American Jews have achieved unprecedented safety, integration, and success in the United States, yet we carry a long historical memory in which periods of apparent security elsewhere, again and again, ended abruptly in exclusion, violence, murder, or expulsion. I grew up with a deeply personal connection to the Holocaust and with sensitivity to how the erosion of democratic institutions and the descent into fascism enabled the rise of Nazism. My father, Richard Sonnenfeldt, was a German Jewish refugee who fled to England in 1938 and then, at 23, became the chief interpreter for the American prosecution at the Nuremberg trials, and ultimately Hermann Goring's personal interpreter. Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging that the United States is not Weimar Germany or Eastern Europe's Pale of Settlement, where deadly pogroms against Jews were a regular feature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. America's constitutional order'independent courts, federalism, a free press,...
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