I lived my youth in the rural south. I was educated at a Southern university where Robert E. Lee is entombed, located in a Virginia town where Stonewall Jackson is also buried and memorialized. I was inducted into the Army and served at a military post in Georgia named after a Confederate General.

Being a Jew, I witnessed and personally suffered the pain inflicted by anti-Semites. I have looked into the faces of anti-Semitic white racists and seen and felt their vicious hatred. Those were the same faces I saw on those marchers in Charlottesville who, the night before the riot, carried torches and chanted “the Jews will not replace us,” and the Nazi idealization of hate: “blood and soil.” There are an overwhelming number of Southerners who are “very nice” people, but there was not a single “nice person” marching with those anti-Semitic bigots on the UVA campus.

In August 1991, I saw those same faces in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, but this time they were black faces. Al Sharpton helped precipitate a riot in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, taunting “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.” That riot resulted in the brutal stabbing death of an innocent rabbinical student and was characterized by Edward S. Shapiro, a historian at Brandeis University, as “the most serious anti-Semitic incident in American history.” That was followed by Sharpton's participation in what was known as the Freddie's Fashion Mart Massacre in Harlem, where Sharpton railed against a Jewish “white interloper” whose store was burned to the ground while eight people were murdered.