Category — Holocaustism

For a long time, many of us have grumbled that Jewish victimology is a dead end, or worse. That promoting Holocaustism and lashing out at all critics of Israel and American Jewish policies were taking us to a place we do not want to go.

The Forward elucidates these concerns in its editorial, “Joe-Bashing and the Jews.� We can rail at anti-Semitism, or note it privately, or we can spend our energy and focus correcting where we have gone wrong communally. As always, defense groups who claim to speak for the Jewish community are disproportionately at fault. They have no right to speak on the Jewish community’s behalf. They are causing us serious harm.

The Forward notes,

Ironically, when Israel’s foes successfully present themselves as underdogs and victims of Jewish bullying, the very attempt by Jews to fight back becomes evidence for the prosecution. And the more the Jewish community’s advocates try to respond with their old, familiar weapons of self-defense — the historic claims of victimhood and vulnerability — the less effective the weapons become.

American Jews have long presented themselves as fighting allies of the embattled Jewish state. Now the other side is firing back, using the Jewish community’s own weapons. American Jews are caught off guard, unprepared for the counterattack[...]

American Jews still have vast resources. They have many more friends than enemies. But a critical milestone has been passed: The post-Holocaust taboo on demonization of Jews is very nearly gone.

Pretty astute, huh? Too bad the Forward didn’t take a more explicit shot at the Neocons, the Jewish defense organizations, and Jewish communal “leaders� and laymen who act like a bunch of whiny, hypersensitive crybabies. That would be badass, but I guess even the independent Forward doesn’t quite have the sack to…oh…oh wait…oh, my.

It doesn’t help when the biggest Jewish representative bodies allow themselves and their community to be identified in the public eye with a discredited administration and a larger conservative movement in terminal meltdown. It doesn’t help when Jews ignore or deny Israel’s genuine shortcomings. It doesn’t help when they overreact to criticism — hostile, benign or just clumsy — and intimidate their critics into resentful silence, reinforcing their enemies’ worst stereotypes.

We live in an era where we literally pump money into regimes whose interest it is to destroy the Zionist Entity, and pretty much any city in the West. The pumps are needles, feeding our addiction. In the U.S., only NYC has successfully resisted the oil addiction in a significant way. The blood-oil money supports terrorism, and supports the growth of fundamentalist Islam. It also—by the way–destroys our environment. It is destroying our environment quite quickly. On the bright side, oil money will probably lead to funding fundamentalist regimes successfully acquiring full-scale nuclear programs a few years before we really feel the full environmental repercussions of our petro-based economy.

So anyway, it is only natural and responsible that Big Aish is concerned…about Nazi Germany. Rabbi Yaakov Salomon explains why he is boycotting any product made in today’s democratic Germany.
This is Big Aish’s version of socially responsible living. This is how Rabbi Salomon expresses his concern for the West and for the Jewish people. He personally boycotts…not today’s Saudi Arabia, but 1940’s Germany.

If Big Aish had a responsible bone in its body, it would at the very least be advocating for a mass transit agenda, sufficient bike paths in every city, and alternative energy. It would explain the apparently oh-so-difficult to understand reality that increased fundamentalist power (from oil proceeds) is bad both for Jews, and for the West. Even for those in the West unconcerned with Jews.

But no, no, no. Clearly, God will take care of that without any hishtadulus (effort) on our part. No need for that. Haredim don’t do hishtadlus. Not today. That’s for the godless secular Jews, and “the modern.” Instead, as fundamentalist Holocaustians, Aish’s rabbi chose classic victimology with zero payoff, except to justify continued resentment with his public “personal” boycott which accomplishes…nothing.

Look at this nonsense — they show the problem — they show automobiles…and Big Aish’s only concern is that they are made in Germany. Unbelievable. Just unbelievable.

Rabbi Salomon wants to know what other Jews feel, not just think, about his very public “personal” boycott.

I feel he is being foolish. I feel both he and Big Aish are irresponsible.

The Jewish Cultural Devolution Continues

As some of you may be aware, Los Angeles is lucky enough to be
(finally!) getting “not one but two major Holocaust museums.�

Of course, as someone committed to promoting Holocaustism and a death camp culture, both internally and for the world, I get a lot of nachas over this, and hope that every Jewish community sees the need to spend communal funds for two (or perhaps three or four) Holocaust museums in every city. Obviously, some of the smaller Jewish communities might only to be able to afford a Holocaust Museum AND a separate Holocaust memorial, but we should take our cues from LA, the city that has The Industry, and whose Jews know that, “There’s no business like the Shoah business.�

I am personally not willing to state quite yet which museum I like more. But I will say that the Museum of Tolerance has one heck of a gift shop, and that’s a pretty important aspect of the experience for me.

But still, some people aren’t satisfied, because WE aren’t thinking big enough.

The Forward’s Rebecca Spence reports,

Yona Goldrich, an 80-year-old Holocaust survivor and longtime museum board member who raised most of the funds for the memorial — he also contributed $1 million to the new building project — said that one Holocaust museum in a city the size of Los Angeles isn’t sufficient. “Even if you had 20 museums, it still wouldn’t tell the story,� he said. “Even if they built a Holocaust museum on every street corner in Los Angeles, it wouldn’t be enough.�

Oh, I couldn’t agree more. I personally would like to see all cities turned into Holocaust City-Museums in their entirety. Let’s start with one. Obviously, we will rename it, “The Metropolis of the Living.�

Please don’t worry your pretty little heads about elderly Holocaust survivors living in poverty (we will honor their memory once they are dead), or on the need for universal Jewish day schools. There is no need for general Jewish education when we can just push the Holocaust. Because unfortunately, the Holocaust still isn’t completely synonymous with what all people think about when they think of Jews or Judaism, and we need to change that.

So don’t let Hitler win! Help build a Holocaust Museum on every city block, and when that doesn’t do shit…build some more.

Ezzie, a popular right-wing Modern Orthodox blogger who enjoys good relationships with select truly modern and even secular bloggers (though not me), is a fundamentalist. This is what he terms an “excellent� post by another one of his fundie friends.

“I was sitting next to the parents of a girl that Fudge had met during her brief involvement in NCSY (the National Conference of Synagogue Youth), and whom she had kept contact with for a short time afterwards. I hadn’t heard anything about the girl, who went to Public School, for a few years, and had (to my discredit) already mentally written her off as another casualty of the American Jewish Holocaust.â€?

This is not a “Holocaust.� You are insane. This is people leaving. People have a right to leave. This is not a crime against humanity.

See comments section – Jewish Atheist lets him have it, and Ezzie actually defends PsychoToddler’s term.

I think it is important to have this discussion. Not because we are going to get anywhere, we are not getting anywhere with these people. But it shows how fundie the RWMO people really are. And as Godol HaDor has frequently noted as has Tzemach Atlas, this must not be overlooked. These guys are a real problem.

I would argue they are the biggest problem in terms of domestic Jewish fundamentalism. The right-wing Modern Orthodox are the most dangerous, as you let them get closer than you should, and then they stab you in the back, kidnap your children, and sell them to the haredim for a few shekels, or even for free, in hopes of gaining their always elusive approval.

Pictured Above: A concentration camp of the American Jewish Holocaust known has Harvard. Ezzie and his partisans try to rescue victims and bring them through the heimeishe underground to safehouses such as Touro, where public school survivors need not worry their pretty little heads on such things as challenging secular academics.

The Jewish Telegraph Agency reports,

Orthodox Union Puts Kosher Certification on Zyklon B
In a shocking development, it has surfaced that the Orthodox Union is putting its rabbinical certification on Zyklon B. This development follows certification on products not historically warranting clerical supervision of any sort, including laundry detergent, water, and aluminum foil. But while much of the liberal and secular Jewish community is up in arms over the strange juxtaposition of placing a rabbinic kashrut certification on a poisonous gas used to kill Jews in large numbers, the Orthodox Union and other religious leaders have defended the move.

Rabbi Willig explained,

“I don’t believe these reports about Zyklon B being used to kill anybody. Someone once insisted on that, but she couldn’t produce two kosher [living] witnesses, so we made her apologize to the nice German chemical company.”

A source close to Rabbi Elyashev claimed the rabbi explained that,

“Perhaps in olden days, one didn’t need a hecksher on Zyklon B, but today, manufacturers cannot be trusted to keep their word. The generations have fallen, even those outside the Jewish community, because the Jewish community itself has fallen.”

Rabbi Elyashev allegedly also expressed concern over levity and immodesty in the concentration camps themselves, and outlawed escaping, as it can lead to mixing with gentiles.

Steve Savitsky, the OU’s president, defended the Orthodox Union’s placement of a hechsher on Zyklon B, explaining that,

“Even if someone is being killed with Zyklon B, it would be truly tragic if the last thing they breathed wasn’t 100% kosher. Now, with our supervision, they can be sure.”

Still, not everyone is convinced that the OU offering its seal of approval is appropriate. Heshy Frechtnen of Williamsburg expressed concern that, “The last thing anyone wants to breath in today’s dark times is more Zionist gas from so-called “Orthodox” Jews. At best, the situation is [not ideal].”

Kornkow’s leading rabbi, the Fahbrentenah Rebbe has called for a stronger hechsher on the gas than the OU, explaining, “When it comes to meat, poison gas, and intimacy issues, it’s good to be machmir [stringent].”

They are almost extinct because of our stupid war. Now we must save this last remnant. Don’t we owe them? This is all our fault.

The NY Times reports (at last),

When American forces invaded in 2003, there were probably 60,000 Mandeans in Iraq; today, fewer than 5,000 remain. Like millions of other Iraqis, those who managed to escape have become refugees, primarily in Syria and Jordan, with smaller numbers in Australia, Indonesia, Sweden and Yemen.

Unlike Christian and Muslim refugees, the Mandeans do not belong to a larger religious community that can provide them with protection and aid. Fundamentally alone in the world, the Mandeans are even more vulnerable and fewer than the Yazidis, another Iraqi minority that has suffered tremendously, since the latter have their own villages in the generally safer north, while the Mandeans are scattered in pockets around the south. They are the only minority group in Iraq without a safe enclave.

As a people, they have nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. And we Jews are apparently closely related to this small people, whose pacifism is a part of why they face extinction. It is not easy to be a pacifist in the Middle East.

No one else is going to stick up for these almost extinct people. We need to save the last 5,000, if it’s even that. This is where we need to act. This is where our Holocaust history is actually applicable. Not for die-ins outside of Penn Station, not for speculative plans to stop a civil war in Africa, not for building museums in every city in the U.S. to commemorate and not forget our European tragedy. But right here, right now. We must save this small, ancient civilization, to which we are probably very closely related to, as they are facing extinction because of a war that our Neocon coreligionists supported and sold, and whose extinction is occurring because of and under our nation’s military’s nose.

Their blood is on our hands. We must help them.

How dare we be silent?

Hat tip: Failed Messiah

Seven Months Earlier

These hipsters are dead inline with the ‘defense’ orgs, with their usual nationalist victimology in the guise of anti-racism, but since its Jewcy, and it’s hipsters doing it, it’s very cutting edge and refreshing.
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I guess since Jewcy writer Abe Greenwald is inline with the ADL over their outrage over McCain’s “disappointing� preference for a Christian president, there won’t be a daring protest at the 92nd Street Y over this one.

Anyway, just so you know, I will take this issue very seriously. Just as soon as Israel elects a Christian prime minister. Not a moment later.

Just as Jews were celebrating the High Holidays, a major, major reason for communal distress was found in New Jersey. Anti-Semitic cornfields.

Fox News reports,

As Jews around the world gathered in synagogues last Friday night to mark the start of Yom Kippur — the Day of Atonement — someone was apparently busy fashioning a massive swastika into several acres of a cornfield in Washington Township, N.J.

The swastika was spotted by a New Jersey State Police helicopter during a routine maintenance mission.

Local residents told the Star Ledger newspaper of Newark, N.J., that they were unaware of the reviled symbol of hate.

Now, some of you may think this is an isolated incident. It is not. In fact, it happens all the time. Like say, just last millennium.

Another swastika — this one estimated to be 130 square feet— was carved in the field in July 1998, and a bigger 600-by-600 foot version of the Nazi symbol was found in a nearby cornfield almost a year later, the newspaper reported. No arrests were made in either incident.

Please, friends, try to avoid (after nightfall) cornfields (in the Newark environs) until these cornball hate criminals are apprehended. At least, don’t frequent them alone. I realize this is a tremendous inconvenience, but one must be cautious.

The Anti-Defamation League said the swastika “shows the persistence of anti-Semitism and hate.”

Obviously, it goes without saying that the ADL should immediately be sent a check.

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.

In POLJ’s guest post on The Kvetcher, POLJ noted that, “DK is a fan of all things homogeneous.� While POLJ was hopefully joking, I must counter that this is hardly the case. Rather, I am dubious of the supposedly far superior benefits of diversity.

While POLJ disputes Mr. Furman’s notion of integration for social purposes, he did not really explain how his vision is substantially different. Instead, he noted,

“In college I got to know many folks of different colors and creeds. But for the most part my close friends were Jewish. When I started into college politics, I was forced to work with different people. By working with them for long hours, like Furman did on his basketball team, I got to know these people better. I learned about Pilipino customs (and of that particular spelling because there is no “F� sound in the Pilipino language), Latino music and food, Black American holidays and even some Christian stuff. Because I was forced into a situation that I didn’t know before, I learned more.�

That’s nice, but it is hardly worth busing a few lucky chosen middle class kids across town to a predominantly “inner city� school, as wonderful an opportunity as that might seem to them and their families. What would be better is learning about other cultures in our schools, and reinstituting geography, as well as seriously teaching foreign languages at an early age. That’s real education.

All too often, from what I have seen, we Americans place more value on socialization than education when it comes to other cultures, in part because we view race itself as the only real barrier between peoples to overcome, and in part, because we don’t see value in other civilizations. Which is really dangerous, since they own more and more of our ever-increasing national debt. But I would prefer my kid to know many languages. I have more faith that he would be able to appreciate, say, French culture and even French people, much better if he knew the French language fluently, than if he had a couple of kids in his class of French descent. I had a friend of French descent as a kid. But surprisingly, it just doesn’t help me get around Paris, nor does it help me understand the difference between French colonialism and British colonialism.

We have to ask ourselves what is important. POLJ says he prefers education to socialization. But it still looks a lot more like socialization to me. It looks like a Benetton commercial. I prefer real education about others. Curriculum, languages, tests…but hey, I’m just a reactionary.

I will say this. POLJ wrote about growing up in a mostly Jewish school. I grew up in a school with almost no Jews. It was quite…challenging. When I went to a magnet arts school, it was better, because it was more diverse. But not because it was educationally diverse, but rather, because I didn’t feel so strange. In the end, I would certainly have preferred a diverse school with more Jews than a homogenous school with almost no Jews.

But quite frankly, I don’t think this is really about education at all. I think a lot of Jews who prefer “diversity,� aren’t really concerned about either education or socialization. And we are fooling ourselves about what we claim we want, and declining to be honest about what we are actually afraid of. And we are not prodding this country towards a good place when we are really motivated not by humanitarianism, but by secret fears.

How can we craft reasonable and strategically sound communal policies if we aren’t honest about what is really motivating us?