I often find myself at the Saint Petersburg – the premier bookstore on Brighton Beach, the heart of the Russian-speaking Jewish world in America. It’s true that I rarely purchase anything. It’s just difficult to find something valuable among the piles of detective stories, romance novels about happy or unhappy love, and CDs of pop singers’ familiar nauseating howls.

But here at Saint Petersburg, I believe that the famous proverb about friendship can be paraphrased: Tell me what you’re reading and I will tell you who you are. And there, entirely unexpected among the books and novellas on the shelves, I find Protocols of the Elders of Zion and The Secret World Government(part of the series The Plot Against Russia), the anti-Semitic writings by Oleg Platonov.

Algorythm Publishers published this libel in Russia as a supplementary edition to the 5,100-print run clearly oriented to home-grown Russian anti-Semitics of all shades. But, how could this happen in America?

But my story does not end here. I also stumbled upon Edward Horos’ anti-Semitic publications, Jewish Strike and Jewish Roulette, similar works to Platonov’s, published in the Southern region of Krasnodar, under former Governor Nikolai Kondratenko, the unwavering “friend of all Jews and Armenians” who referred to the Jewish community as the “dirty cosmopolitan brotherhood.” [Kondratenko’s politics were considered to be blatantly anti-Semitic.] And where do you think I found these works? At the Black Sea store, literally 100 meters from the large group of Odessans were celebrating the day Odessa was liberated from the Hitler's beasts. Save for the store Mosvideofil’m, you can find this type of literature all of Brighton Beach. Let me re-paraphrase the adage: Tell me what books you are selling and I will tell you who you are.

Is there really a Russian-speaking Jewish community in our famous Brighton Beach? With our activists, political figures, small business owners, residents, supervisors, and community members, why is such spittle allowed in our neighborhood? This is shameful and disgraceful.