My latest: history now

Do you ever feel like you are living in history? Because you are.

Right now.

For too many, history is distant, abstract. It’s scribblings in dog-eared high school text books. A bit of dialogue recalled from a movie, or something said on a guided tour while on vacation.

For too many, history is events that are recalled, perhaps, but never really experienced. They’re just some words on a page, like these.

The great American writer James Baldwin knew what history is. He lived through it and sought to capture it in his books and essays. “History,” said Baldwin, “is not the past. We carry our history with us.

“We are our history.”

Now, people are busy. They are scrambling to get across town to get on to work on time, or get a kid to hockey practice, or pay the hydro bill, or catch a few hours of sleep. They don’t have time to ponder history. They only have time for now, right now.

But history doesn’t wait for us. It’s happening all the time. Right now, in particular.

Right now, just about everywhere, sociopaths are marching in city streets, condemning the victims of Hamas, not Hamas. Right now, in places we believed to be places of higher learning, our children are being taught that barbarism is acceptable, even defensible. Right now, in our legislatures, elected people are publishing rationalizations for murder.

Right now, Jewish businesses – places that employ everyday people doing everyday things, trying to get by – are being targeted by chanting, menacing monsters. Right now.

At Cafe Landwer, for example. History is happening here, in this bright and sunny Toronto restaurant.

The people who founded Cafe Landwer know history. They have put it right on their website.

They write: “In 1919 on a picturesque street in the center of Berlin, Moshe Landwer opens a small and romantic coffee house, which quickly turns into one of the city’s favorite hangout spots. In 1933, with the rise to power of the Nazi regime, Moshe Landwer, along with his family, makes aliya [immigrates] and settles in Tel Aviv.”

Not mentioned, there, was what happened to Jewish businesses in Berlin, not long after Landwer left Germany: Kristallnacht. “Crystal night,” it was called, to describe the slivers of glass that littered the streets. After Nazi thugs smashed windows of Jewish businesses.
Terrorizing them. Demonizing them.

And now, more than a century later, the café that Moshe Landwer created is being targeted again, in the most unlikely of places. Not in Nazi Germany – in Canada. Here, now.

Thugs descended on Cafe Landwer on the weekend. Screaming at patrons. Chanting “boycott.” In an insane, spit-flecked rage. Targeting a restaurant?

For being Jewish.

My colleague Brian Lilley and I went to Cafe Landwer on Monday, to show support. To actively oppose hate, and not just talk about it. To be seen. Others did likewise.

This what James Baldwin meant, you see, when he said that history is right now – and all of us carry history with us.

He meant that all of us are seen, and we are all being judged, all the time. History is watching us.

Our Jewish brothers and sisters are being attacked and defamed, right here in our home. Right now. Not in the past. Now.

And, if we do nothing?

We will all be remembered for that, and it will never be erased.