I decided to do an essay with that title the day before he died. On August 14th, I stared at the screen and had no idea what to write. My dad seemed to have no idea I even wrote. "You're so insightful, why don't you write your thoughts down?!' "I've been doing that for twenty years Dad. I usually get published every year. Don't you remember?" "I guess... You should do more!"
My dad was as much scholar as comedian and businessman. He spent his whole life obsessing about August 1914 and the senselessness with which World War I broke out. Something in him had a deep compulsion to crack the code nobody else could. What was it about Old Europe that made a senseless war that upended the world and destroyed his family seem like a good idea? It just makes such sense that he died in August, and it makes sense he died in 2025. It doesn't make sense that he died physically, but for a man obsessed by history, it makes perfect sense that he died the moment the world shattered his view of it.
Sometimes the timing of a death seems uncanny. Death days can seem auspicious for a variety of reasons; but in my family, our biographies so tied down by 20th century history, history seems even tied to the moments we die. Many members of my family seem to die at auspicious times.
My grandfather died exactly 40 years ago on September 11th: precisely six months to the day after Gorbachev came to power. Anticommunism was Zaydie's whole life. He was a missile defense engineer for the Pentagon and one of those original generation neoconservatives for whom no amount of USSR opposition was enough. Going through his house four years ago when Bubbie died, I would still find right-wing newsletters stuck into his books.
But he died practically at the moment when USSR no longer seemed monolithic and peace seemed like an option. His life was based on the idea that communists were as dangerous to us all as any Nazi, but it turned out that the Soviet Union was not what he thought it was, at least it wasn't by the time he died, and whatever the reason the cosmos arranged his death (colon cancer), it almost seems as though he was not capable of living in that new reality.
Dad was born in Poland right after the War to survivors who'd already lost a child. He came to America less than a year old and lived his entire life in postwar Boomer security. With him, the entire social compact of postwar America seems to be dying a final, catastrophic death.
My father was a rock. He had a rock's dependability and a rock's flexibility. He was brilliant enough to speak English, Yiddish, Hebrew, Romanian, German, French and Italian. He got a PhD for which he went behind the Iron Curtain to study in Romania in 1970, one of the very worst years for Cold War tensions. He learned the highest level math an amateur could learn, adapted in business to endless new technologies, knew nearly everything a semi-atheist could want to know about Jewish history and practice. Nobody but his friends knew who he was, and they all thought he was a cartoonish hyena whose life was a never-ending standup routine. It was that, but that was just the image he presented socially, including to his family. Behind the facade, his true colors wisely disguised, was the most formidable man: a stern authoritarian who brooked no dissent. Even his compliments could shake you to your core. He believed he was smarter than everybody because he was--including his eldest son, whom he never let forget it. Getting approval from him was tied at all times to our willingness to acknowledge not just his authority over us, but his superiority. The ultimate injustice was that he was our superior: his intellect, his competence, his work ethic, his moral sense, exceeded nearly the entirety of Jewish Baltimore. There was not a single favor he wasn't willing to grant for anyone who needed it, even when they didn't want it; and he would inevitably do the favor for them better than they ever could do for themselves, and he expected to be acknowledged for exactly that. There was never a time when he would spare us that he believed we made a mistake, and unfortunately, 90% of the time he was right. Whether or not he was ever recognized for it, he was a giant, and had a giant's impatience with the small people around him. This man could have run a Fortune 500 Company, or been an A-list Hollywood producer, or been one of the top academics of his day, perhaps even been a great comedian like Mel or Albert Brooks. Instead, he was my father.
He believed fame and prestige was hollow, and his belief in achievement was tied to his beliefs about what the world is. He believed in family, he believed in stability and security, he believed in settling for whatever life throws at you. He believed very mightily that people were either successes or failures, but his idea of success was not the pursuit of happiness, it was entirely the ethos of his parents: choose a respectable profession, have a spouse and kids, become a person of influence, and only be noticed for what you do correctly.
He came to America a year old, but to his dying day he viewed the world like an immigrant. His views of what constituted achievement and success were completely 20th century, completely 1950s: there was no accommodation for alternate paths or lifestyles. He was born to the first year of boomers and grew up surrounded by sixties counterculture, but he viewed alternate lifestyles as unforgivably decadent, as did he view people like his son who pursued them. He believed in studying the humanities deeply, yet was perpetually shocked that the son he taught so thoroughly valued humanistic learning more deeply than success or security.
My father spent his entire life lecturing his loved ones about the dangers of irresponsibility. He spent his whole life warning anyone who'd listen that America was thoroughly corrupted by insisting on rights before responsibility. He was obsessed by the collapse of the Europe from whence he came, and I think he resolved for himself that by valuing individualism so fervently, Europe unwittingly embraced total war and totalitarianism. Personally, I think he somewhat misunderstood what happened in the leadup to WWI. We talked about it many times, and of course he never conceded an inch. I think he misunderstood America, I think he misunderstood Europe. Not because he believed in individualism too little, but because he believed in it too much.
He thought there was a way to prevent collapses. I'm more cynical even than he. I think collapses simply happen. Civilizations have life cycles just like people do, and we just have to do our best to stand upright in the hurricane winds and choose the priorities of our moral fights very selectively, but precisely because societies can collapse into dictatorship and war, we have to fight for individual rights: unceasingly, deeply, uncomfortably, for the entire duration, and by all means until victory. I've been unfaithful to those beliefs for a long time, and I'm sure it's in large part a futile attempt to please him.
But he was right in many crucial senses. I suppose one could be summed up pretty neatly: By embracing one side of any argument too fervently, you unwittingly provoke your opposition into greater intensity. This is what Marxism did simultaneously to nationalism, and together, he believed they caused a century-long collapse. Ultimately, I agree with him completely. Radicalization collapsed Europe, and radicalization may collapse this country, but radicalization is as inevitable as the moon changing ocean tides. It's tied to the development of new means of communication, it's tied to new weapon and transportation technologies, it's tied to manufacturing trends, it's tied to the inevitable decay of social orders. Against onslaughts like those, it can't be stopped any more than you can stop a freight train with a human hand.
But for all his warnings about what might come here, when it came time to see America for what it now is, this child of the fifties still believed that we would muddle through as we ever did. Against all the parallels he had studied and warned about his entire life, when it came time to see what was happening in America, he did not see it coming, and was very withering about those who did.
I warned from the beginning that Trump was a violent authoritarian, and until January 6th he entirely poo-poo'd it. 'If he's a fascist, where are the crowds?' 'THEY'RE RIGHT IN FRONT OF HIM DAD!' 'Where are the propaganda organs?' 'YOU CAN SEE THEM ON FOX NEWS AND TOWNHALL EVERY DAY!' 'Where are the secret police?' 'HAVE YOU SEEN WHAT ICE IS DOING?!' 'Evan, you're a pessimist by nature who thinks there's a catastrophe around every corner and you're usually wrong.'
And yet, in 2025, my Dad was almost unrecognizable from the center-liberal he was. At times he could sound like Noam Chomsky. Every hour of the day, you could find him at the slow desktop computer in his house's den, obsessively devouring the news. My conservative mother thought there was something not quite sane about the way he would always bring up the latest outrage from Trump and Netanyahu, and when she excused it, he would go below the belt as he always did: "YOU'RE DRINKING THE FOX NEWS KOOL-AID! IS THERE ANYTHING YOU WON'T EXCUSE?"
In the last six months of his life, this man who said for ten years that I overreacted to everything was suddenly arguing I'm underreacting. I'd spent twenty years telling him it wasn't 1967 anymore, but only in 2025 would he bemoan to me: 'I never thought I'd see the day when America/Israel would be the country to do this.' When I told him that there may in fact be light at the end of this horrific tunnel, he dismissed it. When I said that this is the inevitable collapse that often happens in history, he would say something along the lines of 'OK, if you want to be philosophical about it...'
I've been warning about a lurch to authoritarianism in American life since The Great Recession in 2008, perhaps earlier. Lots of writing and ample numbers of friends can attest to this. You don't hollow out a country's economy like that without the wealthy and powerful growing drunk with power. You don't fight as dirtily as Republicans have in election after election, national and statewide, without coming ever closer to achieving a systemic monopoly. And for the twenty years of my adult life so far, we fought each other about it, and as in our fights about everything, we fought each other dirtily. In addition to fights about how I was wasting my life and he was being a hypocrite about how he lived his, in addition to constant accusations that we hated each other and one or another of us was a bully, there were the fights over politics and history, culture and sports, the way he talked crap about people behind their backs and the way I did the same; everything was personal, the real subject was how we were enmeshed and co-dependent. Neither of us got what we wanted from the other and we were forever seeking it.
Eventually, the son wins every fight. He's around longer. His point of view is fresher. He is the person still active in the world, enmeshed in current realities long after the father can retire from them. But eventually my sense of reality will curdle just like his did. I will probably fail to distribute the wisdom I attained at the very moment when my wisdom is most useful, because if my dad taught me anything, it's that this is the nature of human folly. That is the nature of history. This is the nature of one generation passing to the next, who picks up the story where the last one leaves it.
In the last year of my father's life, every secure assumption he had about the world came undone: America, democracy, Israel, his fellow Jews. He no longer felt he could defend any of them. My father was an incarnation of the postwar world, and that world now seems dead along with him.
I miss him like anything. In good moments and bad, the voice that accompanied my whole life is gone. There will be plenty of time to be more sentimental and talk about how much I loved him even as we pissed the shit out of each other right until the day before he died. But this week particularly, the only thought that goes through my head is this:
What would you say right now Dad?
