A Child's First Lesson in Prejudice
how 1890s Utah predicted 2023 Western anti-semitism
This issue has quite a few pictures; if your email client has trouble with it, you can read it at the Substack website.
Content note: this post discusses some of the worst aspects of the Hamas-perpetrated atrocities. Links go to documentation, much of which is graphic and stomach-turning.
There’s also a story, not related to anything in the news at present, that makes me cry and will be hard for some readers to bear.
John D. Fitzgerald was an American writer whose oeuvre is best known for eight children’s books, the Great Brain series. Loosely based on his real childhood, the books are set in 1890s Utah, and tell the story of his family: Papa, Mamma, and his brothers Sweyn and Tom. The eponymous great brain is Tom, a precocious boy with insatiable curiosity and a penchant for making money through conniving and schemes.
The family lives in Adenville, Utah, a small town with about twenty-five hundred people: 2,000 Mormons, 400 or so Protestants, and 100 Catholics. J.D.’s family are Catholics.
The outsider status of the family, not being Mormons at a time when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was overwhelmingly dominant, gives the books an interesting perspective. The American ethos of community and unlimited possibility is the books’ overriding message and theme, with a glorious menagerie of charm and pathos in the details.
The part of this family saga I’m going to tell you about happens in the first book, The Great Brain.
In chapter four, a Jewish man named Abie Glassman comes to town with his peddler’s wagon, The Traveling Emporium. The Mormons must give their business to the ZCMI store, which is owned by their church, but the other residents of Adenville buy enough from Abie, when he’s in town, to make it worth an annual stop.
Papa is the newspaper editor and publisher, deeply respected for his ideals, intelligence, and education—the town’s only college graduate. Abie seeks Papa’s advice, realizing he’s getting too old to continue traveling.
Papa talks Abie into opening a variety store to compete with the ZCMI store.
In chapter six, it’s a few months after Abie’s store opens. A rumor starts going around town that Abie has a strongbox full of gold pieces. The rumor, though false, is plausible; Abie traveled so much that he would have needed to serve as his own banker.
J.D., the narrator, tells of Abie fainting before commenting on his experience shopping at the variety store (pictures from the Kindle edition):
A few weeks later, Abie faints again. And then a third time:
J.D.’s parents plan to have Abie to Sunday dinner, where they will pressure him to see a doctor, or even offer to take him to Salt Lake City to see a specialist. But they do not get the chance, as Abie’s store suddenly closes with no warning.
Later—much later—J.D.’s parents and Uncle Mark, the town marshal and deputy sheriff, finally communicate about Abie. They realize that something is wrong; he closed his store without warning and without having Papa publish anything in the newspaper saying when he’d be back. They go to investigate.
The pictures below show the last couple of pages of Abie’s story.
As a child, I read the Great Brain series many times. Books were my escape from a difficult childhood, and these were my absolute favorites, with the Addy and Samantha sets of American Girl books tying for second.
I loved it all—Tom’s schemes, J.D.’s vacillating between admiration and despair, and the historical details of a time in US history beyond the era I learned about constantly (slavery and the Civil War that ended it). They taught me something of US history, but also about families, love, friendship, loyalty, and the mysterious world of boys.
When Tom’s scheming goes too far, his brother and his friends do the most American thing imaginable—put him on trial in their barn. I read that book, the fifth in the series, over and over, thinking about how important it was that they gave Tom a chance to say his side, even though he was guilty as sin.
I had the life-altering privilege of meeting a Holocaust survivor when I was ten years old, and I immediately made the connection between Papa’s words and how the world let the Holocaust happen.
“It isn’t that we dislike the Jews or mean to be unkind to them. It is just that we don’t worry about them the way we worry about other people.”
The type of prejudice that Papa recognized was the usually-benign sort, the unconscious and unintentional kind of “othering.” The kind that only matters when someone who has been “othered” needs help, support, or has to take action against someone not so othered.
I thought about this again watching the Press Secretary for the President of the United States respond to a question about antisemitism by expressing the President’s deep concern….about the possible rise in Islamophobia.
The best data we have on crimes motivated by hate of the specific type we track (a distinction I make since I think all violent crimes are motivated by hate on some level) indicates that anti-semitism motivates more hate than any kind of anti-Muslim prejudice, and it’s not even close. Jews experience more than 5 times as many crimes motivated by Jew-hatred than Muslims experience hate crimes motivated by hatred for Muslims.
The White House can’t be bothered to condemn things like American college campuses hosting rallies where students explicitly identify with and literally, using the word glory, glorifying the rapist-murderers, using the pronoun “we” to include themselves.
Circles of Moral Concern
Here is a diagram to illustrate the concept of moral concern. It explains both our normal relationship to others, and to some extent our relationship to violence. At the center is oneself and one’s kin.
The graphic is simple enough to understand. My misfortune hurts me more than yours. The death of a family member or friend matters more than the death of a stranger, the death of an animal less than the death of a stranger, and so on.
The placement explains why, though in an extreme circumstance you may have to kill your brother, you would do so in a manner that was as painless as you could manage while still ending his life, and with great sorrow. There are likely no circumstances under which you would torture your brother, much less torture him to death. Among people with normal-range psychology (obviously, child abuse and domestic abuse are sad realities), our capacity for brutality grows the farther we get into the circles on the outside of this diagram.
What Papa commented on, and what Uncle Mark finally understood, was that the people of Adenville had put Jews entirely outside their circles of moral concern.
It wasn’t a conscious decision not to care; it was simply that the notion of a Jew as a person, a community member just as worthy of care and concern as Dave Teller, never crossed their minds.
This is a big part of what is happening in the West right now. The Palestinians and their elected terrorist government are within our circles of moral concern in a way that the Israelis, and Jews more generally, just aren’t.
There is an astonishing amount of flagrant Jew hatred happening, much more so than I would have guessed still existed in the US, but there is also, to an even greater extent, this phenomenon of simply not recognizing Jews as human beings with the right to self-defense, including to respond to terrorism with military might.
That is why we have demonstration after demonstration of making 1500 dead Jews and 200 hostages about Muslims, about Palestinians, about everything and everyone except the people, the human beings, most of them civilians, who were targeted for being Jews.
The IDF Presentation
The Israeli Defense Force hosted 200 journalists from all over the world and showed them a combination of footage that was livestreamed by the terrorists themselves, as well as footage they’d gathered from surveillance cameras, including security cameras on the private homes of victims (similar to the Ring doorbell cameras many people now have). Small segment here.
The atrocities shown were staggering, including children tortured in front of their parents, young children shot while they cowered under tables, and worse.
The presentation was necessary because the West has lost its collective mind, to the point that we now have absurdly pedantic parsing over the meaning of “behead” with regard to the corpses of Jewish infants.
Next we’ll be calling it “babies experiencing headlessness” just to make sure we imply no fault to the terrorists.
Brutal Reality
Multiple reports from forensic pathologists report that both young children and elderly women have been raped, many to the point of fractured pelvic bones.
Due to my own unfortunate backstory, I understand the physical consequences of violent rape: pain, blood, scar tissue, conversations with gynecologists. To actually break pelvic bones requires violence well beyond the norm for rape, even rape of a child. It takes something more than the savage glee of ordinary rape, the commonplace violence of a rapist stealing something he wants from his victim. It requires the conscious and deliberate effort to dehumanize the victim beyond comprehension—to knowingly and willfully destroy a despised object. To set out, with malice and awareness, to use it up, to break it in such a way that nobody can ever use it again.
The Applicable Cliche
Asking a person to consider what would happen if the tables were turned is an old, trite tactic, but it’s returned to so often in part because it’s effective.
Consider that the US, as evidenced by the press secretary for the President, is primarily concerned right now with the feelings of Muslims and the potential for backlash against them.
Ask yourself: what if Israel had done this to Palestine? If thousands of Israelis had stormed across the border, livestreamed the brutal murder of children and tortured many Palestinians to death, if there were Palestinian grandmothers and kindergarteners with fractured pelvic bones from gang rape—how many world leaders would be calling on Hamas, the elected government of Palestine, to show restraint?
Who would dare to remind them, “the Jews have human rights, so don’t go too far” in your response?
Who would even imagine doing so?
What Israel Has To Do
I’ve come to this conclusion slowly, but I’m there now. Since all my paid subscriptions do here is enable me to pay extra on my student loans — they don’t put groceries in the refrigerator or keep the lights on — I can afford to take the hit for saying this. Here is the link to cancel your subscription.
Israel has to end Hamas. Period. This is not up for debate or discussion, regardless of the consequences. Anyone who is afraid Israel may “go too far” should be loudly imploring Hamas to unconditionally surrender and Qatar to turn over every single member of its leadership. That should be their only concern.
If you’re scared that Israel will “go too far” and you’re focused on anything else—if you’re calling your representatives and asking them to pressure Israel and not Qatar—take some time to ask yourself why. Here are some questions to start with.
How is it that Gazans are within your center of moral concern, but dead, raped, and kidnapped Jews aren’t?
When did you set up your moral calculus?
Who influenced it?
Why?
Do you need to re-do the math there?
If you don’t think so, why not?
Israel must end Hamas, or they will be complicit when those barbarians do this again—which they will, at the first opportunity.
Israel simply no longer has a choice. They are now a nation of parents who’ve watched their children be brutalized in the manner described above, been given a gun, and told, plainly and bluntly, “Here’s where the bad guy is. If you don’t shoot, your other children are next.”
Israel can try its best to save innocents—can do everything they’ve done and continue to do. They can drop leaflets, advertise when and where they’re coming, implore the UN to help, ask neighboring nations to take in civilian refugees—but they can only do these things for so long.
If a parent is put in this position and the bad guy chooses to hide behind his own children, ultimately the parent still has to shoot. The moral evil is on the parent hiding behind his child, not the parent doing what must be done.
That is part of what it means to be a human being in a dangerous world, when unfortunate enough to be confronted with evil. It means that sometimes you have to do something terrible to prevent something even worse. That is part of the reality that we get to hide behind here in the United States, the truth we get to ignore behind our comfortable, second-amendment-enabled lives.
What Hamas is doing—hiding behind their nation’s own children to escape the consequences of genocidal barbarism—cannot be allowed to continue. If this is a trump card now, under these circumstances, it will be a trump card forever.
This must end. Both Hamas itself and the precedent we in the West seem to be setting that hiding behind one’s children is a “get out of consequences free” card.
The West has largely proven, by its deplorable responses to October 7, that Jews are still outside our circle of moral concern.
Our marches, cheers and chants of “glory to the martyrs” and other celebrations of Hamas atrocities, including beating Jews in the streets, marching to express the desire to kill Jews, have made us all guilty.
In our embrace of intersectional bullshit that automatically takes the side of the “oppressed,” regardless of any other moral concern, we have forfeited any right to judge Israel for doing whatever it takes to end Hamas.
May the war end swiftly, with every terrorist dead or in prison.
May the orphans, widows, and survivors find peace and healing.
May the West find its humanity again, and the courage to start recognizing and naming evil once more.
If we fail—if we successfully pressure Israel into letting the monsters who did this live, or even remain in power—then, despite my atheism, I can only echo Mamma Fitzgerald.
May God give us strength to bear our burden of guilt.
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About Me and My Substack: I’m a data scientist whose great love is mathematics, but I also enjoy writing. My posts are mostly cultural takes from a broadly anti-Woke perspective—yes, I’m one of those annoying classical liberals who would’ve been considered on the left until ten seconds ago. Lately I’ve regained a childhood love of reading and started publishing book reviews. My most widely useful essay may be this one, about how to resist the demon of self-termination.
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As someone who leans Libertarian the phrase "but what if ________ goes to far" is never far from my political and socio-economic calculus. It's a question that is valid to ask about how governments act as all too often many future actions of a government is very much determined by what they were able to do or get away with in the past, but it is also driven by context to an insane degree that many do not want to think about because it is so easy, for people on both sides, to stop with that initial statement.
"But what if the fire bombing goes to far?" had to be asked about Tokyo and Dresden, but the calculus there involved prolonging the most bloody war in history by months if not years and the deaths of millions as opposed to hundreds of thousands as well as potentially handing more political and military clout to the USSR which was quickly becoming as much of a problem as the Nazi's had been.
"But what if the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki goes to far" had to be asked to end the Pacific Theater, but every scrap of evidence we had from the invasion of Iwo Jima and Okinawa showed that the Japanese Government would literally march their people off the cliffs if it meant harming US troops and showing the fanaticism of their beliefs. Even the conservative numbers said the USA would loose almost as many soldiers invading the home islands as they had in the entire Pacific Theater up to that point, almost 150,000 men dead and many more injured. The war department had already minted over a million purple hearts in anticipation of the unprecedented casualties and injuries that would come about from such an invasion.
That same kind of context shows, in my opinion, that while the Palestinians can perhaps be saved, and I hope they are, and some kind of peace come about, Hamas and its supporters cannot; and right now the simple arithmetic of warfare is that it will demand the deaths of thousands to hopefully spare many, many times more down the road. It sucks, it runs against what I would hope the world could function like, but that doesn't change the facts of what we can see. The simple answer is that, even accounting for the things Israel has done over the last few decades that have made things harder for the Palestinians, there is a simple set of questions one can ask. If Israel controlled all the territory, which they want to do make no mistake, would their still be Palestinians? Yes there already are Palestinians living in Israel and even holding elected office and living as citizens of Israel. If Palestine/Hamas controlled all the territory, which they have also claimed they want to do, would their still be Israelis? No there would not be, not if they could help it based on their rhetoric.
Thank you for your moral clarity.