War and Peace and then, again War...
Why I'm both a peacenik and a supporter of Ukraine's self-defense, and why I think my grandfather would approve
I’ve always described myself as a peacenik instead of a pacificist, and although dictionaries want to make them out to be the same thing, I think in common usage there are significant differences. First, of course, there is the difference that peacenik has a Yiddish etymology (the -nik being a Yiddish suffix now widely adopted in English). But the second is this: I think we understand pacifists to be always opposed to war, where as peaceniks are simply in favor of peace. And I am strongly in favor of peace. But I’m not—and I’m not sure how any Jew could be—opposed to responding to military aggression with a military defense, nor to aiding allies doing the same, particularly against regimes known for gross human rights violations.
My grandfather funded the SDS at Marshall University, and was very much opposed to the needless war in Vietnam. And my mother is definitely a hippie, even though she doesn’t dress like one. I was raised in a home that very much valued peace.
But one of my earliest memories of television is watching footage of the Six Days War, and being keenly aware that we were rooting for the Israelis as if we, too, were Israeli.
Our family business, Polan Industries, manufactured munitions sites, mine detectors, and other defense products during and for a while after WWII. I’m unambiguously proud of our contribution to the efforts to end WWII. And I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot as the rhetoric against US support for Ukraine grows louder in some circles.
Since the war begun, I’ve become acutely aware of the importance of Ukraine to the world-wide Jewish community. On Rosh Hashanah, thousands of Jews travelled to the Ukrainian city of Uman on an annual pilgrimage to worship at the grade-side of Reb Nachman of Breslov. I think of all the European cities in which we found only the remains of a Jewish community rather than a thriving, growing one, and about the fact that if we’d been able to travel to Ukraine before the war, we would have found those communities. According to Wikipedia (I know, I know), Ukraine has (or had, until the war began) the fifth largest Jewish population in Europe.
Of course, the presence of thriving Jewish communities isn’t the only—or even the most significant—reason to support it’s defense against Russian aggression. I hope I don’t need to list them here, though here is a pretty good explainer if you’ve remained largely out of the conversation. But it is a reason for me, and maybe for some of you, to feel a particularly personal stake in the outcome. And I think my grandfather, who was against every unnecessary war, would agree.
Your grandfather would most certainly agree and approve.