They Did It Because They Hate Jews
Yom Hashoah is most properly a time for defiance:
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon vowed Wednesday night at the start of Holocaust Remembrance Day that the Jewish people will never be caught unprepared again in the face of death and destruction.
"Jews will never again be without a home, without a safe refuge, without protection," Sharon said at the annual state ceremony at Jerusalem's Yad Vashem. "Never again we will find ourselves unprepared. Never again."
It is the ony Jewish memorial day that doesn't involve fasting precisely because its purpose is not to remind Jews of the role that their own sins play in their ruin - it is the blind sins of other nations that turn out to be the most dangerous. Every nation of any significance, and many that have none at all, has at one point or another fallen somewhere between silent aquiesence or open abetting when people organize to murder Jews.
It is neither a rational dislike for the practices of Judaism, nor is it any kind of intellectualized anti-Semitism, that lies at the root of anti-Jewish hatred. The tired observation that Japan has no Jews but that the Japanese are viciously anti-Semitic bears repeating. Visceral loathing, the desire for scapegoating, the need to blame personal failures - all of these play a part, in different proportions for different people, in spurring the oldest hate. People don’t hold hate Jews because they believe anti-Semitic myths. They believe anti-Semitic myths because they hate Jews.
And yet, an air of suffocating, feel-good political correctness surrounds modern efforts to combat anti-Semitism. Since at least the 1970s, organizations dedicated to fighting anti-Jewish hatred have focused on education and inter-faith dialogue - as if just telling people that Jews don't control global banking can debunk conpiracy theories born of the confusion and fear of an increasingly complicated world. The glaring exceptiosn to the politics of patronizing, arms-length tolerance have been Holocaust memorials - places that, given their manifest purpose, had to focus on the uniqueness of the Jewish experience. Even that's changed:
Holocaust museums and memorials have shifted the nature of remembrance, moving away from the emphasis on testimony and defiance toward the teaching of tolerance and understanding, according to several Holocaust experts... Newer memorials, such as the US Holocaust Museum in Washington, which opened in 1993, often make a self-conscious attempt to universalize messages in an attempt to make them accessible to more people... Broadening the message of the Holocaust in memorials to include the persecution of gays and lesbians during World War II or including other genocides...
The Holocaust memorials of this period, from the 1980s to the mid-90s, therefore, had a specific message, according to Berenbaum: "The whole world is against us, powerlessness invites victimization and thus the Jewish people must rely upon themselves and only themselves and assume adequate power to preserve themselves in the contemporary world."
The results are predictable:
A survey by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) reveals that only one third of Americans know than six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Respondents in Europe who knew the number of those killed varied from 30 per cent in Poland to 55 per cent in Sweden... Only 11 per cent of Americans and nine per cent of British acknowledged that anti-Semitism is a serious problem.
They don't think anti-Semitism is a problem because for over a decade, the very institutions dedicated to showing the consequences of anti-Semitism have been telling them that the Holocaust "didn't just target Jews," it targeted all people who were "morally inferior" or all people the Nazis thought were "unfit". Holcaust memorials have ceased to be places where people are reminded that for 10 years, the civilized world consumated millenia-old hatreds in the form of systematic extermination. Now they're meant to educate the public of the importance of tolerance towards all, whether it be religious, nationality, race, sex or creed. The problem is that anti-Semitism is a unique form of hatred - unique historically in origin and propogation and singularly horrifying in consequence. It can't be universalized and it certainly shouldn't be used to instill banal object-lessons about the degradation of Jim Crow laws.
Nonetheless, there's a subtle political purpose behind the universalization of the Holocaust. If one walks away from a Holocaust memorial struck by the inevitable persistence and ferociousness of anti-Semitism, then one will be inclined to agree that Jews must have the ability to defend themselves because the rest of the world won't. If one walks away from a Holocaust memorial sighing heavily about the ubiquity of prejudice, then one will be able to dismiss the experience by mouthing homilies about interfaith dialogue. It's tempting enough take away the latter without Holocaust museums telling you to do so.
Part of the horror of the Holocaust is its utter emptiness. Six million men, women, and children were shot, gassed, and burned to death not for any purpose, but simply because they were Jewish. Nothing compares to it - not civil wars that become genocidal, not agrarian societies built on slavery, not terrorist acts meant to affect political decision-making. It was not undergirded by an ideology, it was done in fulfillment of an ideology. It's an ideology that can't be educated or shamed, let alone wished, away. It can only be physically fought to a standstill, and even then only temporarily. That's the lesson of the Holocaust, and that's the lesson that the people charged with preserving the memory of the six million are increasingly loath to disclose.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon vowed Wednesday night at the start of Holocaust Remembrance Day that the Jewish people will never be caught unprepared again in the face of death and destruction.
"Jews will never again be without a home, without a safe refuge, without protection," Sharon said at the annual state ceremony at Jerusalem's Yad Vashem. "Never again we will find ourselves unprepared. Never again."
It is the ony Jewish memorial day that doesn't involve fasting precisely because its purpose is not to remind Jews of the role that their own sins play in their ruin - it is the blind sins of other nations that turn out to be the most dangerous. Every nation of any significance, and many that have none at all, has at one point or another fallen somewhere between silent aquiesence or open abetting when people organize to murder Jews.
It is neither a rational dislike for the practices of Judaism, nor is it any kind of intellectualized anti-Semitism, that lies at the root of anti-Jewish hatred. The tired observation that Japan has no Jews but that the Japanese are viciously anti-Semitic bears repeating. Visceral loathing, the desire for scapegoating, the need to blame personal failures - all of these play a part, in different proportions for different people, in spurring the oldest hate. People don’t hold hate Jews because they believe anti-Semitic myths. They believe anti-Semitic myths because they hate Jews.
And yet, an air of suffocating, feel-good political correctness surrounds modern efforts to combat anti-Semitism. Since at least the 1970s, organizations dedicated to fighting anti-Jewish hatred have focused on education and inter-faith dialogue - as if just telling people that Jews don't control global banking can debunk conpiracy theories born of the confusion and fear of an increasingly complicated world. The glaring exceptiosn to the politics of patronizing, arms-length tolerance have been Holocaust memorials - places that, given their manifest purpose, had to focus on the uniqueness of the Jewish experience. Even that's changed:
Holocaust museums and memorials have shifted the nature of remembrance, moving away from the emphasis on testimony and defiance toward the teaching of tolerance and understanding, according to several Holocaust experts... Newer memorials, such as the US Holocaust Museum in Washington, which opened in 1993, often make a self-conscious attempt to universalize messages in an attempt to make them accessible to more people... Broadening the message of the Holocaust in memorials to include the persecution of gays and lesbians during World War II or including other genocides...
The Holocaust memorials of this period, from the 1980s to the mid-90s, therefore, had a specific message, according to Berenbaum: "The whole world is against us, powerlessness invites victimization and thus the Jewish people must rely upon themselves and only themselves and assume adequate power to preserve themselves in the contemporary world."
The results are predictable:
A survey by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) reveals that only one third of Americans know than six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Respondents in Europe who knew the number of those killed varied from 30 per cent in Poland to 55 per cent in Sweden... Only 11 per cent of Americans and nine per cent of British acknowledged that anti-Semitism is a serious problem.
They don't think anti-Semitism is a problem because for over a decade, the very institutions dedicated to showing the consequences of anti-Semitism have been telling them that the Holocaust "didn't just target Jews," it targeted all people who were "morally inferior" or all people the Nazis thought were "unfit". Holcaust memorials have ceased to be places where people are reminded that for 10 years, the civilized world consumated millenia-old hatreds in the form of systematic extermination. Now they're meant to educate the public of the importance of tolerance towards all, whether it be religious, nationality, race, sex or creed. The problem is that anti-Semitism is a unique form of hatred - unique historically in origin and propogation and singularly horrifying in consequence. It can't be universalized and it certainly shouldn't be used to instill banal object-lessons about the degradation of Jim Crow laws.
Nonetheless, there's a subtle political purpose behind the universalization of the Holocaust. If one walks away from a Holocaust memorial struck by the inevitable persistence and ferociousness of anti-Semitism, then one will be inclined to agree that Jews must have the ability to defend themselves because the rest of the world won't. If one walks away from a Holocaust memorial sighing heavily about the ubiquity of prejudice, then one will be able to dismiss the experience by mouthing homilies about interfaith dialogue. It's tempting enough take away the latter without Holocaust museums telling you to do so.
Part of the horror of the Holocaust is its utter emptiness. Six million men, women, and children were shot, gassed, and burned to death not for any purpose, but simply because they were Jewish. Nothing compares to it - not civil wars that become genocidal, not agrarian societies built on slavery, not terrorist acts meant to affect political decision-making. It was not undergirded by an ideology, it was done in fulfillment of an ideology. It's an ideology that can't be educated or shamed, let alone wished, away. It can only be physically fought to a standstill, and even then only temporarily. That's the lesson of the Holocaust, and that's the lesson that the people charged with preserving the memory of the six million are increasingly loath to disclose.
