One Should Build a Fence Around Holocaustism
“It’s a profanation.” — The Kvetcher’s father’s assessment of the phenomenon of Jewish organizations and individuals who claim to speak on the political or cultural behalf of Holocaust victims.
A bizarre op-ed denouncing Heeb and the most important new writer of the decade was penned in Stupid Federation Paper. I am sorry I was late to this, but I only found out about it through Heeb, because I don’t usually read the Jewish Week because it is badly written, and filled with boring puff pieces about what wonderful things the United Jewish Communities did this week and will do next week WITH YOUR HELP!! They are such a joke.
I have accused Holocaustians of replacing Judaism with Holocaust identity, but clearly I am out of line. That never happens. They have it all in perspective. As Rabbi Joshua Hammerman, rabbi of Temple (Reform!) Beth El in Stamford, CT notes,
Just as the ancient rabbis believed in building a “fence around the Torah� to safeguard the commandments, so must we build a “fence around Auschwitz� to protect the memory of the slain.
Rabbi Hammerman’s issue is that Heeb’s David Deutsch and Shalom Auslander are more of a threat to the memory of the Holocaust than anti-semitic deniers. Leaving aside that the Holocaust is not, in fact, in ANY danger of being forgotten and that’s the least of our problems, Rabbi Hammerman adds,
“In a culture that revels in free expression to the point of unruliness, we need to establish some basic rules.
In my house, we have the Anne Frank Rule.
One night during a recent school vacation, my family was engaged in a stimulating round of “Apples to Apples� — that popular game where a rotating judge picks a descriptive card (like “refreshing,� or “feh!�) and other contestants select cards that they hope the judge will consider the best possible match (like “Passover� and “Alan Dershowitz�). Naturally, we were playing the Jewish version.�
Naturally.
I am pointing out this paragraph in part because quite frankly, I don’t know what this man is talking about, and hope you might be able to explain it. How do “Passover� and “Alan Dershowitz� make a match, exactly?
Why is this passive-aggressive liberal suburban Jew being given a platform to misappropriate Anne Frank as a cudgel for his nonsense? You don’t speak for Anne Frank, you putz!
It gets worse.
Ethan and Dan played “Crown Heights,� “my bedroom,� “J-Date� and “Dennis Prager.� I suppose any of those could have been the best match. But I held the trump card in my hand.
You see, I had just drawn “Anne Frank.�
We have a little rule in my family, one suggested to us by a close friend. Whoever plays the “Anne Frank� card automatically wins that hand. No questions asked. The idea is that it would be offensive to Anne’s memory, and by extension, all Holocaust victims, for Anne to lose to, say, “Joan Rivers� or “potato kugel.�
This is the asinine shit that the Jewish Week attacks Heeb with. This is the nonsense we are supposed to see value in handing down to the next generation. He wraps his bullshit with Anne Frank, and brazenly tells us that he is holding her as his personal trump card.
This is the stuff the Jewish Week publishes.
So now are you still angry at me for calling it Stupid Federation Paper?
Anyway, Heeb’s David Deutsch (Jewdar), the frummie who was fingered along with Auslander for rebuke by Hammerman and Stupid Federation Newspaper, has gone understandably apeshit.
Jewdar notes,
“As for Jewdar, we’ll play non-Holocaust themed games with our children, make sure they get a solid, non-Holocaust centered Jewish education, and grow up to celebrate Jewish life instead of obsessing over Jewish death.”
That’s probably much too old fashioned for Rabbi Hammerman.
To find out how to play Anne Frank Trump Card with the kids, or just hear Rabbi Hammerman and Gary Rosenblatt, the editor of the Stupid Federation Paper explain what is and isn’t okay with the internet, please join them at the JCP this Wednesday.
Shockingly, it’s a free event.
13 comments
I sense that rabbi’s mocking Anne Frank. If he trivializes her and her death for a game, he certainly is anything but respectful towards Holocaust victims. One important lesson the Holocaust-experience taught is that life is immensely valuable.
He’s not mocking her. He’s really that out there, he’s really that out of it. The wild thing is that the Jewish Week thinks this is a reasonable position.
It’s a crying disgrace.
If this means any solace to your friends at Heeb, I’ve ordered The Big Book of Jewish Conspiracies across the Atlantic and even recommended it to an academic audience during a presentation I did at a university over here on forgeries as a structural element of medieval anti-Semitism. See, there’s the love.
This is slightly OT, but speaking of Auslander, I just finished his new book. And while he’s clever and witty, he also makes Philip Roth look like the paragon of mental stability.
If Auslander’s book is a real memoir and isn’t fiction, then the SOCIOPATHIC ESCAPADES he describes, and that he shows NO REMORSE for, show that he has some SERIOUSLY LOOSE SCREWS. What’s worse is that he tells you things about other people in a way that shows he has NO FREAKING RESPECT for other people’s privacy, including his young son’s.
So if anyone is going to read the book, let me suggest you get it from the library, like I did, or get it used. I’d hate to give the guy a penny in royalties.
I heard Auslander on NPR. He’s utterly beyond bitter. It works, though — he makes a nice parnossah selling his family’s dysfunction, slandering Judaism and displaying those loose screws in pretty display cases.
Not so different from Holocaustism, really.
How do “Passover� and “Alan Dershowitz� make a match, exactly?
They don’t make a match. They’re just examples of the noun cards. Apples to Apples has two kinds of cards: nouns and adjectives. Each player has a handful of nouns. The judge turns over an adjective and everybody else plays the noun card from their hand that they think the judge is most likely to pick as matching the adjective card. It’s actually quite a fun, often irreverent, game (although I’ve never played the Jewy version).
For example, if the adjective was “feh!” and the players played Alan Dershowitz, Passover, Anne Frank and JDate, the judge would have to decide which was most “feh!” Some people go for the obvious answer (choosing “Ghosts” over “Marshmallows” for “scary,” for example). Others go for a silly answer. The strategy of the game is to try to anticipate what kind of answer the current judge is likely to pick. It seems the good rabbi’s Anne Frank rule is designed to keep the kids from making fun of Anne Frank (choosing her for “sexy” or “stupid,” for example). As if she’s somehow holier than cards like Helen Keller in the goyische version.
themicah,
Thanks for the explanation!
Another interesting fact about Hammerman (who, by the way, is Conservative, not Reform) is that he once wrote an article on the joy of Bris Milah called “Birth Rite” (New York Times Magazine, March 13, 1994, p. 28).
In this article, Hammerman writes that he came to appreciate the “deeper meaning behind circumcision” after he circumcised his own son. “The knife,” he says, “channels a father’s natural anger into one controlled cut. He takes off one small part in order to preserve–and love–the whole.” Hammerman attributes his “natural anger” to the sight of his infant son “blissfully attached” to one of his wife’s breasts. “There is no greater primal anger,” he writes, “than seeing another male in carnal contact with your wife.”
“No father should be denied this experience, even vicariously, of inflicting upon his child a ritualized blow so intense as to make him shake and recoil, yet so controlled that no damage is done, to signify that this will be the worst the child will ever know from his father’s hand.”
It sounds a little sociopathic, if you ask me.
Wait, dude, what?
If you see your infant son as a competitor because your wife is feeding him via breast, and that you want to and think a retaliatory strike is called for… Yeah, I’d call that a little odd… For a rabbi, a whole lot odd…
On topic, there’s a natural tendency for humans to hold on to victimhood. Every wrong is jealously guarded as an excuse for everything, ever mistake, disagreement, etc.
For instance, how can one make the argument that America is so racist a nation that African Americans have no chance of success (an argument irrationally made relatively constantly in many quarters) when we’re seeing a real chance of Barack Obama going to the White House? Nevertheless, expect everything from the dawn of the slave trade forward to be trotted out if he loses.
Similarly while there are actual anti-semitic anti-Jewish events in the world, we’re not now in danger of a repeat Holocaust. But, the power that comes with that victimization is a powerful seduction from the dark side of the force as it were.
Unfortunately, too many people in their zeal to preserve and promote fresh memory of the crimes they cling to like a mother’s apron end up savaging that memory and making it irrelevant to society, and thus they end up being the ones who cheapen it.
Sad how that works, but it’s the way of human affairs.
DK,
Regardless of whether you agree with the article, I did not find it “shrill.” You are being dramatic. Jesus. It was a pretty calmly written thing.
fine. I changed it to bizarre.
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