I'm going to say something about the Muslim travel ban.
Beginning In 1903, another series of pogroms began, in which Russians, Ukrainians, and Poles raped and murdered Jews, burned down their houses, destroyed their businesses, and turned a blind eye to the law, Soldiers raped girls in my grandmother Anna's school during a riot. To escape the danger, my great-grandfather Beryl sent my grandmother Anna here with Beryl's brother, in 1906.
The pogroms continued, worsened, spread - Odessa, Kiev, Ireland, for gawd's sake, and Wales. .after World War I even more. .
In 1923 Anna was able to bring one of her younger sisters, Szendyl, into the United States, under the auspices of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. In 1924, the United States congress passed and President Coolidge signed the Immigration Act, which totally banned Asians from entering the United States, severely restricted the entrance of Africans, and imposed impossible conditions on the entrance of Italians and eastern European Jews. Its intent was "to preserve the ideal of American homogeneity."
Sound familiar? People were trapped in Eastern Europe. The Russian and Polish governments would not let them leave. The United States wouldn't let them in. Just as today, Trump wants to ban Muslims from wartorn countries, keep them from coming in.
My grandmother Anna's father Beryl tried to emigrate to Argentina in 1938, but he couldn't get out. He returned to Poland, and to the ensuing Holocaust. Anna and her sister Szendyl were here. Back in Ashmyony, their brother, my great-uncle Zalman and his wife Chiyanna, Anna, Zalman, and Szendel's sister, my great-aunt Rachel, their parents, my great-grandparents Beryl and Pesche, all were murdered by the Nazis in 1940.
Now you ask me what I think about the Muslim ban.
I think it is the work of Evil Men who ignore history at their peril, and who attempt to befoul and imperil all of us with their evil. Mr. Trump is an evil man. Mr. Bannon is an evil man. Mr. Sessions is an evil man. May god forgive them, for I will not.
