A New Year’s Wish

In the house I grew up in, the Great Famine was a living memory. The starvation of a million Irish a century before I was born was the Holocaust I lived with, not the one that had recently occurred in Europe. Europe was far away, Ireland was right there in my mother’s kitchen. In those early years after a war that had engulfed the entire world, cost half a million American lives and ended with the destruction of two Japanese cities by atomic bombs, the Nazi concentration camps were only starting to enter public consciousness, never mind my six-year-old’s. At the same time, a civil rights movement for African Americans was beginning to gain traction. But Jewish refugees were told by fellow Jews to forget what had happened to them or their relatives in the old country and to get on with their lives. And African Americans were warned by their leaders and sympathetic Whites not to go “too fast” in their quest for equality….

To read the rest:

http://www.eclectica.org/v24n1/hubschman_salon.html