Albert Einstein wrote on May 23, 1946 that “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking...”
One can say the same of the torching of Temple Beth Israel, three months ago, on January 10, 2026.
Memories are short. People’s minds move to other stories in the course of 24 hour news cycles at their peril.
Actions have consequences, and hate crimes in one’s community cast long shadows. The tragedy in our midst bears the birthmark of violations of civil rights and human rights in the Magnolia State throughout time alongside the unfortunate fact that two previous acts of hatred directed towards Jackson’s Jewish community preceded it.
Three strikes and you’re out: Jackson risks the reputation of becoming the pogrom capital of the country. The Cambridge Dictionary defines pogrom as “an act of organized cruel behavior or killing that is done to a large group of people because of their race or religion.”
Thoughts that isolated subsequent acts erase the stain of the two 1967 attacks and the 2026 attack anesthetize the community to the need to ameliorate, immediately.
A 1955 quote from Senator James Eastland at the time of the Brown decision is telling:
“The choice is between victory and defeat. Defeat means death, the death of Southern culture and our aspirations as an Anglo-Saxon people. With strong leadership and the loyalty and fortitude of a great people, we will climb the heights. Generations of Southerners yet unborn will cherish our memories because they will realize that the fight we now wage will have preserved for them their untainted racial heritage, their culture, and the institutions of the Anglo-Saxon race. We of the South … know what it is to fight. We will carry the fight to victory.”
Anglo-Saxon means White Anglo-Saxon Protestant which, in contemporary terminology, is White Christian Nationalism; often abbreviated to Christian Nationalism.
Exclusionary, hateful thoughts have been perpetuated for generations, such that too many among us inure themselves to the odious aspects thereof. People should consider how such concepts impact those never internalizing them; callous indifference to their inherent offensiveness; the extent to which they perpetuate concepts of caste and superiority that no functional society countenances.
The irony That too many American are comfortable with Christian theocracy during times when the United States challenges theocratic rule abroad is conveniently ignored.
Matthew 22:21 (New King James Version) records that Jesus commented, “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’”
Benefit flowing from state-sanctioned religion in one epoch can easily become otherwise in another. Thus Europeans settling the United States sought freedom of religion and avoided state sponsorship of one preferred religion.
(I note, parenthetically, that the Bible wars in Cincinnati, fundamental in the creation of the doctrine of separation of church and state, involved use of Protestant Bibles in the public schools, displeasing Catholics whose progeny were enrolled there. The Reverend Thomas Vickers — a son-in-law of the ancestors whose portraits grace my dining room — and his close parishioner Judge Alphonso Taft — Attorney General during the Grant Administration and father of the future President and Chief Justice — supported their Catholic compatriots in — heavily German — Cincinnati. That family history [recognizing that “Uncle Tommy” was an in-law, not an ancestor] influences my thoughts).
Anne Applebaum’s “Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World” (2024) states that Chinese autocrats perfected “how to isolate and alienate people; how to break links between different social groups and social classes; … and above all, how to turn the language of human rights, freedom, and democracy into evidence of treason and betrayal;” examples emulated by aspiring autocrats elsewhere.
The community must acknowledge that it is half past time to address what thoughts that one religion or ethnic background is unparalleled create, taken to their inevitable conclusion.
Ethnic cleansing is no less vile when it appears in the Magnolia State and America than when it surfaced in such places as Nazi Germany, the former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda within the memory of living Mississippians.
Jay Wiener is a Northsider
