There have been two mysteries about my family origins that have preoccupied me from an early age. The first had to do with my last name, something I got the answer to about 20 years ago. Despite the Latinate sound, it is a Yiddish word that means the counting house of a tax farmer, a “court Jew” from the feudal era who collected taxes from the peasants for the royalty and received a cut. It was prevalent in the Slutsk region near Minsk in the mid 1800s. I learned about this from one of the Czarist annals in the YIVO Institute in NY.
The other mystery is how my maternal grandparents ended up in Kansas City, Missouri where I was born in 1945. Why didn’t they come through Ellis Island and end up on the Lower East Side like my paternal grandparents? A few years ago, when my mother was still alive, she told me that she understood that they came in steerage on a ship that landed in Galveston, Texas and from there they went to Kansas City, where they knew nobody. Why in the world would they book passage on a boat going to Galveston and why would they pick Kansas City of all places, where there was a vanishingly small Jewish community? Ironically, it was a disgusting attack on the BDS student movement written by Kenneth J. Stern appearing in the Bard College Spring 2011 alumni magazine that solved this riddle for me. Stern, an attorney, graduated Bard 10 years after me and is now the American Jewish Committee’s (AJC) director on anti-Semitism, a job that mostly involves writing garbage like the article in question. As a Zionist ideologue, Stern makes the same kinds of hasbara arguments you hear ad nauseam from Abraham Foxman, Malcolm Hoenlein and disgraced Bard College trustee Martin Peretz. In doing some background research on the AJC in order to help me respond to Stern, I discovered that Jacob Schiff, the German-Jewish Wall Street financier who founded the AJC in 1906, was worried that if too many Yiddish-speaking and “culturally deprived” Eastern European Jews flooded major cities on the Eastern seaboard like New York, it might create a backlash of anti-Semitism. The answer was to disperse the vulgar riffraff throughout the United States in accordance with what would become known as the Galveston Movement. Schiff’s attitude toward Eastern European Jewry reflected the class and ethnic prejudices of the German haut bourgeoisie that included financiers like Schiff, the Ochs family that owned the New York Times, and the rest of what Stephen Birmingham called “Our Crowd”. This is the same filthy rich and reactionary milieu that funds the AJC today and that Leon Botstein sees as his natural allies. In his own attempt to emulate the Galveston Movement, Botstein “dispersed” anti-Zionist professor Joel Kovel from his job at Bard College. Fortunately, Joel landed on Morningside Heights rather than Kansas City. full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/05/03/bard-college-the-ajc-and-how-i-ended-up-being-born-in-kansas-city/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
