You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught … to Hate and Fear

The song “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” from the classic musical SOUTH PACIFIC has been buzzing in my head since I received an email from my dear friend Bonnie Bartel Latino in Atmore, Albama. Bonnie shared with me the newspaper article “Second synagogue vandalized with anti-Semitic graffiti in Huntsville” (Alabama).

The April 10, 2020, newspaper article by Ashley Remkus and Lee Roop begins:

Another synagogue in Huntsville has been targeted by anti-Semitic graffiti.

The Chabad of Huntsville, a Jewish house of worship and private home off Governors Drive, was spray-painted with swastikas and racial slurs overnight. It’s the second Jewish facility to be vandalized in the city in as many days. On Wednesday night, as the Jewish Passover holiday began, Etz Chayim, the Conservative synagogue on Bailey Cove Road, was similarly vandalized.

In a recent guest post of mine for author Joylene Butler’s blog I wrote: In a time when we are fragile both physically and emotionally, it is imperative that we take extra care with our words. How more so, then, our actions, whether merely “pranks” or meant maliciously.

Hateful words lead to hateful actions lead to terrible nation-wide policies, such as Nazi Germany’s extermination of six million Jews and millions of others, including Roma (Gypsies), homosexuals, political opponents, mentally incapacitated, and more.

In response to this news from Huntsville, Alabama, I am trying to reach out to the appropriate people there to offer my free theater project THIN EDGE OF THE WEDGE, designed to combat anti-Semitism and hate.

As is often the case, I am reading several Holocaust nonfiction and fiction books at this time.

I just read the Middle Grade novel HITLER’S CANARY: A DARING TALE OF WARTIME ADVENTURE by Sandi Toksvig (current host of THE GREAT BRITISH BAKING SHOW). The novel is based on the true story of her father and his family risking their lives in October of 1943 to save Jews in Denmark from the Nazi roundup.

I also just read WHEN TIME STOPPED: A MEMOIR OF MY FATHER’S WAR AND WHAT REMAINS by Ariana Neumann, who pieced together her Czech father’s Holocaust survival story from the clues he left her after he died.

And, finally, I just watched on PBS (free until May 3, 2020) THE WINDERMERE CHILDREN — an uplifting historical drama of the dedicated volunteers who worked to bring 300 Jewish children Holocaust survivors back to life in the late summer and early fall of 1945. Read about this amazing show now. (There is also a documentary — THE WINDERMERE CHILDREN: IN THEIR OWN WORDS — with interviews of some of these former children now.)

Lyrics for song “You’ve Got to Be Taught”:

You’ve got to be taught
To hate and fear
You’ve got to be taught
From year to Year
It’s got to be drummed
in your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught

You’ve got to be taught
To be Afraid
Of people whose eyes
are oddly made
And people whose skin
Is a different shade
You’ve got to be carefully taught

You’ve got to be taught
Before it’s too late
Before you are 6 or 7 or 8
To hate all the people
your relatives hate
You’ve got to be carefully taught

Read my guest post for Joylene Butler’s blog — “COVID-19: When Words Are All We Have.”

Read the entire Huntsville, Alabama newspaper article.

From Wikipedia for the musical SOUTH PACIFIC:

South Pacific is a musical composed by Richard Rodgers, with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II and book by Hammerstein and Joshua Logan. The work premiered in 1949 on Broadway and was an immediate hit, running for 1,925 performances. The plot is based on James A. Michener’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1947 book Tales of the South Pacific and combines elements of several of those stories. Rodgers and Hammerstein believed they could write a musical based on Michener’s work that would be financially successful and, at the same time, send a strong progressive message on racism.