Re A Tom Robinson Quote That A Friend Shared On Facebook, And My Response With Some Additions

 I take offense to his "Black Holocaust" comment, though. Langston Hughes (per a "Forward" article) put it best when he explained why Jews should be helping Blacks fight for Civil Rights:

"Very early in life, it seemed to me that there was a relationship between the problems of the Negro people in America and the Jewish people in Russia, and that the Jewish people’s problems were worse than ours. Every so often my grandmother would read a headline in the Negro press stating that a Negro had been lynched in Georgia, or two Negroes had been lynched in Louisiana, or three Negroes had been lynched in Texas.
“From our daily paper every so often she would read an item that a dozen Jews had been ridden down by the horses of the Cossacks in the Ukraine, or 50 Jews killed in a pogrom in Old Russia, or a hundred Jews killed and injured by a mob in Poland. So, I thought, here in our American South we Negroes were lynched by ones or twos or threes, but in Tsarist Russia and Poland they killed Jews by the dozens, or even the hundreds." 

(By the way, I just realized that I'm a fourth-generation pogrom survivor. Since Great-Granddad Czarnecki's parents converted to Catholicism to survive the pogroms and—when the openly-Jewish sides of the family cut them off—remained Anusim to survive Anti-Semitism in America, I count as a fourth-generation pogrom survivor in the same way that children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors count as second- and third-generation Holocaust survivors—and to realize that is pretty unnerving, especially since that never would have occurred to me, since I wouldn't have thought of myself as almost comparable to children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. After all, the Holocaust was at the least quite a bit worse than the pogroms, and at the most far worse than the pogroms, notwithstanding how bad the pogroms were.)

Also, Blacks in no way were targeted for mass ethnocide like Jews were, including by our own. Even ****** was unfortunately Jewish (as DNA testing did prove, and a college acquaintance of mine sadly proved to be right). If Tom Robinson can name me one ******, Rumkowski, Torquemada, or even Donin or Christiani equivalent among Black people, I'd love to hear him name one. Even J. Edgar Hoover (who was actually "mulatto") was nowhere near Torquemada.


I also take offense to his "white Christians" comments. Real Christians such as the Grimkes worked to save Blacks from slavery, and I as a mostly-Patrilineal Jew say that my gentile, Irish, Confederate patriarch John Farrell absolutely got what he deserved when they stripped him of his citizenship and made him apply for renaturalization after the Civil War (Mom has Jewish heritage, too, by the way; though she's self loathing about it.).

PS To me, that those such as Rabbi Dr. Heschel (who was a Holocaust survivor), Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman fought with MLK and James Chaney for Civil Rights makes Tom Robinson's comments even more offensive. To mitigate the Holocaust and other Anti Semitism by revisionistly appropriating terms for what we've suffered throughout history is sickening.