It is only education and understanding of the past that teaches us not to repeat history.

Elites are once again invoking Reagan, dropping their Gs and saying things in a folksy sort of way thats meant to capture the hearts of people. And its all fraud; its all stagecraft. And people are falling for a great deal of elite behavior in this country packaged as if its proletariat behavior.

It was natural to see the struggle for dignity for black people in America as a sister struggle of the Jewish struggle. So growing up, it was always a part of my breakfast cereal to think of myself as someone who was part of a larger struggle.

If we went back to the imprisonment rate we had in the early '70s, something like four out of five people employed in the prison industry would lose their jobs. That's what you're up against.

It is only education and understanding of the past that teaches us not to repeat history.

As I was growing up, you know, I'm a white Jewish American born to Holocaust parents. My father fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and my mother's family had fled the czars of Russia before that.

We come out of Jewish-refugee, Holocaust stock, which means that our predecessors fled and we learned that systems of power are vulnerable to corruption and can treat the defenseless in a destructive fashion.