What's wrong with this picture?

Nazi boycotts of Jewish businesses 1933

Well, nothing is wrong with the picture itself. It's real. It wasn't faked. It is a true artifact of 20th century European history. The poster on the shop window reads: "Germans beware. Don't buy from Jews".

What started as boycotts against Jewish shops and businesses eventually led to the gas chambers and incinerators of Auschwitz and Treblinka. All of this is irrefutable.

What's wrong is how this picture, and others taken at the same time in the early 1930's, are now being used to suppress free speech and non-violent protest and brand a movement for civil and political rights as racist and illegitimate.

It's an ironic and depressing state of affairs.

What we are seeing is a deliberate attempt to make a direct link between those that follow the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel and those that perpetrated the Holocaust.

[It] is poor deduction, sloppy history, and appalling ethics. It also looks desperate and hysterical.

Read the full post at Writing from the Edge my new blog at Patheos.

Auschwitz revisited

In the week we have been commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz I have been trying to understand why I am so weary and wary of the Holocaust. Despite the undoubted emotional pull of the survivors' testimonies, is there any lasting meaning be found in the ashes at Auschwitz? Should it even be looked for?

I didn't always feel this way.

We recently moved house and a few weeks ago my older son and I were unpacking boxes of books and finding new homes for them. I noticed just how much reading I had done on the subject of the Holocaust, mostly more than twenty years ago.

I had straight histories like 'The War Against the Jews' by Lucy Dawidowicz and 'Holocaust' by Martin Gilbert. I'd read 'Last Waltz in Vienna' by George Clare, Elie Wiesel's 'Night', 'Europa, Europa' by Solomon Perel and Primo Levi's 'If This is a Man', and 'The Drowned and the Saved'. There were Art Spiegelman's graphic novels 'Maus', where Nazis and Jews become cats and mice. Ghetto accounts such as 'A Cup of Tears' by Abraham Lewin and Marek Edelman's 'The Ghetto Fights'. I remembered being completely absorbed by Theo Richmond's detailed account of the destruction of one tiny shtetl village 'Konin'. I had the complete transcript of Claude Lanzmann's epic documentary Shoah. Hannah Arendt's account of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in the 1950s. And of course, Anne Frank's diary, the fully annotated critical edition.

My reading had been a search for meaning - historical, political and theological. I had been trying to make sense of something I knew was shaping my adult Jewish identity.

Last weekend I visited my 88 year old father and asked him to recall for me the visit he made to Auschwitz in the late 1960s while on a business trip to Poland. Perhaps his account could restore my faith in the possibility of finding a purpose in the week's commemorations beyond honouring the memory of the dead.

My father's visit to the death camp took place in a very different world from today. For the first two decades after the war the mood had been for moving on, for forgetting not remembering. The Holocaust was very far from being the defining event of the Second World War it has now become.

While he was on his trip, my father and three work colleagues found themselves with time on their hands when a public holiday was announced to coincide with a Soviet Russian State visit. Their local client, the factory manager of a smelt works in Katowice, suggested they visited Auschwitz, which he explained now ran as a museum.

Although my father was familiar with the name Auschwitz, he told me his knowledge of the how the Nazi's had implemented their killing was vague and sketchy at the time of his visit to Poland. Two of his colleagues had served in the army during the war but their understanding was even less than my father's. So the four British businessmen hired a driver and set off for the day with little or no expectation of what they were about to see.

They reached Auschwitz less than an hour after leaving Katowice and found the camp/museum almost deserted despite the public holiday. In fact, my father and his colleagues seemed to be the only visitors there and were rewarded with a personal tour by one of the senior officials.

They were taken to long wooden huts sectioned off into large glass fronted display cases. Inside the first display were bails of material that my father could not identify. "What is this?" He asked. "Human hair" came the reply, "shaved from the heads of those about to be exterminated." Nothing went to waste, it was explained, "The hair could be weaved into cloth and used for insulation". Next came a display of walking sticks and crutches neatly stacked in huge piles. Then shoes, all sizes, suitcases still with name and home address labels attached, spectacles and false teeth. Apparently, it all had revenue potential for the Third Reich.

After three hours of the tour my father was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the attitude of their guide. "He was more interested in the Nazis' attention to detail, administrative diligence and mechanical ingenuity than in the morality of what had taken place there." Finally, they were taken to see the furnaces that burned day and night, fueled by human corpses.

But what had been new and revelatory to my father nearly fifty years ago has become burdensome and problematic to me. When I look at all the books on my shelves relating to just 12 years out of three thousand years of Jewish history, I have no desire to revisit them or even flick through the pages.

As a student I had thought there were lessons to be learnt and meaning to be divined from what had happened. But now it feels as if the event has been used, abused and politicised, and, from a moral perspective, largely ignored.

As time has passed I have become increasingly pessimistic about our ability to take something meaningful and positive from the horror that is now summed up by the single word 'Auschwitz'.

Some, especially the remaining survivors, see denial and forgetfulness of the Holocaust as the biggest concern we should have. But I think these are the least of our Holocaust problems.

Holocaust denial will remain a fringe issue. The documentation is secure in its veracity and overwhelming in its volume. If anything, today's school children are in danger of thinking that Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin went to war against Hitler because of what was happening to the Jews.

And we have become very good at remembering. We do it with great care and respect and afford enormous dignity to the survivors and their testimonies. This week's marking of the Russian army's liberation of Auschwitz proved this once again. So, we remember with no difficulty. It's acting on the remembrance that defeats us.

Since the end of the Second World War we have had Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. All of which suggest that despite the creation of so much international law on human rights and genocide, humankind has not progressed an iota as a result of Auschwitz.

I can now see that my own long-term reaction to the Holocaust has led me not to focus on anti-Semitism and Jewish security (although neither can be ignored) but on the values and teaching that I see as central to Judaism. Justice, Compassion, Humility, individual and collective Responsibility. These are not new lessons but very old ones. As a Jew, I choose to apply these to our relationship with the Palestinian people because this is the issue on which we must judge ourselves. In the 21st century this is 'the Jewish question'.

While a growing number of Jews both in Israel and around the world share this perspective, it is still a minority opinion.

When it comes to the Palestinian people, the Holocaust has hardened our hearts and closed our minds. The scale of our own suffering has made us blind to their suffering - which we see as all of their own making.

Perhaps this was inevitable. Why should a people abused and broken become saints? The opposite result is more often the outcome. I am asking for too much. Expecting something that no group is capable of.

And so I have become both weary and wary of trying to take meaning or lessons from the Holocaust. Yes we must continue to teach it as an appalling stain on humanity. And an exercise in empathy is never wasted. But we must not expect it to unlock the human heart.

Maybe all we have are the stories of bureaucratised murder, random survival, and unexpected acts of kindness that Primo Levi called 'Moments of Reprieve'.

My father and his colleagues had planned to eat a meal together that night back at the hotel in Katowice. But after the visit nobody was hungry.

On the return journey my father asked their driver if he had known about the camp during the war. "Oh, yes", he replied. "We knew something was happening. We could smell it." My father asked him whether anyone at the time felt they could do anything about it? The driver replied "Yes, we would wind up the windows tight, so we couldn't smell the stink".

See also: A Letter to Anne Frank

Yom Ha Shoah, Ahmadinejad and why we need to break the Holocaust narrative

After publishing Letter to Anne Frank in January, I hadn't planned to say anymore about the Holocaust this year. But I feel compelled to return to the subject now as we reach the Jewish day of Holocaust remembrance, Yom Ha' Shoah, on April 19th.

So why come back to the Holocaust so soon?

In a word: Iran

Listening in March to Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to AIPAC (America's mighty pro-Israel lobby) and then reading the commentators who have supported his position since (try Melanie Phillips from the UK's Daily Mail), has demonstrated to me, once again, just how easily the Holocaust is recruited into the propaganda campaign to justify Israeli actions, in this case, airstrikes on Iran.

For Netanyahu, Iran is the new Nazi Germany, Ahmadinejad the new Hitler, and his nuclear programme is an underground Auschwitz in the making. This analogy displays not only a wilfully ignorant presentation of Middle East politics but a poor grasp of European history too. No matter though. For what it does do, is allow Netanyahu to accuse the world (and in particular Barack Obama) of abandoning the Jews to a terrible fate once again. No doubt this week will provide more such opportunities.

Netanyahu builds up his stockpile of radioactive moral blackmail hoping to ensure America will back Israeli airstrikes. And if you still feel uncomfortable about Ahmadinejad's calls to 'wipe Israel off the map' you may like to read this piece from the Washington Post's 'Fact Checker' which puts the whole thing into a less hysterical perspective. All of this beating of war drums, as I've said before, keeps the Palestinians well off the international radar while maintaining the fiction of Israel facing an existential threat that trumps all other moral issues.

For a rounded assessment of the human and environmental impact of dropping bunker bombs (containing depleted uranium) on Iran's nuclear facilities, take a look at Marsha B. Cohen's article at Lobelog. Thanks to Jerry Haber at the Magnes Zionist for drawing my attention to this piece.

History should certainly inform our understanding of contemporary events but Netanyahu's (and others) misuse of the memory of the Holocaust for political advantage has become so acceptable that most people don't even realise it's going on.

So what has happened to our understanding of the Holocaust and how can we counter what has become such a narrow and partial understanding of its meaning in Jewish and world history?

Catastrophe and Redemption

The truth is, the rhetoric of Israeli politics has become so entangled in the Nazi genocide that it's become all but impossible to untie the knots of ethical misappropriation. We have become locked in a narrative of catastrophe and redemption that is now being used to justify immoral actions.

Rather than a profound lesson on the values and behaviour of Western civilisation in the mid 20th century, the Holocaust has become an exclusively Jewish piece of property, an emblem of unique Jewish suffering, our symbol of eternal victimhood. The State of Israel is presented as our justified salvation and the necessary state apparatus to prevent a second Holocaust occurring.

This paradigm of Holocaust understanding is closely guarded by the Jewish establishment and any attempt to break through it is quickly repelled with accusations of anti-Semitism or even Holocaust denial.

After the Holocaust, many Jews in the diaspora see Israel as an essential personal and collective 'insurance policy'. It needs to exist in case 'things turn bad again'. Israel is the Jewish life-raft. But Netanyahu's Iranian rhetoric turns this idea on its head. The life-raft itself is now presented as the target of a new Holocaust. If you accept this thinking then, for a Jew, the most dangerous place on earth to live is now Tel Aviv. If this is the case, then one of the great dreams of Zionism - to normalise the condition of the Jews - has become a nightmare.

Alternative voices

Marek Edelman, Warsaw Ghetto fighter

One of the most-read posts on Micah's Paradigm Shift in the last year has been Lost Jewish Voices (part two) in which I gathered together some pre-1948 Jewish thinkers whose views on Zionism are now considered far beyond the Jewish pale. My aim was to demonstrate the plurality of Jewish opinion that flourished in the first half of the 20th century, in the hope that these views (rooted in Jewish ethical thinking) could be rediscovered by a new generation.

In this blog-post I'd like to do something similar with the Holocaust. Below I've brought together opinions that go against the mainstream Jewish/Zionist narrative on the meaning of the Holocaust, the lessons that should be learnt and how it should guide our understanding of current events.

The life and actions of Marek Edelman, one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, challenges several commonly held views about the nature and meaning of the Holocaust.

Rather inconveniently for the Zionist reading of history, Edelman was a Bundist, a Jewish socialist who refused to accept the notion that the Jewish people had no future in Europe. To the Bundists, the Zionist were prepared to abandon the battlefield of racism to the enemy instead of staying and working for a society of respect and tolerance for minorities.

Edelman did not see the Warsaw Ghetto uprising as a step on the road to necessary Jewish empowerment. After the war in stayed in Poland, became a well-respected heart specialist, campaigned against the Soviet backed communist government and in the 1980s became an activist in Solidarity, the independent trade union opposition. You can read more about Edelman in this obituary from the UK's Daily Telegraph in 2009.

Here's what Edelman said about the meaning of the uprising and the accusation that Jews went passively to their deaths. Behaviour, argued the Zionists, that would never be repeated by the Jewish State:

"We knew perfectly well that we had no chance of winning," Edelman recalled. "We fought simply not to allow the Germans alone to pick the time and place of our deaths. We knew we were going to die. Just like all the others who were sent to Treblinka." Edelman believed that far from going passively, those who went to Treblinka had shown the ultimate courage. "Their death was far more heroic. We didn't know when we would take a bullet. They had to deal with certain death, stripped naked in a gas chamber or standing at the edge of a mass grave waiting for a bullet in the back of the head. It is an awesome thing, when one is going so quietly to one's death. It was easier to die fighting than in a gas chamber."

Another familiar accusation that Israeli leaders, Binyamin Netanyahu in particular, like to present is that the world stood idly by while the Jewish people were systematically destroyed. It all adds to the myth of an eternally persecuted people who are now owed special privileges by those who 'abandoned' them. The Israeli novelist and commentator Shulamith Hareven counters this view in her 1986 essay 'Identity: Victim':

"During the Second World War, not only did the world not remain silent, it lost more than sixty million men fighting Hitler. True they were not fighting because of us, and certainly they would not have offered aid for our sake only. They were fighting against fascism in general...but the loss of more than sixty million men in war does not exactly mean that the world sat by with it's arms crossed...sixty million families suffered losses, and those of us who survived, including the small number of us then inhabiting Israel, survived because of them."

Another important observation from Hareven is how children, Jewish and non-Jewish, grow up today knowing only one thing about the the history of the Jews in Europe - and that's the Holocaust. It's as if two thousand years of Jewish history count for nothing apart from an endless catalogue of persecution culminating in genocide. The development of rabbinic Judaism, the rich cultural achievements of European Jewry in literature and science, the massive contribution to Western civilisation, it all gets forgotten. It's as if the story of the Jews in Europe is nothing but an unfortunate aberration, a deviation, an interruption, from the story of Jewish statehood. In fact, we are what we are today because of the experience of living outside of the Land of Israel. Harevan sees the moral danger of this partial view of Jewish history:

"If I and only I occupy the throne of the victim, then no stranger can occupy it....under no circumstances are we to forget our tragedies. But whoever bases our identity on them and them alone, distorts the greatness of this people."

Poet, feminist and political activist, Irena Klepfisz' father fought alongside Marek Edelman in Warsaw, but was killed on the first day of the uprising. In an essay written in 1989, she asks if the horror inflicted on the Jews has numbed our ability to measure right and wrong:

"As long as hundreds of Palestinians are not being lined up and shot, but are killed by Israelis only one a day, are we Jews free from worrying about morality, justice? Has Nazism become the sole norm by which Jews judge evil, so that anything that is not it's exact duplicate is considered by us morally acceptable? Is that what the Holocaust has done to Jewish moral sensibility?"

Avraham Burg is a former Speaker of the Israeli Knesset and now an out-spoken critic of Israel. His 2008 book 'The Holocaust is over. We must rise from its ashes' was in part an examination of the Israeli national psyche. Like Hareven and Klepfisz, he identifies how Holocaust understanding has limited our ability to relate to the pain of other genocides and shrunken our moral imagination:

"Never again? We have made 'never again' possible for ourselves. What about never again for others? Never again? On the contrary, it happens again and again, because of indifference. This apathy to their fate was made possible primarily by the operating system that was installed in me at birth: The Holocaust is ours,and all other killings in the world are common evils, not holocausts. Well, if it is not a holocaust then it is none of my business. Therefore I am not responsible. Therefore I do not have to cry out in protest. The lives of many thousands, perhaps millions, could be saved if the State of Israel, and the Jewish people, myself included, had stood at the head of the international struggle against hatred and the annihilation of any people anywhere, regardless of colour gender, creed origins, or residence. We did not stand at the head of this struggle. And the swords are still drawn."

David Grossman has been described by Jacqueline Rose as almost a 'non-Zionist Zionist', he's certainly one of Israel's outstanding 'critical friends' and an internationally respected novelist. Here, writing in 2003, he wants to emphasise the universal aspects of the Nazi years:

"I don't belong to those who believe, that the Holocaust was a specifically Jewish event. As I see it, all civilised, fair minded persons must ask themselves serious questions about the Holocaust. These are not Jewish questions. They are universal questions."

I hope these quotes illustrate how the dominant Holocaust narrative should be radically challenged to create an outward looking, inclusive response to the horrors we have experienced.

In the meantime, we face the prospect of thousands of Iranians being killed, generations to come affected by a uranium polluted atmosphere, a destabilised Middle East, a stalled Arab Spring, a world economic recovery reversed, and an upsurge in militant Islamist terrorism. And all this in the name of an unsubstantiated threat that relies for its moral underpinning on the misuse of Holocaust memory.

Let me conclude with words from the UK's Reform Judaism prayer for Yom Ha Shoah. This prayer recalls not only the six million who perished but also the many non-Jews who had the courage to stand outside the mob and suffer with us. These words sum up for me what ought to be the lessons of the Holocaust for all humanity:

"May such times never come again, and may their sacrifice not be in vain. In our daily fight against cruelty and prejudice, against tyranny and persecution, their memory gives us strength and leads us on."

P.S. Please note the new descriptor for Micah's Paradigm Shift: Israel-Palestine from a UK Jewish perspective. Rescuing the Hebrew covenant one blog post at a time.

A Letter to Anne Frank

To mark Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK, January 27th 2012

Anne Frank 1929-1945

"In the long run, the sharpest weapon of all is a kind and gentle spirit." - Anne Frank

Dear Anne,

What would you make of it all?

What would you think of what has become of the world? What would you feel about how we still behave? Would you be surprised at what has happened to the Jewish people since your death and how the Jewish story is unfolding in the 21st century? Would you be shocked at how we have misused the memory of the Holocaust? Would you be dismayed at the mess we have made of your legacy?

What words would you be writing in your diary today, Anne Frank? What would you hope for and dream of?

It was supposed to be the genocide to end all genocides. The final warning of the monumental power of hatred. But then there was Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia. And now Darfur. And all that we have learnt is that we will never learn. Each generation must discover that there is no victory over hatred, only reprieves and endless vigilance.

I, and many others, (most notably Professor Marc Ellis), have asked, what should it mean to be a Jew after Auschwitz, after Belsen, after Treblinka? What should it mean to be a Jew after Anne Frank?

Anne, you have become the representative of the one and a half million Jewish children murdered by Hitler and the Nazis during their war against the Jewish people. We cannot comprehend all of those lost lives but we can treasure yours. As you said once in your diary: "I wish to go on living after my death." That's what I would like for you too. Your faith in humanity and your belief that goodness can triumph in the most harsh of times, is a message we must hold onto tightly.

But what happens when your death, and all of those you have come to represent, becomes abused by your own people and used to justify the blotting out of another people, their identity, their history and their heritage?

What have we done to your memory, Anne, when we choose to label every critic of Israel as anti-Semitic and every Palestinian a modern-day Nazi? What happens to the meaning of your life when we choose to see ourselves as endless victims, endlessly threatened?

The truth is that after 70 years the Jewish people are still suffering from a terrible trauma. It is a trauma that has skewed our collective thinking and our sense of identity. A trauma that has sent our moral compass into spasm. In Israel, and throughout Diaspora Jewry, the Holocaust has been used to explain and justify every aggression, every Palestinian family dispossessed, every piece of land stolen, every house bulldozed, as necessary acts of security to prevent a second Holocaust.

As the Israeli commentator Boaz Evron wrote in 1980:

"Two terrible things happened to the Jewish people in this century: the Holocaust and the lessons learned from it."

 

We have lifted the Holocaust out of history. We have given it metaphysical significance, claiming it a horror like no other, an evil beyond comparison. To mention any other atrocity in the same breath is treated as a heresy. I hope you would agree, Anne, that this is dangerous nonsense. The scale of the Holocaust is unique and its mechanised methods of murder are yet to be repeated, but the mindset and the suffering were nothing new and have been repeated many times since.

Zionism took the Holocaust as the ultimate vindication of its theory of Jewish history. Jews had no future in Europe, they were outsiders who would never be totally accepted and only a Jewish state of our own could bring us normalcy and safety. But in the 21st century what looks more abnormal and anachronistic than an 'ethno-cratic' Jewish state that by its very nature must favour one group of citizens over another.

With tragic irony, we have created for ourselves an ever more strident nationalism based on beliefs of ethnic, religious and cultural superiority. We have recreated in our ancestral homeland the very factors that caused our persecution in Europe and yet we describe it as a miraculous rebirth.

Anne, there are two women I would like to introduce you to. Both have helped me to understand how we as Jews can think about the Holocaust and how it should inform our lives.

Sara Roy is the daughter of Holocaust survivors and has spent more than 25 years studying the effects of the 40 year Israeli occupation and now economic siege of the Gaza Strip. Her father was one of only two known survivors from the death camp at Chelmno, he also survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and gave evidence at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961. Her parents' experience profoundly influenced her commitment to study in-depth the on-going disintegration of the society and economy of Gaza. Here she explains why her mother chose not to live in Israel after the war:

"Her decision not live in Israel was based on a belief, learned and reinforced by her experiences during the war, that tolerance, compassion and justice cannot be practised nor extended when one lives only among one's own...[Roy quotes her mother]...'I wanted to live as a Jew in a pluralist society, where my group remained important to me, but where others were important to me too.'"

Sara goes on to say:

"The lessons of the Holocaust were always presented to me as both particular (that is Jewish) and universal. Perhaps most importantly they were presented as indivisible. To divide them would be to diminish them both."

Irena Klepfisz escaped with her mother from the Warsaw ghetto as a small child. Her father was killed soon after the start of the ghetto's Jewish resistance uprising. She grew up to be a poet and feminist in America. Irena believes that the way to pay tribute to those who struggled, resisted and died in the Jewish uprising in Warsaw is to hold on to their vision and their fierce outrage at the destruction of the ordinary life of their people. Here's what Irena says:

"...the hysteria of a mother grieving for the teenager who has been shot; a family stunned in front of a vandalised or demolished home; a family separated, displaced; arbitrary and unjust laws that demand the closing or opening of schools; humiliation of a people whose culture is deemed inferior; a people left homeless without citizenship; a people living under military rule. Because of our experience we recognise these evils as obstacles to peace."

Irena has recognised the cruel trick that the Holocaust has played on Jewish moral sensibility:

"Has Nazism become the sole norm by which Jews judge evil, so that anything that is not its exact duplicate is considered by us morally acceptable?"

These are the Jewish voices of conscience that we must open our hearts to as well as our ears. They are also the voices that are daily drowned out by a noisy arrogance and chauvinism that prefers might to right, Jewish power to Jewish ethics.

Anne, today we need your simple good faith in human nature like never before. We need you to live on after your death just as you wished to.

Do you remember writing these beautiful words?

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."

Anne,

May your bright spirit be remembered.
May your hopes live on through others.
May your learning be our learning.

Yours in search of justice, kindness and humility.

Robert A.H. Cohen
Micah's Paradigm Shift



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Dear Readers

If this letter has touched a chord with your thinking, then please read the work of Professor Marc H. Ellis and sign the petition campaigning to protect his academic post at Baylor University in the United States.

The quotes from Sara Roy can be found in her book 'Failing Peace'
The quotes from Irena Klepfisz can be found in her book 'Dreams of an Insomniac'