Full-Blown Anti-Semitism

By Deacon Mike Manno

(The Wanderer) – Shortly after I was born, my parents moved to Des Moines, Iowa from Richmond, Virginia. Both my parents were born and raised in Philadelphia, where the rest of our family resided, but they moved to Richmond for only one year, and it was during that year that I was born. Thus, while most people who know me think I was born in Philly it was really Richmond.       

          My dad was a printer and had a print-shop in Philadelphia that he ultimately lost to the city over a civil eminent domain action. They then moved to take a new job in Richmond.

          While there, dad found and applied for a job in Des Moines. He didn’t fly so he drove his old Chevy from Richmond to Des Moines for the interview. The firm was a large business with factories in DM as well as several other major cities including Kansas City, the firm’s headquarters.

          The result was a job offer as head printer. My dad turned it down saying he had applied for the plant manager’s positon and didn’t want to move his wife and new born son halfway across the country for a job similar to the one that he held.

          So he drove back to Richmond. While he was traveling the folks in Des Moines were contacted by the president of the firm who was en route to Europe on an ocean liner. They explained the situation with dad. When told of the result, he asked if they thought dad could do the manager’s job. The answer was yes so the president then told them to hire him.

          When he returned to Richmond, mom told him he had the job he wanted. They packed and moved to Des Moines.

          The reason why I bring this is up is that the president of the company was Jewish, in fact, the company was owned by a Jewish family.

          When my family arrived and moved into our new home, the family member who ran the company locally, and his wife kindly welcomed him and mom to Iowa. Mrs. Jewish Boss even bought a beautiful nick-knack mirror for our living room and later updated it with gold trim. That mirror is now in my living room and serves as a permanent memory of those early days in our family history and the welcoming Jewish family that made room for a Catholic family in a new city.

          I remember the day my mom told me that dad’s boss couldn’t shop, eat, or visit certain places because of his Jewish faith, and how we should act and think differently. As I grew it dawned on me that the Big Boss in Kansas City didn’t have a Jewish name. My father explained that during the war (WWII) he changed it so if he was captured by the Germans they would not know he belonged to the people who they thought should be exterminated.

          My dad loyally worked for that firm for some twenty-plus years until his death. At that time members of the company were more than supportive of mom, my brother, and myself.

          Later we went through the same thing with the Civil Rights movement and I learned that one of my father’s employees could not eat at a drugstore due to his skin color. My parents taught me the same about our “colored” friends. I remember at my dad’s funeral that same, now elderly, black man, approached my mom at the internment ceremony and asked if he could have the honor of one of the flowers from the casket spray.

          And now Jews are the enemy. American academics now seem to be taking up verbal (and sometimes physical) arms against anyone who is Jewish or supports Jews or the nation of Israel. One wonders if this is America or 1930s Germany and whether or not we should be expecting a new Kristallnacht.        

          The “peaceful protests” that are now engulfing some of our major universities, most rising from Anti-Semitism and pro-Hamas individuals, are clearly outgrowths of far left political philosophies, encompassing a wide range of leftist thought. This is the icing on the cake for a movement that has striven over the years to weaken our institutions and to bring Cultural Marxism and all that it implies, to the forefront of the American conversation.  

          But it is not surprising to me that the latest hubbub (dare we call them riots) has grown out of Columbia University. The school has too many historical connections with the type of ideology that is on display right now.

          It was the Communist Bella Dodd, prior to her return to the Catholic Church, who honed her Communist ideology in and around Columbia. On orders from Moscow she placed over 1,200 Communists in U. S. seminaries during the 20s and 30s in order to infiltrate the Church with Communist ideology. In the early 50s she told Bishop Fulton Sheen that world-wide several of the Red plants had achieved the rank of cardinal and bishop, indicating a successful mission.

          Dodd graduated from Columbia where she made her first Communist connections and taught at the nearby Hunter College. She was tasked by the Communist Party U.S.A. to infiltrate the New York teachers’ union, which she did.

          Columbia was also the 1934 landing point for a cadre of professors from the Frankfurt School in Germany where the concept of Critical Theory was developed. It taught that immutable human traits were responsible for all societal inequities. Thus it divided us into tribes, some as oppressors and others as the oppressed.

          This was Cultural Marxism, and one of the main proponents of it, Herbert Marcuse, was himself a product of that same Frankfurt School. That ideology has spread, throughout the academic world from college down to elementary school, and upward to professionals in all walks of life who now control a significant part of the new American establishment.

          Any wonder why this is happening now. It is to disrupt our institutions and social conventions. It’s been brewing for a while and is just now boldly coming out of the shadows of academia where it had been hiding.  

-30-

(You can reach Mike at: DeaconMike@q.com and listen to him every weekend on Faith On Trial or podcast at https://iowacatholicradio.com/faith-on-trial/)