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April 7, 2010

In Germany, Confronting Nazi Perpetrators

Leave a Comment / Holidays /

It isn’t easy facing the cold stare of a Nazi perpetrator, even in a photo. Increasingly, however, memorial sites in Germany are making the confrontation possible, opening a door that long has been sealed.

A new exhibit at the former Ravensbrueck women’s concentration camp in the ex-East German state of Brandenburg is the latest example.

“The Fuehrerhaus: Everyday Life and Crimes of Ravensbrueck SS Officers” opened March 20, allowing a glimpse into the life of camp commandant Max Koegel and his SS underlings through informational panels arranged in his former villa, steps away from the barracks that once housed thousands of prisoners.

On April 18, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is due to visit the memorial for the first time to mark the camp’s liberation 65 years ago by Russian Red Army soldiers.

During a recent preview, members of the restoration crew and their spouses entered the peak-roofed house of Koegel, passed through the former dining area with its large fireplace, climbed the polished wooden staircase to the second floor and stepped out onto the balcony from which Koegel himself could survey the camp below.

The spheres of SS and prisoner “were two completely separate worlds,” exhibit curator Alyn Bessmann said. “We hope this [dichotomy] will be more tangible to the visitors now.”

The contrast “should make people think,” said restorer Dietmar Gallinat, 46, standing on the balcony.

Koegel, notorious for his eagerness to punish prisoners for the slightest transgression, “was probably no different from the town baker” who ignored the brutality around him. “And there are still people who think this way today.”

“The whole thing has a kind of nightmarish atmosphere,” said painter Karsten Neumann, 46. “It is astonishing that people were capable of spreading such misery … and it is important to name these people.”

“When I think that they lived normal lives in these rooms, I feel sick,” said Neumann’s wife, Ulrike. “I felt I had to wash my hands after leaving the house because I did not want to touch what they had touched.”

Ravensbrueck reportedly is the third permanent exhibit on Nazi perpetrators mounted at a concentration camp memorial in Germany.

The first, about female camp guards, opened at Ravensbrueck in 2004. The second, also about guards, opened at the Neuengamme camp memorial near Hamburg in 2005.

At both sites, scholars thought it was time to confront perpetrators as a way to help Germans gain insight into a dark chapter of their own history and prevent future crimes.

The resulting exhibits highlight the victim’s perspective.

“The first thing you hear in the exhibit [about female guards] is former inmates speaking about these guards,” said Insa Eschebach, director of the Ravensbrueck memorial.

Major hurdles had to be overcome to launch the exhibit.

Skeptics, including survivors and their advocates, said such sites should be solely dedicated to the memory of victims. Some feared that exhibits about perpetrators might attract neo-Nazis or feed an unhealthy fascination with horror.

Eschebach counters that it was high time to confront the perpetrator after years of suppression.

In the former West Germany, memorials had been dominated by “a kind of religious intention,” she said, so chapels were built at such sites as Dachau, near Munich. And in the former East Germany, remembrance took on an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist tone.

“If there was any mention of perpetrators, it was to say they were all sitting in West Germany,” Eschebach said.

After German unification in 1990, memorials started “providing historical documentation,” Eschebach said. “And with that came the question: Who were the perpetrators?”

New information centers opened in the early 1990s, including the “Topography of Terror” archive at the site of the former Gestapo headquarters in Berlin and the House of the Wannsee Conference, a villa outside Berlin where high-ranking Nazis met in January 1942 to map out the genocide of European Jewry.

A trove of archival material was suddenly available, and retired schoolteacher Werner Schubert was among those who took advantage.

At Wannsee, Schubert, now 85, learned that Rudolf Lange, one of the Nazis at the infamous conference, came from his own hometown, Weisswasser, in former East Germany.

Schubert’s work exposing the biography of Lange and naming other local Nazi criminals led a town leader to accuse him of “nailing perpetrators to the wall.”

“I answered that the perpetrators themselves are long dead, but they have children and grandchildren, and … they should deal with the past,” Schubert said in an interview.

Increasingly, descendants of Nazi perpetrators have sought information themselves. At Neuengamme, a discussion group was started for them, said historian Oliver von Wrochem.

“The need to confront our own history is relatively large today, much more than 10 years ago,” von Wrochem said. “That is partly because most of the perpetrators are no longer alive, so one can deal with this more intensively and more easily.”

But it is also because this history “is a part of their biography, and they have started to think about it again.”

The daughter of a camp commandant and a granddaughter of a camp doctor once told Bessmann that “they very much wished to love their relatives and that they could not. And I think that this is something quite central in the country from which the perpetrators come,” she said.

But in a sense, all Germans might feel “related” to the criminals.

“In that moment when I stand before the perpetrator, I have a personal relation to him,” said Schubert, a former Wehrmacht soldier, though never a Nazi Party member, he said. The perpetrator “becomes like a neighbor. And when a personal relation is there, it is always hard.”

Empathy is a natural risk. Many debates have been heard in recent years in Germany as to whether films portraying Hitler, Goebbels or other high-ranking Nazis are too humanizing.

Bessmann isn’t concerned, having learned years ago from Israel’s Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem “to show the perpetrator as a person whom we must confront.”

“And as a normal person, you just have to distance yourself from them,” said Schubert.

At a reception following the recent preview tour of the new exhibit, one of several roofers having a few beers together said he resented the fact that “we as grandchildren are still paying” for the crimes of the past. Another said he wanted his own grandchildren one day to learn about the past, “but it should not be exaggerated.”

Such views are not uncommon in Germany. But the resources are there for those who actively seek to know more.

“The confrontation with the perpetrator is so fundamental and important in this country,” Bessmann said, and “increasingly, people are ready.”

Today, however, the closest they may come to a confrontation is with a photo on the wall.

In Germany, Confronting Nazi Perpetrators Read More »

Jerry Brown’s Uphill Climb

Leave a Comment / Opinion, Raphael Sonenshein /

We all know that California is a blue state, with two Democratic senators and a record of favoring the Democratic presidential candidate in every presidential election since 1992.  Barack Obama won California by more than 2 million votes.  But the governorship has tended to be more red than blue. 

Since Edmund G. “Pat” Brown Sr. defeated Richard Nixon in 1962, Republicans have won eight elections for governor, Democrats four, if you count the Gray Davis reelection of 2002 that was reversed in an ignominious recall in 2003. Currently, the likely Republican nominee, Meg Whitman, is narrowly leading Attorney General and former Gov. Jerry Brown in the polls. 

Whitman, the former CEO of eBay, has already come close to wiping out her primary opponent, Steve Poizner, the state insurance commissioner and one of the few Republicans to win a statewide office other than governor in recent years.  In the general election, Republican candidates for governor, who are more moderate than their state party (e.g., Pete Wilson, Arnold Schwarzenegger), can be very hard to beat statewide.

This is the year of public anger against both government and Wall Street.  November’s election is also the first to follow a highly unpopular Supreme Court decision that opens the floodgates to corporate and union money in campaigns.  A self-financed candidate like Whitman can run as an outsider to government and also sidestep the debate over business funding of her campaign by largely paying her own way. Brown, on the other hand, is dependent on unions to raise independent funds to match her.  She can call him a tool of unions while she floats above it all.

Whitman has already spent $46 million, and it has been money well spent. She overcame early stumbles about her lack of a voting record.  She now has a three-point program that makes not a lick of sense on the planet where government actually operates but will resonate with the tax-averse electorate of California: Lower taxes, save education, create jobs.  This program may do well with the independent voters profiled in the most recent Los Angeles Times/USC poll. 

President Obama’s popularity has fallen, and Republicans are enthusiastic about their prospects in November.  While California is a highly diverse state, more California voters tend to be white and middle class than in the overall population. A recent Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) poll, for instance, showed Obama’s popularity at 58 percent among all adults, but only 52 percent among likely voters.  The same poll gave Whitman a 44-39 lead over Brown among likely voters.  Back in 2006, another PPIC study, “California’s Exclusive Electorate,” showed that if nonvoters joined likely voters at the polls, California government would be significantly more favorable to public investment.

What can Jerry Brown do? 

The wild card in the race is the voter verdict on Arnold Schwarzenegger.  The once-popular Terminator is now in the Dumpster of public opinion.  If Brown can make the case that Whitman would be another experiment with amateurism in government with the hope of a different result, he may get a hearing.  No Democrat has been better at balancing the outsider and insider roles than Brown, who can say that he has more experience than Whitman and is just as big a critic of government. 

At the same time, Whitman has attacked Arnold’s signature achievement, the AB 32 Climate Change legislation.  This position is vulnerable to attack and could hurt her with voters concerned about the environment.  And, of course, Brown will tie her to the state and national Republican parties.  If the economy improves, and the Democratic base continues to regain some of its enthusiasm following the passage of the health care bill, Brown could rise with that tide.  With the Republican party base driven to a frenzy, Whitman may not be conservative enough on some issues to hold its support.

Brown has smartly said he would not raise taxes without a vote of the people (hard to argue against that).  The most difficult thing, though, will be to bust Whitman on the “snake oil math,” as he recently called it, that has worked for Republicans since Ronald Reagan pioneered it decades ago. No one has had much success persuading the voters that their fondest fantasies are unrealistic: that there is sufficient waste, fraud and abuse to maintain services while cutting taxes. 

Most polls show that Latino voters are the most receptive to public spending, even if it means raising their own taxes.  In the long run, the prospects for Democratic leadership in California will likely emerge from an electorate that is more minority, more working class and more open to public investment.  Until then, Democrats will have to continue to do some careful sailing to win the California governorship.

Raphael J. Sonenshein is chair of the Division of Politics, Administration, and Justice at California State University, Fullerton.

Jerry Brown’s Uphill Climb Read More »

Dennis Prager: A response to a reader

Leave a Comment / Dennis Prager, Opinion /

Two of my favorite journals ever since I was in college have been Commentary and The New York Review of Books. The first is a major right-wing publication, the second a major left-wing one. Though on opposite sides of just about every issue, they both have a feature that should be present in any journal that takes ideas seriously: a response from the authors to letters to the editor.

In that vein, I will periodically devote space either in this journal’s letters section or in my column to responding to letters written in reaction to a column of mine.

I have decided to begin this process by responding to the letter of John F. Beckmann published in this week’s letters (Page 7). Written well, it nevertheless, in my view, illustrates much of where liberal critics and I differ. It should, therefore, be of interest to both conservatives and liberals.

Mr. Beckmann begins his letter with this: “Dennis Prager warned those of us who support health care reform that we will be scorned by our descendants when they are faced with long waits for doctors and inferior medical care.”

Mr. Beckmann misrepresents me.

This is what I actually wrote about our descendants:

“Those of us Jews who oppose the expansion of the welfare state and cry at the thought of America becoming like Western Europe can only say to American Jews yet unborn, ‘Try to forgive your leftist Jewish ancestors. They meant well.’”

As is clear, with regard to future generations’ assessment of our generation, I did not write about the longer waits and inferior medical care that so many physicians and I are certain will ensue from this bill. I wrote about the growth of the welfare state and America becoming like Western Europe.

If Mr. Beckmann thinks that America becoming like Germany or Norway is a good thing, he should have so argued — many liberals want America to emulate Western Europe’s welfare states. That would have addressed the primary concern of my column.

My whole column opposing the Democrats’ health care bill — including its very title — was about the growth of the state and how destructive I believe this is for all Americans and for Jews in particular.

So why did Mr. Beckmann ignore the point of what I wrote? Because that was the only way he could portray me as being selfishly motivated in my opposition to the health care bill. As he writes: My view is “solely ‘what’s in it for me’” and that “contradicts fundamental Jewish teachings.”

I point this out because what the writer did is regularly done by liberal critics of conservatives. Rather than refute conservatives’ arguments, they charge conservatives with being selfish people. And mean-spirited, bigoted, intolerant, racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic and any of the other many one-word liberal dismissals of conservatives as people.

That is why I am sure that many liberal readers of Mr. Beckmann’s letter nodded in agreement as they read his letter. I wonder how many among those who read my column said to themselves — “but that’s not what Prager wrote about.”

Then Mr. Beckmann cites Maimonides writing about Jewish laws that demand that Jews set up provisions for health care among fellow Jews.

A couple of reactions:

One is that we have been having a debate in America about universal health insurance, not universal health care. Virtually every person in the United States, including noncitizens and people here illegally, has access to health care.

Second, since Mr. Beckmann would like ancient and medieval Jewish laws to guide American lawmakers, does he also wish to have America be guided by the Talmud and Maimonides with regard to abortion? Jewish law, restated by Maimonides, holds that abortion should be illegal unless the mother’s life is directly threatened by the fetus.

Third, if the only thing the Democrats’ health care bill addressed were universal health insurance, few conservatives or other Americans would have been as exercised about this bill. But that is hardly the case — the bill is 2,409 pages and fundamentally reshapes the American government and economy.

The bill is about an unprecedented expansion of the state into Americans’ lives. That is the issue, not universal health insurance, which we all would, ideally, like to see. In my column, I quoted President Obama himself as stating that the bill and opposition to it were about the size of government, not about health insurance.

Fourth, I don’t think Maimonides would have approved of one generation virtually bankrupting succeeding generations. America cannot afford this bill financially — or morally, if we assume that liberty is a moral value.

Finally, if Mr. Beckmann and those who feel as he does are really opposed to the “what’s in it for me?” mentality, they should abandon most liberal and left-wing policies. Over the course of the past few generations, those policies have engendered a narcissism never seen before in American life. The more government does for people, the more it creates the very selfishness that Mr. Beckmann and others claim to oppose and ascribe to conservatives.

Ironically, it is precisely because we conservatives so fear the self-centered mindset that will ultimately bring America down that we will do everything in our power to repeal this latest — and unprecedentedly partisan — liberal attempt to have Americans ask not what they can do for their country but what, more and more and more, their country can do for them.

Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host, columnist, author and public speaker. He can be heard in Los Angeles on KRLA (AM 870) weekdays 9 a.m. to noon. His Web site is dennisprager.com.

Dennis Prager: A response to a reader Read More »

David Suissa: Naming names

Leave a Comment / David Suissa, Opinion /

It struck me during the Passover seders this year how impersonal the Jewish master story can be. We seem to jump so quickly to the grand themes. Slavery, freedom, responsibility. The characters are mythical, the drama is epic, the story laden with symbols. It all feels so overwhelming. It’s as if God gave us a blockbuster movie that we must turn into an indie.

In this blockbuster, one thing that is clearly impersonal is evil. We’re never told which Egyptian pharaoh we’re dealing with. It’s just a generic Pharaoh. One explanation for this (which I saw on the Seraphic Secret blog) is that, had his name been provided, “Historians and psychologists and novelists would have speculated about him, especially his childhood, suggesting probable reasons for his atrocious behavior.” This would “open the door to excuses and thence to the erosion of personal responsibility.”

That may be true for evil, but what about the victims of evil? Shall they also remain mythical and nameless?

This year, I found my own answer to that question. While I was going through the haggadah with my family in Montreal, as we were reflecting on a Passover story that overflows with nameless victims, I couldn’t stop thinking about victims with real names.

I was haunted by two names in particular: Josh Friedberg and Gail Rubin.

I came across Friedberg’s name in the lobby of my niece Rebecca’s Jewish day school in Montreal, Herzliah High School. His picture was framed behind a glass case, surrounded by diplomas, trophies, newspaper articles and other mementos. Friedberg was a star student, captain of the basketball team and an ardent Zionist. His dream was always to make aliyah.

He moved to Israel right after graduating from high school in 1991, during the first Gulf War. After learning in a Jerusalem yeshiva, he enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces’ Golani Brigade. While on patrol in March 1993, he was kidnapped and murdered by terrorists. It took several days to find his body.

Thousands attended his funeral on Mount Herzl, among them Yaffa Ganz, who wrote on aish.com: “Like our father Abraham, Josh had left the familiar to follow his God and to join his people in the Promised Land. … In ancient Egypt, Pharaoh had buried Jewish infants in the walls and monuments memorializing Egypt’s dead. Now, Jewish soldiers stood shoulder to shoulder, forming a living wall to protect Jewish children and keep them alive. Josh stood with them.

“He was kidnapped, tortured and killed because of a khaki uniform, a blue and white flag, a Star of David.”

Twenty-three years earlier, Gail Rubin, in her early 30s, was an editor at a major publishing house in New York, and she was restless. Zionism and politics had nothing to do with her move to Israel after a visit in 1969. As her cousin, journalist Elinor Brecher, wrote: “She fell in love with the irrepressible people who, with ceaseless labor, were turning a scrap of desert into fertile farmland.”

It was in Israel that Rubin began her love affair with photography: “She captured the merry grins of sun-browned kids on the cobbled streets of Israel’s ancient cities. Her color close-ups of tree barks rival the most spectacular abstract paintings. She made tender portraits of relaxed young Israeli soldiers. And she found them also as they lay wounded and dying in the Yom Kippur War.”

During one spring in the mid-1970s, her photographs of Israeli wildlife went on exhibit in the Jewish Museum in New York.

A year later, on a Saturday in March 1978, Rubin was walking on a beach near Tel Aviv, on her way to photograph wild birds at a nearby kibbutz. She was alone when a group of terrorists landed on the beach.

As Brecher wrote: “One report said the terrorists asked her for directions. She gave them the directions and they shot her. Another report said they asked her nothing. They just killed her.”

Rubin was one of 38 victims murdered in that terror rampage, which was in the news recently because Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas dedicated a memorial to its mastermind.

The mastermind’s name is now well known. I’m sure if I do a little research, I can find the names of other terrorists who became local heroes after murdering people like Josh Friedberg.

I doubt very much that I will look. Maybe it’s for the reason I mentioned earlier — that we keep Pharaoh nameless in the haggadah so that we will resist the temptation to rationalize or “explain” evil.

But there’s also a simpler reason. The terrorists get enough media fame and glory. We need to honor those who honor life. Josh Friedberg and Gail Rubin loved life. They gave their lives in the service of life. Friedberg gave his to defend his people. Rubin gave hers because she yearned to reinvent herself.

If there’s a message to their stories, it’s that we need the courage to fight for our cause, but also the wisdom to remember why we’re fighting — so that people like Gail Rubin can be free to walk on the beach and photograph wild birds.

To honor these lovers of life, we must absolutely turn our blockbuster into an indie and name names.

David Suissa is the founder of OLAM magazine and OLAM.org. You can read his daily blog at suissablog.com and e-mail him at {encode=”suissa@olam.org” title=”suissa@olam.org”}.

David Suissa: Naming names Read More »

Danny Danon and the No-State Solution

Leave a Comment / Opinion, Rob Eshman /

If you want to know what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thinks about the peace process, don’t watch what he does, listen to what Danny Danon says.

Danon is a whippersnapper member of Knesset from the Likud party. In 2006, he opposed then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s disengagement from Gaza. For the past year, he’s been attacking Netanyahu for suspending new settlement construction per the United States’ demands.  When the Obama administration chastised Netanyahu last March for announcing new building in East Jerusalem, it was Danon who snapped back, saying U.S. pressure on Israel hurts Israel and hurts peace. If you saw the movie “Youth in Revolt” with Michael Cera (and you should, it’s a very good movie with a very bad trailer), Danon is like Cera’s belligerent alter ego, egging him on, toughening him up.  In other words, Danny Danon is Bibi Netanyahu, 20 years ago.

I met Danon in the lobby of the Beverly Hilton Hotel in late March, after he’d spent a few days speaking around Southern California.  He is a native Israeli of North African heritage, dark-featured, and was decked out in a well-cut suit and power tie — not your father’s shirt-sleeve Israeli pol. At 39, he is chairman of the World Likud and Deputy Speaker of the Knesset. People said that if I wanted to meet the future of Israel, I had to meet Danny Danon.

Danon believes with every fiber of his being that the two-state solution is dead, the one-state solution is a “liberal scare tactic,” and Israel must never give up the territories it captured in the Six-Day War.

This was a founding principle of Likud and its Revisionist ideological forbears: that Israel has a right to the entire biblical land of Israel. It’s a point of view that runs counter to every international peace-making effort in the Middle East since 1967, all dedicated to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It’s also run up against the widely accepted belief that if Israel maintains control of the territories and the millions of Palestinians who live in them, demographic realities will force Israel to become either a nondemocratic, majority Arab nation, or lose its raison d’être as a Jewish state.

“We cannot ignore the long-term population trends that result from the Israeli occupation,” Secretary of State Hilary Clinton told thousands of AIPAC attendees in Washington, D.C., earlier this month. “As Defense Minister [Ehud] Barak and others have observed, the inexorable mathematics of demography are hastening the hour at which Israelis may have to choose between preserving their democracy and staying true to the dream of a Jewish homeland. Given this reality, a two-state solution is the only viable path for Israel to remain both a democracy and a Jewish state.”

So, the obvious question I had for Danon was this: “If you don’t want a two-state solution, what’s your solution?”

“There is no short-term solution,” Danon said. “It’s a long-term vision that I have, that there be a regional agreement with Jordan, and with Gaza and Egypt. … Gaza would be connected to Egypt, and Palestinian territories connected into Jordan, confederated into Jordan. That is the long-term vision, which requires some compromise from Israel, Jordan, Egypt, and international support.”

Danon is aware that the idea isn’t new, and that the Palestinians and the Arab states have categorically rejected it.

But he is confident that Israel can maintain the status quo long enough for the equations to change. More Arab states might turn toward Israel, squeezing the Palestinians. More Palestinians might actually emigrate.  Some conditions might worsen, Danon explained, but others may improve. Better to wait out an unpleasant conflict than rush into a flawed peace.

Other politically active Likudniks in Danon’s generation have offered me the same analysis: Israel is economically and militarily strong, the Palestinians are politically divided. The status quo, which is the bogeyman of centrists, is actually Israel’s friend.

I told Danon it seemed Netanyahu believes this as well — otherwise why risk such a confrontation with the United States?

“I agree,” Danon said. “Today I think Netanyahu realizes we have no one who actually represents the Palestinian who’s willing to cut a deal.

“People say, ‘The clock is ticking, you have to do something.’ No, I think the opposite. We should not do anything in a rush.”

If Danon is correct — that Netanyahu believes as he does — it means the prime minister and his government are merely paying lip service to their agreements with the United States over the peace process, and that the building in East Jerusalem that provoked the United States’ ire was a pure expression of Netanyahu’s true desires to expand settlements, though clumsily executed.

“It was really just a question of how, not whether,” said Danon. “It was just a question of why make it so public, and why make the announcement while the vice president was standing there.”

Netanyahu definitely “wants to continue” building settlements, Danon said. The settlement freeze Netanyahu promised the Obama administration ends on Sept. 30. Danon has been relentless in publicly pressuring Netanyahu to start building after that. Want to see whether Danon moves up a few rungs on the political ladder? Mark your calendars for Oct. 1.

Of course, previous Likud stalwarts like Sharon, Ehud Olmert and even Netanyahu, in his first time around, made or offered substantial concessions once they became prime minister. But not when they were young and on the rise — then their fires burned hot and their ideology was pure. If Netanyahu bends, Danny Danon is waiting in the wings to take over, and keep the status quo alive.

Danny Danon and the No-State Solution Read More »

Have we hit Holocaust fatigue?

Leave a Comment / Cover Story /

For one day in December, the word “Auschwitz” was ranked second on Yahoo’s daily list of most-popular searches. Third most popular that day? LeAnn Rimes. So what did it take for a symbol of the attempted destruction of an entire race of people as well as millions of others to outpace a country singer in her 20s? The previous day, five bumbling crooks stole the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign that teased and tormented prisoners passing through the main gate of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. This brazen crime was subsequently solved, the sign was recovered in Northern Poland, and searches for Auschwitz returned to their normal ranking well outside of the top 10.

On April 12, Auschwitz and the Holocaust may once again return to the top 10, as the United States pauses to recognize Holocaust Remembrance Day. Jews and gentiles will gather to hear testimony, shed tears and hugs, and then swear “never again.” Unfortunately, the words “never again” do not seem to be referring to preventing future genocides, but rather to a dismissal of the Holocaust for the following 364 days. Holocaust fatigue has blanketed the population of the United States.

“Defiance,” “The Reader,” “Valkyrie,” “Inglourious Basterds.”

How can we be ignoring something that was in every multiplex across the nation this year?

What about museums? The Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center opened in Skokie in spring 2009, and the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, the oldest one of its kind in the United States, will open the doors of its new home Pan Pacific Park this fall. The Holocaust is as present now as it ever was in our hearts and minds. We remember, we educate. But, in a very real way, we have moved on.

We have gone from a world that faced the reality of the Nazi death mills in print and film to a world that is Holocaust adjacent. When we do talk or remember, it is not about the camps themselves but about a tangential story. The Holocaust is now a character in films and books. A plot point. A figure in the background. At times it is used as a fable, like “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.” At other times, it is fictionalized outright, as in “Inglourious Basterds.” An entire generation of children is growing up in a post- “Schindler’s List” world, without a point of reference as to the reality of the Holocaust. These children have no visual depiction of the Holocaust. Ask a teenager what he or she sees when you mention the word Holocaust. The answer will not be the same one you would get if you asked a person in his 40s or 50s. We have moved away from the actual concentration camps, and we don’t seem to be going back.

This idea of becoming Holocaust adjacent may seem shocking at first, but then, upon inspection, eerily accurate. Our films no longer take us to the camps. They take us near the camps. They take us to a post-camp world. As long as they take us to a place where the specter of the Holocaust merely looms in the background, foreboding, foreshadowing or coloring a character’s back story, we may turn out to watch. While it seems that the Holocaust is everywhere in film and television, if you stop and look a bit more closely, you’ll see very little about the systematic destruction of 11 million people.

Have we hit Holocaust fatigue? Read More »

Letters to the Editor: Shalhevet, Tea Party Politics, Prager, Suissa

Leave a Comment / Letters to the Editor, Opinion /

Mourning Loss of Jewish Day Schools

The pending closures of Shalhevet’s elementary and middle schools (“Shalhevet to Close 3 Schools Because of Financial Woes,” March 26) are tragedies. The schools are blessed with excellent faculties, and their corridors exude ruach at every turn. They’ve complemented well the outstanding array of Jewish day schools that dot the local landscape by providing unique alternatives for committed Jewish families. The shuttering of their doors will be a sad day for our community.

The reason behind this failure, financial hardship, surprises no one connected with Jewish education. Even in the best of times, Jewish schools struggle to remain fiscally sound. Today’s economy is destabilizing some of the heartiest among them. We must do more than just mourn this passing, as there’s much that can be done to bolster Southern California’s network of Jewish schools. The process should immediately begin by restoring our supplemental schools to the same high standards that they maintained just a few decades ago, because an education at these schools costs just a fraction of day school tuition. Classes should be conducted thrice weekly and students should participate in four to six weekend retreats annually for in-depth study and application of what they’ve been taught. There are numerous Jewish camps throughout the area that can accommodate such gatherings.

Leonard M. Solomon
Los Angeles

Not His Cup of Tea

I take a great deal of personal offense at your characterization of the Tea Party movement (“Party Off,” March 26). The overwhelming majority of people involved in the movement are not racist or any of the “phobes” you on the left love to call people with whom you disagree. I am a proud member of this movement, and I represent the true face of it — a hard-working, law-abiding, well-educated, patriotic American who is very worried about the direction in which the country is presently headed.

To use David Frum as an example of conservative thought is laughable. Out of all the prominent conservative thinkers in the country you could have cited, you quote one of the most erratic and confused men out there. And to equate the Tea Party movement with national socialism and communism, which, I might add, were left-wing movements, is one of the lowest forms of libel imaginable.

Maybe if you would come out of the cocoon of your West Coast elitism and mix with ordinary, mainstream middle America, you might come to realize that we are not the bigots and anti-Semites you think we are.

Sanford Kaplan
Los Angeles

The Right to Health Care

Dennis Prager warned those of us who support health care reform that we will be scorned by our descendants when they are faced with long waits for doctors and inferior medical care (“Jews and Big Government,” March 26). In other words, he feels we should prefer the shorter waits of today and the presumed superior care despite that they result from our fellow citizens being excluded from comparable services. His view of solely “what’s in it for me” contradicts fundamental Jewish teachings. Some 800 years ago, Maimonides listed health care first on his list of the 10 most important communal services that a city had to offer to its residents (Mishneh Torah, Hilchot De’ot IV: 23). Almost all self-governing Jewish communities throughout history set up systems to ensure that all their citizens had reasonable access to health care. I would suggest that when he writes in a Jewish publication to a Jewish audience, Mr. Prager should respect the teachings and values of our faith. He should also consider that our descendants will actually thank those of us who supported health care reform — for being able to pursue careers without having to worry about pre-existing conditions, for being able to work part time or self-employed and still have medical insurance within reach, and even for the shorter lines in the emergency rooms … which will result from more people being able to see doctors on a regular basis for preventive and curative care.

John F. Beckmann
Sherman Oaks

Editor’s note: Please see Dennis Prager’s column on Page 9 for his response.

Government by the People, for the People

Thank you, David Suissa (“Let My People Stay,” March 26)! Why not take it to the people? In the United States, we are so quick to voice our opinions as to how everyone else in the world should conduct business. We always seem to fail to consider the people who are involved — Israelis and Palestinians. Let the people who live there decide how the two-state solution will allow for coexistence for Muslims, Jews, Christians, Greek Orthodox and other religions in the area known as Israel/Palestine. Establish town-hall meetings to identify the issues as seen by the people living in Israel/Palestine. Then have the people prioritize those issues to identify the ones most important to them. Compare those prioritized lists. Submit the lists to a committee consisting of representatives of the people to develop the agenda for the peace process. Let the people decide where and how they want to live in peace. Let the people decide who wants to live in the Palestinian state and who wants to live in the Israeli state. Let them decide on the governmental format of each state.

For thousands of years, Arabs and Jews peacefully coexisted in the Israel/Palestine area. Why not now?

Sandra K. Brodwin
La Canada Flintridge

Correction

In “UCLA Med Sciences Leader Steps Down” (March 19), David Geffen’s endowment to UCLA’s School of Medicine was $200 million.

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City, County Officials Celebrate No Ruz at Westwood’s Persian Square

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On March 28, nearly 10,000 Los Angeles Iranian Americans of various religions, including local Iranian Jews, celebrated the Persian New Year of No Ruz on Westwood Boulevard in Westwood Village, with the official naming of a street corner as Persian Square.  Los Angeles City Council man for District 5, Paul Koretz, was on hand for the ceremony; he introduced a motion in the council to name the corner of Westwood Boulevard and Wilkins Street as Persian Square earlier this year.

“This sign is in recognition of the first Persian business established in Westwood and the city in 1974, and in appreciation for how the Persian community has given back to the city in so many great ways over the years,” Koretz said.

Last year, Koretz narrowly won his city council seat in a tight election with the wide support of local Iranian Americans in the city who primarily live and work in his district. No Ruz is an ancient secular new year celebrated by Iranians of different faiths worldwide to mark the beginning of spring with parties, dancing and the giving of money as gifts.

Other elected officials on hand for the Persian Square gathering included L.A. City Councilman Tom LaBonge, L.A. City Controller Wendy Greuel, L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky and Beverly Hills’ Iranian-Jewish
Mayor Jimmy Delshad. Last month, Delshad was installed to serve his second term as mayor of Beverly Hills, a position that rotates annually among the city council members.

In addition to the No Ruz event in Westwood, the L.A. City Council honored the holiday in an official ceremony at City Hall last month, and on April 4 several thousand local Iranian Americans celebrated the end of the holiday at a Persian festival held at Balboa Park in Lake Balboa.

To view Karmel Melamed’s video interviews with Koretz, Greuel and Delshad on the No Ruz celebrations, visit jewishjournal.com/iranianamericanjews/.

City, County Officials Celebrate No Ruz at Westwood’s Persian Square Read More »