Page 40 - Tales the Maggid Never Told Me

Blood Libel

shredded and the population cowed by the phony war on terrorism,
there was little objection to yet one more version of the Patriot Act.
Saturation of the already hate-filled airwaves with The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion and all the medieval canards against the Jews as Christ-
killers and agents of the devil had been going on for months before
that official sanction of anti-Semitism became law. Parallels with Nazi
Germany in the 1930s did not get much hearing except on what was
left of the alternative media in a few coastal cities. Then it was too
late. If you were Jewish you headed for Canada if you could afford it,
changed your name and hunkered down with your Gentile wife and
children or took up arms for self-defense or guerilla warfare. I had
been sleep-walking through all but the last stages of this nightmare.
The blatant projections of fundamentalist anxiety on the enemy in
their midst—already well-established through centuries of African-
American demonization—struck me as too absurd to be taken
seriously. Christians, not Jews, ate their god’s flesh and drank his
blood in a primitive survival of sacrifice, but the hoary myth that a
Christian baby’s blood was a necessary ingredient of Passover matzo
resurfaced and found new expression in the law of the land.
Henceforth all matzo had to be certified by an FDA inspector and
carry the label “guaranteed not to contain human tissue.” My brother
refused and died defending our bakery against a mob armed with
M17s and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. If I needed a wake-up
call that was it.

S: What was your reaction to your brother’s death?

B: Quite salutary, thank you. You’ll have to send in your friends with
the rubber hoses to learn anything of use to your cause. I will tell
them the same thing I did last time. To go underground you must
change everything. Your name, your habits, the place you sleep every
three nights. I am here, alive and in your hands only because I took
the calculated risk of exposing myself. My defenses can easily be
probed. You can rewrite my history all you want. None of it matters
because once my course was set I deliberately cut myself off from all
knowledge of anyone else’s activities. Nothing I know can be of use
to you. A reasonable person might simply infer that the shock and
horror of my personal tragedy coinciding with the American republic
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