The facts speak for themselves. But there are a few points where a bit of background will help you, if you haven't seen tsuris (anti-Semitic oppression) from the inside.
It would have been a huge mitzvah, if Cohn had stood up to the anti-Semitism of the Trump administration and Trump's Deplorable Base.
A mitzvah is, in the minimal sense, carrying out a duty or observance of Jews, laid down by God. There are 613 of those.
When I say that this is the minimal sense, I do not mean that they are trivial.
Three of the negative commandments fall under the category of self-sacrifice under Jewish Law, meaning "one should [let himself] be killed rather than transgress the prohibition".
In particular, one should die rather than murder an innocent. Guess how that applies to the Health Care Denial Bills, the Trump Don't Care Bills that have just barely been killed, at least for now. We can thank the three Righteous Among the Gentiles, more particularly among GOP Senators, who saved so much for us, including so many lives.
Israel has a major monument, Yad Vashem, to commemorate the Jewish dead in the Holocaust, and also those Righteous Among the Gentiles who risked and often lost their lives to save any of the intended victims. The Jewish victims, anyway.
In the maximal sense it starts with loving God
with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might
a frequent prayer that is also written on tiny scrolls and put up in mezuzahs on every doorpost in an Orthodox Jewish home.
Then
It has been told thee, O man, what is good: to do justice, and love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God.
The Kohanim were the priests of Israel, the descendants of Aaron. They had a special place in Jewish culture through the ages. Their name is variable, sometimes Cohen, Cohn, Cohan (but not the Irish Cohan, or Keohane), Kahn, Kaplan…
Four salesmen on a train in Germany (before things got to be impossible) sat together to play cards. First they went around introducing themselves: König, Kahn, Kagan…
The fourth said disgustedly, "Also Cohen."
Calling out Nazis and other White Supremacists, an act obviously not specified among the 613 mitzvahs in the Hebrew scriptures, is one of the more obvious and important mitzvahs in this larger sense.
Grubbing for money is not.
Now, we know historically how Jews got to be important in banking.
1 Lord, who shall abide in thy tabernacle?
who shall dwell in thy holy hill?
2 He that walketh uprightly,
and worketh righteousness,
and speaketh the truth in his heart.
…
5 He that putteth not out his money to usury
Psalm 15, a Psalm of David
Christian law in Europe forbade Christians from charging interest, while Jewish law at the time was understood to forbid Jews from charging interest to Jews but not to Christians and others. Then various European countries forbade Jews from engaging in any other profession, including law and medicine, even though Jews trained in Muslim countries were the best doctors in Europe. Or even forbade Jews from being in the country at all.
Haters gonna hate.
They hate those they fear, and fear those they hate, and they fear each other most of all. It turns out that they all do expect the Spanish Inquisition, because it's themselves.
So anyway every royal and aristocratic court in Europe in a certain period had to have its Jewish banker. But that didn't mean that they had to like that fact, either the aristocrats or the Jews. Jews didn't always lend money for efforts to oppress or even murder Jews. (There is an example of this in Rudyard Kipling's supposed children's book, Puck of Pook's Hill.) And every once in a while, the aristocrats threw out or killed their Jewish bankers, but kept all of the money. (See Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe.)
I obviously can't tell you all of the stories of tsuris, from calling names to the Holocaust, that many Jewish children are brought up on, and that historians continue to add to. But I guarantee that we didn't talk only about Hitler. Or sing, either.
Who can retell the things that befell us?
Who can count them?
In every age a hero or sage
Came to our aid.
And of course every other oppressed group has more than they can tell of their own experience.
But anyway, now that it is much too safe to be a banker, there are people who like it, and among them, there are those who especially like being able to rip people off. The more, the better.
I don't want to harm bankers physically, but we should be able to prosecute them. Lots of them. Like in the bad old days of the savings and loan debacle, when we had more than a thousand prosecutions, and more than 800 convictions and prison sentences.
So here we are. Bad for the Jews, because we will be blamed for these grifters and enablers of racism who are bad for everybody.
And it isn't just us.
- Kim Jong Eun is the worst for the Asians.
- Milo Yiannopolous is bad for the gays.
- Ben Carson and Sheriff Clarke are bad for the Blacks.
- ISIS is bad for the Muslims.
- Trump is bad for the angry rich White guys.
- Putin is really bad for the Russians and a lot of other people.
- Don't get me started on who among our bozos is bad for Christians.
- The violence against the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar is bad for the Buddhists.
We are all having a bad time. But we are all making progress. Even North Korea is coming under increased Chinese pressure, with North Korean businesses in China just recently being shut down, and no more purchases of North Korean coal.
Feel free to add your own examples.
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