… he wanted to join a party which wouldn’t have him because he was a Jew.
— Hannah Arendt’s remarks on Leo Strauss
This morning Politico published an op-ed by Dr. David S. Glosser, Sc. D. Dr. Glosser is one of Stephen Miller’s uncles. While Dr. Glosser’s, and much of Stephen Miller’s other relations views about him are not exactly news, this is the first time that one of his relatives has directly addressed a national audience about him, his ideology, and his actions as opposed to having those views reported about. Dr. Glossar’s column explains in detail what almost every other American Jew knows very well, that if the immigration policies, laws, and regulations that Stephen Miller is such a clear advocate of were in force when their grandparents or great grandparents came to the US, they would never have been allowed in. And given that they were in force during the Holocaust, many seeking safety were unable to find it.
The Glossers’ journey is an American story. It is the story of the families being detained and separated at the southern border right now. No one takes their children, whatever possessions they can carry, and sets out either overland or at sea unless they are desperate. Desperate to escape state directed or tolerated political violence, drug cartel violence, the violence that arises from the sex trade, and the poverty and imisseration that contributes to it and results from it. Dr. Glossar tells the story of just one of his patients – a young man who was able to flee the mental torture of being turned into a child soldier and the physical torture that arose from suspected religious deviancy to eventually make his way to safety in the US. Dr. Glossar’s patient’s story is a testament to what America is supposed to be – the safe haven for those who seek it and wish to contribute to it. When men and women like Dr. Glossar’s patient, as well as his great grandfather – and many of our great grandparents regardless of our ethnicity or religion – undertook their long, dangerous journeys to the US they knew that at the end of that journey, if they were lucky enough to make it safely to their destination, was safety. This is the ideal that is America. This is its promise. Not the cramped, small minded, bigoted, hateful belief that the wealthiest and most powerful nation-state to ever exist is somehow on the verge of collapse because desperate men and women are carrying their children with them from danger through danger in the hope that they can reach safety.
Stephen Miller is the wickedest of sons. His prejudices and petty grievances betray not a world changing intellect, but the small minded fear of the petulant child who once slighted can never give up his grudge. Miller, and the President he so gleefully serves, like Gen. (ret) Kelly, and most every other American, is only an American because of lax immigration laws at the time their forebears came to the US and family based migration (what the President calls chain migration). It is not that they are hypocrites, they most certainly are, or would be if they had any sense of shame. Rather they are small, fearful, timid men play acting as fierce warriors on behalf of a socially constructed ideal: whiteness. And in the case of Stephen Miller, because he is Jewish, he is only white on sufferance and that privilege can be revoked by the very extremists and white supremacists that Miller has been playing footsie with since he was trying to survive the mean sidewalks and quadrangle of Santa Monica High School.
Open thread!
rikyrah
That piece of racist trash ?
Cheryl Rofer
And the important thing is not that they are hypocrites, but that they are damaging the United States and the lives of people who trust the promises that United States has made with its very being.
SFAW
How strange/ironic that he would end up working for Shitgibbon. I guess there’s a lot of truth in that old adage: “opposites attract.”
ETA: Or, as Shakespeare or someone else once said: “these fucking guys.”
rikyrah
He needs to burn in Hell for what he has done to these children.?
Lee Hartmann
The Glosser article was both righteous and poignant.
The Midnight Lurker
The best thing we can do for Miller is put him in prison because he will never survive the night of the long knives.
Tokyokie
I doubt anybody here can fully appreciate Steven Miller’s predicament because they’ve never walked the mean streets of Santa Monica in his shoes. Perhaps the pier during the summer when everybody’s going barefoot, but not the streets themselves.
kindness
Normally these kind of articles and MSM exposure would shame the person.
Trump doesn’t hire anyone who does shame. It shows.
chopper
someone should knock his kishkes out.
Roger Moore
@Cheryl Rofer:
What’s important and what sells are not always the same. People react emotionally to the story of somebody pulling up the ladder after they’ve climbed it to safety, and triggering that reaction is the goal.
JanieM
Beautiful post, Adam, especially the middle paragraph, and especially this:
zhena gogolia
Thanks for this. Important article.
The Midnight Lurker
Not to come off like a ‘libtard’, but it’s way past time we stop identifying these people by their skin color, sex, ethnic background, or religious heritage – they’re just assholes! And leave it at that!
Adam L Silverman
@JanieM: I’m always stunned by the people screaming about how exceptional, powerful, and wealthy the US is, but some version of healthcare for everyone will utterly destroy us immediately if we even think about it.
BubbaDave
Preach it, brother!
Adam L Silverman
@The Midnight Lurker: The only reason I referenced Miller being Jewish is, as I mentioned earlier, American Jews, despite Judaism being a religion, are treated as an ethno-nationality. And, as a result, have been treated and considered like other ethnic Americans, though with these groups there was also often the overlap of Catholicism and to a lesser extent Orthodox Christianity contributing to their otherness.
The Midnight Lurker
I meant the Trump administration, of course.
Betty Cracker
I urge everyone who has not already done so to read Glosser’s column — it really is beautifully written. I wonder if Miller’s parents are as horrified by his role in this administration’s atrocities as the uncle clearly is. They ought to be.
Schlemazel
The greatest victory the Nazis & KKK have had in this current go-round is that they have convinced Jews, Catholics, Southern European descendants and some number of Hispanics that they don’t mean them this time.
Too many in those groups have no experience with this evil & assume the evil does not mean to harm THEM, after all, they are on the same side . . .
Felony Govt (formerly Old Broad in California)
Good for the uncle. So many of us have a family background that involves one or more brave immigrants who journeyed to a strange land for freedom or opportunity (or who were brought here cruelly and forcibly). What a horrible, stunted person Miller is.
The Midnight Lurker
@Adam L Silverman: I know, sir. And I think this is an important post. But I just hate the guy’s guts and don’t want to come off like an anti-semite. Or as my Jewish Aunt used to say, “He’s a putz!”
J R in WV
Two of my great grandparents, Johann and Elizabet, came here from Europe, Switzerland, speaking only Switzerdeutsch aka Schwiizerdütsch in the late 1890s. My GGrandfather Johann became a naturalized citizen and changed his name to John before his untimely death in the early 1900s. My grandfather did not speak any English until he started grade school in NE Ohio dairy farm country.
I will read Dr Glosser’s article, to the amount I can. I no longer have much tolerance for horror stories in real life, which is part of why I won’t be re-reading Hannah Arandt histories and analysis of the rise of fascism in Europe. I’ve slacked off on political news of America for the same reason.
Who wants to relive Europe’s political history a century later on? Not me. Miller should be in jail awaiting trial for hundreds of counts of child abuse and conspiracy to commit child abuse, and I’m sure there are many other crimes buried in those simple accusations right there. We would have room for all the fascist child abusers if we released all the non-violent criminals. There are obviously hundreds or thousands of them in DHS right now.
I see a headline on the Goog’s news report, children in Virginia were strapped down into chairs, “but not abused” – excuse me, but strapping kidnapped children down IS ABUSE.
Calouste
Martin made a good point in one of the earlier threads today, from his own experience growing up Irish-American, that Miller isn’t “white on sufferance”, he is “white in context”. I.e. as long as there are enough people “below” him in the racist order in a specific context he’s counted in. If there aren’t, something he’s working on, he’s out. And the definition of “enough people” is that the racists need him so that they have overwhelming power against the out group. So once the current out group is made essentially powerless, or not relevant in context, they will start purging people from the in group to the out group, and work on making them powerless.
For example, Jews weren’t subjected to slavery in the US like African Americans, but at the same time they were discriminated against in higher education, a context where there were basically no African Americans.
geg6
Bravo, Adam. Great and passionate writing. Yes, this. My great grandparents on my mother’s side and my grandparents on my father’s side immigrated here. Some of them had it easy getting in (my dad’s parents from England at the turn of the last century) and some had a tough time of it due to where they came from and the mores of the times (my mother’s paternal grandparents from Germany and her maternal grandparents from Ireland). I despise my fellow white people who have forgotten that from which they came.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@The Midnight Lurker: Actually that’s one of the absolutely dumbfounding weird things about Miller, he’s a Jew bashing Jew and seems to be utterly unaware that that his fellow racists see “Jew” as a race and not a just a religion.
Then again Henry “A free copy of The Protocols of Zion with every car” Ford supposedly had several rabbi friends while at the same time railing against Those Jews. Cognitive Dissonance in action.
B.B.A.
@Calouste: in the South, Jews were white enough to serve in the highest levels of the Confederate government, but not so white they couldn’t get lynched.
schrodingers_cat
@Schlemazel: They seem to have also convinced some idiotic people of Indian origin. Pai, Verma, Haley etc.
mad citizen
I second JanieM, a beautiful post Adam.
The Midnight Lurker
My great-uncle married a Jewish lady. She told me a story about her father who came here from Russia. Way back when (not precisely sure) his parents (her grandparents) put him on a ship headed to America with his four-year-old sister. He was nine. They told him, “Go find your uncle in New York.” They never saw him again.
Try as I might, I still can not imagine a situation where I would put my children on a ship to a strange place, knowing I would never see them again.
Schlemazel
@schrodingers_cat:
Great catch, I had forgotten about them
I have worked with a lot of Indian engineers and programers. Most, almost all, have been really decent people but a few have taken great pains to let coworkers know that they are better than the coworkers. I never asked but often wondered if they had come from a privileged background in India. One of them was so obnoxious about it I finally was fed up & we had some very intense words about his behavior. He was always careful around me after that but I heard stories he was still abusive to others. I moved on shortly after or it would have been an issue again I am sure
Roger Moore
@Adam L Silverman:
Judaism may be a religion, but Ashkenazi, at the very least, form a very distinct ethic group. They’re* genetically distinct from the European populations they lived among, which seems like a rational basis for treating them as a distinct ethic group.
*I guess I could say “we’re”, since I’m Ashkenazi on my mother’s side.
Adam L Silverman
@Betty Cracker: They aren’t. While it is unclear – as I’ve seen it reported both ways – either Miller radicalized his parents into his reactionary beliefs (reactionized?) or they were themselves far more conservative than the rest of their family, their congregation, and much of Santa Monica and, being real estate investors and property developers, became more conservative as a result of the Great Recession.
Adam L Silverman
@The Midnight Lurker: I understand.
Adam L Silverman
@Calouste: My white by sufferance is directly tied to white by context.
Cheryl Rofer
@Roger Moore: Yeah, I don’t know. The hypocrisy thing is so overdone, and so blatant all across this administration, that I think it’s worth enunciating the fundamentals. Is this what we want America to be? Which is the implied question of the uncle’s article. Or it may be explicit – I only skimmed.
TenguPhule
@J R in WV:
Virginia deemed that the abuse did not meet the required standard to be considered a crime by the state.
No, I’m not joking.
cain
@Betty Cracker:
Who wouldn’t.. Miller’s family escaped the Nazis and now their kid is encouraging bringing it here. I mean it is a horrible thing given their family history.
Adam L Silverman
@B.B.A.: The Dark Prince of the Confederacy.
TenguPhule
@schrodingers_cat:
They are convinced that the new American caste system will work to their advantage.
A Ghost To Most
We are all immigrants; the only difference is timeline. Multiple branches of my ancestors arrived in 1620; no difference.
YetAnotherJay formerly (Jay S)
@Schlemazel: I wonder if there isn’t some realignment, at least with the Orthodox Catholics given the Russian white nationalist alliance.
Roger Moore
@Schlemazel:
I can’t speak for the rest of those groups, but I can assure you only a tiny fraction of Jews have been fooled. Yeah, there are a few high-profile idiots like Miller, but the vast majority of Jewish people know they mean us. For those who might have been wavering, the chants of “Jews will not replace us” served as a good reminder that we’re always near the top of the enemies list.
Gravenstone
@The Midnight Lurker: Except that to Miller, his skin color seems to be literally his most important self defining feature. As such, it has lead him to these sets of beliefs in this place and amongst these people.
BC in Illinois
@Schlemazel:
@Felony Govt (formerly Old Broad in California):
Adam:
My German-speaking Hungarian g’parents came here around 1910. My Scottish, Swedish, other German, English, (Welsh?) ancestors before that. I always thought this was everybody’s story — growing up in the Eisenhower era, with a lot of Italian and Polish names in class; my father working for the government surrounded by people with names like Youden, Eisenhart, Ku. I first heard of the internment of Japanese Americans in 7th grade, when Bobby Shioto made a report on it.
[[Note–that is probably the only oral report that I remember from 7th grade.]] Junior High and High School were the times of Selma, Freedom Riders, and Martin Luther King. And all this time, my grandparents being living embodiments of “what America is supposed to be.”
I thought this was the story for everyone in America.
Or at least the story of what we’re supposed to be.
Are people not telling the story to their kids?
Would immigrant family-histories be greeted with cynicism?
There are artists and story-tellers, novelists and song-writers who can bridge that.
(Hell, I still remember singing “Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor” at Wheaton High School.)
We can tell the story again — the past (including all its failures) and the future (with all its promises).
Adam L Silverman
I’ve got to go run some errands. Thanks for all the kind words. I’ll check back in later.
Catherine D.
Every time I see Stephen Miller’s face, I think he’s the hellspawn of Goebbels, Heydrich and PeeWee Herman. So now I have an earworm:
Hitler has only got one ball
Göring has two but very small
Himmler is rather sim’lar
But poor old Goebbels has no balls at all
mike in dc
As I noted on LGM, Miller’s uncle is basically making a compelling case that his nephew is a modern-day kapo, except instead of his fellow Jews, it’s modern asylum seekers fleeing persecution in Central America, South America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa whom he is sending/turning back to their own terrible fates.
A Ghost To Most
@Roger Moore:
Below atheists on the Christian fascist hit list.
They need Jews for the end times.
MattF
Trump has low approval among Jews (in the teens, at best)– but still, it’s a dark mystery to me why he has any.
The dangerman
Most of Trump’s people come from under known rocks (i.e., Omarosa = Apprentice, although how she got from the Gore Team to the Apprentice is a bit of a curiosity). Anyway, what rock did Miller crawl out from under?
lollipopguild
@Adam L Silverman: I remember a lot of the same crap during the cold war, “we are the best most powerful country in the world(pause) but the Russians are 10 FEET tall” “We must spend Billions of dollars to protect us from them!” (Billions are spent) ”
We just spent Billions on defence are we safe now? No, because the Russians are 15 feet tall now!
The Midnight Lurker
@Gravenstone: He just looks like another white asshole to me.
Roger Moore
@A Ghost To Most:
Jews aren’t always at the top of the enemies list, but we’re always close enough to the top that we can’t ignore being on the list.
TenguPhule
@BC in Illinois:
The white ones are telling stories about how good it was in the old days, before the Civil rights movement made colored folks uppity against their betters.
Betty Cracker
@Roger Moore: That chant chilled me to the fucking bone. I remember reading a newspaper article (probably almost exactly a year ago) quoting someone who heard it from the interior of a synagogue as the Nazis marched by. In America. In 2017. It is inexpressibly shameful.
Mnemosyne
As I’ve said before, we all would have been better off if someone had taken the adolescent Miller to a dominatrix so he could express his deep need to be reviled and humiliated in a safe space and not force his desires on the rest of us.
Read the article about his high school speech. He likes being hated. He gets off on it.
Gin & Tonic
@YetAnotherJay formerly (Jay S): You’re mixing religions. Orthodox aren’t Catholics.
TenguPhule
@MattF:
27% of the population are irredeemably insane.
debbie
I knew a family like this when I was growing up. They’d been discriminated against in Cincinnati, so they converted and moved to Columbus. Changed their names and everything. Somewhere in the process, they became rabid anti-Semites.
The daughter was in my class. One day in 8th grade, she called me a “kike.” I didn’t even know what that word meant. My dad sure did and when he found out who had said it, they had some kind of confrontation over it.
Mnemosyne
@A Ghost To Most:
They only need a total of 100,000 Jews for the End Times. They don’t give a shit what happens to the rest.
Calouste
@Schlemazel: Actually the biggest victory is that they have convinced the Eastern Europeans, or maybe we should say that the Eastern Europeans have convinced the current Nazis that they are the in-crowd and not people to be killed, starved, or deported like the original Nazis’ plans were for Eastern European.
The Midnight Lurker
@Mnemosyne: AHHHH! Miller and a dominatrix! I NEED BRAIN BLEACH, STAT!!!
Roger Moore
@MattF:
There are a few reasons why you’ll see that level of support in polls:
1) There are always a few people from any group who don’t care about any color but green, and they’ll support the guy who’s giving them a tax break.
2) Likudniks
3) Polling errors/liars. Unless you specifically target a group that makes up as small a fraction of the population as Jews do, you tend to get really unreliable results. It only takes one or two goyim claiming to be Jews to completely skew the numbers when you only get answers from the roughly 1000 people they use in most national polls.
Mnemosyne
@MattF:
From what a friend at work has told me, it’s anti-Muslim Orthodox Jews, especially ones who immigrated here from Israel. She has a cousin she refuses to speak to because the guy’s wife is so virulent in her hatred for Muslims and supported Trump in the hope that he will wipe them all out. The irony of an immigrant from Israel taking this genocidal stance has not escaped the rest of the family. ?
Jay
@The dangerman:
Jeff Session’s
Gravenstone
@Mnemosyne: Biblical numbers tend to be somewhat squishy and flexible.
frosty fred
@Gin & Tonic: That ain’t the way the nuns taught it; I’m rushing out the door, or I’d look for a source other than Wikipedia.
Mr Stagger Lee
Miller’s high position is like Alfred Rosenberg. I mean how does one become chief ideologue of the Nazi Party with a handle like that?
The Moar You Know
no longer have much tolerance for horror stories in real life, which is part of why I won’t be re-reading Hannah Arandt histories and analysis of the rise of fascism in Europe. I’ve slacked off on political news of America for the same reason.
@J R in WV: interesting. I can’t do violent media at all anymore. And this is recent. Pre-Trump, but recent. Was fine with it for a long time. But not any longer. Maybe it’s because I got a puppy. I don’t know.
Roger Moore
@BC in Illinois:
In a lot of the core Trump-supporting groups they don’t tell those stories because they’re lost in the mists of time. I know how my mother’s father got to the US: he left Germany in 1933, met my grandmother in Paris, moved to England when they got married, and moved to the US to avoid the war. I know how my mother’s mother’s family came here: they moved to Baltimore in the 1830s, went to San Francisco during the gold rush, and then one branch of the family moved back to Europe (which is why my grandmother was in Paris).
But my father’s side of the family were all here before the revolution, so we know very little about exactly why they decided to come here. The stories just didn’t last for enough generations. I think the same basic thing is true of a lot of the families who give their ethnicity as “American” (a core Trump-supporting group); they’ve been her for so long they don’t tell the story of why the came anymore. Of course a lot of them probably stopped telling those stories because they weren’t proud of their reasons for coming and decided to talk about more recent and honorable (if you count fighting for the Confederacy as honorable) family stories instead.
The Midnight Lurker
Growing up as a kid in an extended Catholic/Jewish family, we celebrated all sorts of holidays. As children, we especially loved the Hanukkah/Christmas hybrid. Gifts o’ plenty as the Jews started early and the Catholics finished late. I got my ass chewed royally once (by Catholics, no less) for lighting a menorah with a Zippo. Back then, there were always a few gnashed teeth around the ol’ feasting table.
Nowadays, the old Jews and gentiles team up against the young atheists, who refuse to respect any of our old traditions. To everything, turn, turn, turn… am I right, Lord?
BC in Illinois
@BC in Illinois:
I guess my dis-connect from today’s anti-immigrant thinking, is that I grew up thinking that immigration was patriotic.
That “Give me your tired, your poor” was a patriotic song — sort of like the Statue of Liberty itself.
That the “Devil and Daniel Webster (1936) was a patriotic short-story, even with quotes like this:
(that’s the Devil speaking)
We can still do what Langston Hughes said: “Let America Be America Again”
even though (America never was America to me.)
White supremacy is an American problem. But we can fight it.
Uncle Cosmo
@Catherine D.: Five minutes of Googling will turn up photos of Miller & Heydrich that are disturbingly similar. “Separated at birth”? More like “suppurated at decanting.”
Immanentize
@MattF:
C.R.E.A.M.
Immanentize
@The dangerman: He was an aide to Jeff Sessions. Of course.
A Ghost To Most
@Roger Moore:
Same could be said about atheists. We can’t even get elected if we admit who we are.
A Ghost To Most
@Mnemosyne: True, but they need NO atheists.
Jay
@Mr Stagger Lee:
Rosenburg was born into a long established German Merchant family in Estonia, when it was part of pre-WWI Russia.
His antisemitism would have been well established by the Russian State, by his family as well, as Ashkenazi Jews would have been economic competitors, and would have been much more violent due to the commoness of State sponsored violence against the Jews.
When Estonia became occupied by Germany near the end of WWI, he became “attached” to the German Army, being a teacher at a Gymnasium, ( German Army School for Enlisted Men).
When the German Army retreated to Germany after the Estonian War of Independence, he went with them. The war, the Freikorps, and his personal experiences, ( he abandoned his Estonian wife) would have shaped his “beliefs” about “being German”.
TheMightyTrowel
Nearly dead thread, but nothing will make clear the whole ‘white on sufferance’ thing than living in Europe for a while, especially England and the south of France where I lived for a number of years. I am half Irish and half ashkenazi jew, and the mix means I look pretty generically northern European. As a result, people were totally comfortable saying horrible things in front of me for years – about the drunken Irish (pot, kettle), about jews, about muslims, travellers, you name it.* When I felt safe I pushed back, but I didn’t always feel safe. While I was studying at Top English University, a bunch of the undergrads went to a costume party dressed as jews and nazis. They got caught and punished. The next year they dressed in blackface. And yet, it took literal years for me to convince my English friends of the sheer and overwhelming level of casual racism in the UK. It literally wasn’t until Brexit that some finally heard what I’d been saying for over a decade.
*the worst anti-semitic “jokes” I’ve ever been told (incl references to concentration camps and pizza ovens) I heard during meetings of the queer students association at my French university, think about that for a while.
Mnemosyne
@TheMightyTrowel:
I just bought a copy of “Black and British” as research for my next historical novel, and the author (who is both) says that his friends tried to tell him that racial slurs like “gollywog” weren’t really racist, but couldn’t explain why they were written on the note that was wrapped around the brick that was heaved through his family’s window if they weren’t “really” racist. ?
Di
As a Jew, I can.not wrap my head around monsters like Stephen Miller. Never Again for me, but not for thee.
MagdaInBlack
That is do well written, Adam, and so heart-felt that my only comment is Thank You.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
Sounds plausible.
Supposedly my grandmother was brought here from Sicily as a very young infant in the late 1800s, her father was supposedly a mafia enforcer who was “asked” to leave Sicily because he was a little to good and enthusiastic about his work. Bad family stories abound in immigrant families. A lot of families didn’t want to tell those stories, a fresh start so to speak. The stories may not have been told on purpose.
smedley the uncertain
@Uncle Cosmo: Amen!
Adam L Silverman
@MattF: Some, like Adelson, etc are one issue voters. And that issue is Israel.
J R in WV
@BC in Illinois:
You are so wrong. Racism and white supremacy is universal among people lighter complected than some of their surrounding population.
South Africa, India, Russia, are all prone to while supremacy. Japan and China are prone to their own population’s supremacy, above the typical “white” western folk.
BC in Illinois
@J R in WV:
On “White supremacy is an American problem.”
You are correct that “White supremacy is [not only] an American problem.”
There are manifestations worldwide.
What I intended to say is that “White supremacy is not only a problem caused by particular politicians, as if we can vote them out of office and be done with it.” It is a problem more deeply rooted in American culture than that–and in that sense “an American problem.” A problem that all of America needs to come together and fight off. But we can fight it the way we fight any other blight on our culture. With better culture–artists and story-tellers, novelists and song-writers–we have a better, more enjoyable, more uplifting American story than the White Supremacists can ever imagine.
We can gather all of America and celebrate all of America.
They can go sit on a rock someplace and be white.
Ladyraxterinok
@J R in WV: My grandfather also came to US (with some male cousins) in late 1800s from Canton Bern, Switzerland. He settled in NE, met and married my gramma, and then moved to OK in 1906, 1 year before statehood.
J R in WV
@Ladyraxterinok:
My GGrandparents were also from Canton Bern, IIRC. My grandfather died long ago, 40 years ago, so my memories are now vague.
He was a successful businessman, and decided to take his family, wife and 4 kids, to meet the European consins – in 1938. That turned out to be a more interesting trip than he had planned, but they got out to England when Chamberlain’s speech on the radio about “Peace in out time” was put on while they were at a movie theater.
Then they came home on a British vessel, rather than the German ship they had been booked on when they departed. It must have been quite a trip for my father. who was introduced to champagne at the age of 14…
We could be cousins…
MoxieM
@Jay: The unspeakable pedantic pipes up: A Gymnasium as a German schools is a merely a college track high school. They have more kinds of high schools, they way we used to in the USA (Classical, i.e., Gymnasium; Business High; Trade High, etc.) . Downside is you have to decide what you want to do with your life at about age 11.
Also Rosenberg just means “Red/Pink Mountain”. An anecdote: When my kid was in high school (she went to a regular public HS in the US, a Gymnasium in Germany… ) her English teacher asked the class what they saw in a bunch of authors’ names. Daughter said, they’re all German.” Teacher said, “No! They’re all Jewish.” Of course they were both. So, in some cases you can’t determine religion from name.
Jonothan Cullinane
@Tokyokie:
Brilliant post.