STUDY ON WHITE PEOPLE The Reminiscences of Larry Moldo
Columbia Center for Oral History Columbia University 2018
PREFACE
The following oral history is the result of a recorded interview with Larry Moldo conducted by Whitney Dow on May 15, 2018. This interview is part of the Study on White People. The reader is asked to bear in mind that they are reading a verbatim transcript of the spoken word, rather than written prose.
Moldo – 1 – 3
ATC
Session #1
Interviewee: Larry Moldo
Location: Cheyenne, WY
Interviewer: Whitney Dow
Date: May 15, 2018
Q: So, all right, let’s get started. Can you tell me your name, where you’re from, and just a little about yourself?
Moldo: [00:13] I’m Rabbi Larry Moldo, and I was born in Minnesota and have lived a whole bunch of places. Just the states, we’ve got Peoria, Illinois; Omaha, Nebraska; Prairie Village, Kansas; then Manhattan, New York; followed by Elmwood Park, New Jersey; then Buffalo, New York; Modesto, California; in Long Island of New York, one of those small little places there; and then, finally, here in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Q: You saved the best for last, [laughter] clearly [phonetic]. So how long ago did you move here?
Moldo: [01:03] I moved here four years ago, just about to the day.
Q: So tell me a little bit about your synagogue. Is it an old synagogue, a new synagogue? Does it have a big—is it a congregation?
Moldo – 1 – 4 Moldo: [01:18] So there has been a Jewish population, a Jewish presence in Cheyenne, Wyoming, before they actually declared themselves to be an entity called Cheyenne. This was a train stop, a working kind of place, and everybody wanted to do something to relax after hours. So one of the Jews who had made their way out here became a liquor wholesaler and raked in a bundle and built himself a mansion on Mansion Row. The Idleman Mansion is currently where the governor has his office while the state capitol is under repair, so Idleman Mansion had at one point, to begin with, been where the Jews met for services, because he had brought a Torah scroll over with him, which we still have. The synagogue here has seven Torah scrolls including that one, which is from Germany in the mid-1800s. The congregation itself has never been big enough to declare itself to be one thing or another, so it fits the community. It reflects the community who belong to it and has a lot of interesting differences. There is an Orthodoxly kosher mikvah in the synagogue because there is a river flowing underground under the synagogue, so we have this ritual bath to enable us to convert people to Judaism and to clean the pots and pans appropriately if they’re new ones, making them available for use. We’ve got one of the best acoustic rooms for our sanctuary in the city and sometimes within a few different states, actually, where I can talk like this, as I’m doing now, and be heard throughout the whole room without, really, even a microphone. That’s a good kind of thing, and the community itself, whoever leads, leads however they want to do that. And they’ve been very active and involved in Cheyenne, and many of them have been active in Cheyenne politics over the time period as well.
Q: And does the rest of the community—I mean, when I think Wyoming, I don’t think synagogue. I mean, that’s more—if I’m living in New York, I see the images of cowboys, all this stuff. It’s interesting that you say there has been [phonetic] a presence for a long time. How has
Moldo – 1 – 5 that presence manifested itself in the community as a whole? Do you feel like you’re a recognized presence here? Are you deeply interconnected with the non-Jewish part of the community? There’s the big—you know, there are all kinds of different Christian churches here.
Moldo: [04:13] It gets to be a very interesting integrated concept. Many people know that there are Jews in Cheyenne, but they tend to forget that there is a synagogue building in Cheyenne even if they go there for the Yiddish Food Festival in June every year. But they tend to forget that it’s there, and this includes important functionaries who pass by it every single day on their way to work. It’s not necessarily downtown. It’s on the outskirts of downtown, so it’s in between, kind of, things. The director of Homeland Security actually had to Google “Jews in Wyoming” to discover that there was a community and a synagogue in Cheyenne, where he works. And as I told him, that’s one of our best protections, is that nobody actually remembers we’re there [laughs].
Q: When you say “protections,” what do you mean? Why would you need protection?
Moldo: [05:14] Well, in many cases where there are people who are interested in hating others, the number of attacks against Jews is still the greatest of religion-related bias hatred actions. It’s still greatest against Jews in the country as opposed to anything else. Even though the actions against Muslims may have increased a certain percentage-wise, in terms of actual numbers the amount of anti-Semitic activity is still the highest. It’s one thing that I’d love to be able to say we’re not number one at, but we still are number one in actions against us [laughs]. And the folks in Wyoming are very, very friendly folks, but there is a group of people who are into hating
Moldo – 1 – 6 because, well, Wyoming is a widespread community, and you can park yourself somewhere, and almost nobody will know that you’re there if you don’t want them to. So that could be a place— and it’s close enough to Montana, where some of what they call now the alt-right actually have their homes, some of them up there, so if they knew that, “Hey, Cheyenne has got one of these synagogue thingies there. And it’s Wyoming, and there aren’t enough people around, so why don’t we go and take care of that?” they could, except for the fact that everybody forgets that there’s a building in Cheyenne [laughs].
Q: What does it say that they forget? What does it say about the community that they forget there’s a synagogue?
Moldo: [07:09] Our interactions with the community are not putting our religion in their face, but interacting with them to try to get something else accomplished. So we do have—naturally, this being Wyoming, we have Jewish Republicans. We have Jewish independents, and we do have Jewish Democrats. The Jewish Democrats are the loudest demographic because they are the fewest, so I guess they feel they have to be louder to make up for the fact that there are so few of them, although there have been some when David Freudenthal was governor. He was a Democratic governor, and people voted for him because he could do a good job, and they already knew that he had done good in his other positions. I’m from Minnesota, so I sort of believe that you vote for the person who can do the best job, and you don’t care what party they’re from. Many places I’ve been, they don’t get that. It’s like, “Well, look at the party first, and we’ll figure out whether they do a good job after we’ve elected them in.” And I never quite get that particular thing.
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Q: What does that say about Wyoming that it’s overwhelmingly conservative? They don't tend to vote for Democrats regardless of—
Moldo: [08:30] Most recently, that’s been something that’s more recent, and there are, indeed, Democrats who are elected to certain offices, or, if certain locality within the city has a number of them, then their people will be voted in. What it says is a problem about America in general, is that the educational system has been consistently, in my personal opinion, dumbed down over the past several decades so that—either dumbed down or made for people to believe that the Founding Fathers did not know anything, and therefore you can not worry about your own judgment when you’re doing something like voting, because you figure somebody else has done the hard work for you. And therefore, you just look for that letter after the name and vote that particular way because somebody else you trust must have done all the important vetting, and I just don’t totally understand that concept because there are obnoxious people on both sides of these particular parties, especially that like we’ve got here.
In general, places that are much more agricultural tend to be a little bit more conservative because in order to survive you kind of have to be. I used to think, since I grew up in Minnesota, that the reason that Iowa was so conservative was because of the horizon. As far as you can see, it’s the same, so why go anywhere? Whereas if you lived somewhere like here, where you can see mountains and stuff like that, it might look different on the other side, so you make a change. But if you’ve got a bunch of animals you’re taking care of, you can’t really travel to make that change, so you stay where you are and hope that it continues to go well enough, and you’re very
Moldo – 1 – 8 leery of changes in terms of things like that. And I think that actually does have a large part to play in how people do things. It depends upon where they’re kind of from.
Q: When you heard about this project talking about looking at whiteness in Wyoming, what did you think? Is it a weird idea, a good idea, an idea that needs to be done, or a completely ridiculous idea?
Moldo: [11:07] I have recently been very concerned about the use of whiteness in that fashion, because I used to always fill out under race, you know, “White. Sure. Why not? That seems to be fine,” until what people assumed white meant. And then, I couldn’t do that anymore, really, because the things that you think that a European, that somebody from Europe went through do not match what the Jewish people went through in Europe. And that’s sort of across the board anyway. And then, they started talking about white privilege, and it just never seemed to make much sense to me. When I heard about this, I was wondering why they were calling the synagogue if they were looking for, you know, plain, ordinary white folk who have always been identifying as the powerful people in the town or in the place that they’ve been in. Things have to do with how many people other than you are around. Wherever you go that you’re a minority, then there are going to be issues that you’re looking around yourself for because there are often dangers, sometimes very valid things, because things happen. Things do happen to you as an individual, and things happen to the community as a whole. I mean, while as a kid I was physically accosted several times, sometimes because of being Jewish, other times because of being intelligent, other times because a guy hadn’t gotten his drug fix yet, you know, junior high was very high for drug dealing. We knew who they were, and I don’t know—and we never
Moldo – 1 – 9 understood why the adults didn’t get rid of them, [laughs] because you could have asked anybody, and we knew exactly where everything was going on. You know, so, since the adults actually let this happen, you figured that was what they wanted to have happen.
Q: You asked why we contacted the synagogue. Let me start with the first question. What makes someone white, in your opinion?
Moldo: [13:29] Well, it depends upon what the implication of what your words are.
Q: Well, is it the color of your skin? Is it a cultural construct?
Moldo: [13:41] When it’s only pigmentation, then obviously what makes it happen is places where you have less sunlight, and it’s a survival mechanism of being able to be there. In most places, including America, it’s an issue of have you been accepted into the general, broader community and are you under a quota system. Since for Jews this is all still very recent and in some places probably still unclear how accepted one is, but within the last thirty years there still were places where you couldn’t do things because you were Jewish. Jews were not considered whites in America for a very long, long, long time, and there are still anti-Jewish activities by a number of people, some of whom are also people of color. You don’t have to be white to hate Jews. You can hate Jews even if you’re somebody else who the Jews have helped [laughs]. You can still hate them.
Moldo – 1 – 10 Spike Lee’s movie, you know, Do the Right Thing was a prime example of something where it really depended upon what the pigment of your skin was as to how you read that movie and the ending of it, which totally blew my mind, because I couldn’t imagine anybody who would imagine that what the black guy did at the end was appropriate. But there were people who did, and the fact that you might have thought that that was inappropriate did not make you—at least in my opinion—somebody who hated blacks. It just was that kind of thing. If a Jewish guy had done that, I would have said, “That’s a bad thing to do. You don’t want to do that in that fashion.” So within America, whiteness is a construct that’s developed by whoever was there first, and then it slowly broadens to other people. And it could be—it’s not the same as citizens, but it’s sort of, kind of, the same as keeping in power who is not going to be competing with us. The Irish were not considered white. I’m sorry. They’re about—you know, in terms of pigment, they’re about as white as anybody on the planet is going to be, but “No Irish Need Apply” was definitely part of the whole thing. That’s why they all became police guys, because that was something they could do without—nobody cared if you hired a big bruiser to be in charge of that, and it worked out politically well. And every single group at some point is considered not part of the normal group or part of the competition for jobs and scarce resources.
Q: Are Jews white?
Moldo: [16:53] I don’t consider them in that fashion.
Q: Could you put my question in your—sorry.
Moldo – 1 – 11 Moldo: [16:57] Oh, sorry [laughs]. I do not consider Jews to be white. I consider them to be Ashkenazi or Sephardi or Yemenite or African, and then Jews as part of that, because there is no place other than Israel where Jews have been the majority within the place. The experience has been far different. Even in America, we’re not in the majority, and it’s quite clear that we’re not in the majority because if you tell people, “Well, you know what? If you just simply have a workday on December twenty-fifth, we’ll be perfectly fine. You can take off a different day in December and not have December twenty-fifth off.” Whenever somebody talks about the secularity of America, from the outside, no, you’re not [laughs].
Q: Do you think that you get treated as a white person in Cheyenne?
Moldo: [18:07] I think I get treated as probably a white person might be considered to be treated because I’m usually on many, many panels. Of course, I’m on them as the rabbi of the town, so I’m the Jewish person. And sometimes I have to figure out a way to do something that they’re scheduling on a day on which I cannot do it. You know, they have it on a Saturday because it makes sense for them, and therefore I have to see is it a religious or an educational event. Can I walk to it, or do I just simply try to get another congregant to show up at this particular event because it is on Shabbat. It is on the day that I try not to do much of anything else. But in terms of racial kind of outside looks, most people in most places are going to consider me white because I don’t look Hispanic, and I don’t look like I’m a person of color, although that’s really—when I’m looking at the world, I’m seeing how I am different from everybody else that’s in the norm.
Moldo – 1 – 12 Q: I mean, I always think that identity is sort of the intersection of how you see yourself and how the world sees you. And that’s a line that’s constantly moving around, and you’re trying to figure out, you know, where you’re standing on it. Do you think that—because when I look at you— now, looking at you, from here I can’t see that you’re wearing a yarmulke. And if you told me in this—if you said—if I said, “Tell me about [unclear],” and you said, “I’m Irish,” or, “I’m from Norway,” I’d believe you, because from my eyes, until I talk to you, I don’t have a sense of who you are. And now, I, of course, know that you’re a rabbi, but on the face of it you seem to me as a white man. I just was wondering if that’s the way people treat you here, or are you so well known in this town—and you were wearing the yarmulke, and you’re usually coming as the rabbi—that you don’t really get a chance to ever experience that just purely what people’s first impressions of you are as a person?
Moldo: [20:33] In Cheyenne, I have no experience any different treatment than anybody else around me, so it would not necessarily be a racial whiteness issue versus anything else because everybody is being treated the same way, as far as I can tell. And that seems to be, you know, where that part is.
Q: So you’re saying there’s no sort of racial animosity or prejudice in Cheyenne?
Moldo: [21:06] What I’m saying is that in the places that I go and given the fact that I don’t do nightclub entertainment-type things—I don’t go to the bars, and I don’t stand in any of the various welfare handout lines, but in most places that I go to there is no difference in how the people who are behind the desk are treating me versus how they’re treating anybody else, you
Moldo – 1 – 13 know, given whatever is going on. The DMV [Department of Motor Vehicles] or the county clerk isn’t giving me any—they’re not rushing me to the head of the line [laughs]. Whoever is there gets treated the same way, as far as I can tell, from anybody else, you know, with that. There are people who get problems, if you happen to be homeless or have certain issues, and there are other issues with various undocumented people, some of whom—there’s a difference between an illegal immigrant and an undocumented person. And undocumented people can also be completely white under these categories, because all you have to do is not have a birth certificate available, an actual document, because of something that happened in your life or something that happened in the life of the clerk area where you were born, where your stuff doesn’t happen. You know, you get in a few different freezes in Norway, and you might not be able to find your physical birth certificate. And somehow, this government, our country, doesn’t believe you were born if you’re just standing there. Breathing isn’t good enough proof of being alive [laughs]. I don’t get it, don’t understand that at all. Are there people who are bigoted within this area? Yes, and some of that does come out in the legislative session because sometimes people get elected who are of certain opinions, and they’re perfectly fine with having their opinions, expressing them, and acting upon them. I have not yet been in any place where I am treated differently from people around me because of whatever color we may be.
Q: How is—I mean, I live in Manhattan, so it’s a very different place than Cheyenne. How is your experience on a day-to-day basis in the world [phonetic] different in Manhattan and how people treat you versus how it is out here? Do you feel like a fundamentally different person here?
Moldo – 1 – 14 Moldo: [23:49] Well, it’s not so much that I’m a different person, but the area around and what you do to make yourself unnoticed might be different. Manhattan, as long as you look like you know where you’re going and as long as you have a clue of which neighborhood not to go into at which time of night because it might tell the people around you certain things about you that may or may not be true, then, you know, you’re perfectly okay. Here, the biggest thing, of course, is that traffic or lack thereof. When we first moved here, they talked about Frontier Days. Frontier Days in July is when they have a rodeo, and the population within the town grows by two hundred percent for that week. So everybody was talking about traffic. Traffic is terrible. Traffic is miserable. So that summer when we first got here for the Saturday service, we left, as if traffic would be terrible by East Coast and West Coast standards. No [laughs]. It is not terrible. It’s terrible in comparison to the regular thing, where I am now sufficiently enough of a Cheyenne native that when there are five cars keeping me from turning left I get angry, and I wonder where they all came from and why can’t they just go back home, kind of thing, which doesn’t happen anywhere else. Anywhere else, it would be like, you know, “Five cars? Big deal,” anything under fifty cars keeping you from turning, and you might also turn to keep the fifty cars from going, because that would be the only way you’d get to where you needed to be. And that’s a big change between the two things. If those people who have been in Cheyenne throughout their entire lives and are in the older group, say, plus seventy or eighty or above, they have certain ideas about certain neighborhoods in Cheyenne, that, “Only those people live there,” which was true at one point because those people actually owned the property [laughs]. They lived there because they had bought the property. That’s why they were living there. But that has certainly changed. There is integration within there. I’m in one of those neighborhoods where many people were going, “How can you live there? Nobody good lives there.”
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Q: Why was it that you—was there something that you thought was important to say that you wanted to say about Cheyenne, your experience here, your experience here as a rabbi, that in participating in this project you thought it would be a good platform for something you thought it was important to say?
Moldo: [26:55] Well, when I was talking with the person who is the general, overall guy when I was meeting with him earlier, the concept of race was just something that I had been thinking of recently because of intersectionality and some of the stuff that has been said by different people. And the concept that has been expressed by some of the people who support Louis Farrakhan is that you cannot be Zionist and pro-anything. You can’t be a feminist and be a Zionist. This has been said. You can’t be pro-rights of colored people, which—the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] should change their name if they’re going to only be for blacks, too, because blacks aren’t the only colored people there are anymore. If you—I lost track of where I was going with that [laughs]. It happens.
Q: The question was what do you think is important to say, that you wanted to say in the context of a conversation about this, about whiteness.
Moldo: [28:15] What I think is perhaps most important to say about the concept of whiteness is that in America it’s really an artificial construct. It’s a concept of have you made it yet, and individuals may or may not have made it individually as much as the acceptance of people as a whole has been. There are successful people of all kinds within America. There are areas where
Moldo – 1 – 16 things could be slightly better. Is it colorblind or inappropriate to put, say, for example, Will Smith in the Wild Wild West movie, knowing that at the time it was very unlikely that there would have been somebody of his color being allowed to be in the Secret Service that they were talking about or in that particular thing, or do you differentiate between a movie and a documentary about the time period, a reenactment of a timeframe? Do you have problems if a white person is given a Hispanic role and not a Hispanic actor, which from the Hispanic point of view—I’ve read a number of places where they get upset with people being given that or with Asian parts going to non-Asian actors. Is that a case of racial profiling, as it were? If we were completely colorblind, we wouldn’t care what anybody looked like on the thing, but we actually do kind of care what people look like in general.
Q: Could we become [phonetic] colorblind? Is being colorblind the goal?
Moldo: [30:12] I think what becomes the goal is a balance of two things, being historically accurate when you’re doing history, being allowed to make use of people who are talented in whatever they are doing and not really caring about what they might look like or what other aspects of their personality exist outside of what they are doing.
Q: But what about on a day-to-day basis? Is being colorblind the goal on a day-to-day basis? Do you want to be treated as if you are—like everybody else, you’re not Jewish, or do you want that taken into account? Do you think that when you meet a person who’s African American—do you not take that into account? Should you treat them just as the content of their character? Is this idea of colorblindness a valid thing and the goal?
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Moldo: [31:09] In many ways, it should be. When a minority of people of a certain type are committing violent acts, then it is appropriate to potentially double-check everything, depending upon the violent acts. When it’s an act that has been done against you, then, often, you have to step back a little bit. So I have this in two ways. To me, every dog is Cujo to begin with, so even if it’s a small little thing held in your hand I see this as Stephen King’s big, huge, scary dog to begin with. I also have been held up at gunpoint, so the race of the individuals who held me up at gunpoint is what I first see whenever I see somebody of that same race and sex and general age. I know enough about how I react to hold off on my reactions until I know more about the individual. Not everybody is aware or is as self-aware of the fact that half the time they’re not seeing the person in front of them. They’re seeing history, personal history. The personal history is what I think we should definitely be getting rid of. The actual stuff that happens may make it necessary to check on people. If the only people doing, say, pedophilia in a neighborhood are Pakistanis, then you might have to double-check every Pakistani to make sure that they’re not doing something you associate with pedophilia. That makes sense to me. In other countries, that’s considered racial profiling, and it gets you cashiered, because they’d rather have the Pakistanis not be thought of as being oppressed and have the kids be subject to pedophilia activities rather than come out as being biased against some racial form or another. So there’s a balancing act within all of that, you know, with that, and people can take advantage of this if they desire to.
The issues involving what other people see, if they’re being honest about it, I can handle that, and that’s okay. If somebody who is, you know, African American comes and says, “Whenever I
Moldo – 1 – 18 see somebody who’s white, the first thing I see is a plantation owner and a whip,” I can get that. And then, what do you see after you’ve been around the person for a while? If the only thing you ever see—and that’s all that you see, then you have a problem, because you’re not seeing what’s in front of you. And in the same way that you’re not seeing what’s in front of you, the people who are looking at you are very unlikely to see what’s in front of them either.
Q: I know, [unclear].
M1: Oh, yeah. So before you were talking a little bit about intersectionality, and I was just kind of curious—I had a few questions about that regarding Zionism and Israel. So, right now, there’s some stuff going on in Israel, and I see a lot of debates on Facebook and stuff, both people in the Jewish community and outside the Jewish community. And I just wanted to ask you your opinion. Can someone criticize Israel and not be anti-Semitic?
Moldo: [35:12] In my opinion, people can criticize Israel without being anti-Semitic depending upon what they’re saying and when and how they focus and function it in and if it is based on what is going on. So when Israel sends leaflets out to the people saying, “Please stay away from the inner fence,” it doesn’t say, “Stop gathering.” It doesn’t say, “Stop burning tires.” It doesn’t say, “Stop doing all these other things and waving around your machetes and the rest of it.” It says, “Please stop looking like you’re trying to overrun the area and kill people,” because if you do that’s an attack, and that should be defended against, just like anybody else might do the same thing if you had a bunch of people going on. But when you get news headlines saying, “American embassy moved to Jerusalem, Israelis kill Palestinians,” as if there is a connection
Moldo – 1 – 19 between the two things—and historically, there really isn’t that much of a connection—you can have pro and con thoughts about recognizing that Jerusalem is, indeed, the capital of Israel. And you can separate that out from moving the embassy. Our State Department has a problem with separating these out, so that might have been one reason why, you know, Trump actually did do the moving of that over. And realistically, and embassy could be wherever a person wants it to be. I don’t know how many embassies are in New York City, for example, which is not the capital of the United States, but it is where a whole lot of people are [laughs]. And it is, you know, where the United Nations is and the rest of it, and there’s a lot of stuff going on there.
So when somebody says that you can’t be pro-Jewish people having a country that is a majority Jewish, where Judaism of one kind or another is the official country religion, and you’re saying that if you are for the existence of a Jewish state then you cannot be for the existence of equal rights for women or equal rights for people who are minorities in various places, that’s a problem. That is, indeed, a problem. You can say—you can disagree with the [Benjamin] Netanyahu administration. Many Israelis do. Enough of them have voted in the party that he is part of for enough years that they consider that nobody else can do as good as job as he has. No matter how bad a job he might be doing, he’s better than all the alternatives, as far as they’re concerned. If he stops being better than the alternatives, they’ll vote for some other party that they want, and they’ll get that going with that. There are many, many people who have been starting to write that they can’t in full, good conscience sign on to a number of progressive movements as such because part of the progressive movement like Black Lives Matter includes buying into the nonexistence of the state of Israel. And sometimes, you say, “This issue is really important, so I’ll live with the fact that they are anti this,” and sometimes it’s a matter of, “What
Moldo – 1 – 20 does this have to do with that?” What does the existence of the state of Israel have to do with how blacks are treated in America? That’s a question. I have no idea. What does the existence of the state of Israel have to do with how LGBTQ [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer] people are treated in America? If you’re going to come off and say that you’re pro a certain group, then why aren’t you yelling when the Syrians are destroying those people? Why is it only when anything negative happens with Israel that you come out with something? And this gets integrated with how racial things are expressed. So today, you’ve got people who will say that the leader of the Women’s March movement is okay with being who she likes because we’re into the women being ahead, and we’re willing to let all these people be in charged. And there are others who are saying, “This is enough already,” and none of this is against what the government of Israel is doing.
And part of being against the government of Israel might depend on becoming educated about how the government works. It’s not America. It doesn’t work the way America does, and there are many, many, many people working in the government who don’t like the guy in charge and will do a whole bunch of stuff to embarrass him when they can. And if you knew that reality, then you wouldn’t get so upset when somebody else is doing something to make you be upset with the head guy because that’s what they’re trying to do. That’s how it’s trying to go. And it’s that whole thing of the only people who are worth backing are the people who are victims, and that’s—and you do get today sometimes white folks saying, “We’re victims here,” a reverse kind of thing. As Jewish history is that there have been lots of quotas at lots of universities, I’m perfectly fine with no quotas, no affirmative action at the university level, just wherever you can be qualified to go, work it out that way, because that will be the best. And nobody will really—
Moldo – 1 – 21 some people will still be angry and not getting into their school, but nobody will be able to say that there’s some other reason. “If I were a guy, if I were a girl, if I were an Asian, if I were onethirty-second Native American, I could make it in.” You know, nobody would be saying that.
Q: But don’t you think life has always been unfair? Societies have always been unfair, and this idea that you’re somehow going to create a fair society seems kind of—I mean, we’ve always—I mean, certainly, there has been state-sanctioned anti-Semitism. There has been state-sanctioned racism against blacks. There have been intern—[internments] not “internships,” but the Japanese during World War II. There has been genocide against American Indians. We’ve always had complex—there has never been a fair—women didn’t have the vote. So do we have now— because of those things in the past, do we, as white people from Minnesota, from New York, or, actually, from Massachusetts originally, have some sort of obligation to the past to make up for those pasts, or is that all in the past in the same way that the past with Jews made up with the state of Israel? I mean, is there—or is the past nonexistent in the present?
Moldo: [43:11] The interplay between the past and the present is a little bit complex, and the interplay internationally is also complicated. America, beyond a question, with no doubt, is the single best country to disagree with and live in, possibly even including Israel, because we have various marches, and nobody gets shot. Nobody gets dead because they participated in something saying that they hate the current government or they hate this or they hate that, and in many other places that wasn’t the case. America is one of the few places where, barring certain localities, there wasn’t governmentally sanctioned anti-Semitism. There were individuals within the government that had expressed their own personal anti-Semitism. There were towns and
Moldo – 1 – 22 communities, which eventually changed around. Minneapolis at one point was a very antiSemitic city until Hubert Humphrey changed that, which is one of the reasons why Hubert Humphrey is a very good favorite of most Jews, and so in [Walter] Mondale, by the way. You know, Minnesota voted for him even if nobody else would [laughs]. We did because of that.
Now, there are things where we can correct certain things, that’s fine. Dealing with the Native Americans where the kids were taken from the parents and sent to other schools so they could learn to become white, that is something that is appropriate to educate about and do as much retrofitting as possible and as much helping the educational process of Native Americans to remain who they want to be. That is appropriate. To take somebody whose ancestor—and there have been a couple of cases where I’ve read of this, where grandparents or great-grandparents have told kids, “Being brought over as a slave was the best thing that happened,” because guess who sold them? Their neighbors. They would not have had a good life back home either, many of them. Not every single one, but the people who were supplying the raw material were the same color as the people being put down in the slave holds, and I don’t believe the country owes them back pay unless they all plan to leave the country, in which case it might be like the Exodus where you take your back pay because you didn’t get anything at all, ever, during the time period when you were slaves. They have since gotten stuff after that. And there are—things are even more complicated based on stuff that I’ve read than all of that, but it’s—do we look at the past? Do we take it into account? We always take it into account so that we can watch and see what is happening. We know that this nation as a whole really doesn't care what happens to pretty much anybody, because we never get active that much when other peoples are being destroyed. There
Moldo – 1 – 23 has been mention of the Rohingya, but have we gone over there to save them? Have we brought them in?
Q: Is there some sort of—how do you feel about the Black Lives Matter movement? I think sometimes there has been a comparison of the Black Lives Matter movement and the Free Palestine Movement. Is there any sort of comparison to that?
Moldo: [47:39] Between the Black Lives Matter movement and stuff with the Palestinians—with the Gazans, actually, pretty much. You have the West Bank group as well. Part of that involves historical understandings, too, especially the stuff that is involved with Israel. The equivalent to the Palestinians, if you’re taking their side as being indigenous, more or less—which is not necessarily accurate, but if you are—the equivalent is the Native Americans. And if you are fully interested in having them share Jerusalem, then have the Native American government have a seat in Washington, D.C., because that’s the equivalent. They were here first. And how many people are going to give their homes up to the Indian that owned it before they got there? When you start doing that, then you can start talking to Israel about what it should be doing theoretically to the people who took over from the people who took over from the people who took over after they were kicked out.
Now, the Palestinians as a group are the only refugees that weren’t required to become citizens of the countries they were sent to. All those people there should, theoretically, be Egyptian and Jordanian citizens because that was who had them through ’67, from ’48 to ’67. They were in Egypt. There were in Jordan. They were not considered a separate people by the Jordanians or
Moldo – 1 – 24 the Egyptians. They were allowed separately. So even if you’re talking about freeing them in some fashion—they are sort of, kind of free. They voted in Hamas. That was a free election. They voted these guys in, these guys who authorized the blowing up of the humanitarian crossing. I don’t know of any war that we’ve been in where the people that are trying to kill us— we supply them with the things they need to survive, all of it. I can be wrong, because I don’t know everything, but on a daily basis they’re getting foodstuff. Now, the Black Lives Matter movement, if it were to start out with something a little bit different than it did and if it would not result in the killing of police officers, which it does—so if you found somebody like the guy at the university this past week who actually is somebody completely innocent, but when you’ve got as your main guy a kid who you don’t want even in your own neighborhood because he’s a thug, [laughs] and he was, jumping to conclusions, it becomes more of a problem. And then, when you add to that not wanting Israel to exist, that becomes more of an issue. Now, the—
Q: Let me ask you a question, because this has always surprised me. You know, historically, the American Jewish community and the American black community during the Civil Rights era were allies. They both faced oppression, both faced discrimination, and they were really working together. The Jewish community was a huge supporter of the Civil Rights movement [phonetic].
Moldo: Yes.
Q: What happened? Because I’ve been in New York a long time, during the Crown Heights riots, all this stuff. What happened? What caused the schism between the black rights movement and the American Jews that now it seems like there’s real at loggerheads and tension?
Moldo – 1 – 25
Moldo: [51:45] I can’t be a hundred percent certain because I wasn’t there during all of that time, but I think from what I’ve seen that, in some cases, many people whom we have been trying to help look at us afterwards and say, “Who asked you?” You know, and we’re—one of the things that we seem to be hardwired for is looking for what goes wrong and trying to figure out a way to make it better or make it right. So, from the outside, we can see some of these things that are very unfair and try to figure out a way to make life more fair, because that’s our job as partners with God, is making the world a more perfect place. We’re partners with God in doing this, so, you know, it’s part of that. And some of the—you know, there are different people of different strokes all the way throughout, but some of the blacks have always been anti-Semitic and not necessarily pro every black on the planet, by the way. If the black on the planet is an Africa, they may not be concerned with their oppression. They’re only concerned with American black oppression, you know, oppression against blacks in America, “That’s important. Anywhere else, what do we care?” at least in terms of the actions that have been done afterwards in terms of trying to not have people kill each other over in other places. So you have these people who have been anti-Semitic despite whatever was going on because they didn’t want to have anybody else and because in their eyes a Jew is just a white, although there are black Jews, and there always have been. And when you go to America, you see plenty—when you go to Israel, you see plenty of them. You see plenty of people of all races who are Jews in Israel, and they exist in all those kinds of cases, but the intersectionality folks a lot of times don’t connect that in that fashion.
Q: So I think we’re about out of time. We have [unclear] question.
Moldo – 1 – 26 M1: [unclear].
Q: We have to [phonetic] [unclear].
M1: You talked about—and I’m getting what you said wrong, but the idea is in here somewhere. You basically were—the idea was duality and that a person can—one person can hold two opposing viewpoints and both viewpoints be true to that person, essentially. What I am hearing you say in reference to, you know, social movements here is that if Black Lives Matter activists aren’t worried about people in Burma being killed, then they’re not allowed to be worried about blacks in America being killed. What—
Moldo: [54:43] When Black Lives Matter activists are more concerned about what Israel does than they are about anybody anywhere else that is an issue. If you limit it to what happens in America, fine, you’re limiting it to what happens in America. But if you’re going worldwide, then don’t jump to Israel, because there are plenty of countries that are mistreating folk and killing them. On occasion, you’ll hear that Israel is killing the Pale—you know, genocide against the Palestinians. They’re very incompetent at it, because there are more Palestinians today than there were back in ’67 or even in ’48. There are a lot more. So if you think Israelis are incompetent, [laughs] you know, at what they would be doing, then don’t worry about that. But that’s where I kind of come down with—if Israel is one of the countries you’re concerned with, then that puts it in perspective. Okay. But otherwise, it’s an anti-Semitic thing that somebody who is worried about how they’re perceived as a person of color is not worried about how they’re perceiving Israelis because, “Aren’t all Israelis just white?” and they aren’t.
Moldo – 1 – 27
Q: What we’re going to do now is we’re just going to take a couple of photos of you. So this is actually the hardest part of the interview.
Moldo: Okay [laughs].
Q: You just need to look at me and—
[END OF INTERVIEW]