... On the (subway) train ... I was reading, suddenly a person grabbed the yarmulka off my head and yelled, “Jew bastard!”
He was with two friends.
... I jumped up from my seat, slammed my book, ran at the three of them, and karate-kicked the fellow who was holding my yarmulka.
I kicked him in a part of his body that rendered a serious question whether he ever would have children.
... In 1980, I was in rabbinical seminary at Yeshiva University (YU).
... As I was walking, there were two youths ahead of me ... one of those youths hit (a) YU boy in the face, unprovoked. I could not believe my eyes.
The youths started yelling “Kikes!” and “Jew bastards!”
... I then was holding a very heavy book, Bava Kamma, a thick tractate of Talmud I needed for shiur (class).
... I ran at those two laughing youths.
They never saw me, coming from behind.
I reached them, and — with all my might — I slammed the assailant on the head with my Gemara volume.
... Later ... I was a fine litigator as a senior-associate eighth-year attorney at the Los Angeles offices of one of the top 20 law firms in the country ...
At my prior firm, Jones Day ... I never lost a case in my entire litigation career.
... here, for three years, they never once had me argue a motion.
... And then one day the managing partner asked me to argue a motion on a case that I was not even handling, an application on an RTAO — a Right to Attach Order — before Commissioner Levin.
Only when I entered his courtroom did I understand: Commissioner Levin wore a yarmulka.
That is why they had me in front of Commissioner Levin but never in front of anyone else.
I have encountered prejudice all my life.
I wear a yarmulka, and that makes me different.
In my (UCLA) law school first year, my professor of criminal law would not allow me a “make-up date” to take an exam that fell on Yom Kippur.
... Later, as a professor at UCI Law School, I was approached by a law student whose contracts law professor had announced that anyone who misses any class session all term would suffer a reduction in his course grade, and that professor would not allow that student to miss class on Rosh Hashanah.
Later, perspicaciously seeing where the greater society was headed, I voluntarily signed up for the first or second time the university offered a certificate course in “Diversity Training.”
... I privately approached the program director and said, “Y’know, for all the sensitivity and group bonding, you are isolating me as an Orthodox Jew.
All the group meals are at non-kosher restaurants where I cannot eat, and all the gatherings are on Saturday afternoons, Shabbat, the day of my Holy Sabbath, so I cannot attend.”
He looked at me — this master of sensitivity and diversity — and said, “We cannot accommodate everyone, Dov.”
That’s how I learned about diversity.
I not only have a formal Certificate in Diversity Sensitivity from the University of California, but I also know what it means.
So I am sick of hearing about diversity and sensitivity.
...You know how I succeeded in my life?
I did not whine about anti-Semitism.
I did not tell all my classmates and professors and my readers that “you all owe me” for all the times I was called a “Kike” and a “Jew bastard” and a “Christ killer.”
That you owe me reparations and you owe me compensation for the reduced grades I suffered for classes and tests missed on Sh’mini Atzeret and Simchat Torah.
... I never relied on a favor or compensatory advantage from government or institutions.
I just knew I had to work harder and do better than others, such that “they” would not be able to keep me out even if “they” wanted.
... To be a law school professor, I had to have pedagogical skills that rapidly would make me too good not to hire and — in this era of cancel culture — have the self-discipline in the classroom to hide my beliefs from the rabidly leftist faculty members always on the prowl, looking for conservative professors and G-d-fearing adjuncts to extirpate.
So I am sick of it.
Like almost every other Caucasian in this country, I do not owe a thing to anyone “of color.”
My two Bubbies (grandmothers) and two Zeydes (grandfathers) fled to this country from Poland and Russia in the period between 1881 and 1914, one step ahead of the Cossacks and Muzhiks who killed Jews in pogroms while yelling “Zhid!” and “khristos ubiytsa.”
My ancestors — unlike Kamala Harris’s ancestors — did not own slaves.
Rather, they were the society’s quasi-serfs, living behind ghetto walls.
When my parents of blessed memory were born here in the 1920s they did not know slavery — they were too busy starving during the Depression, one step removed from being homeless and evicted with their virtually penniless parents.
My Bubbie sold eggs on a street corner to get through it, and she stored the day’s leftover stock in her small Brownsville apartment;
... We grew up in a home that was free of prejudice.
My parents taught me that all people are created equal in G-d’s eyes.
... With the 1978 Bakke case ... decided by the U.S. Supreme Court 30 years earlier, the United States ... offered discrete minorities two generations of extra advantage to get into college, to own businesses, to enter professions.
...Two generations of Americans never had seen a segregated bathroom or bus or lunch counter.
This country had achieved racial harmony.
... And then we got Obama.
What kind of “White-privileged systemic racist” country voluntarily elects a Black — with no demonstrable background other than having been a community organizer and an undistinguished one-term senator — to be their president?
... This country was built in part with the terrible Original Sin of African slavery.
And yet more White American men gave their lives fighting to end slavery than have died in all other American wars combined.
And it ended more than 150 years ago.
... This country is not “systemically racist.”
Obama ... fooled a nation, the most racist-free, open, and tolerant society that ever was — into believing it is “systemically racist.”
... if you are White as alabaster, but you keep moaning about “systemic racism,” maybe the people of color will not notice that you control all the positions of influence and power they covet?
That you run the New York Times,
the Washington Post, NBC, CBS,
ABC, PBS, MSNBC, CNN.
Give them a few token slots,
hand them an Oscar or two
— and maybe they
will not notice that it is you,
the Hypocritical White Leftist
Power Infrastructure
at the universities,
in Hollywood,
at the mainstream media,
running Silicon Valley
and social media,
who actually hold
the reins of power
and run this country,
determining
— by wielding (their) influence
and control of the media
and over the minds
of the mediocrities
who cannot find news stories
outside of Facebook and Twitter
— who wins presidential elections,
which tweets may appear
on White-privileged
Jack Dorsey’s Twitter
and White-privileged
Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook and
White-privileged
Jeff Bezos’s Amazon Web Services
and Washington Post.
I am sick of it.
The road to success in America is — and always will be, unless Democrat “progressives” have their way and degrade us into socialism — by self-help.
If you rely on government to pull you up, you never will be equal to The Man because no one who gives charity, whether it is called “welfare” or “food stamps” or just-plain “entitlements” — will ever make you richer than they are.
If you want to break barriers, you have to take advantage of all that America offers and make yourself indispensable in some way, leaving others unable to deny you.
... 50 years from now the same disadvantaged groups who today rely on blaming instead of self-help will then be at the same exact rung on the social order that they are today,
... just as 50 years of racism-free society and Great Society “entitlements” have not accomplished equality of results today,
... even as newcomers from Asia entered this country these past 50 and 60 years and leap-frogged those already here.
As someone who has faced discrimination all my life, and has succeeded ...
I know firsthand the secret to the American Dream:
Don’t rely on the government for equal results because the government only will botch most things it touches.
... rely on yourself for self-help and your immediate network of family and friends, and the people at your church, cathedral, synagogue or temple, and private sources for a boost when needed — and understand that all you need to do to succeed in America is to be good at something valued by others ...
... systemic racism” is a canard adopted only by losers who are doomed always to be losers … or by their White liberal overlords hoping that no one notices them (trying to ) retain their reins of control."
