It is with great sadness that I learned, a few days ago, of the death of the great modernist Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever ז”ל. Sutzkever’s immense talent as writer was matched only by his heroism as a freedom fighter. During WWII, Sutzkever fought as a partisan and famously saved Yiddish documents in Vilna from destruction at the hands of the Nazis, who killed both his mother and his son. After the war, Sutzkever immigrated to Israel, where he became editor of the Israeli Yiddish literary quarterly Di Goldene Keyt.
Sutzkever has never received his proper due among literary audiences, especially Jewish American readers, and if you have never read anything by him, I commend his understated but intensely powerful writing to your attention (yes, go ahead; buy two copies: one for you and one for the Yiddish lover in your life). Here is a poem he penned in 1948, entitled Yiddish:
Shall I start from the beginning?
Shall I, a brother,
Like Abraham
Smash all the idols?
Shall I let myself be translated alive?
Shall I plant my tongue
And wait
Till it transforms
Into our forefathers’
Raisins and almonds?
What kind of joke
Preaches
My poetry brother with whiskers,
That soon, my mother tongue will set forever?
A hundred years from now, we still may sit here
On the Jordan, and carry on this argument.
For a question
Gnaws and paws at me:
If he knows exactly in what regions
Levi Yitzhok’s prayer,
Yehoash’s poem,
Kulbak’s song,
Are straying
To their sunset —
Could he please show me
Where the language will go down?
May be at the Wailing Wall?
If so, I shall come there, come,
Open my mouth,
And like a lion
Garbed in fiery scarlet,
I shall swallow the language as it sets.
And wake all the generations with my roar!
One of the last members of the Auschwitz women’s orchestra has got a new crew: Esther Bejarano is now dropping beats with the Cologne-based rap group Microphone Mafia.
Basically, there’s a guy, R’ Youlus, whose shtick is rescuing sifrei Torah from Nazi-stricken Europe – removing them, restoring them to usable condition, and rehousing them in America. (As someone with a personal interest in resurgent European Jewry I have my reservations regarding the idea that the appropriate way to “rescue” a sefer Torah is to remove it to America, mind you.) Jolly good. He’s been doing this for some years. A generally laudable project.
This article suggests that perhaps all is not quite as it should be in the realm of R’ Youlus’ sifrei Torah, that these are no more genuine Holocaust-surviving continental sifrei Torah than they are splinters of the True Cross.
In particular, certain highly-coloured, heart-wrenching tales of dramatic Torah-scroll rescues don’t appear to stand up so well to close examination.
There was a legend of a Torah scroll that had been hidden under the floorboards at Bergen-Belsen…[R' Youlus] came to Bergen-Belsen on a tour and literally fell into a hole in the corner of the floorboards, felt something strange, suspected that this might be where it was. It was dug up. Indeed it was the Torah, fully there. After some negotiations, Rabbi Youlus was able to purchase the Torah…
But Youlus’s discovery at Bergen-Belsen comes as news to the historian at the camp museum. “I can definitely exclude that there could have been a find of the Torah scroll on the grounds of the Bergen-Belsen Memorial” in recent years, writes Thomas Rahe.
That sort of thing. Well, you can read the article yourselves and see what you think. Wouldn’t be the first time a pious-looking person has fleeced people by selling fake relics.
By now you’ve probably heard the news: the sign over the gate at Auschwitz, the infamous “arbeit macht frei” — “work sets you free,” was stolen this morning, sometime before dawn.
What would someone do with this? Where would they hide it? Is there really a black market for stolen iron gates from Auschwitz?
When people die we often add Zichrono Livracha after their names–may their memory be blessed/for a blessing. This speaks to the way that people impact the arc of history even after they themselves are no more. What lessons do those living learn from those who have departed? If we think about the beautiful lessons to learn from other lives lived and act upon them, those memories are for a blessing.
Most of us are aware by now of the heinous attack on a mosque in the West Bank. Many leaders have expressed sympathy and empathy. Ari Hart noted such a visit earlier today. The one that struck me the most was of the Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi of Israel, who said:
“I came here to expression [sic] my revulsion at this wretched act of burning a place holy to the Muslim people.” Agence France-Presse reported that that he drew an explicit comparison to Kristallnacht, the November 1938 attacks on Jewish synagogues and businesses in Nazi Germany. “Seventy years ago,” Rabbi Metzger said, “the Holocaust, the biggest tragedy of our history, began with the torchings of synagogues during Kristallnacht.”
Much of my family is from Germany. They lived there for many hundred years. Their shul, like many others, in Augsburg was defaced (destroyed, I think) on Kristallnacht. Every time Kristallnacht is invoked to critique terror, xenophobia, other-ing, and narrow-mindedness, the memory of my family’s synagogue in Southern Germany is for a blessing. The memory of siddurim and volumes of Talmud being hurled into the street and burned, as windows were broken and lives shattered, is a traumatic one. Though that memory still burns, it is for a blessing when used to fight the surviving racism today, the very sort that led to that terrible night 71 years ago.
As Chanukkah candles burn and we think of brightening a dark world and a dark time, I hope the memory of the fires that burnt those prayer books help guide us to a more beautiful brighter future.
Recently, the Rabbinic Assembly, the organisation that represents Conservative rabbis, issued a statement, signed by 300 members, asking that Nazi rhetoric not be used in political discussions. The JTA reported they included examples such as “Southern Baptist Convention leader, the Rev. Dr. Richard Land, calling health care reform proposals ‘what the Nazis did’ and U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) referring to the current health care system as a ‘holocaust in America’.”
Bernie Faber, CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress, wrote an opinion piece for the Toronto Sun decrying the use of Hitler/Nazi comparisons in politics as well, including examples of its use in the US and Canada.
And we all know the principle behind Godwin’s law: “As an [Internet] discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” Overuse of Nazi/Holocaust comparisons lessens the impact of valid comparisons.
But apparently the message wasn’t heard by B’nai Brith Canada. Their mission is, in part, to fight antisemitism, racism, and bigotry. Except, it seems, when it comes to evoking the Holocaust as justification for slamming Muslims. On November 9th, Kristallnacht, they ran a full-page ad in the National Post, one of Canada’s two national newspapers, equating radical Islam with the Nazi movement that led to the Holocaust. Unsurprisingly, it upset many people, including Holocaust survivors and groups that work to create bridges between Jews and Muslims.
Bnai Brith has said that despite the outcries, the ad was a success as it alerted people to the real threats of Islam, Iran, and a “future holocaust.” The ad can be seen in full online here. In case you don’t want to look at the ugliness (not just its message, it’s also hard on the eyes), it was summarized by the JTA:
Headlined “The Unholy Alliance,” the ad … noted the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the widespread pogroms in Germany on the night on Nov. 8-9, 1938. It showed a photograph of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem meeting with Adolf Hitler, and noted the “common objectives of Nazism and radical Islam: Killing Canadian men and women on the battlefield, incitement of children through schools and media, annihilation of world Jewry, and subjugation of every one else, [and] world domination.”
And, yes, that’s right, this was all done in hopes of soliciting donations. Bnai Brith claims that negative reactions to the ad were greatly outnumbered by positive reactions, so they feel it was worthwhile.
I agree with Now Toronto columnist Susan G. Cole’s outrage, so let’s leave it with that:
It features a photo of Adoph Hitler and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, as if it was only Islamic leaders who were complicit while the Nazis herded Jews into the gas chambers. History tells us the Catholic Pope sat back quietly, knowing exactly what was going on. And didn’t every single western democracy refuse to take Jews into their countries when it was obvious they were in grave danger? So why single out the Mufti?
The ad is misleading, inflammatory and, worse, reflects terribly on the Jewish community. So let it be known that there are many Jewish people, including myself, horrified by the ad.
On one side, there’s Facebook’s stance that unless groups directly advocate violence, asking Facebook to take down groups/individuals for Holocaust denial is a misunderstanding of its role. Their employees came out greatly on their company’s side, including Jewish ones. For example, employee Dave Willner very rightly explains that their company should not have “an official version of the world” against which to test hate statements. You can rightfully argue differently, although I agree such policing is the wrong road to go down.
On the other side is the nauseating activism of the JIDF and chief activist David Appletree, whose views are not separable from each other and were most easily summarized in an interview here. Regarding Obama: “We hope to continue to highlight the issues surrounding his terrorist connections…” On Islam: “99.9% of Muslims hate us…” On the conflict: “Palestinians should be transferred out of Israeli territories…”
Appletree’s ostensible goals for JIDF may be laudable (ending anti-Semitism online) but it’s used as a platform from which to spread reciprocal defamation. Islamophobes and Arab haters made poor representatives of the Jewish people for starters. But it’s particularly painful when it’s someone who’s advocating Arab transfer, selectively upholding self-determination, and makes insulting generalized claims about any people. My personal communiques with Appletree, presumably the admin behind JIDF’s Twitter profile, repeat those views.
Then there’s his misleading campaigns to Facebook advertisers that they’re “supporting” Holocaust denial. The JIDF web site manipulates the facts into an action alert targeted at 50 advertisers demanding they halt their Facebook ads. Several companies have since pulled their ads. The kind of defamtion we should be fighting becomes a tool in a campaign for retribution. More intelligent might be asking those companies to donate some proceeds to anti-prejudice groups who fight not just anti-Jewish hate but all kinds of hate.
Reinforcing anti-Arab stereotypes is also hatred. Spreading belief in a “global jihad” is the same as spreading belief in the Elders of Zion. Ignorance about Islam, Muslims and Arabs are unfortunately hatreds widely accepted as fact, especially in the Jewish community. Opinions such as “Arabs should be kicked out of Israel” and “Arabs already have 22 countries” are hatred. Those broadcasting such views should be denounced and then ignored.
Even if I could stomach the cause the JIDF is championing (in principle) or the methods it is choosing (not at all), then I still would never do so alongside Jewish haters like this. Personally, I’m against Jew haters as much as I am Jewish haters. Anyone interested in the Facebook-Holocaust denial debate best find a more credible organizer.
We previously reported on that whole neo-Nazis/Heschel highway situation in Missouri. The NYTimes follows up with a second piece about it, with input from Susannah Heschel:
Missouri officials, thwarted in the past on free-speech grounds when they tried to keep the Ku Klux Klan from adopting a highway, took another tack after the National Socialist Movement adopted the half-mile stretch of road, on the outskirts of Springfield. The legislature voted to name it for Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who fled the Nazis’ advance in Europe and became a prominent theologian and civil rights advocate in the United States before his death in 1972.
Lawmakers said they hoped the new name would send a message that the area valued inclusiveness, not anti-Semitism and racism. But Rabbi Heschel’s daughter, Susannah Heschel, the Eli Black professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth, said Monday that while she appreciated their intentions, attaching her father’s name to a road cleaned by neo-Nazis would be “vulgar” and would “dishonor” him.
I’m in agreement with the pundits who conclude that there was absolutely nothing new for consideration offered in Netanyahu’s speech. Perhaps he achieved a personal milestone by finally uttering the words “Palestinian state” but beyond this it was a tune we’ve all heard before. He offered “peace negotiations immediately without prior conditions” then proceeded to spell out the all too familiar prior conditions that everyone knows are non-starters for the Palestinians (i.e. Jerusalem remains the “united capital of Israel,” “natural growth” of the settlements will continue, there will be no right of return for the Palestinians.)
Same old, same old. For me at least, the most interesting parts of his speech were not his tired policy pronouncements, but his extended forays into historical analysis – and in particular, his repeated justifications of the Jewish people’s right to the land:
The connection of the Jewish People to the Land has been in existence for more than 3,500 years. Judea and Samaria, the places where our forefathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob walked, our forefathers David, Solomon, Isaiah and Jeremiah this is not a foreign land, this is the Land of our Forefathers.
It seemed clear that Netanyahu’s history lesson was a pointed rejoinder to Obama’s Cairo speech, in which Obama stated that the “Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.” You may have heard that following his speech, many in the Jewish community criticized Obama for connecting Israel’s right to exist to the Holocaust and failing to cite the Jewish people’s historical connection to the land. Witness this livid Jerusalem Post editorial:
Mr. President, long before Christianity and Islam appeared on the world stage, the covenant between the people of Israel and the Land of Israel was entrenched and unwavering. Every day we prayed in our ancient tongue for our return to Zion. Every day, Mr. President. For 2,000 years.
Perhaps it’s because Palestine was never sovereign under the Arabs that even moderate Palestinians cannot find it in their hearts to acknowledge the depth of the Jews’ connection to Zion. Instead, they insist we are interlopers.
When Obama implies that Jewish rights are essentially predicated on the Holocaust—not once asserting they are far, far deeper and more ancient—he is dooming the prospects for peace.
For why should the Arabs reconcile themselves to the presence of a Jewish state, organic to the region, when the US president keeps insinuating that Israel was established to atone for Europe’s crimes?
Thus Netanyahu’s pointed words yesterday:
The right of the Jewish People to a state in the Land of Israel does not arise from the series of disasters that befell the Jewish People over 2,000 years – persecutions, expulsions, pogroms, blood libels, murders, which reached its climax in the Holocaust, an unprecedented tragedy in the history of nations…The right to establish our sovereign state here, in the Land of Israel, arises from one simple fact: Eretz Israel is the birthplace of the Jewish People.
It’s facinating to me that Netanyahu et al are so threatened by the suggestion that Israel’s establishment is ultimately bound to the Holocaust. After all, didn’t Theodor Herzl himself found political Zionism as a reponse to world anti-Semitism? And whatever historical claim the Jewish people might have to the land of Israel, it’s safe to say there would never have been international support for a Jewish state had it not been for the Holocaust.
Beyond this, I’m troubled by the need to continuously and defensively remind the world of the historical Jewish connection to this particular piece of land. I’m not at all sure that this is really a road we really need or want to go down.
What does it really mean for any people to have a “right” to a land? I understand that the Jewish nation, like every nation, has its historic narrative, but let’s face it: nations don’t exist by right, they exist by fiat. Nations exist by virtue of military power and by their ability to maintain a system of governance that will ensure their survival as a polity. Beyond this, it’s pointless to argue one’s historical or moral right to a land. It seems to me that if history has proven anything, it’s that might makes right – and all the rest is commentary.
The real question here is not who has a right to this land. The central issue is how its inhabitants will see fit to exist on the land. And on this point, I don’t see that Netanyahu gave us anything fresh to consider.
What to make of the news that a neo-Nazi gunman killed a security guard at the US Holocaust Museum in Washington DC? Rabbi Marvin Hier says it shows “that the cancer of hatred, bigotry and anti-Semitism is alive and well in America.” According to President Obama, it means “we must remain vigilant against anti-Semitism and prejudice in all its forms.”
I don’t know, I’m not sure that we really needed this particularly horrid act to remind us that hatred and prejudice exist in our country. But it does seem to offer an important sign that for all of our angst about international terrorism, we’d do well to recognize that it’s alive and well in our own backyard.
And it seems to be working. The New York Times reported today that the late Dr. George Tiller’s Witchita abortion clinic has now closed permanently…
But suppressing the memory of Holocaust victims? That’s pretty low, and not funny at all.
According to the New York Post, Jewish Brooklyn’s second-favorite shanda is currently venting his indignation at a plan recently approved by City officials and the NYC Parks Department to add prominent elements commemorating the persecution and murder of “homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the disabled, political prisoners and Roma and Sinti Gypsies” to the public HolocaustMemorial in Sheepshead Bay.
From the horse’s mouth:
“To include these other groups diminishes their memory… These people are not in the same category as Jewish people with regards to the Holocaust… It is so vastly different. You cannot compare political prisoners with Jewish victims.”
Always with the snappy response, Gawker points out, ”No, you certainly cannot, especially if you’re a real dick.”
It’s a fact. Eleven million people were systematically killed by Hitler and his Nazi regime in Europe in the mid-twentieth century. Six million were Jews who were victims of a special, all-inclusive, genocidal rage that was meticulously cultivated and undertaken by Nazi Germany, from early propaganda to the gas chambers, and which succeeded beyond all nightmares. But the other five million were there in the camps too. They were stripped of their rights under the same legal blasphemy, were imprisoned by the same fascist government, labored to death over their own graves, shot by the same death squads, and burned in the same ovens, because they too were considered sub-human in Germany. You can’t take that away from them. And unless victimhood is a brightly-colored plastic toy, and you’re a four-year-old, I can’t imagine why you’d want to.
It’s a city memorial on city land. If Dov Hikind (D-Kahanistan) wants a Jews-only memorial, he should build it in his garage.
The visit ended with a somewhat strident tone, as Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, chairman of Yad Vashem, criticized the pope’s speech as being “devoid of any compassion, any regret, any pain over the horrible tragedy of the six million victims. Even the word ‘six’ was not included.”
Rabbi Lau also censured the pope’s use of the word “killed” instead of the word “murdered.” Benedict, he added “said nothing about the killers, neither Germans nor Nazis. What bothered me the most was the lack of condolences to the Jewish nation, which lost a third of its sons (in the Holocaust).
“I’m not talking about an apology, I’m talking about empathy… this was more about sympathy to the pain of humanity. This speech had a cosmopolitan phrasing to it.”
The article also notes that Museum Director Avner Shalev registered his disappointment that the speech lacked any “direct reference to anti-Semitism.” Not to be outdone, Shas chairman Eli Yishai took the Pope to task for failing to “rebuke past and present Holocaust deniers.”
All those who are sick and tired of the cynical use of the Holocaust as a political battering ram, click here.
I’m more than a little bummed that Waltz with Bashir did not win the Oscar. Not that I’ve seen the film that won, but it’s a break from the typical Jewish films up for Oscars which are always about the Holocaust. Seriously, it’s time to find another good-vs-evil setting in which we can inspire ourselves that We Westerners did a Good Job.
But Bradley Burston on Haaretz goes too far – and make a huge bumble along the way. Not only does he say that Hollywood prefers its Jews as perpetually victimized innocents (convenient as that is to most Jews’ self-narrative, barfitty barf barf) but he misquotes Kate Winslet as exploiting the preference for an Oscar. Check this clip via YouTube, which you can also hear used onNPR in a segement about Holocaust obsession in film:
Whoa! But hang on a minute. Bradley Burston has not done his homework. Apparently this clip of Winslet was on the HBO show Extra and she’s satirizing herself and her lack of Oscar trophies despite thrice-over nominations — and three years ago at that. More »
A recent article about tthe infamous Nazi doctor’s continuing attempt – and apparently some success- in continuing his appalling work after the fall of the Third Reich. He apparently continued his work on trying to discover how to induce women to bear twins in order to speed up the “aryan” birthrate so that Hitler could create a “master race.”
A small Brazilian town was the focus of his ongoing attempts- originally posing as a veterinarian named Rudolph Weiss, he started artificially inseminating women and cows ( I goggle at the thought of women allowing a veterinarian to artificially inseminate them, and somehow this whole vision also makes me think – and now we know what he thought of women, too – no surprise) and succeeded in creating – and the townspeople claim, without their overt knowledge or consent- a town in which the twin birthrate was one in five.
The memoir is called Angel at the Fence, and was due out in February. In it, Herman Rosenblat recounted his time as a teenager in Schlieben, a sub-camp of Buchenwald. As the story goes, he met a woman who lived on a farm on the other side of the camp–a Jew pretending to be a Christian–who tossed him an apple a day over the barbed-wire fence. The war ended, everybody went their separate ways, but then the two met again, entirely by chance, on a blind date in New York in the 1950s, and figured out that she was the apple tosser and he the apple tosse. They married and lived happily ever after.
The thing was, in pre-pub, already getting fair acclaim–Rosenblat appeared twice on Oprah, who called his story “the single greatest love story, in 22 years of doing this show, we’ve ever told on the air,” and there were lots of appearances elsewhere, and the rights were sold to turn the book into a movie.
The “real life fairy tale” began to be called into question when scholars began to have a closer look–as The New Republic had reported,
While, in theory, there is a slim chance Herman was able to conceal these meetings–and the apples he received–from his fellow prisoners, [Professor Kenneth Waltzer, the director of the Jewish Studies program at Michigan State University,] concluded from studying maps of Schlieben that it was impossible for either a prisoner or civilian to approach the fence; the only spot where one could access the perimeter at all was right next to the SS barracks.
And, after the initial defense, it looks like the author has ‘fessed up–the story was, indeed, a fabrication, and publication of the book will be canceled. Both Rosenblat and his wife are indeed Jews who went through the Shoah, but she was hidden at a different farm, 200 miles away from Buchenwald, and the apple thing never happened.
by Shalom Rav [➚] · Wednesday, December 17th, 2008
Prepare for the latest entry in the “you can’t make this stuff up” hit parade:
The father of 3-year-old Adolf Hitler Campbell, denied a birthday cake with the child’s full name on it by one New Jersey supermarket, is asking for a little tolerance.
Whaaaa? According to the AP, the disappointed parents claim they gave little Adolf the name because “no one else in the world would have that name.” (Yeah, right…)
There’s so much post-post-post-modern irony to respond to in this story, where oh where to begin? My favorite tidbit:
The Campbells ultimately got their cake decorated at a Wal-Mart in Pennsylvania…
In the wake of the 70th anniversary of Kristalnacht, one might ask oneself, is there anything left to learn about the Shoah? Is there anything left to learn from the Shoah?
Well, thanks to information gleaned from postings on a couple of different internet message boards, I can assure you the answer is yes.
According to the highly reputable British tabloid The Sun, the long-believed rumor that Hitler was monorchic has been confirmed by his doctor’s priest’s diary. The Brits are particularly overjoyed at this revelation as it lends credence to their charming folksong “Hitler Has Only Got One Ball.” (The link above includes a fascinating sidebar detailing variations in the lyrics to the ditty.)
In related news, a Los Angeles area figure skating troupe has out Mel Brooks’ed Mel himself by putting The Producers on ice. See below. If you want to skip straight to the skating Nazis, that part starts around 4:30.
My conscience requires me to cap this with Brooks’s quote about his original intent with The Producers: “Rhetoric does not get you anywhere, because Hitler and Mussolini are just as good at rhetoric. But if you can bring these people down with comedy, they stand no chance. “
By now you’ve probably heard the 
Except, it seems, when it comes to evoking the Holocaust as justification for slamming Muslims. On November 9th, Kristallnacht, they ran a full-page ad in the 
Why is 
According to YNet, 
Prepare for the latest entry in the “you can’t make this stuff up” hit parade:
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