Educating the Next Generation
The blogosphere is all abuzz with the new coping strategy that Germans are using to deal with the guilt of gassing and burning six million Jews:
Six decades after the mass extermination of six million Jews in the Holocaust by Nazi Germany, more than 50 percent of Germans believe that Israel's present-day treatment of the Palestinians is similar to what the Nazis did to the Jews during World War II, a German survey released this weekend shows.
The psychological drive behind his vicious demonization is not difficult to understand:
There is another enticement where Israel is concerned: The victims of the Nazis have become similar to Nazis, and the Palestinians have become similar to Jews. This in turn begets the comparison between separation fence and Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz, a comparison that raises to absurd levels the political correctness of the homogeneous European press.
If the Jews are evil enough to be the Nazis, then either they retroactively deserved what the Nazis did or the Nazis weren't all that bad. But these absurd justificatory fantasies don't just emerge out of a vacuum - they are intellectualized, legitimized, and justified by well-managed and highly-organized academic institutions. Here is where modern anti-Semitism really meets academic anti-Zionism: it is not just that anti-Zionism is a mask and a vehicle for crude anti-Semitism. Rather, anti-Zionism functions as the soothing salve that takes the sting out of anti-Semitism. The taboos that protect Jews from anti-Semitism are undermined in the exact moment that the justification for anti-Semitism is reinserted. Trying to follow the dizzying and surreal double-dynamic, we turn our heads from side to side and end up not getting a clear picture of either.
The results have become inescapable: existence in Europe is becoming unlivable for Jews:
Returning from an intensive two-month trip throughout Europe, Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, former chief rabbi of Israel and a Holocaust survivor, declared Sunday that European Jewry has no future. "In the past months I've traveled to Austria, Britain, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands, and I'm telling you there is no future for European Jewry," said Lau...
European Jewish families he had met that they live in fear. "I've met parents who tell me that when they send their children to Bnei Akiva (a religious-Zionist youth movement) for evening activities they are in constant fear that something terrible will happen, G-d forbid, until they return. "Once Jews had no choice but to live with anti-Semitism. Now they do."... Anti-Semitic violence has spread to include the burning of synagogues, the desecration of graves, attacks against Jewish schools, and anti-Semitic propaganda spread via the Internet and on university campuses.
It is not Jews who are abandoning the world - it is the world that is forcing Jews out. And when the history of the end of the Diaspora is written, it will be the colleges and universities (places where Jews had always been able to trade ideas for sanctuary even in the darkest times) who will be held responsible.
Six decades after the mass extermination of six million Jews in the Holocaust by Nazi Germany, more than 50 percent of Germans believe that Israel's present-day treatment of the Palestinians is similar to what the Nazis did to the Jews during World War II, a German survey released this weekend shows.
The psychological drive behind his vicious demonization is not difficult to understand:
There is another enticement where Israel is concerned: The victims of the Nazis have become similar to Nazis, and the Palestinians have become similar to Jews. This in turn begets the comparison between separation fence and Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz, a comparison that raises to absurd levels the political correctness of the homogeneous European press.
If the Jews are evil enough to be the Nazis, then either they retroactively deserved what the Nazis did or the Nazis weren't all that bad. But these absurd justificatory fantasies don't just emerge out of a vacuum - they are intellectualized, legitimized, and justified by well-managed and highly-organized academic institutions. Here is where modern anti-Semitism really meets academic anti-Zionism: it is not just that anti-Zionism is a mask and a vehicle for crude anti-Semitism. Rather, anti-Zionism functions as the soothing salve that takes the sting out of anti-Semitism. The taboos that protect Jews from anti-Semitism are undermined in the exact moment that the justification for anti-Semitism is reinserted. Trying to follow the dizzying and surreal double-dynamic, we turn our heads from side to side and end up not getting a clear picture of either.
The results have become inescapable: existence in Europe is becoming unlivable for Jews:
Returning from an intensive two-month trip throughout Europe, Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, former chief rabbi of Israel and a Holocaust survivor, declared Sunday that European Jewry has no future. "In the past months I've traveled to Austria, Britain, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands, and I'm telling you there is no future for European Jewry," said Lau...
European Jewish families he had met that they live in fear. "I've met parents who tell me that when they send their children to Bnei Akiva (a religious-Zionist youth movement) for evening activities they are in constant fear that something terrible will happen, G-d forbid, until they return. "Once Jews had no choice but to live with anti-Semitism. Now they do."... Anti-Semitic violence has spread to include the burning of synagogues, the desecration of graves, attacks against Jewish schools, and anti-Semitic propaganda spread via the Internet and on university campuses.
It is not Jews who are abandoning the world - it is the world that is forcing Jews out. And when the history of the end of the Diaspora is written, it will be the colleges and universities (places where Jews had always been able to trade ideas for sanctuary even in the darkest times) who will be held responsible.
