It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, and we are going to go out and try to take advantage of it. But before we do, I better post something or you will have to have your coffee with MSNBC or the New York Times.

Here is what I am thinking about right now. And I will admit that my thoughts aren’t particularly well formed.

During the buildup to World War II, when Hitler had taken power in Germany and began to grab other parts of Europe that he felt were part of the God-given German world, the Jews in those countries were being marginalized – they were denied certain jobs, kept out of educational institutions, limited in their ability to use public facilities, and so forth. When the war itself began, and before the United States got involved directly, things obviously got much worse for the Jews.

It must be remembered that, before about 1930, it appeared that Jews were being welcomed into mainstream society throughout Europe, that historic barriers to Jewish participation in almost everything had been knocked down, and that the future looked good for the millions of Jewish Europeans, even in those eastern parts of Europe which were still poverty stricken and which World War I had treated so savagely.

During this entire period, there was a great debate among the American Jewish community as to how to react to growing restrictions on the Jews of central Europe. There was a strong difference of opinion as to how strongly American Jews should publicly protest what was going on in Europe. Should they hold rallies, and stage parades? Should they write op-eds or magazine articles? Should there be petitions? Or should they be quiet and lay low, or try to influence politicians without public clamor?

Today, one wonders if louder protests might have increased opposition to Hitler and changed the course of history. In the 1930s, the fear was that increased public protests of any kind might (1) not do any good, and (2) stoke American antisemitism and become not only self-defeating, but downright dangerous. So most of American mainstream Jewry stayed quiet. Of course, no one foresaw the Holocaust as it turned out, but still……

When you look at what is happening in the United States today, it seems to me that much of the same phenomenon is occurring. Just a few years ago, it seemed that Black Americans, just to name one group out of many, was on its way to much better days. There had been so much progress in every aspect of American society regarding Black participation, and much of this progress had been the result of legal protections, stemming from the civil right and fair housing acts of the 1960s, to the more recent DEI movements, to foster (as they say) diversity, equality and inclusion in all aspects of American life.

Of course, every time someone was chosen for some position where there were more than one person who would like to have been chosen, there were to be losers. And if the person chosen was chosen to foster the goals of DEI, the loser was, at least much of the time, to be someone who was not a beneficiary of DEI. And that was a balance that needed to be dealt with, that required some sensitivity.

But like in Germany, where Hitler stirred up the masses to think that Jews were taking their rightful places, Trump and his white supremacist followers stirred up white Americans to think that Blacks, and other DEI beneficiaries, were taking their rightful places. They were invaders, he implied, in a land not fully their own. And we have seen the results.

In fact, we are still seeing the results as DEI, once a positive aspect of American life, was turned into what is almost a treasonous set of letters, what was good became evil or (analogy or pun obviously intended) what was black is now white (or maybe it is what was white is now black).

But where are the Black voices opposing the downfall and destruction of DEI and everything it stood for? Where is Ibram X. Kendi, who in his book on anti-racism, took such an extreme pro-DEI position, saying basically that if Blacks are 15 percent of American citizens, Blacks should not be satisfied until they hold 15% of the positions of every job description in America? Why do we see Black journalists, educators, and pundits on TV giving the “news” without the great emotion that you might expect they would have seeing DEI, which helped many of them obtain their positions, be decimated?

Is this a replay of the America of the 1930s and early 1940s, where now it is the Blacks who are saying, “this too will pass”, and “let’s keep the rhetoric down, or we will make it worse than it is”?

We now see that, with the redistricting going on in the solid South, up to 1/3 of Black members of Congress may not return in the next session. We see the number of Blacks admitted to many universities dropping, and hiring practices across the country changing. But where is the Black outrage? We know it is there, but we don’t really hear it.

It obviously did not help the Jews to remain quiet almost 100 years ago. Will the same reticence and silence help the Blacks now?