Sara took me to the Longacre Theater in Manhattan to see Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt, a drama whose premise is that Jews, and especially culturally assimilated Jews can never feel fully integrated into any society for any long period of time due to the long tail of antisemitism. At the same time the play serves to remind us all that undercurrents of racism, sexism, them-ism (whoever they happen to be at any particular time), hatred, and every other notion of outsiders are unlikely to ever disappear.

The Stoppard play is a very very good case of preaching to the choir. To paraphrase George Santayana, “Those who do not know the past are condemned to see revivals of Camelot. Or Brigadoon.”

Leopoldstadt focuses on the history of secular Jews in Austria at the turn of the twentieth century, and specifically Jews who thought that they were integrated into Viennese society (by culture, by professional status, by not being consigned to ghettos, and by lots of other things, including later fighting on behalf of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire in WWI) when in fact even the converted-to-Christianity Jews were offed by the rise of National Socialism in Austria and Germany. All told through the story of one family, which in turn was inspired by playwright Tom Stoppard’s later-in-life discovery of his own Eastern European Jewish background.

Very touching, but the thing about antisemitism, racism, and all forms of historical hatred is that cultural acceptance is 1. fleeting, and 2. an ineffective tool to change long-held beliefs and pre- and ill-conceived notions about people and the world around us. Apart from breaking heads, only long term education and long term public service campaigns may … I repeat, MAY … make inroads. And the only way for such things to happen is to fight for governments that will not tolerate such BS, and make sure the intolerant current-day-Nazis, racists, antisemites, white nationalists, and too many others to list stay on the fringes. They’ll always be there, but better on the fringes than in the mainstream. My belief is that you can always make money betting that hatred will never be eradicated.

And the fight I point to above is never ending, and voting is only a part of the solution to the problem, but as Stoppard shouts out loud in Leopoldstadt, don’t ever think you’re in the in crowd.

Because you’re not.