Remembrance, and the righteous among the nations

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. So, remember. On Passover, we're injoined to remember as if we had personally been there, and we should remember this as if it had happened to us personally.

Last night there was a documentary on PBS with a Ukranian survivor, Fanya Gottesfeld-Heller. As a teenager, she entered into a sexual relationship with a man much older than she. If it hadn't been necessary to survive --he was her protector-- it would have been remarkably creepy. Her father softly encouraged her, "Be nice to him." With her parents and brother, she hid in a ditch big enough only for 2 people, for 2 years. Without even the most basic sanitation. Without the freedom even to get out of the ditch. With barely any food. And when the Nazis left and they could get out, her father disappeared. She'll never know what happened to him, but she's sure it was her lover who murdered her father.

My grandmother, born in Kiev, left after the Revolution, but it's not hard to imagine it could have been my family. Actually, I imagine my grandmother left some family behind. Cousins or such. If they were so lucky to survive, they probably had similar stories.

Tonight, PBS airs a show, The Righteous Among the Nations, about Arabs who saved Jews. There are clips here.

The Reader -- far worse than I'd imagined

Wound up seeing it Saturday night. Had no desire, but Soo put it on our Netflix queue for some reason. It was for worse than I'd imagined.

Look at just the first 10 seconds of this trailer. A wealthy Jew in a large Manhattan apartment that must cost several million, handsomely appointed with art and furniture. A stern look on her face, arms and legged crossed. She's closed off and in control. A German, played by Ralph Fiennes, is bent over with his elbows on his knees. He's embarrassed and doesn't know quite how to begin his plea. The contrast is made even more striking by two shots missing from the trailer. Her face is shown in extreme close up, cutting off the top of her head and bottom of her chin, so that she dominates the screen. The camera cuts quickly back to Fiennes, palpably smaller, fragile. A very powerful Jew and a very meek German. The Jew, in this case, is a Holocaust survivor, and Fiennes is there to represent a Nazi guard. It's hardly typical of survivors that they are rich (even for those who have written memoirs), or for their Nazi guards to have been illiterate. An even greater inversion: the guard has committed suicide, but here the survivor continues on without any noticeable effects. She speaks of the sentimental value of a tea tin, not of fear and death. In order to elicit sympathy for the poor, unfortunate Nazi guard who was just a victim of her illiterate circumstances -- and how could an illiterate understand the moral weight of mass murder? -- the film inverts everything.

Though the intention isn't to trample on the memory of the Holocaust, by such inversions the film recreates the very same arguments about powerful Jews and weak Germans that led to the Shoah. Humanizing the Nazis is important firstly because the Holocaust didn't need monsters. Human beings with human failings and only good intentions so far as they could understand were enough.

In fact, my mother spent some time in Germany a little bit after the time of the film's trial. Germans were still very much in denial, convinced that "ordinary Germans" were completely unaware. The film is, in that simplest of ways, without having to resort to selecting unrepresentative cases, inaccurate. It assumes the moral weight of the Holocaust needs only allusion, but it was and is still debated. Not only are there still deniers of the crudest kind, but also those who wish to lock the Shoah in the distant and best forgotten past, who don't want to deal with the implications or how to make this world safe for Jews. Without a real, honest, and cutting portrayal of the suffering its heroine knowingly caused, The Reader cannot earn for her or for itself the redemption and sympathy it seeks.

Bearing Witness to what exactly

I actually didn't know that Bernie Glassman is still alive. But he is. Here's a talk entitled "Bearing Witness", on returning to Auschitz-Birkenau year after year.

The famous prayer about oneness, the Sh'ma Yisrael, begins with Listen: Listen, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. Not only does oneness begin with listening, listening begins with oneness. And Zen Peacemaker Order's Buddhist service begins similarly: Attention! Attention! Raising the Mind of Compassion, the Supreme Meal is offered to all the hungry spirits throughout space and time, filling the smallest particle to the largest space.

Listen! Attention! Bear witness!

It can't happen if you want to stay away from pain and suffering. It probably won't happen if, like most people, you go to Auschwitz, look over the exhibits, and return to the buses for a quick getaway. When you come to Auschwitz, stay a while, and begin to listen to all the voices of that terrible universe -- the voices that are none other than you -- then something happens.

It's an interesting contrast to Jamie Kastner's Kike Like Me. There's more to the film, which I may return to, but one of the most controversial aspects is his trip to Aushwitz. After seeing German memorials to dead Jews that are resented by the local Jewish community, Polish restaurants with Jewish themes but no Jews, and synagogues staffed by gentiles that serve as museums, Kastner is not in the same frame of mind as Glassman. Not to mention, antisemitic Ajax fans with Magen David tattoos and everthing else he sees in Europe. He wants something more than a memorial. And he's right.

But so is Glassman:

During our 1996 retreat, a man of Jewish descent living in Denmark stood up one evening and spoke about forgiving those who had perpetrated cruelties at Auschwitz. A short while later I stood up and suggested: "And then what? So you forgive, and then what? Is that the end of it? Or is there something else to be done?"

Glassman offers something of an answer. It seems awkward, at first, since he takes a lot of responsibility onto himself, but he takes responsibility for the only thing he can. And offers himself as a teacher.

Extent of Nazi Camps Far Greater Than Realized

Shapiro says that the sheer number of camps may end one of the lingering protestations surrounding the Holocaust -- that ordinary people knew nothing of the killing underway in their locales. "In most towns, there was some sort of prison, or holding area or place where people were victimized," Shapiro says. "Think about what this means. For anyone who thinks this took place out of sight of the average person, this shatters that mythology. There was one Auschwitz. There was one Treblinka. But there were 20,000 other camps spread through the rest of Europe."

Defiance

Hey, my piece on Defiance and Jews in film more generally, is up at Racialicious.

I found Defiance moving, but also entertaining. It swells with action in the best tradition of Hollywood. For some people, this is a problem. The most commonly expressed fear of directors making films about the Holocaust is that they will trivialize and exploit the tragedy. Ralph Seliger complains about historical inaccuracies and that the Bielskis are cheapened as “the image of Hollywood heroes.” My concern is different. There were six Holocaust films out at one time, but given the history of how Hollywood has depicted Jews and the Holocaust - and the way in which I understand antisemitism as shaping that depiction - Defiance was the only one I had any interest in seeing.

Read the rest.

The Reader, "pernicious"

I haven't seen it, don't want to. My first thought about it was that it was yet another Holocaust movie not about Jews. (Schindler's List - protagonist is the Good German. Sophie's Choice - among other things I've said about it, the protagonist is a Pole. The Diary of Ann Frank - they took every step to trivialize Frank's Jewishness.) But then there was Ron Rosenbaum's plea at Slate not to give the film an Oscar. "We don't need another 'redemptive' Holocaust movie." The review is damning, and solidified my personal feelings against seeing the film. Now, here's more from historian Deborah Lipstadt:

This is a rewriting of history. It is, simply put, soft core denial. It does not deny the reality or the horror of the Holocaust. Not at all. But it does deny who was responsible.

Who'd a thunk of it - a bad nazi?

In the mid-'60s, critic Judith Crist quipped, "[A] screenwriter, with a revolutionary glint in his eye was telling me the other day he's going all-the-way original; he's writing a World War II movie with bad Nazis."

Really, there aren't that many Holocaust movies, when you consider how big an event it was in world history and how many people it touched. This year, however, there are a bunch out for the holidays. (Valkyrie came out Christmas day.) But perhaps people are starting to notice how absurd these films tend to be. (Via)

For a Shoah-free Christmas?

Stuart Klawans calls for a moratorium on Holocaust movies. "Lest We Remember: Saying never again to Holocaust movies." What struck me:

In fact, some of them can scarcely bring themselves to put a Jewish character on the screen. Valkyrie, for example, is based on the true story of Colonel von Stauffenberg and the plot to assassinate Hitler, which means the exciting foreground of the movie can be filled with German staff officers, while the victims of genocide linger in the rear as a kind of atmospheric effect. This is convenient for the director, Bryan Singer, whose 1998 Apt Pupil delved into the awful fascination that Nazism exerts on young minds, the better to fascinate an audience with the exact same thrills. I predict Valkyrie will offer you even spiffier uniforms, louder commands, bigger guns, and (with the presence of Black Book’s Carice van Houten) maybe a little sex. The action should be everything you’d want from the maker of X-Men.

So, like Sophie's Choice and Schindler's List. Of course, Anne Frank was about a Jew, but deracinated and distant from the genocide -conveniently for a Hollywood insistent on happy endings- during the writing of the Diary.

From The Holocaust in American Film by Judith E. Doneson:

Now, Meyer Levin's major complaint about the play throuout the years had been that it ignored the Jewish content of Anne's book, a very apparent Jewishness, as in this passage:

Who has inflicted this upon up? Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly up till now? It is God that has made us as we are, but it will be God, too, who will raise us up again. If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example. Who knows, it might even be our religion from which the world and all people learn good, and for that reason only do we have to suffer now.

Levin quite rightly viewed this as a central idea of the Diary. And his anger was justified when in the final version of the play, Anne's words had been changed to read: "We're not the only people that've had to suffer There've always been people that've had to...Sometimes one race...Sometimes another...and yet..."

I doubt antisemitism has ever been as simple as a dominant view of Jews as subhuman. Certainly, it hasn't been that simple for a long time. Even in pre-Nazi Germany, the dominant view was intolerant of Jew-hatred. But anti-antisemitism has always been blunted, so that Jew-hatred was able to reinvent itself as antisemitism. So it's important to me to ask -though I know there are many stories to tell about WWII besides the Jewish one- how the hell can we talk about antisemitism while we keep backgrounding Jews in the retelling of the Shoah? Or giving Oscars to Roberto Benigni.

I'm sure it's just coincidence that these films are out for Oscar season, which happens to concur with the annual aural assault of Christian dominance. But looking at that poster, above, I'm not sure I could really tell Life is Beautiful from Home Alone at the video store.

Holocaust Music

The idea of collecting music written in internment camps before and during World War II may not occur to everyone.

But that has been Francesco Lotoro's quest since 1991.

"To allow the musicians to continue to work was also a way to control them better," said the 44-year-old Italian Jew. "At Auschwitz, there were seven orchestras."

(to me via Nextbook.)

Still a national secret

"Many who had such experiences won't talk about it, or they will try to turn themselves into victims, or they will lie,” said German filmmaker Malte Ludin, who wants to launch a project to record the ex-Nazis’ stories and build an archive of perpetrators’ testimony.

h/t Normblog

Hate Crime in Brooklyn

A Brooklyn rabbi said Tuesday that he was beaten by two men screaming "Allahu Akbar" (God is Great) after a third man snatched his kippa off his head in a New York City subway station, CBS news reported.

According to various news sources, the one who stole the Rabbi's yarmulke was hit by a car while running away. Police have arrested him and charged him with hate crimes. The other two, who beat the Rabbi, have not been arrested.

Also, Deborah Lipstadt has a post on a wretched analogy by a deputy director for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The museum owns a painting which an Austrian woman is laying claim to. The painting was sold during the Holocaust, and the woman claims it was "under duress." The director makes the analogy to the Depression to suggest that the sale was made freely, minimizing to the extent of denying the experience of Jews trying to escape Nazi genocide. Lipstadt writes:

I would suggest that MFA Deputy Director Getchell learn a bit more about history before she makes any more such far fetched, if not, absurd analogies.

Meanwhile, Norm Geras recently noted another wretched analogy. Journalist Brian Keenan compared the destruction in Lebanon to the Holocuast. While the destruction in Lebanon was tragic, it hardly compares in any sense to the Nazi attempt to systematically destroy an entire people.

Why do I include these links in a post about an antisemitic assault in Brooklyn? Like any ideas that have been around so long, antisemitism and racism are deeply embedded in our society. Yet it isn't the case that stereotypes about Jews show up in crime dramas the way that stereotypes about blacks as criminals does. I think because of that, people have a hard time getting a handle on antisemitism. A lot of people, in fact, think it's a thing of the past. But it is deeply ingrained. Here are two examples of how Jewish history is misremembered and manipulated.

Anti-Zionism might not be antisemitism, but Jews are right to be skeptical

I haven't put many posts on this blog about Israel or Zionism. In the wake of the killing of eight students at a Yeshiva in Jerusalem, it's hard to ignore the connection between the Jewish people and Israel. The vast majority of Jews, religious or secular, support Israel in some form or another. The reasons are vast.

The original arguments for Zionism, as it emerged in the wake of the Dreyfrus Affair, centered on the situation of Jews as unable to achieve political rights others took for granted. That formulation of Zionism didn't achieve a great deal of support among Jews until the Holocaust. Some Jews opposed Zionism for religious reasons. Some, most notably the Jewish Bund, opposed it as a diversion from what they saw as a more universal struggle.

But the Holocaust provided an emotional resonance and urgency for the idea. Jews who had opposed Zionism, recognizing that only Zionism among the ideologies of Jewish liberation had successfully saved Jews from the camps, became Zionists. For me, the image that burns is that of refugees refused asylum in nation after nation dramatized in Voyage of the Damned and more loosely in Exodus. Fundamentally reliant on the good will of others to realize even their most basic rights, Jews seeking asylum during and following the Holocaust were sent back to Germany. Like it or not, political power flows from the nation-state in this day and age. Although one might support a change to that system in some unspecified future, Zionism is a practical necessity today.

For many, the establishment of Israel is a grand project of affirmative action, restitution for repeated oppressions, genocides, and ethnic cleansings over more than a thousand years. But ultimately, it was the right of self-determination, enshrined in the charter of the UN and subsequent treaties, upon which Isreal was justified. Self-determination for peoples is a tricky philosophical business, but it is undeniable that something of the right is not only enshrined in international law but fundamental to all modern political understanding. And it is undeniable that Jews fit every understanding of a people entitled to a right of self-determination that anyone has devised.

Except one. Jews did not, prior to the establishment of Israel already have a homeland in the form of an existing state. For some, self-determination is dependent upon not being so oppressed. And so I have no problem suggesting that such people, when they argue for the Palestinians' right to self-determination at the same time they argue against the only practical method of Jewish liberation, are advocating Jewish oppression.

The actual arguments of Zionism, including Why there?, are discussed here in significantly more detail. It is enough here to state that I, like most Jews, feel that the liberation of Jews from oppression is dependent on the establishment of a Jewish state.

Often we are told that Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. Ignoring the obvious fact that much anti-Zionism, including most which would claim that simplistic slogan, is a thin veil for antisemitism, there's a sense in which it's true. Anti-Zionism is not necessarily antisemitic in and of itself -and there are numerous shades of thinking between Zionism and anti-Zionism- but such a simplistic slogan obfuscates the relationships between the anti-Zionism and the oppression of Jews. The analogy between Zionism and affirmative action is deep. Opposition to affirmative action is not necessarily racist or indicative of racist thinking, but it is by definition an opposition to the pragmatic solution to oppression favored by most ethnic minorities. Anti-Zionism likewise amounts to, regardless of the underlying justification, the only pragmatic solution favored by the vast majority of Jews for liberation from oppression. Affirmative action is not racism, and neither is Zionism.

Affirmative action is often framed in terms of a false colorblindness that denies the oppression of blacks in the here and now and pretends that it is whites who are really oppressed. Anti-Zionism too often draws upon the long history of antisemitic mythology to outdo such an inversion, quickly turning to blatantly antisemitic claims of Jewish control. In order to avoid being antisemitic in a very real sense, anyone opposed to the existence of Israel simply must think quite hard about what that means and be prepared to answer some very hard questions before spouting off.

Starting with At the time of Israel's creation, what would you have argued for? At that point, many people are quick to answer what they would have argued against. That's not enough. What would you have argued for? What policy to enact Jewish liberation? And if you can't answer that, perhaps you can understand Zionism a little better. It isn't that I think one must be a Zionist in order to not be antisemitic, but it isn't anywhere as simple as claiming that anti-Zionism isn't antisemitism.

Holocaust Carnival parade float?

In the category of WTF?!

A Carnival float with a pile of model dead bodies commemorating the Holocaust is causing unease before the lavish parades in Rio de Janeiro this weekend...

"If we had people dancing on top of dead bodies that would indeed be disrespectful," he told Reuters.

Update: A court has ruled against the float. Details make the story weirder and weirder.