Joey Kurtzman Responds

First of all, I should mention that my post, “The Luftmentshen of Jewcy,� was not representative of Jewschool in any way. I left Jewschool, at least for now, and though Kurtzman had no way to know that, really, I did publish the piece on The Kvetcher, not on Jewschool.

In his response, “The Daily Foxman: The Luftmenschen of Jewcy�, Kurtzman argues,

The Jewish community has worked very hard to instill in its young the sense that bearing witness to genocide is virtually a sacred responsibility, that denial of genocide is the final step of genocide, that the “criminal indifference� of the world to the genocide of European Jewry was a cataclysmic moral failure that must never be repeated, and that only by remembering the past can we prevent its repetition. So no, you don’t get to switch horses now that recalling someone else’s genocide conflicts with a strategic goal.

True, this is promoted by most of the organizational Jewish community. However, it is not a goal that I endorse. Hence, I am not bound by its logic, nor are others who disagree with it. Quite frankly, I don’t think that remembering the Holocaust will prevent anything from happening. I consider such a strategy most speculative, and already proven wrong to a large degree.

Kurtzman invokes a Jerusalem Post op-ed that declares,

Never Again has been exposed as an empty mantra, most recently in Rwanda and Darfur,� and this has happened because we have not “sufficiently internalized� the lessons of tragedies such as the Armenian Genocide.

No. Never Again is an empty mantra because we are not in control of everything. We can “internalize� whatever we want. But terrible things, including genocide, will still happen. The Mandaeans are being exterminated this very instance. Where is the Jewish community? Why isn’t/wasn’t Kurtzman and Jewcy raising hell? Perhaps Kurtzman needs to go “internalize� the Armenian genocide more “sufficiently.� That will surely help the Mandaeans. We could help them a lot more than the Armenians killed in WWI.

Kurtzman argues,

“If this is the direction you want to take the Jewish community, then go ahead and raise the next generation to believe that genocide is a trifle that can be ignored when politically convenient to do so.�

This is not the choice. The Holocaust can be viewed internally by the Jewish community as quite a bit more important than a “trifle,� but still not be the paradigm for which all policy must be crafted.

Kurtzman asked,

What sort of ideological shakeup is taking place in the Jewish community that Jewcy sides with the Jerusalem Post for the universalist luftmenschen against the tough-minded ethnocentrists of Forward and Jewschool?

I obviously don’t speak for the Forward, but I would guess that it is the same “tough-mindedness� that has frequently placed the Forward historically on the opposite side of the utopian Luftmentshen for most of its past 110 years.

Some things change. Some things don’t.