Don’t Anyone Dare Lecture Me About Race - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Don’t Anyone Dare Lecture Me About Race
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Black Lives Matter is a despicable, anti-freedom, anti-Semitic organization that hates our country’s core values of equal opportunity, law and justice, and free enterprise. Don’t anyone dare lecture me about race.

My father died from leukemia when I was barely a boy of fourteen. He imbued many warm and rich values in me. Likewise, my mother profoundly influenced me on several issues. No surprise. One thing I carry from her is that a Black doctor and his family moved into our all-White Brooklyn neighborhood. Soon, the real-estate blockbuster vultures were leaving flyers, and all the Caucasians ran to Long Island — the Italians, the Irish, the Jews, the Poles. It is similar to how Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield of “Ben & Jerry’s” and Brooklyn’s Bernie Sanders all fled racially diverse New York for Vermont, which assured them the opportunity to become multi-millionaires in a state that is 94 percent White.

A beautiful neighborhood in Brooklyn — the area in the East 50’s, just before Ralph Avenue, at avenues like Glenwood Boulevard, Farragut Road, and Foster Avenue — changed overnight. My mother was the only one who would not leave. She loved her house, decorated and renovated it exactly as she liked, and she saw no reason to run from a Black doctor. We soon were the only Whites on the block. I grew up with that, living as the sole Caucasian on a street that was racially diverse and populated virtually entirely by Black households.

In the end, all the others sold their homes at good prices, converted their home equity to Long Island, where their home values shot up even more. When my Mom sold her home decades later, as we four kids not only had left the nest, but now had kids of our own, two of us in southern California and two in Queens, Mom sold to move to Queens to be near her grandchildren and two of the four of us. Mom found that with her house mortgage completely paid off, her house sold for $35,000 instead of the multi-hundreds-of-thousands her former neighbors’ Long Island homes were worth. So the White Flight meant:

1. It was financially smart to flee to Long Island if everyone else is.

2. It is financially foolish to stay.

3. A Black family that tries to move into an upscale upper-middle-class neighborhood could not get a break because their presence — at least in those days — turned it into the same neighborhood from which they were trying to move up. The Bernie Sanderses and Bens and Jerrys always flee Whiter.

Years later, my dear precious Ellen of blessed memory and I flew back to Brooklyn for a wedding. We arrived early in the day, and the wedding was at night, so I asked Ellen whether she would mind seeing where I grew up. We rented a car and drove to both homes of my boyhood. Those neighborhoods, once a blend of Jews, Italians, Irish, and Poles, were now 100 percent Black. And, y’know what? They both still were lovely, tree-lined communities. We had just driven through Flatbush (Avenue J or so, around East 16th Street or so). Without going into detail, hands down, the Black neighborhood was far more lovely and elegant than the Jewish one. I have no data on which real estate was pricier; I can infer.

All the shuls of my childhood now were Black churches — Rabbi Ashkenazi’s shtibl, Rav Drillman’s Glenwood Jewish Center. So many Torah institutions now were Black churches — because a Black doctor had moved in back in the 1970s. For all my pain and outrage at the implied racism, I also knew that everyone but my Mom had made the right financial decision. In contrast, my Mom took a bath financially, although she always had enough, ultimately experienced the joy of living among her grandchildren, and had kids who saw to it that she always had more than enough.

Years later, I went to UCLA Law School. I was seated in many classes alongside a Black woman who had graduated from Harvard. We soon found we had nothing in common — and everything in common. She was “New York sharp,” had the best sense of Catskills-type humor, did a mind-blowing great imitation of a Lawng Eyeland suburban Jewish housewife. She was Harvard-brilliant. We both were a decade older and life-wiser than everyone else in the class. Like me, she had decided after a career of 10 years to go back to school to get a law degree. I had three kids then with a fourth en route. She had a daughter. She and I became study partners for two years. We studied together for all our classes. She often studied with me at my home, where I still was married to my first wife. She and her daughter ate over frequently. During the Rodney King riots, we offered her to move in with us with her daughter for a month because she lived in a place near the disturbances, and it was final exams season. Politically, she and I were poles apart. She had Black radical sympathies at the time. I was a JDL supporter, in favor of Rabbi Meir Kahane’s activities to liberate Soviet Jews from Communism. She believed America should cut off support for Israel. I agreed — but for a very different reason: so that Israel would stop feeling pressure from our State Department to refrain from building more Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. It was a time in America where a pro-Black Panther woman and a pro-JDL rabbi could be best friends and study partners. We ended up both being accepted onto law review. I actually was not going to apply, but she persuaded me to go for it. I ended up chief articles editor, and she ended up chief comments editor. (The former deals with articles submitted by professors; the latter with articles submitted by law students). We were inseparable through law school until the last year when she met the wonderful fellow she would marry, also on law review. As her relationship with that gentleman and mutual classmate blossomed, it was appropriate that he and she became study partners and otherwise exclusive.

Moot court season arrived. You need a teammate if you want to do moot court. You don’t have to do moot court, but it is a good resumé builder. The president of Black Law Students of UCLA approached me and asked me to be his teammate. I asked him: “Why me?” He told me that several of his best friends regard me as the only Jew in the law school they really respect. All the others walk around with baggy shorts and t-shirts like they are in the “boyz in the ’hood,” insert the word “man” at the start of every sentence with an occasional “dude,” and hang around like they are Black Wannabes. “But, Dov, you are the only Jew in this place who is at home in his own skin. You wear that thing on your head. You dress and talk like a White guy dresses, none of this ‘Look how cool I am.’ So I would like to be your teammate.” So we were. We became friends. Years later, he became a district attorney in Seattle.

After law school, I clerked for a year in the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit for the Hon. Danny Boggs. Having lived all my life on the two coasts — in New York City and in Los Angeles — I now was in Middle America, based in Louisville, Kentucky. During vacations, I took my wife and kids to experience the fullness of America. We explored 28 states in depth: Lewis and Clark Meet the Fischers! Among the places I brought my kids: (i) the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis; (ii) the Lorraine Motel, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was murdered; (iii) the basement museum of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, the church where Dr. King had served as he led the Civil Rights battle. We saw that his church was two blocks from the state capitol, where there is emblazoned a gold star on the spot where Jefferson Davis delivered his first inaugural speech launching the Confederacy. I brought our family to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), in years before they lost their way and became what they now are, and showed them the fountain outside where the words of Dr. King are inscribed, derived from Amos 5:24: “We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

When Ellen of blessed memory and I married, we had decided on the two men who would witness and sign our Ketubah, the traditional marriage contract. As I looked around, I saw a gentleman whose wife was one of Ellen’s closest friends. The man, Alan, is Black and had converted to Judaism. He worshipped regularly at the same synagogue we attended. I always liked him. He was middle-aged then, like us. He was a seriously-positioned educator in the public school system. I walked over to him quietly and asked, “Alan, have you ever signed a Ketubah?” He said no. “Ever been asked?” He said no. I said to him “Ellen and I would be honored if you would sign our Ketubah. We would like you to sign the top line. Is that OK?” He was shocked. We framed the picture of Alan signing. There was whispering in the room: “Such a prominent rabbi as Dov Fischer, and he is having Alan sign his Ketubah? What’s that about?”

I don’t know what my future holds. In today’s Cancel Culture, every time I publish an article in The American Spectator or show up on talk radio or walk into a law school classroom, I never know when this is the day that someone will try to cancel me and call me one of the names that Hillary used to fill her basketful of deplorables. Among the 2,000-plus students I have taught these past 16 years, I have had scores of Arab Muslims, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Armenians, Jews, LGBTQs, Whatevers. I treat them all the same. When their lives are falling apart, some of them ask me for private pastoral time, beyond the call of a law school professor, since most of their other law professors do not care about the individual human being the way I do. Word gets around.

I never know when Cancel Culture will next knock on my door. I do not know how I will defend because all the experiences and moments I have described above are sacred and holy to me, not to be leveraged to cover myself. But let no one dare lecture me about racial issues, “White privilege,” systemic racism, or about paying reparations to Obama and LeBron James.

And as for Black Lives Matter: they are a despicable, anti-freedom, anti-Semitic organization that hates our country’s core values of equal opportunity, law and justice, and free enterprise.

As I read about weekend shootings in Chicago, I see the cynicism and mendacity behind it all. Pick your week.

I am a taxpayer. None of my children attended UCLA, where admissions quotas for preferred demographic groups including the children of illegal aliens remove many seats from the pool available to taxpayers’ children, but they all got into other schools better than UCLA. And they did not have to join the crew team to get in. Meanwhile, when I was studying at UCLA Law School, the career-placement office coldly scheduled all my job interviews during “On Campus Interview Month” to take place during the weeks between Rosh Hashanah and Sukkot, so I had to miss my opportunities because I am proscribed from engaging in business-related matters on holy days. I asked the placement office to reschedule my interviews. They easily could have, but they refused because Orthodox Jews are a population group that does not qualify for sensitivity or diversity, equity, and inclusiveness. My first-year mid-term exam in criminal law was scheduled for a Jewish holy day; the oh-so-liberal professor refused to accommodate me. UCLA Law School graduation the year before mine was held on the holy Biblical festival of Shavuot. Leviticus 23:21Numbers 28:26Deuteronomy 16:10. As a result, Orthodox Jews — students and their families — were excluded from their UCLA law school graduation. Privilege? White Privilege?

From the day my father’s leukemia left me an orphan at age 14, with my mother left challenged to feed, house, and educate a family of four children, I have had to scrap and scrape for everything I ever have had. If I still am a bit rough at the edges, even now, it is because I have had no privilege ever in my life other than the parents and faith community with whom G-d blessed me, the gift and honor of being born an American, and the wife who said “yes” to my marriage proposal a half year after my divorce. Life is not about privilege, and it offers little for those who wallow in jealousy and whining. It is about taking the cards dealt and learning to play them wisely. I was a boy orphaned from his father at age 14. I encountered my share of challenges — instances of physical anti-Semitism on the street and genteel, elegant anti-Semitism at other venues, a tough first marriage, moments of unfairness at the workplace, financial setbacks caused by others who took advantage of an idealistic young man believing in the inherent good of all people while lacking a father’s guidance to realize when he was being cheated and defrauded. That is life. You pick yourself up, learn, and do better next time.

This wonderful, amazing country’s Constitution does not guarantee equal results, only equal opportunities to mess up or to succeed. That is what propelled our nation to greatness. Not diversity, equity, and inclusiveness. Rather: Equal Opportunity. So stuff critical race theory in the trash where it belongs. And don’t anyone dare lecture me about race.

Dov Fischer
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Rabbi Dov Fischer, Esq., is Vice President of the Coalition for Jewish Values (comprising over 2,000 Orthodox rabbis), was adjunct professor of law at two prominent Southern California law schools for nearly 20 years, and is Rabbi of Young Israel of Orange County, California. He was Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review and clerked for the Hon. Danny J. Boggs in the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit before practicing complex civil litigation for a decade at three of America’s most prominent law firms: Jones Day, Akin Gump, and Baker & Hostetler. He likewise has held leadership roles in several national Jewish organizations, including Zionist Organization of America, Rabbinical Council of America, and regional boards of the American Jewish Committee and B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundation. His writings have appeared in Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Federalist, National Review, the Jerusalem Post, and Israel Hayom. A winner of an American Jurisprudence Award in Professional Legal Ethics, Rabbi Fischer also is the author of two books, including General Sharon’s War Against Time Magazine, which covered the Israeli General’s 1980s landmark libel suit. Other writings are collected at www.rabbidov.com.
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