I have started to read a brand new book (very rare for me, I know), titled: “Two Roads Home: Hitler, Stalin and the Miraculous Survival of My Family” by Daniel Finkelstein. Finkelstein, the back of the book says, has been a member of the House of Lords since 2013, was an advisor to Prime Minister John Major, and writes a weekly political column in the Times of London. He is 61 years old.

The book is about 300 pages long, and I am only on page 43, so there is a lot I haven’t read yet. But what I have read is very interesting. Finkelstein’s mother’s family came from Berlin; his father’s family from Lviv. Both families were wealthy and prominent. Although I only know this from the title of the book, his grandparents survived Nazism and Communism and found a much better life in the UK.

The Lviv Finkelsteins made a tremendous amount of money in the iron and steel business. Finkelstein’s Berlin grandfather, Alfred Wiener, was a well educated Arab speaking Berlin Jew, who fought in the German Army in World War I, who became highly concerned about the incipient Nazi movement in Germany in the early 1920s, and who was an active leader in the CV, the Centralverein, an organization that represented the 600,000 German Jews until it was disbanded under Hitler. I admit to never remembering hearing about the CV, or about Alfred Wiener, and I was surprised to read about its activities in the early chapters of this book.

I raise this because it cast a new light on German Jewry through the Weimar years and the first part of Hitler’s 12 Year (not 1000 Year) Reich. What I didn’t know is that there were large Jewish organizations, during all this time, that invested time, energy and money in countering the Nazi antisemitic publicity and activities. Wiener and others gave speeches, wrote articles and pamphlets, organized meetings and did everything else you might imagine a Jewish group doing today in the United States to counter antisemitism. What they didn’t know during this time was that none of these activities would do any good.

Today in the United States, where there has been an increase in antisemitism, the ADL (and, I am sure, other less well known organizations) are doing the same thing that the CV did in Germany. Of course, here conditions are different. While there has been a marked increase in antisemitic activity in the U.S., we are not faced with a political party spewing an antisemitic program. But the responses of the various organizations are parallel.

In addition, as you might expect, one of the goals of the CV was to counter false information and disinformation. Today this is true of those who are responding to antisemitic literature, but it is also true to those who are responding to disinformation spread by the MAGA world, by Russian specialists and by so many others. Compared to what the CV was facing (and which it was so unsuccessfully trying to combat), the amount of fake news and disinformation circulating today, as well as the means of circulation, are so much more extensive. If the CV, led by individuals I am sure of the highest competence, could not combat disinformation in Germany during the 1920s, can we expect today that efforts to combat disinformation will be any more successful?

I am looking forward to the remainder of Finkelstein’s book. I think I will keep today’s post a little shorter than usual, so I can get back to it.