Wolf-Leib Glosser lived on a dirt-floor shack in the small town of Antopol in what is now Belarus.
“Beset by violent anti-Jewish pogroms and forced childhood conscription in the Czar’s army, the patriarch of the shack,” his descendant David Glosser wrote in Politico, “fled a village where his forebears had lived for centuries and took his chances in America.”
Glosser landed on Ellis Island in early January 1903. He had $8 in his pocket. He neither spoke nor understood English.
His son Nathan followed him to New York. They worked in sweatshops and peddled goods on the street. They sent home enough money so the rest of their family could come to America.
Persecution – and perhaps death – awaited them as Jews in Belarus faced violent pogroms from 1903-1906.
When the Glossers approached New York harbor, they saw the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor that said …:
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
https://www.nps.gov/stli/learn/historyculture/colossus.htm
The Glosser family, through sheer grit and determination, sold goods from a horse and wagon and then opened a haberdashery in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and became part of the American dream, the rags-to-riches story that defines us as a country.
Stephen Miller and Donald Trump want to destroy this narrative once and for all because it refutes the ideology of their demented vision of what America should be – a vision shared by the Ku Klux Klan and other white-supremacist organizations.
Miller’s and Trump’s ancestors both emigrated to the United States – from Antopol and Bavaria, respectively. The Glossers and the Trumps found wealth. Trump’s grandfather Frederick reportedly made his money with a restaurant and brothel serving those seeking gold and other things during the Klondike gold rush in the 1880s.
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-trump-family-fortune/
The family business continues.
Donald Trump continues to make his money screwing people.
Wolf-Leib and Nathan owned a chain of supermarkets and department stores in Johnstown.
Sam Glosser, one of Leib’s sons, and his own son, Izzy, joined the family business, which, in time, was listed on the AMEX stock exchange and employed thousands of people, David Glosser said.
“This family emerged from poverty in a hostile country to become a prosperous, educated clan of merchants, scholars, professionals, and most important, American citizens,” Glosser said.
David S. Glosser, a retired neuropsychologist, is the son of Izzy Glosser.
David’s sister is the mother of Stephen Miller, a burden no mother should carry.
Miller is, of course, Donald Trump’s violently anti-immigration advisor who reportedly once advocated violating international law by using drones against unarmed migrants trying to come to America.
https://www.vanityfair.com/topic/stephen-miller
“I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, an educated man who is well aware of his heritage,” David Glosser said, “has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country.”
“If my nephew’s ideas on immigration had been in force a century ago, our family would have been wiped out.”
David Glosser then added the following:
“I shudder at the thought of what would have become of the Glossers had the same policies Stephen so coolly espouses— the travel ban, the radical decrease in refugees, the separation of children from their parents, and even talk of limiting citizenship for legal immigrants — been in effect when Wolf-Leib made his desperate bid for freedom.”
If the Glosser family had survived the pogroms and continued to live in Belarus for another three or four decades, they probably would have been murdered by the Nazis, David Glosser wrote.
David Glosser’s essay refers to his nephew Stephen Miller as a hypocrite.
https://time.com/5365329/stephen-miller-uncle/
Miller, like so many who inherited their wealth, confuses what he inherited with what he earned on his own – very little of what he possesses he achieved on his own — with the exception of his cruelty and odiousness.
It was said of President George W.H. Bush that he was born on third base and thought he hit a triple.
Stephen Miller thinks he hit a home run in a game he never played.
Miller is a hypocrite, but he is so much worse than that.
Vanity Fair calls him “one of the most evil people to have worked for Donald Trump.”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/06/stephen-miller-migrant-boats
The magazine’s description was not meant to be hyperbolic.
No president has ever employed so many awful cretinous people as Donald Trump, as this website demonstrates, I think.
Stephen Miller is the evil that other evil aspires to.
Miller, among other things, wrote Trump’s inaugural address, which was so dark it made Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness look like a merry romp through a village of laughing children, banjo-playing minstrels, singing seniors, ice cream shops, and strawberries fields.
Sleeping upside down in a cave and receiving no sunlight probably has something to do with Miller’s vision of the world.
I’ve seen corpses with more color than Stephen Miller.
Jean Guerrero, in her book about Trump, Hatemonger, calls Miller the “’architect’” of Trump’s restrictive immigration policies, and his “`mind meld’” with the president has produced executive orders and rhetoric heavy on exclusion, cruelty and “`prejudicial white patriotism,’” the Washington Post said in a review of the book.
Some people are born bigots. Some achieve bigotry. And some have bigotry thrust upon them.
Miller achieved bigotry on his own.
Miller taunted his darker-skinned classmates while he was in school.
While running for class president in high school, he said: “Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/14/stephen-miller-leaked-emails-white-nationalism-trump
Miller’s views were then shaped and hardened until they found a home in the Trump White House, where he sent hundreds of emails to Breitbart writer Katie McHugh that “promoted racist fears of demographic replacement of white people by non-whites (and) disseminated conspiracy theories positing a United Nations-inspired plan to colonize America.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/14/stephen-miller-leaked-emails-white-nationalism-trump
McHugh said in an interview that Miller radicalized her as a white supremacist but she has since repudiated those views.
“I was a white nationalist,” she says. “Whatever you want to call it – white nationalist, white supremacist. But that part [of me] is dead.”
https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/13/politics/katie-mchugh-stephen-miller/index.html
This is not the case for Miller who has made racism his brand.
His emails suggest, among other things, that a bipartisan organization sponsored by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was promoting illegal voting, The Guardian reported.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/14/stephen-miller-leaked-emails-white-nationalism-trump
None of these conspiracies has any basis in truth.
More than 50 civil rights organizations wrote Trump telling him that Miller must be ousted from the White House.
“Stephen Miller has stoked bigotry, hate and division with his extreme political rhetoric and policies throughout his career,” the letter said. “The recent exposure of his deep-seated racism provides further proof that he is unfit to serve and should immediately leave his post.”
Tiana Lowe, a columnist for the conservative newspaper, the Washington Examiner, agreed.
“It’s long past time for Trump to dump Miller,” Lowe wrote.
More than a hundred Democrats in Congress sent a letter Trump demanding Miller’s removal.
“A documented white nationalist has no place in any presidential administration, and especially not in such an influential position,” the letter said.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/14/stephen-miller-leaked-emails-white-nationalism-trump
It is not clear whether the letter was referring to Miller or Trump.
