I’m hav­ing a déjà vu all over again. Fifty years ago, the town I grew up in — Wayne, New Jer­sey — went through a sear­ing episode in which a brash and blunt pub­lic fig­ure used anti-Semit­ic com­ments as a dog-whis­tle in a local elec­tion. The episode, briefly nation­al news, pre­sent­ed the town with a per­fect oppor­tu­ni­ty to own and purge the ugli­ness in its midst. Instead it decid­ed to do the opposite.

In the back of my mind, I suppose I want to believe we still have a chance to do better as a nation than Wayne did as a small community, even horribly burdened as we are with Trump.

I was in sec­ond grade then, obliv­i­ous to every­thing but the emo­tions of the moment. But my moth­er, Saun­dra Segan (Kalb), was a beau­ti­ful, ide­al­is­tic, young Eng­lish teacher in Wayne ready to turn the world on its head with lit­er­a­ture. She knew all the key play­ers and end­ed up resign­ing in protest over the affair — a cost­ly deci­sion that had major ram­i­fi­ca­tions for my family.

This inci­dent could have been a mere scratch. Instead it swelled into a fes­ter­ing social wound and endur­ing stain. In the wake of Char­lottesville and the nau­sea every­one I know feels about it, I’m moved to tell this sto­ry now in the spir­it of ​“the road not tak­en.” In the back of my mind, I sup­pose I want to believe we still have a chance to do bet­ter as a nation than Wayne did as a small com­mu­ni­ty, even hor­ri­bly bur­dened as we are with Trump.

Like many sub­ur­ban towns in 1967, Wayne was fac­ing bal­loon­ing pub­lic school costs due to a mush­room­ing pop­u­la­tion. Its school bud­get had become a dri­ver of annu­al dis­cord because of stiff resis­tance to tax hikes.

In this atmos­phere, the vice pres­i­dent of the Board of Edu­ca­tion — a cocky, flam­boy­ant, Trump­ish ego­ma­ni­ac named New­ton Miller, prone to reck­less, offen­sive remarks — deliv­ered a state­ment to the local news­pa­per declar­ing that two can­di­dates for the Board were too lib­er­al because they were Jews. If Jews won a Board major­i­ty, he wrote, ​“Wayne could be in real finan­cial trou­ble.” He added for good mea­sure: ​“Two more votes and we lose what is left of Christ in our Christ­mas cel­e­bra­tions in our schools. Think about it.”

These remarks are mild by the stan­dards of Char­lottesville, but they were painful and shock­ing at the time. The delib­er­ate use of big­otry in elec­tion appeals had then become taboo, at least in the North­east, and lots of peo­ple were proud of that.

Miller was wide­ly con­demned by the pow­ers that were, includ­ing New Jersey’s gov­er­nor and Sen­a­tors and the edi­to­r­i­al page of the New York Times. He was cen­sured and asked to resign at a nation­al­ly tele­vised school board meet­ing. The smart mon­ey saw him as a polit­i­cal sui­cide and assumed that the town would duly elect the high­ly qual­i­fied Jew­ish can­di­dates it had seemed poised to elect.

Instead, those can­di­dates were defeat­ed in a land­slide in favor of less qual­i­fied gen­tiles, one of whom hadn’t both­ered to cam­paign. The sham­ing nation­al pub­lic­i­ty had back­fired as the towns­peo­ple used their votes to prove they couldn’t be bul­lied by elites.

It was an extra­or­di­nar­i­ly ugly moment that divid­ed the town for decades. The area around Wayne did have a big­ot­ed past: KKK and Ger­man-Amer­i­can Bund activ­i­ty before WW II, restric­tive hous­ing covenants that exclud­ed any­one not north­ern-Euro­pean white from two desir­able lake neigh­bor­hoods. But things had been har­mo­nious for decades, even as the town grew by a fac­tor of three and attract­ed about 2,000 Jews.

Peo­ple were cour­te­ous, neigh­bor­ly. There was no open intol­er­ance. I don’t remem­ber a sin­gle inci­dent of ​“dirty Jew” bul­ly­ing on the street like those Nathan Eng­lan­der painful­ly describes on Long Island in the same period.

Then came the Miller inci­dent and, as my par­ents tell it, every­thing changed. Neigh­bor mis­trust­ed neigh­bor. Stony silences pre­vailed in encoun­ters in super­mar­ket aisles. Peo­ple no longer dis­cussed local issues with one anoth­er at bar­be­cues or PTA meet­ings — not, that is, with­out fore­knowl­edge of which ​“side” the oth­er per­son was on. You were either for Miller or against him, and the major­i­ty was evi­dent­ly for him because he went on to be elect­ed May­or of Wayne three times.

My moth­er said the anti-Semi­tism of that moment was nev­er the main point. It had been a deflec­tion, a cyn­i­cal hail-Mary pass by a mild big­ot bent on keep­ing the school bud­get and tax­es low. The social wound fes­tered, because so many peo­ple were ready to wink the cyn­i­cism away as an innocu­ous gaffe while their neigh­bors were deeply offend­ed. For them, the move had crossed a bright-red line of decency.

The inci­dent trans­formed Wayne. In my mother’s eyes, it changed the place from an enti­ty that could fair­ly be called a com­mu­ni­ty into a soul­less, atom­ized patch­work of sin­gle-fam­i­ly hous­es. When we moved there from New York City in 1963, she felt it had a nascent but man­i­fest social and eth­i­cal cen­ter, an unmis­tak­able soul. After this it became per­ma­nent­ly the quin­tes­sen­tial, desert­ed-side­walk social waste­land. No one min­gled any­more. They kept to them­selves, mix­ing only with those who they knew shared their assumptions.

And this is the griev­ous social dam­age inflict­ed by politi­cians like Miller and Trump — the break­down of trust and faith in a com­mu­nal ground they leave in their wake. For the sake of their self­ish, short-term goals, they are pre­pared to destroy the painstak­ing­ly woven human fab­ric of whole towns, cities and now the nation.

My par­ents stuck it out in Wayne for anoth­er eight years, occa­sion­al­ly doing sub­ver­sive things like tak­ing strolls down the block and strik­ing up con­ver­sa­tions about Nixon in people’s dri­ve­ways, cir­cu­lat­ing a neigh­bor­hood peti­tion against fences oth­er than for swim­ming pools and reach­ing out social­ly to one of the town’s only black families.

None of it took root. They felt unap­pre­ci­at­ed and more and more alien. Mon­ey grew short. My par­ents’ mar­riage crum­bled. I’ll refrain from blam­ing all of that on New­ton Miller. As the hor­ri­fy­ing images from Char­lottesville flash on the screen, though, I find myself curs­ing his mem­o­ry while hon­or­ing my mother’s, and hop­ing that some rare, brave peo­ple arise in all towns like Wayne to knock on their neighbor’s doors and put their heads togeth­er about what the hell to do now.