Who Owns the Holocaust?

Op-ed by Evan Goldstein for newvoices.org

I've got this list. On it, I jot down the names of authors I mean to read when I have the time, and at the top of this list is James Baldwin. Knowing little about him, I somewhat absent-mindedly opened a 1967 essay Baldwin wrote in the New York Times Magazine. I was speechless:

    "It is true that many Jews use, shamelessly, the slaughter of the 6,000,000 by the Third Reich as proof that they cannot be bigots…it is galling to be told by a Jew whom you know to be exploiting you that he cannot possibly be doing what you know he is doing because he is a Jew…one does not wish, in short, to be told by an American Jew that his suffering is as great as the American Negro’s suffering. It isn’t, and one knows that it isn’t from the very tone in which he assures you that it is."

There is so much to be said, and at the same time, no words that feel worthy of being spoken, after encountering Baldwin’s brilliance. He speaks for himself, and to reduce his unapologetically true witness to an analytical datum is intellectual malpractice. Baldwin is braver than most. But I think it is time for American Jews to give everyone permission to speak as truly as James Baldwin about our history. It is time, in short, to let the Holocaust be history, which does not mean forgetting so much as remembering the past honestly as past. It is, to be sure, part of our history (among others’), but it must be history nonetheless, not an a-historical symbol of radical evil that we claim to own and deploy against those who, like Baldwin, question the politics of Jewish identity.

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Please Be Disturbed: Triggering Can Be Good for You, Kids

Brutalities cry for attention. Attention to the appalling causes disturbance. Deal with it. You’re at school to be disturbed.

By Todd Gitlin for Tablet Magazine

In college, I took a sociology-history course that included a segment on Nazi Germany. One day, we were ushered into an auditorium where we sat through Triumph of the Will, probably the greatest Nazi propaganda film ever made. Leni Riefenstahl’s diabolically inspired 1935 paean to Hitler and his Nazi gang of usual subjects is brilliantly shot and edited to hold viewers rapt with wave after wave of spectacles. For almost two hours, the reverent, obedient masses go through the requisite motions at Nuremberg on Party Day, forming vast human battalions, reverberating in a demonic call-and-response with their lionhearted idol. In most of Riefenstahl’s sequences, individual life melts into rituals of submission and the mass worship of power. Equally compelling, and therefore terrifying, were the interspersed images of radiant young blonds frolicking in the sunshine in a summer-camp atmosphere. Weirdly, I remember best, probably for its erotic implications, a sequence in which some young Germans drink, or wash, from the same water spigot. Taken a few at a time or en masse, the Nazis are enraptured by the opportunity to sink into the (to them) transcendent embrace of der Führer. If ever there was a celebration of “Strength through Joy,” this is it. The ideological fusion is complete: eternal life, eternal surrender, eternal mass murder in the making.

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Introducing ‘Voices From Europe’

We’ll be hearing from young European Jews on our partner site, Jewcy

By Stephanie Butnick for Tablet Magazine

Europe is on the minds of most Jews these days. In the wake of the Hyper Cacher massacre and deadly siege on a kosher supermarket in Paris, as well as a gunman attack on a synagogue in Copenhagen in which a volunteer security guard was killed, the safety and existential health of Europe’s Jewish communities has been much discussed. The loudest voices, though, seem to be Jews outside Europe.

We’re trying to change that. Over at Jewcy, our partner site, we’re devoting the month to hearing from young Jewish voices across Europe. After all, who is better equipped to address those questions of Jewish continuity?

Our guide is Jane Braden-Golay, president of the European Union of Jewish Students, who will be guest editing Jewcy. You may remember her from a podcast featuring young European Jewish leaders last year, or from her Scroll post following the Paris attacks in which she assessed the new reality for the Jews of Europe. (You can listen to her address the Council of Europe in Strasburg, France, for the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz several weeks later here.)


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Who Speaks for America’s Jews?

by Amram Altzman for newvoices.org

The question of who should speak for the Jews is not a new one, nor is the question of whether or not Israeli political or religious leaders can or should speak on behalf of American (or other Diaspora) Jews. It dates back to a series letters between Jacob Blaustein, then the head of the American Jewish Committee, and David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, detailing exactly how America’s Jews can and should support the Jewish State and what that support or allegiance would look like.

It was in those letters that America’s Jews were formally absolved from any allegiance to the Jewish State, and it was promised that America’s Jews would never have to choose between Israel and America. However, this would not be the end of the complicated question of whether or not Israeli political leaders can speak for the world’s Jews. These letters were exchanged in 1950, and, yet, we still conveniently seem to forget that until 1967 and Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War, Reform Judaism, was ambiguously Zionist at best when it passed its Columbus Platform in 1937, and was against the notion that the Jews were a nation for a large part of its history. The American Jewish Committee was officially “non-Zionist” until 1967. Indeed, the exchanges between Blaustein and Ben-Gurion were specifically to assuage the fear that American Jews would have to choose between being loyal to Israel and being loyal to America. To be sure, there were Zionist leaders, such as Judge Louis D. Brandies, and poet Emma Lazarus (of “The New Colossus” fame), who called for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine before the term “Zionist” was even coined. Neither Brandeis nor Lazarus, however, could speak for the majority of America’s Jews. And, yet, today’s leaders of the Jewish community in America like to tout Israel as the consensus issue around which American Jews can organize themselves.

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Hillel president shuns J Street conference due to attendance of Saeb Erekat

From JPost.com

“My desire to attend the conference was based on my wish to speak at a student-only session directly with the students."

Eric Fingerhut, the president of Hillel International, is withdrawing from speaking at J Street’s annual conference because of the presence of Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat.

“My desire to attend the conference was based on my wish to speak at a student-only session directly with the students who will be in attendance, to thank those who have joined in the fight against BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions] and anti-Semitism on college campuses, and to urge everyone to take up this crucial cause,” Fingerhut said on Monday.

J Street U, the group’s campus affiliate, has been active in opposing BDS, and the national group has a policy of opposing the practice.

“However, after reviewing the full list of speakers, I now realize that any benefit that might come from this opportunity would be overshadowed by concerns regarding my participation among other speakers who have made highly inflammatory statements against the Jewish state.”

Asked by JTA what speaker at the March 21 to March 24 conference triggered the pullout, Hillel’s chief administrative officer David Eden named Erekat, noting his inflammatory statements in the past.

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In U.C.L.A. Debate Over Jewish Student, Echoes on Campus of Old Biases

By Adam Nagourney for the New York Times

LOS ANGELES — It seemed like routine business for the student council at the University of California, Los Angeles: confirming the nomination of Rachel Beyda, a second-year economics major who wants to be a lawyer someday, to the council’s Judicial Board.

Until it came time for questions.

“Given that you are a Jewish student and very active in the Jewish community,” Fabienne Roth, a member of the Undergraduate Students Association Council, began, looking at Ms. Beyda at the other end of the room, “how do you see yourself being able to maintain an unbiased view?”

For the next 40 minutes, after Ms. Beyda was dispatched from the room, the council tangled in a debate about whether her faith and affiliation with Jewish organizations, including her sorority and Hillel, a popular student group, meant she would be biased in dealing with sensitive governance questions that come before the board, which is the campus equivalent of the Supreme Court.

The discussion, recorded in written minutes and captured on video, seemed to echo the kind of questions, prejudices and tropes — particularly about divided loyalties — that have plagued Jews across the globe for centuries, students and Jewish leaders said.

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Does Israel Need Diaspora Jewry?

Taking the high road

By Maj. Gen. (ret.) Yaakov Amidror for israelhayom.com

When the highest Israeli echelons encouraged the Jews of France to immigrate to Israel after the terror attacks in Paris, they were criticized for several reasons. Sufficient time has passed since then to discuss the topic with no personal or political connection.

Some said it was inappropriate to call on people to move to Israel only because living in a foreign country was dangerous. They believe that the meaning of true Zionism is that all Jews must return to the country of their ancestors, the sole and historical homeland of the Jewish people, whether life in the Diaspora is good or not. They said that drawing a connection between aliyah and the recent terror attacks in France falls short of the goal of true Zionism.

Others called it anachronistic to call upon Jews to move to Israel, and that the State of Israel had an interest in Jews remaining in the Diaspora and supporting it from without. That is true in a general sense and certainly true regarding the United States, whose support of Israel depends on the influence of the Jews who live there, and without which it would be difficult for Israel to exist.

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