I was accepted by and matriculated at an elite Ivy League college in 1959, and subsequently I learned that 25% of my entering class was Jewish. But so it was, and in a sense the Admissions Department at the college had discriminated against Jews by admitting only 25%, because there was a larger percentage of Jews qualified to attend the college than non-Jews in certain areas throughout the United States, and qualified non-Jews had been admitted from those areas in preference to more qualified Jews to promote "geographical diversity" in the class. I hailed from San Antonio, and almost certainly was one of those "geographical diversity admits," but I hardly knew what a Jew was in 1959. And when I was accepted, and took to college life like a seal to water, I was unaware that 25% of my fellow seals were Jewish.::::::::
Now it's over fifty years later, and although I thank my lucky stars for the college education I enjoyed because I was born a non-Jew in San Antonio and not a Jew in a Jewish neighborhood in Manhattan, I cringed when I saw this year's National Holocaust Remembrance Days in America -
Days of Holocaust Remembrance (2012), by The U.S. Holocaust Museum
- cringed, because evidently the great majority of American Jews simply will not understand, acknowledge, and act on the fact that militant Israel's inflexibility regarding the Palestinians and Iran threatens the entire human race.
In fact, it's for the countless Jewish activists for good causes all over the globe that I link for you this year's National Holocaust Remembrance Day theme, Choosing to Act: Stories of Rescue. Their forbearers were also rescued.
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I have a law degree (Stanford, 66') but have never practiced. Instead, from 1967 through 1977, I tried to contribute to the revolution in America. As unsuccessful as everyone else over that decade, in 1978 I went to work for the U.S. Forest (
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