I remember, when I was eight years old, coming home from elementary school and turning on the television. Captain Video wasn’t on the screen, but Senator Joe McCarthy was. I wasn’t sure what was on his mind, but I do remember him asking some Army dude sitting at a table: “Who promoted Peress?”
Probably, everybody but historians, and of course family and friends, had forgotten Irving Peress until he popped up just about a year ago in the New York Times obits, dead at 97. The son of a tailor, Peress graduated from George Washington High School and City College, where he enrolled in ROTC, and then NYU Dental School. He was politicized by his wife, Elaine Gittelson, an English teacher who became a psychiatric social worker. Apparently, they were both “fellow travelers” and, probably for a short time, Communist Party members. Peress took the Fifth about these connections, but claimed to have always opposed violence, quoting the Book of Psalms: “His mischief shall return upon his own head and his violence shall come down upon his own pate.”
Peress tried for an Army commission during World War II, but was rejected for a hernia, but then he was drafted as a doctor during the Korean War. After a short, uneventful service at the Fort Monmouth Radar Laboratory, he was promoted from captain to major, and honorably discharged because his wife and daughter were sick. The Army refused to crucify Peress despite McCarthy’s inquisition. Yet after the Army-McCarthy hearings, his house in Queens was stoned, his wife was pressured to step down as editor of the P.T.A. bulletin, and an anonymous caller warned the Brownie Pack that one of his daughters was a subversive.
Now, based on long experience, I hate dentists as much as the next man. The sadistic dentist on motorcycle wheels played by Steve Martin in Little Shop of Horrors was no joke to me. I was truly terrified by the Mengele-modeled dentist played by Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man. Yet, despite this aversion, some of my best friends are Jewish dentists.
What would the ghost of Irving Peress think of the case Dr. Gershon Pincus who worked as a part-time civilian dentist at an off-base Naval clinic in Saratoga, NY, recently received a notice that he was deemed ineligible to receive security clearance because he has “weekly contact with [his] mother and brother in Israel”? The questions asked Dr. Pincus by the Navy’s security sleuths had a McCarthyite ring, and certainly were more intrusive than the pro forma enquiry faced by Pakistan’s and San Bernardino’s Tashfeen Malik when she was questioned by State Department functionaries who granted her a fiancé visa.
Far from an aberration, Dr. Pincus’ sad experience is typical of some 100 American Jews denied security clearances in recent years because they were too chummy with relatives or friends with ties to Israel.
I cannot help but juxtapose their treatment with Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent decision to honor the provisions of our nuclear deal with Iranians by giving Iran’s nationals virtual get-out-of-jail free cards in the form of visas allowing them to enter the U.S. without special scrutiny. Are cronies of Iranian President Rouhani and Grand Ayatollah Khameini more trustworthy than Jewish dentists from New York? Are ties with Tehran’s mullahs less damning than a flirtation with Prime Minister Netanyahu?
Of course, American Jews with Israeli ties can be spies: case in point Jonathan Pollard. Maybe—now that Pollard’s been paroled from jail after three decades—he can become a regular or Homeland or Quantico, the new television show that loves to feature duplicitous Jews both in our homeland and the Holy Land.
On the other hand, why must the Obama Administration be complicit in security protocols, reminiscent of The Protocols, that equate all Jewish dentists who are fond of Israel with Jonathan Pollard?
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