The first time I met Josh Shapiro, he didn’t strike me as Ted Lasso, the way the brilliant writer David Sirota described him earlier this month, in his piece “The Democrat Who Picks Fights with Bad Guys,”  (https://www.levernews.com/the-democrat-standing-between-america-and-fascism/).

After all, Shapiro, the Governor-elect of Pennsylvania, and I met four years ago in April, 2018, two years before the upbeat Ted Lasso entered America’s consciousness on television, and six months before hate and anti-Semitism murdered 11 Jews quietly worshipping at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburg on an ordinary Saturday morning.

Serendipity brought our families together at Beth Sholom Synagogue, in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, just outside of Philadelphia, on a similar Saturday morning across the State. Carol Villano and I were there to celebrate the 90th birthday of the matriarch of Carol’s family, Ethel “Etty” Jacobson Hamburger.

Shapiro’s family, like our beloved Etty’s, also belonged to the only synagogue in the United States designed by the legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and declared a National Historic Landmark.   Josh Shapiro was there to celebrate the Bar Mitzvah of his son, Jonah, who, two years later would achieve instant internet fame by casually walking in on his father’s November 2020, MSNBC post-election interview, as then Pennsylvania AG Shapiro explained his legal challenges to Trump’s Presidential election deniers.

Twenty years earlier, with Josh Shapiro fresh out of Georgetown Law and living in DC, we first visited Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural “tribute to Mount Sinai,” when Etty, then 70, and her granddaughter Stephanie, both made their Bat Mitzvahs.     The synagogue’s soaring design—with its’ translucent glass roof reaching skyward, and the graceful melding of geometric shapes in every detail– mesmerized and inspired me.

 During long Hebrew riffs in services that I didn’t always fully understand, my eyes would wander up and down the fiberglass walls of the Temple, and up 110 feet to the crest of the ceiling, marveling at every meticulous detail in metal, wood, stone or glass.  Being at Beth Sholom, was a feast for every sense, and left me feeling uplifted.

So it was in that context, bathed in the soft, filtered light passing through the luminescent roof of this Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece, that we were introduced to Josh Shapiro and his family by our Etty, and her oldest daughter, Pam.  Most of her fellow synagogue members knew Etty, since, a decade earlier, she was honored as “Congregant of the Year” at Beth Sholom.  That’s just who she was.

At the Oneg celebration following that morning’s services to literally “break (challah) bread” with the other families sharing joys of life that day (like the Shapiros), Etty waved us over to where they were sitting. 

“Carol, Steve,” Etty called to us, reaching out her arm.  “Come, come–you’ve got to meet our State’s Attorney, Josh Shapiro. I was just telling him of your work with Mario Cuomo, and of the book you wrote all about it.”

This was Ethel Jacobson Hamburger at her cheerleading, family-advocacy best.

Ever since I entered the family 46 years earlier (and later converted to Judaism), I fell head over heels in love with the woman.  She embraced us wandering Jews, for Shabbat dinners and Jewish Holidays, and was there to help us out when our son, Matt, was born in Washington, DC, in 1975, (two years after Josh Shapiro was born), and was present in New York to celebrate Matt’s Bar Mitzvah, 13 years later.    It was as natural as sunshine for Etty to become a booster for my memoir, “Tightrope:  Balancing a Life Between Mario Cuomo & My Brother,” when it was published in 2017.  It’s just who she was.

She arranged a “book talk” for me at Martin’s Run, the senior care facility where she was living outside of Philadelphia in the Fall of 2017, and filled the room with dozens of her fellow residents—aged 80 to 100—who were interested in learning how to write their own memoirs.

A former teacher, founder of libraries, and a literacy maven, Etty had some practical, and loving, advice for me on how she, at age 89, would help sell my book.

“Steve,” she said.  “I’ve put together a list of many Jewish publications in and around Philadelphia, and I think it would be advantageous for you to contact them before you come down here.”

“ I love this idea, Etty,” I responded.  “Plus, I may be the only new author with an 89-year old Jewish grandmother for my press agent.”

Etty kvelled and smiled her sweet smile:  “Great grandmother,” she added, to be more precise.

So, Josh Shapiro— the up and coming Pennsylvania politician and national political figure, and as Dave Sirota wrote, “cheery mensch your Jewish grandmother really wanted you to be,” had met his match.  Etty entertained him with her generous review of my book, and felt that because of our similar commitments to make our faith come alive through compassionate, inclusive, and progressive public service, it was fate that we meet.  She was merely fate’s facilitator, a Yentl, of sorts.

Not even the brilliant, natural light that poured in through the panels of Frank Lloyd Wrights’ “luminous Mount Sinai,” could match the warmth and brightness of Ethel Jacobson Hamburger’s sparkling smile that day, her 90th birthday.  I cannot think of Josh Shapiro and his battles against injustice and hate, without thinking of Etty’s love and gratitude.

I think of her, and Josh Shapiro, and the moment we met inside the heart of Frank Lloyd Wright’s concrete & glass ode to exultation, and I permit myself to, once again, have hope for humanity.

I am ALL 12 angry men.

I am a truthful man,

Furious at the evil hate and fear

Of strong women, by flaccid, weak men;

Shriveled souls, hell-bent on complete control,

To compensate for un-faced failures, buried deep inside dark holes.

I am a Caucasian man,

Enraged at so many vile, bigoted White people,

Ignorance etched into every pore,

Proud of their prejudices; poisoned to the core.

I am the descendant of Italians,

Disgusted by the pig-headedness of many brothers

Whose names end in vowels, but think with their bowels,

Forgetting when our people were the “others.”

I am a Jew by choice,

Refusing to mute my voice,

When Christians, I once was, and knew,

Campaign to erase all living, and dead, Jews.

Nor do I support Theocratic Israeli Jews,

Who think they have nothing to lose,

By resorting to that same Rule by Hate,

To justify a Jewish State, as if that breaks the chain.

I am a grandfather of girls,

Determined to repair and improve their worlds,

So they can live in peace and calm,

Free from all violence or any harm.

I am a man closing in on death,

Who’ll fight until my dying breath,

For freedom to love, and live and think,

That could be gone in but a blink

If we shut our eyes to injustice and pain,

Our legacy, forever stained.

I am a student of the law,

Passionate about fairness and playing by the rules,

With zero tolerance for arrogant fools,

Who demand order, for all but their own ghouls.

I am an angry man, demanding dignity for all,

Detesting acts so cruel and mean and small,

Protesting “jokes” and winks, to purposely berate,

Or anything from anyone which masquerades the hate.

I am a father and a lover,

Fierce in the protection of my loves,

And of the other, who, unsheltered, or without embrace,

Have no less need to be seen, or feel a caring eye upon their face.

I am the son of immigrants, and of imagination,

Of dreams, of values, of hope, and indignation

That incantations about equality and fairness are goals, not actual,

That until achieved, are far, far, less than satisfactual.

I am an ethical human child, whose present is my future;

Who, despite my age, will not be mild in my rage for what is right,

Nor sit silently through the dreadful, deepening night,

Knowing that beauty and life and love depend upon our light.

https://villano.substack.com/p/the-second-assassination-attempt?sd=pf

I Am A Jew, And They Want Me Dead.

I am a Jew, and they want me dead.

By gas, by stone, or bullet in my head,

I am a Jew, and Ye & Q want me dead.

I am the Universal Scapegoat,

The object of Hitler’s hate;

The bone in Father Coughlin’s throat,

Eternal enemy of their “faith.”

I am a Jew, and they want me dead,

Christian Nationalists, Fascists of dread.

Unable to convert me,

Their “final solution” is to hurt me.

I am the Enemy of Their State

Of mind, so blind to anything but hate.

I think, therefore, I am humanity —

Challenging their poison of insanity.

I am a Jew. Crazed Savonarolas want me dead.

Not because of what I said, but for how I pray & think.

“Christian Nations” hell-bent on purifications,

Pushing democracy and people, over the brink.

To them, I am the fault for all their failure,

The brunt of all their blame,

Resentment is their deranged jailor,

Vile actions recognize no shame.

I am a Jew, and Ye & Q want me dead;

To Def-Com our world with violence and strife.

Unwilling to learn what’s in our head —

That to be a Jew, is to improve all life.

In filmmaker Ken Burns’ remarkable documentary The U.S. and the Holocaust: A History to be Reckoned With, the truth about America’s culpability in the slaughter of 6 million Jews is carefully documented in devastating detail.  

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It may be the first time the story was told with such excruciating exactness on American television, where human brutality toward fellow humans is usually sanitized before being televised.

Burns, a master at making history come alive, wanted no part of sanitizing this particularly grotesque part of U.S History.  In fact, he insisted on moving the documentary’s release date up from 2023 to before the 2022 mid-term elections, “because I felt the urgency that we needed to be part of the conversation.”

Calling “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” his most important work, Burns has not been reluctant to say why.  In an interview with The Guardian last month when his documentary premiered on PBS, Burns said:

“We were obligated to do that because the way we mount this series is we begin with anti-Semitism in America and racism and the pernicious slave trade and xenophobia and eugenics.  We’re obligated then NOT to close our eyes and pretend this is some uncomfortable thing in the past that doesn’t rhyme with the present.”   

 Burns and his team had plenty of original material to mine– in 30 race-based Jim Crow laws enacted throughout the US following the Civil War to systematically deny Blacks—state-by-state— federal constitutional rights guaranteed by the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments; and, the blatantly racist U.S. Immigration Act of 1924, which banned Asian immigrants and dramatically reduced the number of Jews, Italians and other non-Nordic people allowed into the US.  

Many of those state and federal statutes were drafted by members of the Ku Klux Klan—at their peak of power in 1924, when 50,000 hooded hoodlums marched through the streets of Washington, DC.    The Klan’s chokehold on Congress and State Legislatures was eerily similar to how today’s MAGA-made legislators, Governors, and dark-money groups, are behind the drafting, passage and implementation of contemporary race-hate laws and actions against immigrants, voter suppression laws designed to repress the Black vote, and draconian limits on the healthcare rights of women and members of the LGBTQ community.

In fact, Adolf Hitler and his cult of fanatic, anti-democratic criminals—also captivated by Blood Red and black symbols made famous by the Confederate Flag and later mimicked by MAGA imagery—used America’s Jim Crow laws, anti-immigrant fervor, and American genocide against Native Americans, as their inspirations for codifying the Nuremberg Laws against the Jews.  If a democracy like the United States could deny legal rights to and murder people on the basis of race, then surely a newly elected Fascist government in Germany could do the same.

In the meticulously researched book by Yale Law School Professor James Q. Whitman, entitled “Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of the Nazi Race Law” (Princeton University Press, 2017, Princeton, NJ) the horrifying details are spelled out, of how the Nazis copyied American legal precedence to justify their plan to annihilate the Jews. 

Hitler couldn’t believe his good fortune when Nazi lawyers presented him, after his election in 1933, with the evidence that even a “great” democracy like the United States of America, believed in racial purity.   Yale’s Professor Whitman shows — through never before published material and verbatim transcripts — how the Nazis, as early as 1920, were inspired by the American States’ Jim Crow laws and increasingly xenophobic Federal anti-immigrant laws.

 The Nazis were so inspired by these American laws reflecting our “racial madness” that they based the Nuremberg Laws upon them — sham “laws” which resulted in systematic dehumanization and eventual annihilation of 6 million Jews.

 Professor Whitman uncovered the transcripts of debates among Nazi lawyers, drafting early versions of the Nuremberg Laws, which revealed that even the most radical Nazis thought that America’s anti-miscegenation laws against Blacks, “went too far.” Until, of course, the Nazis went even more insane, making interracial marriage with someone even slightly Jewish  punishable by death.

Ironically, as Burns illustrates in this explosive documentary—and in his earlier masterpiece entitled The Civil War–the Jim Crow laws were the law of the land in the Confederacy of the U.S. prior to 1865 and formed the basis for a Civil War.  That war, witnessed an illegal, violent militia of White Supremacists commit armed treason against the government of the United States, resulting in the deaths of more than 365,000 official U.S. Army troops.  That number of deaths almost equaled the number of American soldiers (400,000) killed while battling Fascism abroad, during WWII.

 But the U.S. Civil War, and America’s racist Jim Crow laws, weren’t the only inspirations for the Nazis that were made in the USA.

Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf how thrilled he was by the United States willingness to commit genocide against Native Americans in order to achieve America’s “Manifest Destiny” and acquire new territory. The Nazi’s would later use America’s “gunning down of redskins” (Hitler’s own words), the racist slaughter and aerial bombing of hundreds of Black Americans in Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Greenwood Neighborhood (“Black Wall Street) in 1921, and the Klan’s Immigration Act of 1924, as justification for murdering Jews.

Burns unapologetically links the spread of authoritarianism, racism, and anti-Semitism with the life and death threats being posed to democracy today. He is unafraid to end his three-part series with scenes from the blatantly anti-Semitic “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, in 2017, or the armed attack on the United States Government and Capitol police by maniacal Trump supporters on January 6, 2021:

“The story of the Holocaust reminds us of the fragility of democracies…Certainly lots of the smoke that preceded the American Civil War is proceeding now:  the increasingly vitriolic rhetoric, the isolated, sporadic incidences of violence. That’s true also of Nazi Germany…the time to save a democracy is BEFORE it’s lost.”

Think of the vilest villains

Who have disfigured the faces

Of nightmarish graphic novels, movie screens,

Or other such rot.  Than, think of Rick Scott.

If Lex Luthor & Voldemort

Mixed their twisted sperm into a test-tube,

And steamed it in a fetid swamp for

Many months or years, or what,

The end result would be…Rick Scott.

His glowing orb, fresh from the Dark Lagoon,

Sucked life from ailing humans far too soon,

Hissing his seductive tune of health care savings each day,

Killing them harshly, through Columbia HCA.

A mere warm-up for the spawn of Voldemort & Lex,

His deprivation of care, sheer insanity.

How easily Scott shilled the slimy hex,

Manipulating it, Mengele-like, against humanity.

Crazed Eyes ablaze with dollar signs,

Gleefully pulling the plug on yours and mine.

 Then, foraging for more to defraud, or scare,

Scott’s ghoulish-gaze grabbed Medicare.

With Frankensteinian flare,

He raped and pillaged taxpayers bare.

His scandalous fraud hit the multi-billion $$ scale,

So Scott “Fifthed” away the truth 75 times, cheating jail.

The cretinous creation of Voldemort & Lex,

Dripping with dirty wealth, limped close to political death.

His continued existence could not look horrider—

So, of course, he became Governor, then Senator, of Florida.

If Medicare was ripe to raid,

The State of Florida was tailor-made

For the soul-less son of Slytherin.

Pots of Gold to gorge on, from ESCAMbia to Dade.

Slithering into the Everglades,

Disappearing into the Upside Down—

Ferretting away tax money he filched

From Florida’s workers, cities and towns.

The Sunshine State was blinded

By the reflection from his pate,

By his attack on the words “Climate Change,”

And other objects of Scott’s scornful hate.

From The Villages to South Beach,

They dozed while Scott’s wealth tripled.

His hurricanes of self-dealing, his Naples mansion,

Causing barely a political ripple.

With blistering Daytona-like speed,

Few could keep pace with Scott’s lying and greed.

He force-fed the State a pipeline, in which his family invested,

And, directed State Workers to his company to get mandatory drug tested.

He rejected Fed. billions for FLA. for a high-speed train,

So he and his wife could, invest privately, get All Aboard and capital gain.

No-bid Scott, loved controlling State contracts,

Enriching himself and his contacts, who bankrolled his campaigns.

From I-95, through the marshes of sawgrass,

Drivers though Florida pay for travel with SUNPASS.

So, of course, Scott personally profits from every cent,

Through his “No-bid” company which owns SUNPASS, named Conduent.

While Florida floods, and its citizens drown,

 Scott, “not-a-scientist” gives climate change two-thumbs down;

Yet, pockets ALL the other change that he can find around.

Making money off of misery; such evil is unbound.

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