Freedom Book of the Month for July, 1999:
The Mitzvah
by L. Neil Smith and Aaron Zelman
Mazel Freedom Press, $7.95 ($10.95 postage paid)

Throughout history, the Jews have suffered persecution. They've been enslaved, dispersed over the face of the earth, and subjected to expropriation, ghettoization, and pogrom. They have been barred from professions, forced into the banking industry by a church that forbade its adherents to charge interest, and reviled for their success in it. These atrocities form part of the core of what we commonly call "The Jewish Experience."

There is, however, another key component to that experience: Throughout history, when they have faced their darkest days, the Jews have fought. In the alleyways of Jerusalem. At Masada. In the Warsaw Ghetto. On the frontier kibbutzim, and in the arid Negev from which the Jews have carved their modern state and held it against all comers.

The Jews have fought. While historical persecution may be key to their identity, their willingness to fight for that identity is certainly key to their survival as a people. Those among them who attempt to negate that principle do their culture a disservice.

It is fitting that Aaron Zelman of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership should collaborate with L. Neil Smith, the most prolific living libertarian novelist—and arguably the most effective advocate of the right to keep and bear arms—in producing "The Mitzvah."

The premise of the novel is straightforward enough: The protagonist, Monsignor John Greenwood, finds his world turned upside down by the revelation that he is one of the many Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who was hidden and eventually adopted by a Catholic family after his parents were taken by the Nazis. As he begins to explore his heritage, Greenwood comes face to face with what the policies he advocated as a liberal priest have accomplished.

It isn't a pretty picture.

Those who are familiar with Zelman and Smith know that neither is given to pulling punches. The right to keep and bear arms—in its pure, unadulterated form — receives cogent support both in an elaboration of the historical experience of the Jewish people and in the events of Greenwood's life as they unfold. The novel certainly succeeds as an admonition to those in the Jewish community who are all too quick to place their trust in a government whose recent actions hearken back to the days of the cattlecars and the gas chamber.

"The Mitzvah" succeeds on another level, too. It's a damn good story. Smith and Zelman have ably rendered the shock and confusion of Greenwood as he enters into a world that Hitler's thugs deprived him of, the world of Judaism. They make real the love of freedom that motivated many who survived the Holocaust to emigrate to the United States, and the horror they feel as they watch this country sliding down the slippery slope of gun control (or, as Smith accurately names it, "victim disarmament"), official murder, and political and religious oppression. They bring to life the lady who carries a pistol in her purse because she knows that the police only arrive after the fact.

Buy this book. And while you're at it, make a contribution to JPFO. No, I don't care where you go to church. It's not about that. As Pastor Martin Niemller said, "First, they came for the Jews ...." If "they" had found themselves, the very first time they came, staring down the muzzle of a loaded rifle, that might have been the end, rather than the beginning, of the Holocaust.

Additional Links:

• Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (JPFO)
• Online Ordering Information for "The Mitzvah" from JPFO
• L. Neil Smith's Webley Page

June 2000: Law's Order by David Friedman

May 2000: Forge of the Elders by L. Neil Smith

April 2000: Reciprocia by Richard G. Rieben

March 2000: The Art of Fiction: A Guide for Writers and Readers by Ayn Rand

February 2000: Addiction is a Choice by Jeffrey A. Schaler

January 2000: Revolutionary Language by David C. Calderwood

Special December 1999 Feature: The Freedom Book of the Year: Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998 by Vin Suprynowicz

November 1999: Conquests and Cultures by Thomas Sowell

October 1999: A Way To Be Free by Robert LeFevre, edited by Wendy McElroy

September 1999: Assassins (Left Behind) by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins

August 1999: Don't Shoot the Bastards (Yet): 101 More Ways to Salvage Freedom by Claire Wolfe

July 1999: The Mitzvah by L. Neil Smith and Aaron Zelman

June 1999: The Incredible Bread Machine by R.W. Grant

May 1999: Send in the Waco Killers by Vin Suprynowicz

April 1999: It Still Begins with Ayn Rand by Jerome Tuccille

March 1999: The Dictionary of Free-Market Economics by Fred Foldvary

February 1999: Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand edited by Mimi Reisel Gladstein and Chris Matthew Sciabarra