Just the other day I asked my 15-year-old son if he'd like to visit the National Holocaust Museum. He had a few days between the end of school and the launch of his summer plans. Our last visit to the museum has become something of a family "joke": A decade ago I took him (age 5) and his older sister (then 7) to visit the children's section of the museum. Although that exhibit is geared to a more youthful audience, it was still nightmarish and chilling to such young imaginations.
Called "Remember the Children: Daniel's Story," the exhibit tracks the fate of an ordinary German schoolboy who is eventually deported with his family to Auschwitz. You begin in a replica of the boy's bedroom--just like any other, comfortably furnished, with toys, books, mementos--and then proceed through a series of rooms that re-create the rise of German anti-semitism, from the cracked shop windows of Kristalnaacht, to the typical quarters of a family now living in the ghetto, and eventually to the concentration camp itself. The journey is narrated by poignant, and often harrowing, excerpts from the boy's diary, a la Anne Frank.
My children could not sleep properly for weeks afterwards. My husband (born Jewish)--who'd not received an advance warning of our little excursion--was flabbergasted that I would think that this had been a good idea. Still imbued with the zeal of a convert, I insisted it was important for our children to understand this aspect of their religious heritage. It being 1998, antisemitism--especially in North America--seemed as much a thing of the past as the grainy black-and-white photographs depicting trainloads of passengers in old-fashioned dress, being loaded to their doom.
My husband shook his head. "Yes, it's never too early to let them know how loathed Jews have been." He suggested a corrective field trip to the Israeli embassy, where they might glimpse more positive images of Jews defending themselves. I bristled--but guiltily (isn't that emotion also integral to the Jewish identity?). It was stupid of me. For years I regretted the ghastly pictures I'd imported into my children's minds.
Now fast forward: The little boy who once asked, plaintively, grasping my hand, "Mommy, why do people want to kill the Jews?" is now taller than I. He recently (as in, during the most recent conflict in January) accompanied our Rabbi on a tour of Gaza and visited with Israeli victims of suicide bombings and other acts of terror. Post 9/11, he's witnessed the rise of worldwide, and often officially sanctioned, antisemitism in cities where we once thought it had been eradicated--London, Paris, Berlin. Closer to our home in D.C., he's watched cement barricades go up around the Jewish schools he attended in pre-K and elementary. The playgrounds are now screened from the street. The front classroom windows are darkened so as to impede visibility from the outside. We no longer remark on the police cruiser that sits outside our shul on major Jewish holidays: private security is now as central to the celebration of Rosh Hashanah as apples and honey.
So when free time arose this week, I proposed he and I go back to the museum so he could see it through more mature, less vulnerable , eyes. He was keen to visit this time--and ribbed me again about inflicting it upon him when he was so young.
We were thinking of going today or tomorrow. It's a good thing that we procrastinated. Who would have imagined that the sentiments we'd once thought were so safely encased as historical exhibits would blast forth and shatter through the museum itself?
And what would I answer now to my son's haunting question: "Mommy, why do people want to kill the Jews?"
Robert D. Stolorow: "Radical Evil"
Richard Bernstein has written an important philosophical inquiry into the phenomenon of evil (Bernstein 2002), an inquiry that will be of great value to psychoanalysts.
And for holding these "radical" ideas of dialog, they are imprisoned.
These young Israeli heroes, Israel's HOPE, give their testimonies at http://december18th.org/ .
Take a look at this, people are going nuts
That’s why the hate has to stop
Stop hating Jews
Stop hating Palestinians
Stop waiting for the end of time hoping that the entire world will be plunged into unbelievable misery
Start loving each other!
Support our President in his attempt at bringing peace and good sense back in to this troubled world.
Let’s have positive examples posted about people helping each other even their so called enemies.
Let’s begin to celebrate man’s humanity
But what is going on in the middle east with Arabs and Jews - Semites all - is something else and for that conflict both the right question and the right answer are certainly different - although the complication of the overlaping influence of the ongoing Christian Crusades complicates the considerations
The jews are special. Not only are they a self identified separate ethnicity/race, they also practice a separate religion with a rich rich history with their own language (Hebrew). If this wasn't bad enough, the religion they practice is at direct odds with the two largest religions, Christianity and Islam.
Maybe because of this very fact, they form close communities, which fosters business, professional, social and familial success. So of course being successful, people have an additional reason to hate them.
They are a bigots wet dream.
A similar case is the chandala caste in Hinduism. They are perceived as a separate race and only permitted to worship certain gods. So already the hindu tradition has figured out that the two pronged marginalizing forces of racial segregation and religious self-identification are excellent ways to keep people down.
That's why Jews keep on popping up, they are good signs of racial and religious intolerance. (which Chris rock highlighted in a funny routine)
Also to be Jewish is NOT a nationality because they have no nation. (2000 year old nation doesn't count). But you can be an Israelite.
One can self identify oneself as Jewish in the sense of a community or cultural identity, being a Jewish atheist here makes sense.
But you cannot be a racial Jew, because DNA evidence and modern genealogy disproves almost all of that. It is really a religious term people mix up with being a cultural Jew.
Judaism is not at odds with Islam and Christianity. There are many common beliefs and values, and all three share the same common ancestor, Abraham.
And being Jewish is very simple, either you converted or your mother is Jewish. Just because you like bagels and lox, and occasionally use the word schtik, that does not make you a "cultural Jew," there is no such thing.
Abraham had no female children, nor did his son Isaac, or grandson Jacob (aka Israel).
The "children of Israel" (Jacob) were 12 men, not women. They had 4 different mothers, none of whom were descended from Abraham.
So, how was the "Jew gene" passed down by women beginning with Abraham when Abraham had no female children?
"Jew" was a nationality (Judean), not a "race." A nationality that no longer exists.
Currently, Jews are members of a religious cult called Judaism, but they are not born Jews, they must accept Judaism as their religion. Same as Christians or Muslims.
Jews have not been the only group persecuted over time, that is just part of their mythology which they actively promote to legitimize their mythology.
Zionism is an extension of the Christian Crusades.
The problem is with people who promote a book of mythology as a history book. And, then, proceed to wage wars based on those myths.
And, repeat those myths (e.g. "Jews are a race") as fact.
Why do we demonize the Muslim Arab and why are thousands upon thousands of their lives slaughtered not even worth mentioning?
So, Europeans--whether they are Gay or Straight acknowlege the suffering of the Palestinians, for example, but not the Americans, because so many of the despotic tyrannies that we set up and call "our friends" persecute homosexuals and women?
1/ Act in an alternative way, and thereby demonstrate the inefficiency and wastefulness of that ideology and its methods.
2/ Adopt and maintain a similar approach, and thereby infer legitimacy to those actions.
I may rid the world of another. But what advance has been made, if I become him?
J
In recent years, it has become fashionable for Jew-haters to disguise their racism with clever camouflage: "Oh, I'm not anti-Semitic, just anti-Israel/anti-Zionist." Sorry, that won't wash. It's one thing to criticise the actions of the Israeli government; I do that often. But what's often done is to question our very existence, our legitimacy as a people. That's racist. And it's such talk that fuels the actions of extremists and haters.
Let's see if this gets posted. So far it hasn't worked. I wonder?
What a growing number question is the existence of Israel as a Zionist state, a state that must remain Jewish. Like South Africa was once determined to remain white.
This insane act by a disturbed individual will be used to try to discredit anyone who has this view, as you're doing. It's no more relevant than the crazy Jewish gunman who shot up the Dome of the Rock a few years ago.
Sorry, but we're contemptuously rejecting this cheap attempt to discredit our views, which, like those who try to use the Holocaust as an excuse for imposing Israel on the unwilling Palestinians, actually dirties the memory of those who were murdered.
who has the skills and positioning to advance certain crimes to front page news
while other crimes languish in the ethers
Some hate crimes are just more important than others.....
An abortionist is dead and the story was good for a couple news cycles.
An Arab shoots an American enlistee -- but it really didn't get much traction.
A guard at a holocaust museum is shot and ..... whoa....
24/7 for the cause.... not a bad nights work
The killing of the guard story is new. We don't know how many cycles it will last. It may depend on how many people say that the shooter was justified by whatever twisted logic they might use.
My heart goes out to the families and friends of all of all three men, killed by extremists.
People are too vested in the archetype of a Jew as a weaklings ( or universal evil as, switch as needed) who used as a scapegoat whenever occasional required.
Bur now Jews have a country. A small but powerful and a sucessful one.
And the atavistic Jodeophobes of the world will just have to get used to it.
J