Above: A view of the memorial in Berlin, Germany, to the Jewish Holocaust.
1984
When Is It Time To Get Over A Holocaust?
by YONI GOLDSTEIN
2000 years later, Christians still commemorate Christ's crucifixion every Spring.
70 years ago, 6 million Jews were murdered in the Jewish Holocaust by a nation self-avowedly Christian - Germany - to "avenge" historical wrongs, including the crucifixion.
Is it time for Jews to "get over" the holocaust which is now but 7 decades old?
A recent op-ed in The Beacon, an online magazine created by students of New York City's Yeshiva University, is causing quite a stir in the Jewish community.
Entitled "Why It's Time for Jews to Get Over the Holocaust," the article argues that Jews and Judaism would be better off if the memory of the Holocaust was demoted in the religion's collective narrative. Author Binyamin Weinreich writes:
"To be sure, the Holocaust is crucially important. But why does it need to be singled out as if it's more special than other historical events, like it's qualitatively different from other historical events, like it's more than a mere historical event?"
Weinreich also contends that Holocaust-denial should not be considered a crime ("Do we arrest flat-earthers? Ancient Astronaut enthusiasts? Believers in ghosts? Why should denial of a historical event be considered a crime, something detrimental to society?"), and that the real lesson of the Holocaust "isn't about Jews and Germans and 1935. It's about the powerful and the weak, the superior and the Other."
The article is more juvenile than vile, informed by cheap college-grade postmodernism and poorly argued -- a "shandah" if ever there was one.
And I'm glad Weinreich wrote it.
Not that I agree with him, quite the opposite. But he's not the only one of who feels that way - there are lots of them out there, and the number is steadily growing. Jews need to have a serious discussion about what the meaning of the Holocaust will be once the survivor generation dies out - better to get it out in the open sooner rather later.
For younger Jews (let's say, 25 and under) the significance of the Holocaust does not compute the way it did for previous generations.
Nearly 70 years of frantic, dogged documentation has produced a
Holocaust study body of work that is, quite literally, exhaustive. And
yet, the sheer amount of information available has had a curious numbing
effect on the children of the children of survivors. They have absorbed
in great detail the information - the whens, wheres, hows and whys -
of the Holocaust, often straight from the mouths of survivors, but
exhibit little emotional reaction to, or connection with, it.
There's no need to speculate why this is the case, the answer is
obvious: Jews are today in a place of comfort that the religion has not
enjoyed since the end of the Davidic dynasty. Anti-Semitism is at an
all-time low and its purveyors have been pushed beyond the most extreme
margins of society. Young Jews face no social or professional barriers. And while Israel faces a threat from Iran, this generation of Jews has
come to understand that the Jewish state always has and always will face
some sort of Arab-infused existential threat and simply learned to live
with it.
The incontrovertible rejoinder to Weinreich and others like him is that
when Jews become complacent, when they get too comfortable - when they
forget their inherent otherness, to borrow a phrase - bad things
happen.
This was precisely the narrative in the years before the Second
World War and at other historical times when Jews were persecuted and
killed. Carrying the backbreaking emotional weight of the Holocaust and
six million dead coreligionists is a defence mechanism - a constant
Shoa consciousness prevents the next Holocaust from happening.
All of this is true, but the argument will fall on deaf ears.
It's been
so long since the Holocaust happened. The world is different now. Jews
are accepted, their enemies are derided. And if most of these young Jews
aren't naive enough to think the Holocaust couldn't happen again, they
are optimistic it won't.
The Holocaust will not fade away quickly. There will be some young Jews
who see the movement away from Holocaust centricity as a call to action
to keep the narrative going - in most cases, as a duty to their parents
and grand- and great-grandparents. And they may well find ways to
further Holocaust education in new formats more suited to the Internet
and social media.
But with each passing generation, their ranks will be
further depleted, until, at some point, the Holocaust will become what
Weinriech envisions, just another historical episode.
If Jews are lucky enough to never experience another genocidal
nightmare, they may well look back upon Weinreich as some sort of
visionary, the one person who saw that the stultifying ordeal of
persecution was truly and finally over.
Frankly, I hope he's right - we all know how the alternative storyline ends.
[Courtesy: Huffington Post]
March 10, 2012
Conversation about this article
1: Sunny Grewal (Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada), March 10, 2012, 10:05 AM.
This article reminds me of the statements of P. Chidambaram that Sikhs should forget about 1984. If we haven't forgotten about the injustices to our community which happened a few centuries ago, how can we forget something that only happened 20 years ago? The same could be said in the case of the Jews. They still commemorate the destruction of the Temple by the Romans, even though it is now thousands of years after its occurrence. The holocaust and other genocides should never be forgotten nor complacently glossed over in history texts.
2: Baldev Singh (Bradford, United Kingdom), March 10, 2012, 11:32 AM.
"Forgetting" or "getting over" these 'holocausts' is the very reason why so many happen over and over again. The last century is probably the worst in human history in this regard.
3: Harveen (Singapore), March 10, 2012, 8:31 PM.
To Sunny Grewal (Comment #1 above): The crucial difference is that the genocide and persecution of the Jews has been recognized, whereas the genocide and persecution of the Sikhs has not. Moreover, Sikhs still face bigotry in the media and popular culture in India. More generally: Re getting over / not misusing the Jewish holocaust, there's plenty of commentary (including from Jewish writers and groups) on the point that Israel uses it cynically, continuing to milk sympathy for itself, while crowding out the narrative of its own ongoing persecution and genocide of the Palestinians. The irony for Sikhs is that, like the Jewish people, we're a small group that has had to deal with adversity over generations. There are therefore many parallels between their historical struggle and ours. The similarity doesn't continue into the modern day though - today I think it's fair to say that the Jewish people have turned oppressor, forgetting their centuries of being discriminated against. The narrative is so tightly controlled that any criticism of the state of Israel and its policy of systematic repression of Palestinians is quickly branded anti-Semitic. As Sikhs with our own history of persecution and resisting oppression, we are probably the only group in the world whose community DNA and ethos requires us to stand up to that kind of oppression and call it out for what it is. On the value of the holocaust at the hands of the Nazis: I think the Jewish holocaust belongs to us all, in the sense that all of us own that massive example of how cruel humans can be to one another, and that we should use it as a reminder to never again allow one group to oppress another. To be faithful to the memory of that genocide requires us to be critical of Israeli state policy against the Palestinians. By appropriating the holocaust and using it to serve its short term political agenda, Israel cheapens it and reduces its value as a reminder and warning to us all.
4: Parmjit Singh (Canada), March 11, 2012, 10:09 PM.
Harveen, comment #3, please continue to contribute your thoughts and the care and good sense they contain. You have conveyed the true spirit of Sikhi so well, while being respectful of everyone!
5: Jesse Bateau (U.S.A.), March 12, 2012, 6:27 PM.
Interesting article that I think asks some very pertinent questions that every group that has had to cope with genocidal acts in its history has to face in their ongoing dialogue as the older generation dies out and the younger generations grow up, not having the same emotional connection to the events of the past. I grew up listening to both First Nations elders (i.e., indigenous Americans) as well as Armenian elders talk about the genocide of their respective peoples, the First Nations at the hands of those coming over to this country, that in some respects continues on to this day; the Armenians at the hands of the Turks around the turn of the century, around 1900 (I forget the exact year, these old men would chastise me severely if they knew I had forgotten the year!). This article is definitely worth reading. I happened to be in India, in the Punjab, less than 5 km from the site where the genocide of Sikhs began with the invasion of Sri Harmandar Sahib (the Golden Temple) in Amritsar, the holiest site to all Sikhs, by the Indian government troops, resulting in the deaths of thousands on that one day alone. No one even knows the true number of Sikhs who died in 1984, both in June at the height of the fighting, and later in October after the death of Indira Gandhi, who was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards for ordering the assault on Sri Harmandar Sahib. All that we really know is that many thousands were killed. Please read, and join in the discussion.
6: R. Ross (Australia), May 24, 2012, 10:11 PM.
It says a lot when the only comparison you can make is to a religious figure who was supposedly God made man! The suffering of Jews under the Germans was neither the first, nor tragically the last, nor the worst. Persecution and genocide have been with us for millenia. In fact if one were to believe the Bible, which I don't, the earliest followers of Judaism were pretty happy to commit genocide against the Canaanites. But the reason why Judaism has to get over this 'holocaust' is because it has been turned into propaganda and theological dogma which is destructive for the nation founded in its name, Israel, and for Judaism in general. It's like an adult who had a bad childhood - you will become and remain dysfunctional if you don't get over it and move on. Admittedly, Judaism is a religion founded in victimhood and one only has to listen to those at the Wailing Wall wailing about wrongs done thousands of years ago to know that if there had not been a holocaust then Israelis/Jews would have had to invent one. That is the view of some although not mine but I do question the numbers killed given that the Zionists were talking decades before Hitler about a mythical six million victims and the number of European Jews in 1939 was fifteen million and ten years later, after the war, fifteen and a half million. But whether the treatment of Jews by the Nazis has been propagandised, and it has, and how much is true or not is irrelevant. It is time to get over it because the atrocities and human rights abuses committed against the Palestinians and others in the name of Jewish suffering under the Nazis would have those who did die, no matter how many million they were, turning in their graves in shame and mortification.