Dear Niot,
You told Holocaust jokes at the table on
Friday night. Ima and I grimaced and tried to segue into a discussion of the boots you are refusing to buy and your insistence on trudging through the Polish snow in running shoes. We acknowledged that telling jokes with your classmates would be a legitimate way of letting off pressure during your trip, although we didn’t think the ones you told us were particularly funny.
It was then that I knew how I was going to write this letter, a letter that your teacher asked us to deposit with him in a sealed envelope for you to read, in Hebrew, when you arrive in Poland. That’ll be at about the same time that The Jerusalem Report’s readers receive it in their mailboxes in English (and thanks for giving me advance permission to share it with them).
I reminded you that when your older sister and brother wanted to sign up for their class trips to Poland’s Nazi death camps, in what has become a routine part of the Holocaust curriculum for Israeli high school seniors, I objected. “Why?” you asked.
I explained that I don’t want my children to be Jews who are Jews because they are victims. I don’t want my children to be Israelis because the world hates them. Our history, tradition, and culture are rich and powerful and provide adequate reason to want to be a Jew and an Israeli even if Hitler had never been born and the swastika never had reigned.
When your sister said she was going to Poland anyway, I was reminded of a comedy skit I once saw at a club in New York. [Read the rest on the Jerusalem Report website--come back here to comment!]
11 responses so far ↓
1 Dina // Nov 16, 2008 at 6:16 pm
As a parent and a person who accompanies students through the process that begins a year before the trip to Poland and ends months afterwards, I greatly appreciate your comments.
I would add a few other mesages that I would hope that the trip includes is personal responsibility, heroism comes in many forms, difference ought to be celebrated not feared and that the point of Holocaust studies may be to raise questions as opposed to providing answers.
I am sure that your voice is more influential to your children than any teachers’ will ever be.
2 David H. // Nov 17, 2008 at 5:58 am
Beautifully said. I hope he forgives you for publishing something between you and him. And I think having to jump over to the J’lem Report is a bit of a bother.
3 Lloyd // Nov 17, 2008 at 7:04 am
Haim: another masterpiece. I had come to the same conclusion within the last couple years after much internal debate regarding “why be Jewish?” Too bad, I spent the previous two decades, off-and-on, in the study of the Shoah. I’ll never forget those two gay guys saying Kaddish in tandem at a public Holocaust remembrance; I don’t know if they were the impetus to dig deeper but makes for an interesting story and something definitely clicked that day. I wish you had written this letter twenty years ago . . . it really spoke to me and I’m sure a lot of your other readers.
Best regards,
Lloyd
4 Haim Watzman // Nov 17, 2008 at 9:14 am
David H. –
Sorry about the jumps, but to keep this blog going we need to increase readership and to get paid for some of what we write. When we write for pay the newspapers and magazines generally won’t let us post the piece in full on the blog, so we lead in and jump to it. I hope you’ll accept and understand the minor inconvenience. As I noted in my previous post, “Son Sacrifice: Humility and the Significance of the Akeda,” we’ll also be doing this with material that will appear on Jewcy.com
5 sean // Nov 17, 2008 at 12:01 pm
Haim, I appreciate the your touching words addressed to your son, on what I’m sure will be an emotional trip for him.
There’s just one part that really, really bothers me:
Growing up in Israel, as you have, in the age of suicide bombings, Qassam missiles, and virulent bellicose anti-Semitic rhetoric from Islamic extremists in Lebanon, Iran, and even closer to home, in Gaza, you hardly need to go to Poland to learn that there are still people who want to murder Jews simply because they are Jews, and to learn that if we don’t defend ourselves, no one else will.
Here in Lebanon, I’ve never met anyone who wants to “murder Jews simply because they are Jews,” although there are people who would be glad to hear about Israelis being killed because they’re Israeli. Likewise, if Iranians were so bent on killing Jews qua Jews, why would there be tens of thousands of Iranian Jews represented by their own member of the Majlis? I can’t speak for Gaza, because I’ve never been there, but I have been to Ramallah and Qalqilya and Beit Sahour, and I can say that there’s little in common between the bloodthirsty anti-semites you’re conjuring and the people I’ve met in those places.
The idea that Arabs and Muslims just want to kill Jews for being Jewish is only a slightly less inflated version of the mentality that would see all goyim as just waiting for an excuse to start the next round of pogroms. This is a blind spot in Israeli and American discourse on the Middle East, and from Beirut, Damascus or Ramallah, it’s hard to believe that this inability to see isn’t intentional.
6 Haim Watzman // Nov 17, 2008 at 12:58 pm
Sean — I appreciate having your perspective from Lebanon, but I think you dissimulate and impute things to me that I didn’t said. I did not say that Arabs and Muslims in general and as a whole want to kill Jews because they are Jews. I said that there are people in the world, among them Muslims, who want to do that. To pretend that there is no one in Lebanon (or Iran, or Ramallah) is to be either blind or willfully ignorant of certain sectors of the society you live in. You’re right–we should be careful in imputing evil to entire national or religious groups. But we should recognize evil when we see it.
7 sean // Nov 17, 2008 at 1:39 pm
Haim: Thanks for the quick response. Although I’ve never met anyone here in Lebanon who wants to kill Jews because they’re Jews, that, of course, does not necessarily mean that there are no such people. There are, likewise, surely people in Oslo, Minneapolis, Beijing, Sydney, Bogota or Harare who have similarly irrational anti-Jewish feelings.
But let’s be honest here, you’re not mentioning the odd hate-monger, you’re mentioning Lebanon, Iran and Gaza specifically, explicitly singling these places out. It’s hard to read the paragraph I cited above as anything but an implication that suicide bombings and Qassam rockets are anything but the result of anti-Semitism, pure and simple.
And that’s what I take issue with. Rocket attacks on civilian targets in Sderot or Haifa and suicide bombings of cafes and buses in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem are indefensible and disgusting. Explaining them away as attacks on Jews for being Jews, though, is the same as Americans believing that “they” hate “us” because we’re free. That is stripping a political action of its political context, giving a facile explanation of the act which strips Israelis and Americans of any responsibility for the political context within which it is occurring. (Incidentally, I am equally annoyed when I hear the flip side of the same rhetoric that would have Israel bomb Gaza or Beirut purely because Israelis hate and want to kill Arabs and Muslims.)
I know that you’re much too thoughtful and nuanced to make blanket condemnations on entire peoples, which is why that one paragraph really bothered me.
By the by, I recently read and thoroughly enjoyed your translation of Segev’s The Seventh Million, and I can’t wait until I’ve got the time to get to One Palestine, Complete.
8 Haim Watzman // Nov 18, 2008 at 1:00 pm
Sean, some Arabs who fight Israel may hate Israelis and like Jews. But the ones lobbing the missiles over from Gaza and southern Lebanon are Islamist fanatics among whom–by all the evidence of their websites and publications–are many who hate Jews pure and simple. And, while I’m not one to insist that anti-Zionism is equivalent to Jew-hating, those who say they love Jews while denying Jewish peoplehood (like the Iranian regime) are conditioning their love on Jewish denial of a major part of their identity. That’s like Golda Meir denying the existence of a Palestinian nation, or like those fundamentalist Christians, so well documented by Gerhom in his book “The End of Days,” who love Jews and support Israel but in fact believe that any Jew who doesn’t accept Jesus will be sent to hell at the Second Coming.
9 sean // Nov 18, 2008 at 4:02 pm
Haim: I’m afraid that this gets to the crux of the issue. And I’m afraid that there’s not much wiggle room for us to eek out an agreement here. I think you’re confusing a rejection of a Jewish state in what was mandate Palestine and rejection of a Jewish state altogether.
Of course counterfactuals aren’t terribly helpful, but I think most of the world can agree that Hamas wouldn’t be sending rockets at Israelis if the Jewish state had been founded in Uganda, Argentina or Madagascar. (In fact, Hamas most likely wouldn’t exist at all.) We can also probably agree that had Israel been created in any of those places, there would likely be Ugandan, Argentinian or Malgache groups attacking the Jewish state instead of Islamist ones. I don’t think that would necessarily make those people anti-semites.
Likewise, I don’t think that my rejection of citizenship and statehood based on ethno-religious criteria makes me an anti-semite. But perhaps you’d beg to differ. Further, who’s to say that Israel is a “major part” of Jewish identity? After all, there are more French, American and Argentinian Jews than there are Israeli Jews. Personally, I know Jews for whom Israel plays absolutely no part in their identity, religious or otherwise. And what does that say about pre-Zionist Jewish identity? If Israel is such a major part of Jewish identity, does that mean that it was somehow incomplete until 1948?
As for the fundamentalist Christians, I’ve not read Gerhom’s book, but I have spent many a year in the Bible Belt, and I can tell you that from my experience, it’s more accurate to say that they dislike Jews less than they dislike Arabs and Muslims. But it’s right that at the end of the day, both are just tools to bring about the second coming.
So I don’t think the parallel is a fair one, because I think you’d find that Iranians and Palestinians and Lebanese would be more or less indifferent to the idea of a Jewish state, were it in South America instead of the Middle East.
10 Yisrael Medad // Nov 18, 2008 at 9:23 pm
I always sought to differentiate between the Holocaust and the Arab anti-Zionist struggle. I t was hard given what was done to Hebron’s and Tzfat’s Jews in 1929, among the other attacks. And then it occured to me on the background of the suicide attacks that I never heard of a Nazi who, seeing that some Jews managed to escape death in the gas chambers, strapped on dynamite and threw himself on them to make sure they did not get away. But here, in Israel, Arabs have basically done that, sacrifice themselves, whereas Nazis never did. Strange. Whose ideologically motivation, then, is worse?
And as for why be Jewish, Paul Newman’s reason for considering himself Jewish was “I find it more challenging”.
11 Ruth // Nov 19, 2008 at 7:00 am
What a lot of baloney from Sean. Why the pretense of dialogue?
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