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DKGoldberg's avatar

Welcome to the backdrop of my life. My dad was a Holocaust survivor from Poland who managed to escape from his town's ghetto before it was emptied and his family was killed. He rarely missed an opportunity to express his hatred for FDR though I learned from Burns' film that the reality was quite a bit more complicated. He died this past June having told my children and me stories of all he experienced and always warned it could happen here. The silver lining around his death was that as early dementia set in during his last year he was unable to process the level of anti-semitism and anti-immigrant feeling that we now see. It was amusing though to try to convince him that yes, Dad, the president of Ukraine is really Jewish.

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Lewis Grotelueschen's avatar

Charlie rightly focuses on the massive moral failures surrounding the Holocaust. Perhaps an equally hard lesson to learn, in the sense of looking in the mirror, is that FDR's political realism about the nature of the American people was absolutely necessary. This would also seem to hold lessons for our time. We need desperately to put together a lasting coalition to defeat Trumpism. This means that compromise is the order of the day within that coalition. Joe Manchin and Bernie Sanders make strange bedfellows. But this is what we need.

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