I am going to ignore our president’s most recent comments this morning. I am not going to talk about how he wants American sailors trapped in the Strait of Hormuz to stay there even longer, how he denies that recent suicides among those on the ship have anything to do with conditions on the ship, or how he plans on adding the Strait to those American territories which will include Venezuela, Cuba, Greenland, Gaza, Panama, and, yes, Canada. I am not going to mention any of those things this morning. You will not even see a listing of them here. I promise.

Instead, I am going to the first page of today’s New York Times, but I am not going to talk about the dam recent immigrants (beavers, not people) have built in northern Quebec which is “as tall as a city bus and even longer”, which journalist Norimitsu Onishi calls “hydraulic attenuation”. And I am not going to talk about the comments of murderer Luigi Mangione, except to say that you should never confuse him with my wonderful law school classmate Lou Mangione, who is as opposite Luigi as it is possible to be.

I am going to talk about the State of California and the article headlined “California Mulls Recognizing ‘Jewish’ as a Formal Ethnicity”. The gist of the article is that California is thinking about listing “Jewish” along with, I guess, African-American, French, Samoan, Hispanic, Native American, etc., as ethnic groups on all state documents where you have to, or have the opportunity to, state your ethnicity. Yes, Judaism is more than a religion, and “more than a bagel”, but what is it? This is a question that has confused the confusable since time immemorial.

We know you can be Jewish and an atheist. We know that you can not be Christian or Muslim and be an atheist. They are both religions. If Judaism was just a religion, one who disavows the religion would no longer be Jewish. But we know that is not the case (although some very Orthodox Jews think that any Jew who is not at least as Orthodox as they have ceased to be Jewish, but who cares about them?)

I saw a comedian on a Facebook reel the other day. I don’t know his name. He was clever. I think he is from Toronto. He said that he is Jewish, but not religious. That he doesn’t have any respect for Judaism’s religious structure. But….he said….his Judaism is like his belief in the Toronto Maple Leafs, whose organizational structure he doesn’t think much of, either. He identifies as a fan (as he does of being Jewish) and, if a miracle does happen to occur, he will be the first to be there wearing his jersey.

I also listened to most of the first session of a class called “Hitler and Stalin”, being taught by former Yale professor Timothy Snyder at his new home in Toronto to a bunch of Canadians. The course is built around his now aging, but still eye opening, book Bloodlands about the effect of Hitler on the lands between Germany and Russia. I remember a fair amount about that book, including Snyder’s belief that Hitler and the Nazis saw world civilization as a continual, repeating clash of nationalities or ethnicities, one against the other and, in each instance, there had to be a winner and a loser. He (Hitler) thought that the Germans (the Aryans) were destined to be winners as he pushed in all directions for more Lebensraum. And ethnicity was built up over the centuries both by genetic and physical connections and by a set of shared beliefs of one’s identity with a group.

To Hitler, the Jews did not fit into this worldview. Because they had no homeland (Hitler was really a kind of Zionist, you know, for some time), they lived everywhere as infiltrators, spoiling the purity of the ethnicity which would exist if they were not around, so they had to be disposed of.

This is not what is happening in California, of course, but the thought process is not that foreign to Hitler’s thinking. Of course, the premises are opposite. The goal of Nazi Germany was ethnic purity, and the goal of California is to protect various ethnicities, the ethnic groups that make up California’s enormous melting pot. In order to protect the Jews in an era of growing antisemitism, should the Jews be defined in such a way as to enable them to come under the protection of all of California’s anti-discrimination laws. (I know, the federal government is now against anti-discrimination laws; that’s for another day.)

I am in the middle of reading Rachel Cockerell’s fascinating book Melting Point, published just a few years ago. It is fascinating because Cockerell didn’t write any of it, other than the introduction. The entire book is composed of excerpts of books and speeches and newspaper articles from the time periods that the book is covering.

Melting Point‘s stated focus is on the movement of European (mainly Russian) Jews to the United States through Galveston, Texas in the early 20th century. Her great grandfather was one of the organizers of that movement. But the book (and I am only a little over half way through it, but it fits with this column) covers more than that. It covers the Zionist movement starting with the calling of the first Zionist Congress in 1897 in Basle, Switzerland.

The goal of the Zionists was to establish Jewish settlement (a state? maybe, maybe not) in then Ottoman and soon to be British mandate Palestine. When it became clear that this was not going to happen in short order, the next question was whether there should be an attempt to create a Jewish homeland somewhere else, either as a temporary measure or permanently.

Digression: One thing leads to another. I read the Times article about California, and it reminds me of Timothy Snyder, whom I just heard yesterday, and that takes me to the book I am reading now, and it leads to something else. Where does it lead me? It leads me to a book I just finished reading a week or so ago, Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, which presupposes such an alternative homeland. In Alaska, on Baranof Island, home of the city of Sitka. End of digression.

You may have heard about the possibility of creating an alternative Jewish homeland in British East Africa, in today’s Kenya, then a part of a larger Uganda. The British were apparently willing to permit large scale Jewish settlement there and, with pogroms running somewhat rampant in Russia, this was viewed as a realistic alternative to waiting until the Sultan decided he could open up Palestine to large scale Jewish immigration.

Of course, it never came off, but until I read Melting Point, I don’t think I realized how serious the proposal was, how seriously it was taken, how much effort went into deciding the practicality of such an effort, and how much it was debated at two separate Zionist conferences before it was voted down, both for ideological and for practical reasons, to the great distress of Theodor Herzl.

And, I didn’t realize that there were then alternatives proposed that also were seriously considered and studied and which also proved to be impractical. One such place was in today’s northern Libya, then called Cyrenaica. Another was in Portuguese Angola.

And still another was in the United States. In 1900, there were already many, many Jews in the United States, and most of them seemed stuck in New York City and Brooklyn. The goal was to spread them around. To direct the ships bringing refugees somewhere else. One possibility was Baltimore, but it was deemed to close to New York. Another was Charleston, SC, but it was thought that there weren’t sufficient economic opportunities there. A third was New Orleans, but New Orleans was deemed to be such an attractive place that no one would leave and it would become another New York City.

But then there was Galveston. And Galveston became for several years at the beginning of the 20th century an entry point for tens of thousands of Jews coming to America. Successful at first, it didn’t last. Many Jews did not want to go to Texas, did not want to take the month long ocean voyage from Bremen or Hamburg to Galveston. Many were afraid that they would be spread around an unwelcome country where they knew no one or, conversely, that they would become so American that they would no longer be Jewish. And then there were unanticipated opposition from American immigration authorities which had to be overcome.

All this is history. But it all connects to today. Who are the Jews? What is their role in the world? Why are they so different in so many respects from other groups who seem to fit into a very different pattern? And where is all this heading today?

Michael Chabon had the Jews going to Sitka (at America’s invitation) because the Jews lost their battle to the Arabs in 1948. He rewrote history. But that battle of course continues today. As Timothy Snyder said in the lecture I heard yesterday, no one knows what will happen tomorrow, but it will only happen because of what happened yesterday and what is happening right now, and, he says, no one knows what is really happening right now either.