Co-opting Judaism

About 10 years ago I was invited to attend a conference in upstate NY where Holocaust survivors meet annually with the children of Germans who had actively taken part in the war, as opposed to those who claimed ‘we knew nothing, saw nothing…”

The first days were spent with survivors describing what they had lived thru. Emotionally devastating to listen to, slowly, methodically spoken, with such dispassionate facts. One might mistake this manner of speech as a kind of numbness, when it actually is just the opposite, a rawness so deep it must be contained with very careful speech.

Young Germans spoke about the stories they had heard from their parents, trying to explain why they did what they had to do, in that time, sometimes defending their roles, sometimes apologizing to thier own children for the legacy they marked their family with. The sense of shame some of these young adults felt was clear and in my opinion wasted. The final day of the 3 day conference culminated in both groups coming together, Germans offering apologies and survivors trying to accept their verbal offerings.

While cathartic for many, the process seemed an erasure of a history so inexplicable and debased, that apologies border(ed) on pathology.

This pathology becomes clearer as more recently Holocaust revisionists, deniers and others have begun claiming that Jews are “exploiting” an ‘incident’ similiar to the suffering of many peoples. The Jews are milking a moment of suffering (the Holocaust)and have themselves become nazis to other people in a land they stole and sit in illegally. Antisemitism continues to flourish throughout Europe, grows intensely in the Mid East and percolates more quietly in America.

In Poland there is currently a revival of Jewish culture, foods, dances. In one of the most destructive countries that both slaughtered and built the ghettos and ovens of destruction, this too, is a perverse celebratory cannibalism of the dead. Yiddish is no more alive today than the millions of Jews who were sent to their deaths. Yiddish only exists in tiny communities were chassidim continue to use it. And Singer is one of the rare writers that can be read in English without losing nuance; you either know the culture he describes or you dont.

That Others take on the cloak of dead Jews, already soaked in blood and try it on, attempting to fool ‘blind’ folk into believing the Chosen son remains alive, means nothing more than the deceptive act it is. BEcause Others chose to forget or forgive themselves doesnt mean Jews have forgotten or forgiven. Although forgetting, like selective memory is becoming preferrable and politically correct.

Yiddish is a sacred language, I would liken it to Aramaic–which may sound bizaare–both languages created the sacred laws defining a people and the means with which they communicated in their daily lives.