Priceless. That's how I would describe the look on the faces of my 9 and 13 year-old children. We were watching the evening news and hearing, for the first time, a taped, White House conversation between former President Richard M. Nixon and his then national security adviser, Henry A. Kissinger. "The Jews," Nixon's voice is heard saying, "are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality."
My children were stunned. Living in a rather cloistered, protected environment, surrounded primarily by other Jews they were shocked to learn that a United States president would speak in such disparaging terms about, well, them. My daughter has been studying the Shoah in her Jewish Studies class at MJDS so her interest in the conversation which was unfolding on the t.v. was acute. Neither she, nor her younger brother were prepared for what would follow.
Henry Kissinger, whom they had just learned from news anchor, Brian Williams, was Jewish, told the President that helping Jews leave the Soviet Union was "not an objective of American foreign policy." He then went on to elaborate, "And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union," he added, "it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern." "He's Jewish and he said something like that?!" my children asked almost in unison with the same amount of incredulity. They couldn't fathom how a Jew only 32 years after the close of World War II and the Shoah could make such an outrageous and vile statement.
None of us would have been surprised if we had heard Richard Nixon or Mel Gibson say such a thing, but Henry Kissinger, a Jew who fled Nazi Germany with his family and would probably have ended up in a gas chamber himself? Explanations and apologia abound. There are those who argue that Kissinger is the archetypal court Jew, one who rises to high, political station often at the expense of his coreligionists. The master of realpolitik was being well, just that, going along with the President to get along with the President. Some claim that he was and still is simply a self-loathing, self-hating Jew. Others like, Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League have tempered their criticism of Kissinger by claiming that his efforts to help Israel when the Jewish nation's survival was hanging in the balance should not be tarnished by his repulsive words.
We will probably never know the reasons why Kissinger said what he said. It may be due to one or all of the reasons offered by arm-chair therapists. But this enigma really isn't the important issue. There have and always will be Jews who rue the fact that they're Jewish. This is a very sad and troubling phenomenon; one over which we have little or no control. The more important, over-arching issue is what we do in response to hateful, insensitive and anti-Semitic speech. Tempering our criticism against one of "our own" even in the face of mitigating circumstances (e.g. he supported Israel when he was in the White House) weakens and casts as hypocritical our tokhekha (reproach and criticism) of others when they spew their hate language. You can't condemn Mel Gibson, Pat Buchanan or Billy Graham for what they say about us if you're going to give the likes of Henry Kissinger a slap on the wrist.
So shame on you President Nixon, and shame on you too Dr. Kissinger!
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