In Sorrow and in Anger

An Open Letter to Elizabeth Warren, U.S. Senator from Massachusetts

April 10

Dear Senator Warren, I feel a profound sense of personal betrayal about your joining the anti-Israel lynch mob with a false accusation of genocide that is certain to lead to more violence against Israeli and American Jews.

Why personal? I am not one of your constituents, unlike the Jews of Boston, my late father Dr. Harold Gorvine’s birthplace. He was a follower and admirer of your political career for a long time. He grew up on the edge of poverty in Malden, walked door to door for Henry Wallace along with his immigrant life insurance salesman father in 1948, and received a personal letter from Eleanor Roosevelt in 1960 reassuring him of her strong support for JFK for president. Two years later, he earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University with a thesis on the New Deal in Massachusetts. In 1980, by then middle aged, he went door to door for Ted Kennedy, and in 2008, as an old man, he went door-knocking one more time for Barack Obama. All his life, he kept the faith for the good old New Deal, and he very much admired you for carrying on that tradition, for your passion and your well-thought-out policies when you set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under President Obama.

Alas, Dr. Gorvine was a Zionist, as am I. Liberal Zionists, two-states-for-two-peoples Zionists, but I suppose that in your eyes, we are guilty of abetting genocide, along with the vast majority of American Jews, and Ted Kennedy, whose former seat you occupy. Dad passed away in November 2022, and I can’t help thinking it’s just as well. Because the betrayal of the Jewish people by you and those like you would have killed him.

Personally, I was very excited when I saw you destroy Michael Bloomberg’s presidential campaign in about thirty seconds in the first of the Democratic primary debates in 2020. I had been working for one of his companies until only about a year and a half before that, when I was caught in a mass layoff in which Bloomberg’s minions specifically targeted older employees. I was all of 49 years old at the time, making me the youngest person “escorted” to clear out my desk that day. So I was over the moon, watching you take him down. If I had felt completely free to vote my conscience in those primaries, I would have voted for you instead of Joe Biden.

So I find it unfathomable that a carrier of that good old New Deal torch, a law professor and a credentialed academic with excellent policy ideas, is so quick to revive the medieval blood libel against the Jews, which accuses us of deliberately murdering innocent children out of sheer evil. There is no evidence, despite your claims, that Israel is doing any such thing in fighting a war of self-defense against a gang of Nazis in “resistance” garb. Six months have passed since what you yourself referred to as Hamas’s “brutal October 7th terrorist attack on Israel.” There are about 2 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and according to extremely dubious or possibly fabricated figures put out by Hamas itself, the total number of dead in Gaza is 33,000. What kind of genocidaires, possessing overwhelming firepower, would kill such a paltry number? In three weeks back in 1994, the Hutu killers in Rwanda, who were armed largely with machetes, took 800,000 to one million lives.

Since your grasp of the rules of evidence is a little shaky for a law professor, perhaps you can explain to me why the Enlightenment and three centuries of bold talk about the natural rights of humanity was not in vain? Because I, my late father, and so many Jews before us, in Europe but most of all in America, put all of our faith in all those promises to throw down the ghetto walls and break the chains that bound men’s minds. We threw ourselves, heart and body and soul, into every struggle for liberation, from the American and French Revolutions to the Civil War, the labor movement, the civil rights struggle, human rights movements, second-wave feminism, LGBTQ rights, and more. And now that we are besieged once more, now that our babies are slaughtered in their cribs and our women and girls are raped and our young men are held in lightless dungeons or die in battle against Hamas rapist-murderers in the alleyways of Gaza; now that right here in America, the best and the brightest students in Harvard Yard call for a “global intifada” to take our lives, while their comrades smash glass and smash faces in Berkeley to prevent a Jew from speaking publicly; now that they demand a boycott of Jewish restaurants in Philadelphia, and of Jewish writers and artists in all the best magazines; now that we are attacked on every side by all those we fought so hard for—we appeal for help and find you, Senator Warren, the luminous heir of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, encouraging the lynch mobs with your denunciation of the Jewish state as devils plotting the mass death of innocents. From bomb-throwing radical provocateurs like Ilhan Omar, we perhaps expected no better, but from a law professor? Ah, but I fear I have fallen into my dear departed father’s peculiar form of naivete, that an advanced degree should somehow correlate with decency.

And then I remember, Professor Warren, that President Roosevelt himself, the great friend of Justice Felix Frankfurter, he with his Brains Trust stuffed with Jewish brains, thought that the Nazis had a reasonable complaint about Jewish overrepresentation in medicine and the law, and turned a blind eye to Cordell Hull’s State Department rejecting visa requests from European Jews desperate to flee Hitler, so that the paltry immigration quotas were left unfilled and the Nazis could destroy six million Jews and a millennial civilization unimpeded. And I am forced to ask myself whether liberalism was only ever one giant, hypocritical lie. Perhaps you can enlighten me, my dear professor, in these last, desperate months before the “America First” beast comes slithering back to the White House and, as Winston Churchill once put it, “the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.” Ah, but Churchill was an imperialist, and sympathetic to Zionism besides, which is all very heinous and also de trop.

I expect no answer. Perhaps you are too busy forging unlikely partnerships. I hear there is a Congresswoman from Georgia whose views on Jewish space weaponry are based on evidentiary standards no less sturdy than your own, and that there are some politico-religious leaders in Iran who have teenage girls who refuse to wear head coverings beaten to death in the streets, but whose views on the unique iniquity of the Jews and their state are not unlike your own.