example of courage, love, tenacity and compassion for others. No matter how challenging things got, my mother did not know the meaning of giving up—on herself, or on those she loved.

For my mother’s 90^th birthday— she got all “dolled up,” in a pink Boa and a “Happy Birthday” tiara to spend the day at the casino with her granddaughters,  my sister Vera, and my brother-in-law Carlo, my mother’s care-givers for the last 14 years of her life, when she was largely confined to a wheelchair.

I was making my World AIDS Day educational trip to Southern California, and, as a gift, brought her an advanced-copy DVD of an HBO-produced story about FDR’s years in Warm Springs, Georgia, which depicted how he tenaciously battled his Polio, and did his physical therapy, day after day, to prevent further deterioration of his paralyzed muscles.

FDR was a hero, and almost a saint, to my mother since her childhood, and like him, she religiously followed her routine of daily physical therapy (coupled with praying on her Rosary Beads) right up until her final days.

As my mother and I watched the HBO film together, she gave a stream of commentary about how she, contracting Polio as an infant in the epidemic of 1915, was put into a Crippled Children’s Home (it’s actual name), and banned from NYC’s public swimming pools for fear she would infect others. 

My mother always considered herself “fortunate” (her favorite word) to not be trapped in an Iron Lung to breath as many other “Polio Kids,” were, and “blessed” to be selected as a New York Times Fresh Air Fund Kid, where she was taken by bus to a special upstate summer camp for poor kids with Polio.

On the ride up to the Catskill Mountains from New York City, my mother remembered passing small-minded, small towns along the way with signs at their entrance that shouted: “No Polio Kids Allowed.”

“It was the same as with AIDS, today” this remarkable Italian woman, than 90 years old,” said. “Some people don’t give you a chance if you have a disease or a disability, but you can never let them get the best of you.”

And, she quickly added,  “It helped to have some powerful advocates like FDR and the March of Dimes.”

For years until the Polio Vaccine was discovered in 1954–some 60 years after the virus was identified–my mother dutifully dealt out her supply of dimes to the March of Dimes, determined to be part of something far bigger than herself.

Her help, she was convinced, would make it possible for medical researchers to find a cure for the disease that had paralyzed her on one side of her body, and spare another child from the same kind of suffering and stigma she endured, from narrow-minded members of her own family, and from a society all too quick to cast aside the disabled.

My mother’s instincts were exactly correct. Millions of others like her, with a strong sense of compassion and social responsibility, contributed hundreds of millions of dimes, and kept the search for a cure for polio on the top of the public’s priority list of public health imperatives for decades to come, when people still believed that medical science could save the world.

“If only people would support a March of Dimes for AIDS,” this 90-year old Italian woman with only a sixth-grade education would say.

“If only you had a fighter like FDR to find a vaccine for AIDS. And if only, you could convince the public that everyone has a responsibility to help each other.” She didn’t mince four-letter words when it came to describing anti-vaxxers.

That was my mother’s time-tested recipe for social responsibility. She clearly saw the connection between Polio and AIDS, between caring and compassion, between love and social action. A devout, progressive Catholic in the tradition of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers Movement, acting to improve the world and help others was the central commandment of her faith.

Giving up was never an option for Margaret Villano; in fact, it was a mortal sin. And each time she lifted her paralyzed arm up with her “good arm”, or carefully guided her “good hand” to put ten dimes in a specially designed giving card, you could feel that her hope, and action, could move the world.

It takes a fraud to know one. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) and George Santos, in an official GOP Campaign Photo, when Stefanik, House GOP Conference Chair, was boosting Santos as part of “The Next Generation of Republican Leadership.”

Over the past year, I’ve written a few pieces about Georgie Santos, the former Drag Queen of a thousand lavish costume changes and faces, as he and his fellow blowhards like Steve Bannon, Elise Stefanik, Lee Zeldin and Kevin McCarthy inflated Santos, like a Diva Diribigle, onto the New York and National Political scenes.

Then, like the Hindenburg blimp bursting into flames over Lakehurst, New Jersey, the imposter immolated himself as he lied and lied as fast as he could flap his arms and his gums. First came a swath of indictments for breaking a number of federal laws, then his arrests. Now, Elise Stefanik’s favorite dragged queen—who cast a crucial vote to make Kevin McCarthy (briefly) Speaker of the House, is being kicked out of the Congress he faked his way into.

Sadly, it was only when House Ethics investigators discovered that Santos illegally used campaign funds for Botox, Spa Treatments, lavish hotel visits, fancy meals and expensive clothing—all such stereotypically Drag Queenie stuff—that they decided he was too much of a fraud, even for House Republicans—who have masqueraded as lawmakers, ever since they tried to burn the U.S. government down on January 6, 2021.

So before you have to listen to the bloviation over “fraud,” and “trust,” being bleated by the GOP-smacked ghouls in Congress next week, when they finally kick Santos in the pantos—to prevent the flames licking at his daring disguises from leaping onto THEM (I’m talking to YOU, ELISE!), remember who sold us Georgie Porgy as part of the “Next Generation of Republican Leadership.” (See Official GOP Campaign Photo).

(Back in December, 2022, I wrote about the blizzard of Trump-like lies swirling around newly-elected Republican Congressman George Santos, who fraudulently stole the New York Congressional seat in the district where I lived for 20 years. Santos was the poster-boy for the “Next Generation of Republican Leadership,” and campaigned with House Republican Conference Chair, Rep. Elise Stefanik, from upstate New York. Stefanik even helped raise money for Santos, and used some of those funds to support other GOP Congressional candidates, giving the GOP control of the House of Representatives.

This morning those lies, fraud and alleged crimes caught up with George Santos when he was arrested by the FBI, and indicted on 13-federal charges including money laundering, fraud, and theft of public money — COVID money.

Like many law abiding Americans, I love the sound of GOP frauds, liars and cheats being handcuffed in the morning…

Here’s my original piece, entitled “Georgy Santos Has No Pantos.”

He never went to Horace Mann,

He lies and lies as fast as he can.

Baruch, a goof; Citibank, a prank.

Georgy Santos has no pantos.

Deaths in the Holocaust? 9/11? Or Pulse?

Surely such horror was meant to repulse.

No one will fact check; no one will question.

To grift on such grief,

Is to cause indigestion.

Georgy Santos, has no pantos.

Ukrainian-ISH, Jew-ISH, or just a tad gay;

The lying was pure TrumpISH,

Even Elise would say.

To them, one big con game, so ripe to play.

An overnight wonder, like Elizabeth Holmes or Crypto;

Santos source of $$$, didn’t come from calypso.

From Brazilian fascists? Putin? Stefanik, perhaps?

Just cook up a fake resume, and goddamn the facts.

A dash of Latino, a gay man, a Jew —

A rich man, a poor man, anything for you.

A Grand Ole’ Prevaricator (that’s the G.O.P),

Santos is whatever you can imagine him to be.

If you can believe him,

Santos crashed the Insurrection,

So maybe Steve Bannon (friend of Lee Zeldin’s)

Funded his political resurrection.

Now, he’s exposed,

Like Mar-A-Lago’s Emperor, with no clothes.

Georgy Porgy with no pantos?

The only thing more cringy,

Is a Naked Ron DeSantos…

(Illustration by Art Spiegelman, Maus.)

In the frontispiece to Volume II of Art Spiegelman’s  Pulitizer Prize winning graphic novel, Maus, there is a quote from a 1930’s newspaper article from Pomerania, Germany:

“Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal ever revealed…Healthy emotions tell every independent young man and every honorable youth that the filth-covered vermin, the greatest bacteria carrier in the animal kingdom, cannot be the ideal type of animal…Away with the Jewish brutalization of the people!  Down with Mickey Mouse! Wear the Swastika Cross!”

A contributing editor and artist for The New Yorker, Spiegelman’s drawings and prints have been exhibited in museums around the world. 

In frame after frame of his nearly 300-page monumental masterpiece Maus, Spiegelman carefully shows how years of calculated dehumanization of referring to Jews as “Vermin”, led to the massacre of millions of Jews, the disabled, members of the LGBTQ community, the press, liberals and humanists—whom Hitler wrote about extensively in “Mein Kampf”—as  just an extension of world Jewry.

Spielgelman, who still lives in NYC with his family, speaks even more graphically when discussing how methodically Nazi propagandists carried out their decades long campaign of dehumanization as a predicate to mass extermination:

“ The most shockingly relevant anti-Semitic work I found was “ The Eternal Jew,” a 1940 German “documentary” that portrayed Jews in a ghetto swarming in tight quarters, bearded caftaned creatures, and then a cut to Jews as mice—or rather rats—swarming in a sewer, with a title card that said “Jews are the rats” or the “vermin of mankind.” This made it clear to me that this dehumanization was at the very heart of the killing project. In fact, Zyklon B, the gas used in Auschwitz and elsewhere as the killing agent, was a pesticide manufactured to kill vermin—like fleas and roaches.”

With his flimsy, toupe-like veil of not mentioning us Jews specifically in his definition of  “Vermin”—delivered in a New Hampshire Veterans Day speech supposedly honoring thousands of American Veterans who sacrificed their lives fighting Hitler, and Fascism—Trump targeted many groups long tagged by tyrants like Hitler, Mussolini and Joseph McCarthy as “fellow travelers” of Jews:  “radical leftists,” “sinister, dangerous forces from within,” “communists,” “Marxists” and, “thugs.”

Mein Kampf, Hitler’s deranged diatribe against the Jews and “liberal” society,  written nearly 100 years ago from his cell in Landsberg Prison, explodes with the same kind of vitriol that Trump and his MAGA-Nazis use against many of their imagined contemporary enemies.  Sounding much like Trump, Hitler rants:

“…all at once the Jew also becomes liberal and begins to rave about the progress of mankind…Slowly, he makes himself the spokesman for a new era…To strengthen his political position he tries to tear down the racial and civil barriers…To this end, he fights with all the tenacity innate to the Jew, for religious tolerance; …another weapon in service to the Jews is the Press; the Jew talks of ‘enlightenment,’ ‘progress’, ‘freedom,’ ‘humanity’…and of the equality of all men without regard to race  and color.  He (The Jew) poisons the blood of others, but preserves his own.” (From, section of Mein Kampf entitled “Development of Jewry”)

Michael Tomasky, writing in The New Republic on November 12, 2023, is right to point out the difference in Trump’s Veterans Day version of “Mein Kampf,” :

“Trump, let us clarify, does not mention the Jews.  He means SOME Jews—the ones who aren’t for him, which, come to think of it, is most (American) Jews.”

American Jews, considerably to the left of our Israeli counterparts, have repeatedly rejected Trump, seeing right through his previously coded discriminatory, racist and totalitarian comments and tactics.  In 2016, Hillary Clinton won 71% of the Jewish vote, while receiving only 37 % of the overall white vote; Biden did even better among American Jewish voters in 2020, receiving 77% of the Jewish vote.  Polls taken earlier this summer positing a Biden/Trump match-up for 2024, show Biden with a massive 50 point lead among Jewish voters.  And that was before the Israel/Hamas war, in which Biden’s strong response has pushed his numbers among Jews even higher.

Perhaps most telling—and I’m sure Trump’s own Joseph Goebbels, Stephen Miller,  has read this—at the end of Hitler’s maniacal Mein Kampf section entitled “Development of Jewry,” Hitler reveals what we Jews are really after:

“His ultimate goal in this stage is the rule of ‘democracy,” or as he understands it: the rule of parliamentarianism.”

Among us Jews and our fellow travelers, we understand it as the “Rule of Law.”

(Shimon Peres and me, Jerusalem, Israel, 1991.)

I have been haunted by two memories this week. 

Memories which have come back to me as nightmares, blaring to me like air-raid sirens in the night, because they tried to warn us—some 30 years ago—of the mass murders which just occurred in Israel, the killing of civilians in Gaza, and the haunting spectre of a dark endless pit, carved out by hate and violence, into which thousands of innocent human beings would disappear.  

If only we had listened and acted upon those warnings.

In one memory, the face and voice of Shimon Peres, former Israeli Prime Minister, President, Foreign Minister, and Nobel Peace Prize winner is right in front of mine.  In the other, Yitzak Rabin, Israeli war hero, Prime Minister, and Nobel Peace Prize winner, shakes my hand, and repeats the word “Shalom” over and over and over again.

I first met Shimon Peres 32 years ago this summer, as part of a small group of public officials on a fact-finding mission to Israel, sponsored by New York’s Jewish Community Relations Council. Peres, then Chairman of the out-of-power Israeli Labour Party and a member of the Israeli Knesset, talked passionately with us about peace and democracy for nearly an hour. 

He had devoted his life to the pursuit of both, first as a fighter in Israel’sHaganah—under the direction of his mentor David Ben-Gurion—when the nation was formed in 1948; then, two-years after our meeting, Peres was a signatory to the Oslo Accords for peace with the Palestinian Liberation Organization, along with Yasir Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin, and U.S. President Bill Clinton.

Speaking freely on the day before Mikhail Gorbachev returned to power during a tumultuous time in the Soviet Union, Peres talked of history happening as we spoke, not far from the classroom where me met, in Jerusalem.

I asked Peres about the prospects for peace in the Middle East, since he was so closely identified with the effort to achieve it.  He quickly outlined his plan for peace, and for Israel’s future:

“ The three basic problems in Israel’s future are: 1) We must achieve peace before the Middle East goes nuclear; 2) We must keep Israel from becoming a bi-national state. We may end up keeping the territories as Likud wants, but losing our country.  What makes a country is not land, but people. We don’t want to dominate others. Who is a hero? The one who dominates himself.”

Shimon Perez, paused and stayed silent for a moment, to allow the vision he had for the Israel’s future, to sink it.  He had been grappling with these matters for most of his lifetime, appointed by Ben-Gurion to be Israel’s first Navy Secretary at the age of twenty-four, in 1948, the year before I was born. 

I stared at his face, following each deeply creased line, to see how far back in time I could trace his thoughts, and the beliefs that drove him.

“The third problem,” Perez said, “is economic.  We cannot live forever on aid of the U.S.  Right now, world markets are more important; dangers and opportunities are regional; we cannot solve our problems without reorganizing our water sources.”

Peres was preaching now, his soul on fire:

“We should combine the oil of the Saudis, with the water of Turkey and the know-how of Israel to build a common market. For us, the way the peace will wind up is more important than how it will be obtained. For us, it is a matter of life and death; the only option we have is to become a medical center for the region, a technological center for the region, what with the number of Soviet doctors and engineers coming to Israel. We shall have to give back the territories — they should be demilitarized. They would run their lives without our intervention, such as Gaza. Jerusalem would have to remain united. We have to work toward a regional economy with regional solutions…The motivation for the Palestinian conflict may disappear if it’s solved along the lines I have suggested.”

Peres’ bright eyes sparkled as he detailed his plan for peace throughout the region. He noted that Israel did not have territorial issues with Eqypt or Jordan, but only with Syria, over the Golan Heights, which, he noted, “was not a holy place.”

I asked Peres to suggest some alternatives for dealing with the Golan and Gaza.

“I’m not in the mood to enter into negotiations, “ Peres said. “When we start negotiations, then we’ll see. One day, Saddam Hussein will disappear. Our enemies are not the people, nor a religion. We must judge the land by its’ people. What is Gaza?  For me, Gaza doesn’t belong to us; it belongs to the people who live there. I’d give back Gaza; I’d admit it is a fact of life — it is theirs. The same goes for the West Bank. We have to cut the geography in accordance with the demography. Both areas would have to be demilitarized.”

He finished answering our questions and Shimon Peres, dressed in an open-necked, short-sleeved sport shirt that matched mine, shook my hand and posed for photos. I told him I worked with New York Governor Mario Cuomo and his heavy, tired eyes, lifted at each corner.

“ Please give the Governor my warmest regards,” Peres told me.

The following year, 1992, I accompanied Cuomo on his first trip to Israel, watching as the Governor and Peres embraced like long lost brothers; marveling at how each resembled the other in voice, manner, gravitas and appearance. The deep lines in their faces seemed to be mirror images.

Peres had just lost a bruising leadership battle to lead Israel’s Labour Party, to Yitzhak Rabin, who went on to be elected Prime Minister in June of that year.

Rabin, who was the Israeli Army’s Chief of Staff during the 6-Day War of 1967, and a war hero, was the first native-born Israeli to be elected Prime Minister.  As Prime Minister, Rabin immediately put a freeze on new Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, infuriating the opposition Likud Party, and the nation’s growing number of fundamentalist religious extremists on the Far Right.

At the suggestion of Peres, who was Rabin’s Foreign Minister, the newly elected leader of Israel met in his Jerusalem office with Cuomo, in September 1992.

Prime Minister Rabin, joined by his wife Leah, welcomed us into his office—a simple, straightforward office without ostentation, much like the man himself.

I sat next to the Prime Minister, by his left side. Governor Cuomo sat across from him and Matilda Cuomo and Leah Rabin sat next to one another, to the right of the Prime Minister. The conversation was warm and cordial. Cuomo, a leading American progressive, was well-liked and highly respected by Israeli Labour Party leaders.

In office just a few months, Rabin talked of his plans for pursuing peace in Israel and throughout the Middle East. He looked at each of us squarely, as he spoke in his deep, monotone, mournful voice. My eyes explored Rabin’s expressive face.  It was a face chiseled with sadness, with eyes that had seen too much death and suffering. Later, I would learn that this man, haunted by the thought that he was leading young Israeli soldiers to their slaughter, suffered a nervous breakdown during the 1967 War—the war which secured the Golan Heights and the West Bank for Israel, and represented Rabin’s greatest military victory.

I can still hear Rabin’s voice,  that somber voice, warning us of the grave threats to peace posed by political extremists among both his own people and the Palestinians. Just the day before in a public park in Jerusalem, I witnessed some of the Jewish extremists Rabin referenced. They tried to shout down Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek—an effervescent, ebullient five-term Mayor—who was speaking at a public event.  The Right Wing zealots—followers of ultra-nationalist and convicted terrorist Rabbi Meir Kahane– despised Kollek, because he believed that all faiths should be able to worship freely at their holy sites in Jerusalem. As a convert to Judaism, I admired Teddy Kollek’s respect for all religions.

I can still feel Yitzak Rabin’s penetrating gaze into my eyes, the firm yet gentle look of a man who had known love and loss, weakness and strength, sorrow and joy, victory and defeat.  I can still see the sadness slip from his eyes, each time he spoke of his hopes for bringing peace to the land of his birth;

I can still feel the sweet contradiction in the strength of his handshake and the softness of his voice when he wished each of us “Shalom.”

 It was the last word Yitzhak Rabin spoke to us.

Three years later, in November, 1995, Rabin attended at a peace rally in Tel Aviv, to support the Oslo Accords with the PLO which he & Peres had negotiated with Yasir Arafat, and for which he, Peres & Arafat would all be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

At the peace demonstration, Rabin sang the words to the “Song of Peace.” He folded the paper on which the words to the song were written, and gently placed it in his jacket pocket. Minutes after that, an assassin’s bullet ended Rabin’s life. The folded paper containing the following lyrics to the “Song of Peace “ (Shir L’Shalom) was found covered with blood:

“ Let the sun rise, the morning shine,

The most righteous prayer will not bring us back.

Who is the one whose light has been extinguished,

And buried in the earth;

Bitter tears will not wake him; will not bring him back.

No song of praise or victory will avail us.

Therefore, sing only a prayer of peace.

Don’t whisper a prayer—

Sing aloud a Song of Peace.”