Thinking about Charlottesville and the Jews

In Charlottesville, white supremacists marching last weekend had one group on their minds—Jews. “Jews will not replace us,” they chanted, along with other Nazi and neo-Nazi slogans. Afterward, one of my Facebook friends asked people to post pictures of fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers who had fought against the real Nazi regime. I couldn’t help thinking of my own grandfather.

Russell Willis Ingersoll was not a military man by any stretch of the imagination. He was a house painter and sometime taxi driver in Peekskill, NY, who never attended college or entertained big career ambitions. But he played his own part in the great struggle in Europe. Drafted in 1940, and qualified as a driver, mechanic, and cook, he was attached to the 170th field-artillery battalion and shipped to Europe to serve in the Rhineland campaign in 1944 and 1945.

My grandfather could not have known then that one day he would have four Jewish great-grandchildren—he passed away before I met my Jewish husband and long before any of them were born. But he did know that he was one more American who helped annihilate Hitler and undo the Nazi plague. His discharge papers cited his “honest and faithful service to this country”: service demanding that men cross an ocean to save the West from a new dark age by putting themselves between a great evil and its next targets.