Moishe Holtzberg of Mumbai

The two-year-old, in Israel now after his parents were gunned down last week, evokes tears and stirs a childhood memory.

One day when I was ten, in a Bronx park, a band of kids from another neighborhood suddenly attacked half a dozen of us. In the melee, I was pinned against a tree by a bigger boy. He held me with one hand and kept driving a fist at my head as hard and fast as he could. I warded off most of the blows with my arms, but I couldn’t take my eyes off his furious face. While struggling to escape, I was transfixed by a rage I had never seen before--it was like being caught in a storm.

When it was over, I asked an older boy from our neighborhood why.

"They hate us because we're Jews," he said. "They say we killed Christ."

"Did we?"

"How the hell should I know? It happened a million years ago."

From then on, I lived in a world among those who despised people like me enough to inspire special words for our slaughter--pogrom, genocide, Holocaust--and by those with euphemisms for killing the spirit, if not the body: “restricted” and “gentlemen’s agreement,” and those on the streets and in barracks where the expressions were raw but honest--kike, sheenie, Hebe.

They made it clear I belonged to a people fated to be despised and driven, their names their crime, the shape of their noses their destiny. Faced with such hatred of a religion I could never feel in my heart, it would have been unthinkable to stop being a Jew or calling myself one.

Last week in Mumbai, the killers were apparently Muslims motivated by murderous hatred of Hindus, but they took the time for a detour to slaughter Jews in a Hasidic headquarters. An Indian nanny saved Moishe as his parents Gavriel and Rivka died.

The boy is in a village near Tel Aviv now, where during a memorial service, a rabbi told him, "You don't have a mother who will hug you and kiss you. You are the child of all Israel."

As he grows up, someone will have to explain to him why his parents died.

What a Difference a Year Makes

Last March 4th, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, arms linked with civil rights leaders, were reenacting the 1965 march in Selma, united in declaring their debt to the non-violence of Martin Luther King. Today, they are at the precipice of divisions that could be suicidal for their party in November.

In Obama's grasp for the nomination and Clinton's last stand in Texas and Ohio, identity politics are threatening to tear the Democrats apart--accusations against him of Farrakhan sympathies to unnerve Jewish voters, paired with countercharges that the Clinton campaign is fueling them by distributing a photo of Obama in Muslim garb. Voters are being targeted by race, gender, ethnicity, economic status and any other demographic that could prejudice them

Last March, Hillary Clinton was telling worshippers at Selma's First Baptist Church that the Civil Rights Act of 1965 today "is giving Senator Obama the chance to run for president. And by its logic and spirit...yes, it is giving me that chance.”

Before the march, Obama praised both Clintons and said of the coming political campaign, “We don’t have time for other folks to divide us.”

But the conventional wisdom of inciting demographic splits among voters has overrun those promises to bring them together in rejecting the extremes of the Bush era and attract Democrats of all stripes, along with Independents and disillusioned moderate Republicans.

Tomorrow should be the tipping point. With those critical primary prizes in the balance, will the results mark an end to the divisiveness or fuel continuing contention to give John McCain, against all logic, a chance to enter the White House as Bush Lite?

Picturing a President

If Barack Obama is sworn in next January, last night's debate may prove to be the turning point when American voters started seeing him as more than a gifted candidate. Hillary Clinton's job was to create doubts about his fitness to be President, but she ended up giving Obama the opportunity to demonstrate he has the qualities for the job.

After a peevish start (citing a Saturday Night Live skit to air her grievances against the questioners), Sen. Clinton worked hard to present herself as Presidential and rattle Obama into appearing less so. But he never took the bait.

In 15 minutes about health care, he defended his position without demeaning hers. When she accused him of wanting to bomb Pakistan, he restated his more nuanced position and pointed out that the Bush Administration had just done what he proposed in taking out an al Qaeda leader. When she criticized him for not "rejecting" Louis Farrakhan's support, Obama pointed out that he had denounced his racist views but would be happy to reject them as well, if there was a distinction.

As the long campaign has gone on, Obama's command and self-confidence have been visibly growing, thereby undermining the arguments about inexperience the Clinton campaign has tried to use against him.

In this last debate before the nomination is decided, he demolished them. In the general election campaign, John McCain will have to work very hard to prove that his years in Washington qualify him to make better decisions about the future than Barack Obama.