Definitely an important consideration in my commitment to the political Left was learning about anti-Semitism. One day (I don't remember why), my mother picked me up from school and we flew up north to visit her family, but stayed this time not at her parents’ but at Alma, her brother's estate in the Santa Cruz mountains. While there I read a book published by the United Nations, under the sponsorship of two famous Jews, Albert Einstein, and uncle Yehudi. I discovered the Holocaust book on the shelf at the Baller Cottage at Alma. It was there I learned the details of the Holocaust, the dreadful creation of the graveyard that fascism had made for millions of Europeans, Jews and non-Jews alike, but mainly Jews. Baller Cottage was named after Yehudi’s musical associate, pianist Adolph Baller. When Baller was in a concentration camp, the Nazis asked him what he did for a living. He said he was a pianist. So the Nazis took out their hammers and broke all his fingers. Baller always stayed in this cottage when he came to Alma, so that, obviously, must be added to the picture.

For professional reasons, my father had to move to the port town of Long Beach to take an appointment as a workers compensation appeals court judge there. In those days, Long Beach still betrayed its Midwestern roots, with its Iowa picnics, and the concomitant fact (to my mind at least) that there were still many followers of Gerald L. K. Smith around who blamed everything on the Jewish conspiracy. Since I was Jewish, I wondered why I hadn't known about this conspiracy.

Along the way I had discovered a book that I read and then reread a number of times because it seemed to explain what was puzzling and appalling to me in Long Beach. The book was Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here, the tale of a Hitler-like American named Buzz Windrip and his “Corpo” followers who stage a fascist takeover in this country during the Depression. The book was written during the rise of Mussolini and Hitler in Europe. Things happened to me in high school that focused the question. A Christian minister's son and his gang of thugs used to chase me home, south to Belmont Heights through the back alleys from Woodrow Wilson High School, howling the epithet “Christ Killer” and Kike and such other terms of endearment. My two best friends had last names like Garrison and Austin; one's father was a commercial fisherman, the other a career naval officer. Mr. Austin, my friend's father, had two mentors in life: Gerald L.K. Smith and Henry Ford. He would sit and tell me about the Jewish conspiracy for hours, and I listened because I assumed this was the way all gentiles thought. He also hated the “Japs,” because even in those days it was becoming difficult for American tuna fishermen, who were usually, like Austin, independent entrepreneurs competing with the floating tuna factories that the Japanese used. I started becoming militant about my Jewishness. I decided it was not something I was ashamed of, quite the contrary. I was also a budding atheist as well, and forced attendance at the Christian assembly, with its story of Jesus the Messiah, was insulting to Jews, after all, it was in his name that anti-Semitism was invented by the Romans. I explained my opinion to the boys’ vice principal at Woodrow Wilson High School. The principal ordered me to attend the Jesus assembly, because "this is a Christian country," and I had best accept that and shut up with this Jewish stuff.