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Stephen Schecter's avatar

This is a very confusing article written by a very confused author. And I am being generous when I use the word confused, because the many lies presented as self-evident truths turn what on the face of it seems a denunciation of left-wing Jews' invocation of the Holocaust to justify their denunciation of Israel into a criticism of Israel, if not Judaism itself, from an equally tendentious perspective. One example: " At last year’s Academy Awards, director Jonathan Glazer invoked his own Jewishness and the memory of the Holocaust to condemn its cynical weaponization by Israel’s Right-wing government." Reading this sentence one would think the author agrees with the statement that Israel's government is best described as "Right-wing," and that being "Right-wing" with a capital R of course "its cynical weaponization of the Holocaust" is a fact not to be disputed. What the author does dispute is Jonathan Glazer's use of the Holocaust to denounce Israel.

Another example: "The playwright Tony Kushner put a finer point on it: “The history of the Holocaust, the history of Jewish suffering must not be used as an excuse (for Israel’s war in Gaza) Kushner said. “It is a misappropriation of, of what it means to be a Jew, what the Holocaust meant ... Who doesn’t agree with that?” And the author goes on to write: "But what exactly is being called upon when these people invoke their Jewishness? Or by “If Not Now” when they invoke their “Jewish values”? It’s hard to believe they are referring to religious values, which offer a confusing muddle of admirable precepts and ancient, reactionary theology."

To this I would say the first point to take issue with Kushner is that Jewish suffering, especially as exemplified in the Holocaust, is not used to justify Israel's war in Gaza. Palestinians' invasion of Israel and their wanton slaughter and rape of Israeli citizens, men, women and children, is the justification. Only progressives are quick to drag the Holocaust into the equation, though the author himself seems to think that many Israelis invoke the Holocaust in the sense of Never Again when thinking about the war In Gaza and understandably, if not rightly, so. Israel, until Trump arrived on the scene, had been abandoned by the West in the conduct of its war in Gaza, and the author would have done well to point that out. But in addition to that is the strange phrase of the author about Jewish religious values being nothing but a "confusing muddle of admirable precepts and ancient, reactionary theology." In fact, the Hebrew Bible is the template of western literature and the founding document of the Jewish people, with many a political lesson for Jews and the modern West.

And so we come to the nub of the article, which is to point out that "there are no good lessons to draw from the Holocaust." And the nub for the author being that he is free as a Jew to reflect on the fate of history which landed him in America, thus enabling him to be as progressive as he likes without any indebtedness to his Jewish ancestry, traumatic or prophetic. I must confess that I too think the Holocaust is not necessary for a Jew to identify with Israel and for any normal decent person to be on Israel's side when it comes to the war in Gaza. I also certainly do not think the Holocaust should enter into the logic of Jews who denounce Israel's conduct of the war in Gaza. I do think, however, that the trauma of the Holocaust is so deep for Jews they have not yet begun to plumb its depths, and this trauma shows up in the less than ruthless campaign the Jews in Israel have conducted with respect to their Palestinian enemies in Gaza, Judea and Samaria. That statement may surprise some readers, but any normal country would have decimated Hamas and the Palestinian Authority for their murder and duplicity long ago. That the author thinks that under other conditions he "too might be a traumatized Israeli invoking the Shoah to justify Israel’s actions in Gaza" is simply a phrase as trite as it is slanderous.

The author clearly thinks of himself as a progressive Jew and wants to be able to act thereon without having to bear and plumb the weight of Jewish history, Holocaust included. Bully for him. But he is wrong on Israel, wrong on the war in Gaza, and like so many people has no idea what to think about the Holocaust. Understandably on the latter point, for it is in so many ways unspeakable even when one has studied it. Perhaps one takeaway is that the Holocaust wrecked western civilization and we are living that wreckage, to which the stupid and insipid moralism directed Israel's way by the elites of western democracies testifies.

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Russell Gold's avatar

I'm having some trouble understanding what you mean when you speak of "... a traumatized Israeli invoking the Shoah to justify Israel’s actions in Gaza."

What actions in Gaza do you believe are vile and being justified by the memory of the Shoah?

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