What would Mom and Dad say?

As a child of the American “Greatest Generation,” I learned about my parents’ wartime activities through the photos of Dad’s army units tucked away in an old piece of furniture. I found out that Mom was among the first group of New Jersey women — recent Douglass College graduates — to go to work in a converted General Motors plant here in Linden, creating blueprints to build our Air Force fighter planes. When she was 23, Mom also picked up stakes to join Dad at army posts in rural parts of Texas and California, where she worked as a base clerk before Dad went overseas. One uncle of mine served with the field artillery in North Africa, which gave him partial hearing loss for the rest of his days. Dad’s cousin, whom I never got the chance to meet, was killed in action in the Pacific.

In retrospect, I don’t think I was sufficiently proud of my family members’ war service when I was growing up. I don’t think any of them saw themselves as heroes. It was just what folks did — certainly it was what Jewish Americans did.

Now I find myself wondering what my folks would think of our 2025 America, where Trump-friend Kanye West uses a Super Bowl commercial to promote his website selling swastika T-shirts.

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In case you somehow missed it, the Trump-empowered billionaire Elon Musk took the recent occasion of a campaign rally of the neo-Nazi linked Alternative for Germany party (AfD) to cheer them on ahead of upcoming elections and to complain that in Deutschland there was now “too much focus on past guilt.” Our newly inaugurated Vice President JD Vance quickly followed suit, meeting with the AfD candidate for chancellor and lecturing European leaders that they need to end the isolation of such pro-fascist rightwing groups.

Given this, what are we to make of Vance’s appearance at the location of the Dachau concentration camp during his visit to Germany, and his subsequent statement that he was “really moved by this site”?

Some will notice that Vance’s Dachau trip was a virtual carbon copy of Musk’s visit to Auschwitz a year ago. Sadly, Musk’s Auschwitz media event became the occasion for a few legacy Jewish groups to give him a pass for the upsurge of antisemitic content he has promoted on Twitter since he took it over.

Of course, it’s not even so much about Vance’s shocking foray into the politics of our European allies from where I sit. The new vice president has been hinting that he would support the Trump administration defying orders coming from our U.S. courts. That’s been a typical defining feature of those pushing to transform a country from a democratic, constitutional form of government to an autocracy.

We’ve seen all manner of excuses from some leaders in our Jewish community for giving the MAGA president and his allies a pass for their increasingly open pro-fascist and antisemitic links and dictatorial actions. These excuses often involve Mr. Trump’s claims of being “pro-Israel” (which should be read as pro-Netanyahu.) Is it the feeling of proximity to power that is actually producing in some this kind of abdication of responsibility and betrayal?

The essentially anti-democratic and antisemitic nature of Trump and his power group was fully apparent to most of us, at least from the moment during his first term in office when the president referred to “very fine people on both sides” after the torch-lit rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Klansmen and Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us.” But the nonfiction accounts of our Greatest Generation heroes and heroines have plenty to say about which side the very fine people have actually been on.

Normalizing Nazis and their MAGA supporters can’t be the business of any American Jews, much less leaders of recognized Jewish organizations.

We will all have to learn how to stiffen our spines and be more like our parents’ generation. A slogan often used in the U.S. military seems appropriate here: Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

Mark Lurinsky of Montclair has recently retired from a career in public accounting. He is an activist in local politics and a member of the steering committee of J Street’s New Jersey chapter.