When the FBI Came to Our Apartment . . .

We've Seen This Movie Before

When I was a child, maybe 8 years old, I answered the door in our upstairs garden apartment in Queens — my parents were not home, it was just me and my 11-year-old brother — and said hello to two FBI agents.

They were there to question my grandmother and my parents. What in the world about? I had no comprehension of what was going on. Neither did my brother. “They’re not home,” he said. And away they went.

When my folks came home and heard about the visit, they tried for the first time to explain to us what it meant that they were, or had been, members of the Communist Party USA. I don’t remember a word of what they said, or how it made me feel. Neither does my brother. But I began to understand why, about a year before, my beloved bobe (grandmother), had suddenly begun to live in the Long Island nursing home where she was working as a licensed practical nurse. This, I realized years later, was her version of going underground.

Eventually I made a career out of processing this family drama by working for Jewish Currents magazine, which had been founded by the CPUSA in 1946, five years before my birth. I spent many, many hours writing, reading and in discussion about both the idealism and terrible shortsightedness of American communists, and I struggled with many aspects of their Marxist belief system, much of which I came to reject. In the course of these ruminations, I absorbed a lot of radical history, especially about leftwing Jews. Today, I’m among very few living caretakers of the history of Jewish Currents up to my retirement as editor in 2018.

All of which brought tears to my eyes when I watched the international broadcast of GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK, starring George Clooney as the brave news reporter Edward R. Morrow. I had seen the 2006 movie with David Strathairn as Murrow (directed by Clooney), but the political context back then was vastly different; even with George W. Bush in the White House, the far right was still on the outside looking in. With Trump now in office and pushing America off the cliff, I experienced Clooney’s broadcast as the most powerful cultural rebuff so far of Trump and the hateful spirit he embodies. And because of my knowledge of the repression that my parents and their comrades struggled with in the 1950s and early '60s — and the fantastic social advances we won in the '60s, '70s and beyond — I was acutely feeling the losses that we are all feeling, and I felt inspired to stop freaking out and just take on the responsibility of helping to oppose his predations.

Thanks to George Clooney, I’m going to attend a “No Kings” demonstration in Kingston, NY tomorrow. Here’s the poster I’ll be carrying:

I hope you’ll be demonstrating, too.