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Maus and the repressive power of Jewish trauma Should American Jews let go of the Holocaust?

'The Holocaust trumps art every time.' (Pantheon)

'The Holocaust trumps art every time.' (Pantheon)


January 28, 2023   8 mins

There was a great three-panel comic that the artist Art Spiegelman did for The Virginia Quarterly Review a while back that neatly encapsulates the dubious if nearly universal centrality of the Holocaust in American Jewish life. In the strip, the artist, author of Maus, the path-breaking Jews-as-mice-Nazis-as-cats Holocaust manga, hands a little treasure chest to his son, Dash — a birthday present. When his son opens the box, a horrible fire-breathing dragon wearing an Auschwitz prisoner’s striped cap, with a little extra Hitler head for good measure, breathes fire on the child and burns him. Nice gift, dad.

Still, Spiegelman’s Maus seems fated to wind up one day in its own Dead Sea Scrolls-like wing in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which stands on the National Mall in Washington DC, a stone’s throw away from the gorgeous Yoruba crown of the American Museum of African American History. Since the Holocaust Memorial Museum opened in 1993, fewer and fewer American Jews seem to question the wisdom of putting a gruesome and terrifying act of mass murder at the centre of their collective identity. In a recent Pew Research Center study, 76% of American Jews said that “remembering the Holocaust” was a key component of what being Jewish meant to them — far ahead of other ostensible pillars of communal life such as “working for justice and equality” (59%), “caring about Israel” (45%), “having a good sense of humour” (34%), or “observing Jewish law” (15%).

The centrality of the Holocaust to American Jewish self-definition is also a surprisingly recent phenomenon. The invisible barrier that partitioned the American Jewish success story from the terrors of the Holocaust only began to dissolve in the late Seventies, with the airing of the 1978 mini-series Holocaust, starring Meryl Streep. Conceived and sold as a kind of Jewish Roots, Alex Haley’s sweeping drama about American slavery which had aired the previous year, Holocaust was seen by large mass audiences in both the US and Germany, breaking the informal ban on portraying Nazi crimes through the lives of their Jewish victims. In that same year, the Polish Jewish writer Issac Bashevis Singer, who lived in Manhattan and wrote movingly in Yiddish about the vanished world of European Jewry and the lives of Ă©migrĂ© Holocaust survivors in America, was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, leading to broader interest in his work in the US. The following year saw the publication of two taboo-breaking American novels that brought the Holocaust into mainstream literary culture, Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer and William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, both of which underlined the uneasy continuities between Europe and America (Streep also starred in the movie version of Styron’s novel).

In the context of these cracks in the cultural ice, which would culminate, in 1993, with the opening of the Holocaust Museum in Washington and the release of Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List, the appearance of Art Spiegelman’s autobiographical cartoon strips about Jewish mice and Nazi cats in the underground comics magazine Raw in 1980 — the strips were published in book form as Maus in 1986 — did not cause much of a stir. Yet for those of us who were kids in New York and read Raw, Spiegelman’s strips were the ultimate Holocaust Samizdat. Were they sacrilegious? Were they art?

When I asked Spiegelman that question a few years back, he sighed, and gave his stock answer: “The Holocaust trumps art every time.” Spiegelman, whose name can be translated as “art mirrors man”, is the owner of a stunningly fertile graphic imagination that over the past 40 years has produced dozens of formally innovative and often searingly self-reflective strips in various magazines, including Arcade and Raw, which he co-founded and edited with his wife, French artist and editor Francoise Mouly. In his day job at the Topps trading card company, he created and edited the Garbage Pail Kid series before moving on to a more upscale day job at The New Yorker, where he created some of the magazine’s most iconic covers of the past three decades, including a Hasid and a black woman kissing on Valentine’s Day and the famous post-9/11 “black cover”, which, when you held it at an angle to the light, showed the outlines of the vanished Twin Towers.

Spiegelman came by his interest in the Holocaust naturally enough, as a child of parents who survived Auschwitz and settled in New York City after the war. Spiegelman himself was born in Stockholm, Sweden; his brother Rysio was poisoned in a bunker in Poland along with two other small children by his aunt, so that they wouldn’t be taken to an extermination camp. When Spiegelman was 20, he was confined in a mental hospital, whereupon his mother killed herself. Spiegelman was released from a state mental institution in Binghamton, N.Y., to attend her funeral — an event that would become the basis of one of his early, devastatingly personal cartoons. Spiegelman’s father then burned his mother’s diaries about her experiences during the war and in the camps, which she had intended for her son to read after her death.

His impulse to rid himself — and his son — of the burden of the Holocaust was not unusual, either among survivors or American Jews in general. The Holocaust was largely a taboo subject among American Jews, most of whom were glad to have left Europe and the experiences of European Jewry behind, especially given the opposing fates of Europe’s Jews and America’s. Where European Jews had faced total annihilation, American Jews had gained unparalleled social acceptance in a more open and democratic country that they were eager to embrace, and which seemed increasingly, and even unusually, willing to embrace them.

The key to Jewish social acceptance in America, which included access to higher education, jobs, and housing that had routinely been denied to Jews before the war, was their military service during the Second World War. More than 600,000 American Jews fought in the Allied Armed Forces to defeat Hitler, who was both a national enemy and a particular enemy of the Jews he sought to exterminate. The fight against Hitler therefore united American nationalism and Jewish particularism in a way that helped liberate Jews from the prejudice they had suffered before the war. The Manhattan Project, which gifted the United States rather than Nazi Germany with the most terrifyingly destructive weapon known to mankind, was led by the Jewish physicist Robert Oppenheimer and a team of Ă©migrĂ© scientists, most of whom were also Jewish, and was grounded in a theory of matter whose outstanding progenitors were physicists Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, who were also — well, you get the point. Another half million or so American Jews fought in Korea.

The replacement of images of American Jewish wartime patriotism, heroism and strength with images of European victimhood struck Jews in the Fifties as a dubious, undesirable and even potentially dangerous trade-off. Far from being a pillar of communal identity, the Holocaust was mostly a kind of terrifying in-group secret that accompanied the great movement of Jews from urban ghettos to tennis clubs in leafy suburbs like the one that Philip Roth portrayed in Goodbye, Columbus. Speak too loudly about the Holocaust, or so the whispered communal voices suggested, and friendly post-war Americans might recall that before 1939 many of them — especially at the higher echelons of society — had been fervent antisemites. Survivors such as Art Spiegelman’s parents, who came to America after the war with numbers tattooed on their arms, speaking broken English and haunted by terrible memories, were unwanted guests at the banquet of post-war American Jewish success, bearers of the grim message that it could all vanish tomorrow.

A good part of the energy of American Jewish culture after the war can therefore be seen in part as the product of an act of profound and even generative repression of a tragedy that after all, had happened somewhere else. In Hollywood, where Jews, individually and collectively, exerted an enormous cultural presence, it took until Schindler’s List for an A-list Jewish director or executive or star to make a major film about the destruction of European Jewry. Neither The Naked and the Dead nor Catch-22, the two classic American Second World War novels, written by the Jewish novelists Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller respectively, mentioned the Holocaust. The 1959 movie version of The Diary of Anne Frank was directed by George Stevens and otherwise carefully de-natured to avoid seeming like a Jewish story.

For an American kid like Spiegelman, who was nevertheless unable to avoid the subject of the Holocaust because of the ways they had shaped his own life, it was necessary to find non-mainstream cultural forms in which to express his terrors. Spiegelman credits Mad magazine and the sensibility of its founder Harvey Kurtzman for shaping his early desire to use cartoons to express his sense that something was not entirely right with the way the world around him worked or was portrayed in mainstream acceptable culture. His first Mad anthology, which he studied with the intensity that some of his peers brought to pages of the Talmud, was a gift from his mother, the Auschwitz survivor who killed herself.

Starting in 1978, Spiegelman, then a well-known underground cartoonist, began interviewing his father about his wartime experiences. In the early Eighties, he began creating strips that narrated his father’s stories and portrayed his own relationship with his father, a miserly and compulsive yet deeply sympathetic character; the strips were published in Raw under the title “Maus”. Both the title and the device of portraying Jews as mice and Germans as cats had been used by Spiegelman before, in a three-page strip he had published in 1972 and that was later published in his collection Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!, which attracted the admiration of hundreds of dedicated alternative comics fans but few buyers.

Today, it seems clear that Maus and Maus II, Spiegelman’s continuation of the first collection, are the most powerful and significant works of art produced by any American Jewish writer or artist about the Holocaust. While their enduring popularity is a tribute to Spiegelman’s deep honesty about his emotional experience of his upbringing and of his graphic and narrative talent, it is also a reflection of the way in which the Holocaust has morphed from a threatening and largely repressed communal trauma to the glue that binds the American Jewish community together. If Art Spiegelman is a genius who created a work of searing originality and insight out of his familial and personal suffering, it is also hard not to worry about the anti-aesthetic and communal consequences of his achievement. If he is right to complain that the Holocaust trumps art, it was Maus that opened the floodgates.

Of course, Jews are hardly the only group of Americans who seek to define themselves through historical trauma. In America’s flourishing victimhood Olympics, to be a black American is to be the descendent of slaves, who were whipped and chained — even if your Nigerian parents came to America to study medicine on Fulbright Scholarships. To be Asian is to have been sent to labour camps during the Second World War — “Asian” being one of the catch-all American identity groupings like “Hispanic” that lump together the experiences of widely differing nationalities, population groups and tribes. To be gay is to be persecuted for your sexual preferences, like Oscar Wilde, or be denied treatment for Aids. In all these cases, the moral virtue and practical wisdom of inculcating identities centred around the traumatic experiences of people who, in most cases, are no longer alive is simply taken as an article of faith.

Yet Jews remain a special case, in part because the trauma inflicted on them was so recent and totalising; in part because they are in fact a tribe, with a continuous collective historical memory stretching back to the Old Testament; and in part, because they are also, simultaneously, an unabashed American success story. The apparent contradictions between the American Jewish success story and the Holocaust victimhood narrative can be unsettling, both for purveyors of victimhood ideology and for American Jews. For if historical trauma begets present-day ills, then why are Jews so successful — and were they ever truly victims? And what if Jewish success in fact begets Jewish victimhood, in which case America’s special status as a safe haven from the terrors of Jewish history is illusory?

The fact is, neither the Left nor the Right in America can get what they actually want from the Holocaust, which is a simple and gratifying victory over their political enemies. Fantasies about rural Trumpers gleefully carting liberal American Jews off to the gas chambers have more in common with fetish porn than they do with American social or political reality. Similarly, the poor inner-city teenagers who physically attack poor urban religious Jews with sickening regularity have little in common with goose-stepping would-be Übermenschen.

The eagerness with which both sides in America’s inane political wars seek to deploy the Holocaust as a weapon is not a sign of any great respect for the dead. Nor does it do anything to help living Jews, whose position as a small minority in an increasingly fractured and unstable country seems unlikely to improve anytime soon, no matter how often the Left and Right accuse the other side of being Nazis.

Perhaps Art Spiegelman’s parents understood something important about the past that today’s balkanised and trauma-obsessed Americans can no longer credit: that the greatest gift you can give your children is to free them from the past, so that they can become something new. For Art Spiegelman’s parents, the demand that they not pass on their incalculable suffering to their son was simply too great. The rest of America has no such excuse.

 

David Samuels contributed an essay to Maus Now, a new essay collection edited by Hillary Chute (Viking).


David Samuels is a writer who lives in upstate New York.


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Nicky Samengo-Turner
Nicky Samengo-Turner
1 year ago

Of course due to the woke world, and people falling over themselves to make excuses for certain ethnic minorities in the US, it is almost heresy to publicly state that the Jewish immigrants, and more latterly the Indian Hindus are the most succesful, high achieving peoples in the US in every single part of life that they turn their almost incredibly able, talented and vibrant minds to.

Mike Fraser
Mike Fraser
1 year ago

That is one of the problems. the jealousy of the perceived Jewish ability to be pound-for-pound cleverer, more hard working and richer than others seems to mean that antisemitism is not so bad.
Which of course is rubbish.
Antisemitism is the worst of racist crimes because Judaism has been hated by other religions for so long as well as all the false accusations thrown at it.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 year ago
Reply to  Mike Fraser

I respect your point of view and agree with what you’ve stated, except in one respect.
Why does antisemitism, virulent and widespread as it has been for many centuries, have to be uniquely bad, the incontrovertible worst of all bigotries? Have Jews as a group received the worst treatment in America? Should the enslavement of African-descended peoples and genocidal mistreatment of Native peoples be placed in some less vicious category of man’s inhumanity to man?
I’m not suggesting that any group “wins” the historical or present-day victim Olympics, but I am insisting that it is possible, and better, to understand the important differences between campaigns of group-directed violence and oppression without ranking them.
I thought this article made a very facile and wrongheaded advocacy for stuffing the Holocaust down the memory hole, as if that is a healthy path forward. Especially when Holocaust denialism and minimization is so rampant.
But any group identity based very heavily in a sense of shared suffering–and that can happen with any human group that’s been around long enough, including non-Jewish European ethnic groups such as my ancestral folks, the Irish–is a trap, and a likely source of more division and misunderstanding. No one “wins” the most mistreated people contest in any helpful or conclusive way.
That’s my sincere opinion, one that’s perhaps too easy for me to hold due to my non-membership in any groups that had it worse than my ancestors did–whether or not, or in whichever way, the criminal group-mistreatment suffered is the all-time or present-day worst of all.

Last edited 1 year ago by AJ Mac
PAUL NATHANSON
PAUL NATHANSON
1 year ago
Reply to  AJ Mac

I agree with you, AJ Mac, and I am a Jew. Comparative suffering really means competitive suffering, which is very hard to measure (except purely physical suffering, to some extent, in a medical laboratory). That’s because suffering is experienced subjectively (but not imagined) and defined culturally. But that’s not the main problem, which is that no person and no group can win this game on moral grounds, because it inevitably trivializes the suffering of some and, in effect, glorifies the suffering of others–thus ignoring or negating the need for compassion. And that, in turn, leads to resentment instead of reconciliation–especially when people forget that revenge is not a synonym for justice.

Last edited 1 year ago by PAUL NATHANSON
AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 year ago
Reply to  PAUL NATHANSON

Well-stated and persuasive, Paul (though I can’t deny that I’m biased toward your supporting view). Compassion and understanding are never reliably stored up, but more like a well in continual need of replenishment.

Alan Osband
Alan Osband
1 year ago
Reply to  PAUL NATHANSON

The whole concept of inherited suffering is truly bizarre . In what sense do people ‘inherit’ or share in the suffering of people 200 or even 100 years ago just because they belong to the same ethnicity ? The serious point of the article is that you shouldn’t deliberately try to inculcate some kind of vicarious unwanted borrowed suffering in your children . I agree.

Last edited 1 year ago by Alan Osband
AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 year ago
Reply to  PAUL NATHANSON

Well-stated and persuasive, Paul (though I can’t deny that I’m biased toward your supporting view). Compassion and understanding are never reliably stored up, but more like a well in continual need of replenishment.

Alan Osband
Alan Osband
1 year ago
Reply to  PAUL NATHANSON

The whole concept of inherited suffering is truly bizarre . In what sense do people ‘inherit’ or share in the suffering of people 200 or even 100 years ago just because they belong to the same ethnicity ? The serious point of the article is that you shouldn’t deliberately try to inculcate some kind of vicarious unwanted borrowed suffering in your children . I agree.

Last edited 1 year ago by Alan Osband
Warren Trees
Warren Trees
1 year ago
Reply to  AJ Mac

It is uniquely bad due to the nature of the hatred involved. Jews were hated and exterminated for who they were and what they represented. The African slaves weren’t hated for who they were, they were simply the easiest and cheapest form of labor that could be exploited. They weren’t enslaved over hatred for black people, per se.

PAUL NATHANSON
PAUL NATHANSON
1 year ago
Reply to  AJ Mac

I agree with you, AJ Mac, and I am a Jew. Comparative suffering really means competitive suffering, which is very hard to measure (except purely physical suffering, to some extent, in a medical laboratory). That’s because suffering is experienced subjectively (but not imagined) and defined culturally. But that’s not the main problem, which is that no person and no group can win this game on moral grounds, because it inevitably trivializes the suffering of some and, in effect, glorifies the suffering of others–thus ignoring or negating the need for compassion. And that, in turn, leads to resentment instead of reconciliation–especially when people forget that revenge is not a synonym for justice.

Last edited 1 year ago by PAUL NATHANSON
Warren Trees
Warren Trees
1 year ago
Reply to  AJ Mac

It is uniquely bad due to the nature of the hatred involved. Jews were hated and exterminated for who they were and what they represented. The African slaves weren’t hated for who they were, they were simply the easiest and cheapest form of labor that could be exploited. They weren’t enslaved over hatred for black people, per se.

Nicky Samengo-Turner
Nicky Samengo-Turner
1 year ago
Reply to  Mike Fraser

As a Roman Catholic I cherish and love our intimate and historic connections with Judaism and the scriptures: hadly a Mass goes by without a mention of Israel.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 year ago
Reply to  Mike Fraser

I respect your point of view and agree with what you’ve stated, except in one respect.
Why does antisemitism, virulent and widespread as it has been for many centuries, have to be uniquely bad, the incontrovertible worst of all bigotries? Have Jews as a group received the worst treatment in America? Should the enslavement of African-descended peoples and genocidal mistreatment of Native peoples be placed in some less vicious category of man’s inhumanity to man?
I’m not suggesting that any group “wins” the historical or present-day victim Olympics, but I am insisting that it is possible, and better, to understand the important differences between campaigns of group-directed violence and oppression without ranking them.
I thought this article made a very facile and wrongheaded advocacy for stuffing the Holocaust down the memory hole, as if that is a healthy path forward. Especially when Holocaust denialism and minimization is so rampant.
But any group identity based very heavily in a sense of shared suffering–and that can happen with any human group that’s been around long enough, including non-Jewish European ethnic groups such as my ancestral folks, the Irish–is a trap, and a likely source of more division and misunderstanding. No one “wins” the most mistreated people contest in any helpful or conclusive way.
That’s my sincere opinion, one that’s perhaps too easy for me to hold due to my non-membership in any groups that had it worse than my ancestors did–whether or not, or in whichever way, the criminal group-mistreatment suffered is the all-time or present-day worst of all.

Last edited 1 year ago by AJ Mac
Nicky Samengo-Turner
Nicky Samengo-Turner
1 year ago
Reply to  Mike Fraser

As a Roman Catholic I cherish and love our intimate and historic connections with Judaism and the scriptures: hadly a Mass goes by without a mention of Israel.

Gordana Dainow
Gordana Dainow
1 year ago

Why do you think that is?

Mike Fraser
Mike Fraser
1 year ago

That is one of the problems. the jealousy of the perceived Jewish ability to be pound-for-pound cleverer, more hard working and richer than others seems to mean that antisemitism is not so bad.
Which of course is rubbish.
Antisemitism is the worst of racist crimes because Judaism has been hated by other religions for so long as well as all the false accusations thrown at it.

Gordana Dainow
Gordana Dainow
1 year ago

Why do you think that is?

Nicky Samengo-Turner
Nicky Samengo-Turner
1 year ago

Of course due to the woke world, and people falling over themselves to make excuses for certain ethnic minorities in the US, it is almost heresy to publicly state that the Jewish immigrants, and more latterly the Indian Hindus are the most succesful, high achieving peoples in the US in every single part of life that they turn their almost incredibly able, talented and vibrant minds to.

Abe Stamm
Abe Stamm
1 year ago

Antisemitism is flourishing in the 21st Century in America…just look at the FBI statistics for perpetrated hate crimes against a specific religious group. The Jews are the #1 targets, even in supposed safe havens like the New York metropolitan area [31.9% of all religious hate crimes in U.S. in 2020 were anti-Jewish according to the U.S. Department of Justice. By comparison anti-Muslim incidents were 9.5%.]
Yesterday, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, a Palestinian man walked into an East Jerusalem synagogue during Sabbath prayers and murdered 7 worshippers. Today, a 13 year old Palestinian boy shot and wounded 2 people outside of another synagogue in East Jerusalem, the section of the city where Jews live. These antisemitic acts generated very little western major media coverage.
The author of this article obviously doesn’t realize that the Holocaust was just the most concentrated and recent Pan-European effort to eliminate Europe of its Jews. My ancestors escaped the pogroms of Eastern Europe between the 1880’s to 1890’s at a time when Jews were expelled from their ancestral homes, or simply murdered in cold blood, which was just European history repeating itself. The earliest European persecution and mass murder of European Jews can be traced back to the Black Death of 1348-50, when the bubonic plague had to be blamed on somebody, and the Jews were a convenient target. That butchering of the scapegoated Jews spread across Europe and lasted until the end of the 14th Century.
January 27th has been chosen as International Holocaust Remembrance Day…which makes sense, since it marks the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps, where almost 1 million Jews were exterminated like vermin, like a maus (mouse) in the cartoon comic book. Maus is the perfect birthday present for a Jewish father to present to his child in order to educate him/her about the uncomfortable truth of being born a Jew in a world that historically hates Jews.
Jews proclaim ” Never Forget “ on Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, as they should…as they hopefully always will, in America and around the world. The next planned pogrom might be just around the corner…and, all Jews need to be vigilant, and prepared to fight back.

Last edited 1 year ago by Abe Stamm
Andy O'Gorman
Andy O'Gorman
1 year ago
Reply to  Abe Stamm

And the antisemitism is perpetuated by whom? That needs to be highlighted and addressed if there is to be any progress in the scourge of antisemitism.
Jews need to realise, that people who they think they are helping are not necessarily their friends. They see wealth being held by a tiny proportion if the populace and never really understand the hard graft that went into acquiring that wealth. Sacrifices made to educate their brethren and then working a lifetime to make sure the next generation also benefit and is given every opportunity to succeed.

Abe Stamm
Abe Stamm
1 year ago
Reply to  Andy O'Gorman

I don’t really follow your thought process here. Most Jews who emigrated to the United States were poor when they arrived. My maternal grandfather slaved in the New York garment industry, for peanuts, always more comfortable speaking Yiddish or Russian. He forced my grandmother to get two illegal back-alley abortions in the 1920’s because he felt that he couldn’t afford to feed another child. My grandmother refused to get a third abortion…the result was my mother. My grandfather, a truly mean spirited man, fled Russia in the 1890’s, having experienced such horrors that he was never able to speak of them, though he lived to be 101 years old.
My father grew up poor in the same neighbor as author Philip Roth (Newark, New Jersey). His ladder out of poverty was the post-WWII G.I. Bill, which enabled him to be the first person in his family to go to college, then medical school. He and a handful of Jewish men were allowed to matriculate into what’s now Drexel Medical School (Philadelphia) because the school was on the verge of loosing their academic accreditation. The Dean of Admissions, at a time when Jews weren’t invited to attend medical schools due to antisemitism, felt that a bunch of brainy Jews would lift the academic standards of the student body. He was right. My father practiced medicine for 51 years…one of his patients was Philip Roth’s mother.

Last edited 1 year ago by Abe Stamm
Andy O'Gorman
Andy O'Gorman
1 year ago
Reply to  Abe Stamm

That is exactly what I was agreeing with. See my comment Mike Fraser.

Andy O'Gorman
Andy O'Gorman
1 year ago
Reply to  Abe Stamm

That is exactly what I was agreeing with. See my comment Mike Fraser.

Mike Fraser
Mike Fraser
1 year ago
Reply to  Andy O'Gorman

We are discussing here perhaps the greatest evil ever by man’s inhumanity to man.
The culmination of centuries of racism against us. Following recently the pogroms from the Pale of Settlement, the Dreyfus Affair, the banning of Jews in England for 400 years from 1290, the Roman Catholic and Islamic view of Judaism and so much more and you ask perpetuated by whom?
Antisemitism is the worst of racist crimes because Judaism has been hated by other religions for so long as well as all the false accusations thrown at it

Andy O'Gorman
Andy O'Gorman
1 year ago
Reply to  Mike Fraser

Ahh you willfully ignore what was written about NY’s antisemitism and see my surname and assume which is of Irish Catholic decent play the religious card.
Well if you had been paying attention to the crimes being committed in NY, you would see that it is being done by blacks.
Now before you further accuse me of racism for highlighting that fact, I would (if i were you) take a hard look at yourself.

Mike Fraser
Mike Fraser
1 year ago
Reply to  Andy O'Gorman

I smiled on reading your reply above. If you are ignored, to accuse those who you believe are ignoring you willfully, speaks much about you.
And as for reading something into your name, as a Jew here in London with a Scottish name, that speaks that I am hardly likely to read anything in your name, and neither did I.
As for your final paragraph you seemed to have wandered of course.
I hope you find your way back

Mike Fraser
Mike Fraser
1 year ago
Reply to  Andy O'Gorman

I smiled on reading your reply above. If you are ignored, to accuse those who you believe are ignoring you willfully, speaks much about you.
And as for reading something into your name, as a Jew here in London with a Scottish name, that speaks that I am hardly likely to read anything in your name, and neither did I.
As for your final paragraph you seemed to have wandered of course.
I hope you find your way back

Andy O'Gorman
Andy O'Gorman
1 year ago
Reply to  Mike Fraser

Ahh you willfully ignore what was written about NY’s antisemitism and see my surname and assume which is of Irish Catholic decent play the religious card.
Well if you had been paying attention to the crimes being committed in NY, you would see that it is being done by blacks.
Now before you further accuse me of racism for highlighting that fact, I would (if i were you) take a hard look at yourself.

Abe Stamm
Abe Stamm
1 year ago
Reply to  Andy O'Gorman

I don’t really follow your thought process here. Most Jews who emigrated to the United States were poor when they arrived. My maternal grandfather slaved in the New York garment industry, for peanuts, always more comfortable speaking Yiddish or Russian. He forced my grandmother to get two illegal back-alley abortions in the 1920’s because he felt that he couldn’t afford to feed another child. My grandmother refused to get a third abortion…the result was my mother. My grandfather, a truly mean spirited man, fled Russia in the 1890’s, having experienced such horrors that he was never able to speak of them, though he lived to be 101 years old.
My father grew up poor in the same neighbor as author Philip Roth (Newark, New Jersey). His ladder out of poverty was the post-WWII G.I. Bill, which enabled him to be the first person in his family to go to college, then medical school. He and a handful of Jewish men were allowed to matriculate into what’s now Drexel Medical School (Philadelphia) because the school was on the verge of loosing their academic accreditation. The Dean of Admissions, at a time when Jews weren’t invited to attend medical schools due to antisemitism, felt that a bunch of brainy Jews would lift the academic standards of the student body. He was right. My father practiced medicine for 51 years…one of his patients was Philip Roth’s mother.

Last edited 1 year ago by Abe Stamm
Mike Fraser
Mike Fraser
1 year ago
Reply to  Andy O'Gorman

We are discussing here perhaps the greatest evil ever by man’s inhumanity to man.
The culmination of centuries of racism against us. Following recently the pogroms from the Pale of Settlement, the Dreyfus Affair, the banning of Jews in England for 400 years from 1290, the Roman Catholic and Islamic view of Judaism and so much more and you ask perpetuated by whom?
Antisemitism is the worst of racist crimes because Judaism has been hated by other religions for so long as well as all the false accusations thrown at it

J D
J D
1 year ago
Reply to  Abe Stamm

Earliest European persecution of Jews was in 1348? What about the expulsion of Jews from England in 1290?

Abe Stamm
Abe Stamm
1 year ago
Reply to  J D

You’re absolutely right. And, it wasn’t until 1656 that Jews were allowed back into England.

Last edited 1 year ago by Abe Stamm
Alan Osband
Alan Osband
1 year ago
Reply to  Abe Stamm

In the Middle Ages right up to the Age of Enlightenment ( 18th century-ish ) European societies were mono-cultures . Look what happened in the 16th -17th centuries between adherents to different forms of Christianity .
I don’t find persecution of the Jews that surprising . ( I’m from a Jewish background ) , especially considering the status of Jews in say 12th century England as (extremely ) rich money lenders. I ‘d find it more surprising if the experience of Jews in medieval societies had been harmonious . Think about it . Deny the divinity of Jesus Christ , acquire extreme wealth by practicing occupations ( lending at interest) denied to Christians , while living totally separate lives .

Last edited 1 year ago by Alan Osband
Abe Stamm
Abe Stamm
1 year ago
Reply to  Alan Osband

Jews became money lenders in 12th Century England because the premodern Church wouldn’t allow British Christians to work in the usury business (i.e. lending money for interest). I’m certain that there were wealthy Jewish moneylenders, just as I’m certain that many moneylenders barely made ends meet when default of loan payment was calculated into their business model.
Importantly, Jews were shut out of many of the trades that were open to British Christians.
The hook nosed Jew as moneylender became the convenient stuff of fiction, which has tainted real life Jews for hundreds of years…feeding the beast of antisemitism. If it weren’t for Shakespeare’s creation of Shylock in his Merchant of Venice, the perpetual stereotype of a Jew as the greedy, avaricious, villainous moneylender might not exist today.

Last edited 1 year ago by Abe Stamm
Maurice Austin
Maurice Austin
1 year ago
Reply to  Abe Stamm

I’ve given a thumbs up because of the mention that Jews were forced into roles that were denied them by the Christian authorities, which of course led to resentment that your ordinary Christian peasant could not possibly reason his way out of.
However, I don’t think that there is a chance in hell that without Shakespeare and Shylock the vicious stereotype might not exist today. That stereotype existed long before, and I doubt Shakespeare was front of mind on the Continent, particularly in Spain, Poland or Russia.

Alan Osband
Alan Osband
1 year ago
Reply to  Maurice Austin

Also ( I haven’t read it )Marlowe’s Jew of Malta is said to be far more anti-Semitic . At least Shylock could be played sympathetically , and was so from the early 19th century at least . Though I doubt Shakespeare expected much sympathy for him . We’re clearly meant to prefer Portia , and Shylock’s daughter and the Merchant himself, Antonio .

Abe Stamm
Abe Stamm
1 year ago
Reply to  Maurice Austin

I’d have to disagree. The “term” Shylock, at least in the United States, has become synonymous with a cheap, cheating Jew. The visual representation of Shylock appeared on Nazi propaganda in order to reinforce the demonization of Jews in the 1930-early 40’s. http://teachingshakespeareblog.folger.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2016/05/Shylock-2-AP.jpg
Also, there’s very little likelihood that Shakespeare every met a Jewish person face-to-face since Jews were expelled from England in 1290 and not allowed back until the 1650’s. The Merchant of Venice was written over 50 years before Jews were allowed to (sparingly) re-immigrate to England. And, there’s no evidence that Shakespeare ever left England during his life, so his imagining of a Venetian moneylending Jew was just that…imagined.

Last edited 1 year ago by Abe Stamm
Alan Osband
Alan Osband
1 year ago
Reply to  Maurice Austin

Also ( I haven’t read it )Marlowe’s Jew of Malta is said to be far more anti-Semitic . At least Shylock could be played sympathetically , and was so from the early 19th century at least . Though I doubt Shakespeare expected much sympathy for him . We’re clearly meant to prefer Portia , and Shylock’s daughter and the Merchant himself, Antonio .

Abe Stamm
Abe Stamm
1 year ago
Reply to  Maurice Austin

I’d have to disagree. The “term” Shylock, at least in the United States, has become synonymous with a cheap, cheating Jew. The visual representation of Shylock appeared on Nazi propaganda in order to reinforce the demonization of Jews in the 1930-early 40’s. http://teachingshakespeareblog.folger.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2016/05/Shylock-2-AP.jpg
Also, there’s very little likelihood that Shakespeare every met a Jewish person face-to-face since Jews were expelled from England in 1290 and not allowed back until the 1650’s. The Merchant of Venice was written over 50 years before Jews were allowed to (sparingly) re-immigrate to England. And, there’s no evidence that Shakespeare ever left England during his life, so his imagining of a Venetian moneylending Jew was just that…imagined.

Last edited 1 year ago by Abe Stamm
Maurice Austin
Maurice Austin
1 year ago
Reply to  Abe Stamm

I’ve given a thumbs up because of the mention that Jews were forced into roles that were denied them by the Christian authorities, which of course led to resentment that your ordinary Christian peasant could not possibly reason his way out of.
However, I don’t think that there is a chance in hell that without Shakespeare and Shylock the vicious stereotype might not exist today. That stereotype existed long before, and I doubt Shakespeare was front of mind on the Continent, particularly in Spain, Poland or Russia.

Abe Stamm
Abe Stamm
1 year ago
Reply to  Alan Osband

Jews became money lenders in 12th Century England because the premodern Church wouldn’t allow British Christians to work in the usury business (i.e. lending money for interest). I’m certain that there were wealthy Jewish moneylenders, just as I’m certain that many moneylenders barely made ends meet when default of loan payment was calculated into their business model.
Importantly, Jews were shut out of many of the trades that were open to British Christians.
The hook nosed Jew as moneylender became the convenient stuff of fiction, which has tainted real life Jews for hundreds of years…feeding the beast of antisemitism. If it weren’t for Shakespeare’s creation of Shylock in his Merchant of Venice, the perpetual stereotype of a Jew as the greedy, avaricious, villainous moneylender might not exist today.

Last edited 1 year ago by Abe Stamm
Alan Osband
Alan Osband
1 year ago
Reply to  Abe Stamm

In the Middle Ages right up to the Age of Enlightenment ( 18th century-ish ) European societies were mono-cultures . Look what happened in the 16th -17th centuries between adherents to different forms of Christianity .
I don’t find persecution of the Jews that surprising . ( I’m from a Jewish background ) , especially considering the status of Jews in say 12th century England as (extremely ) rich money lenders. I ‘d find it more surprising if the experience of Jews in medieval societies had been harmonious . Think about it . Deny the divinity of Jesus Christ , acquire extreme wealth by practicing occupations ( lending at interest) denied to Christians , while living totally separate lives .

Last edited 1 year ago by Alan Osband
Wim de Vriend
Wim de Vriend
1 year ago
Reply to  J D

Earlier yet, there was a big pogrom in 1190, one result of which was the recent discovery of 17 Jewish victims dumped in a well. 800 years later they got a proper burial.
Aside from that, the writer doesn’t seem overly qualified. He claims that the surname Spiegelman “can be translated as “art mirrors man”, but all it means is “Mirror Man”, an indication that an ancestor was in the mirror business, just as “Schneiderman” means “Tailor Man”.
Worse, he feels a moral need to sanctify feral black hoodlums by claiming that “… the poor inner-city teenagers who physically attack poor urban religious Jews with sickening regularity have little in common with goose-stepping would-be Übermenschen.
Like hell they don’t. In pre-war Germany after Hitler came to power, street attacks by brownshirted S.A. men on Jews became common, culminating in November 1938 in Kristallnacht, when the S.A., the S.S. and Hitler Youth combined to kill hundreds of Jews, destroy their businesses and synagogues, and round up thousands into concentration camps.

Last edited 1 year ago by Wim de Vriend
Brendan O'Leary
Brendan O'Leary
1 year ago
Reply to  Wim de Vriend

I think the author was just having a play on the name of Art Spiegelman.

Alan Osband
Alan Osband
1 year ago
Reply to  Wim de Vriend

The left in Britain and Europe have a tendency to pretend increased attacks on Jews and increased anti-semitism is the result of far right white suprematism , whereas it’s almost always the result of mass immigration of Muslims .
And it’s ironic that leftist Jews are among the biggest supporters of unrestricted immigration . ( see the stunt of the Holocaust ‘survivor ‘ haranguing Suella Braverman) .

Last edited 1 year ago by Alan Osband
Brendan O'Leary
Brendan O'Leary
1 year ago
Reply to  Wim de Vriend

I think the author was just having a play on the name of Art Spiegelman.

Alan Osband
Alan Osband
1 year ago
Reply to  Wim de Vriend

The left in Britain and Europe have a tendency to pretend increased attacks on Jews and increased anti-semitism is the result of far right white suprematism , whereas it’s almost always the result of mass immigration of Muslims .
And it’s ironic that leftist Jews are among the biggest supporters of unrestricted immigration . ( see the stunt of the Holocaust ‘survivor ‘ haranguing Suella Braverman) .

Last edited 1 year ago by Alan Osband
Abe Stamm
Abe Stamm
1 year ago
Reply to  J D

You’re absolutely right. And, it wasn’t until 1656 that Jews were allowed back into England.

Last edited 1 year ago by Abe Stamm
Wim de Vriend
Wim de Vriend
1 year ago
Reply to  J D

Earlier yet, there was a big pogrom in 1190, one result of which was the recent discovery of 17 Jewish victims dumped in a well. 800 years later they got a proper burial.
Aside from that, the writer doesn’t seem overly qualified. He claims that the surname Spiegelman “can be translated as “art mirrors man”, but all it means is “Mirror Man”, an indication that an ancestor was in the mirror business, just as “Schneiderman” means “Tailor Man”.
Worse, he feels a moral need to sanctify feral black hoodlums by claiming that “… the poor inner-city teenagers who physically attack poor urban religious Jews with sickening regularity have little in common with goose-stepping would-be Übermenschen.
Like hell they don’t. In pre-war Germany after Hitler came to power, street attacks by brownshirted S.A. men on Jews became common, culminating in November 1938 in Kristallnacht, when the S.A., the S.S. and Hitler Youth combined to kill hundreds of Jews, destroy their businesses and synagogues, and round up thousands into concentration camps.

Last edited 1 year ago by Wim de Vriend
Seth Edenbaum
Seth Edenbaum
1 year ago
Reply to  Abe Stamm

It’s Palestine. The European Jews came to conquer, and now Israel is allied with Neo-Nazis.
Herzl: “The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies. We want to emigrate as respected people.”
Herzl wanted the respect of anti-Semites, as long as they were white, and so do you. Netanyahu was willing to negotiate with Hungary over the Holocaust museum: Holocaust revisionism. His son is the poster boy for the AFD.
Palestinians are killed every day. Civilians, women and children. And you don’t care.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vn0JytPgcgg

Alan Osband
Alan Osband
1 year ago
Reply to  Seth Edenbaum

Anti- Jewish feeling is a feature of Muslim religious texts ( and the life of the prophet ). While not wanting to justify much of the Israeli behaviour towards the Palestinians I believe the direction of causality is pretty much the other way . Muslims support Palestinian grievances precisely because opposing Jews is a significant part of their religious culture .

Alan Osband
Alan Osband
1 year ago
Reply to  Seth Edenbaum

Anti- Jewish feeling is a feature of Muslim religious texts ( and the life of the prophet ). While not wanting to justify much of the Israeli behaviour towards the Palestinians I believe the direction of causality is pretty much the other way . Muslims support Palestinian grievances precisely because opposing Jews is a significant part of their religious culture .

Richard Ross
Richard Ross
1 year ago
Reply to  Abe Stamm

Anti-Semitism is indeed flourishing, everywhere in the West, but (in the main) it’s no longer a *product* of the West. The Palestinian problem, aggravated by a growing Islamic presence, has been able to bloom here, where Jews are perceived as “white”, and white is perceived as “bad”.
As Andy O’Gorman says below, (although pointed differently), “perpetuated by whom?” needs to be highlighted.

Last edited 1 year ago by Richard Ross
Andy O'Gorman
Andy O'Gorman
1 year ago
Reply to  Richard Ross

Thanks. It’s not always the usual suspects as I say in my reply.

Seth Edenbaum
Seth Edenbaum
1 year ago
Reply to  Richard Ross

https://twitter.com/301arm/status/1619761135418490880
BREAKING: Israeli extremists just attacked the Armenian Patriarchate in the Armenian Quarters of Jerusalem in an attempt to take down the flags of Armenia.
One Armenian was detained while protecting the Patriarchate.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20230130-israel-extremists-attack-armenian-patriarchate-in-jerusalem/
“The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem on Saturday condemned the takeover of its land in Wadi Hilweh in the Silwan neighbourhood of occupied East Jerusalem by an extremist Israeli settler group on 27 December.
In a statement sent to mass media, the Patriarchate shared: “This radical group has no right or judicial backing in their favour to allow them to enter or occupy the land.”
The Patriarchate also condemned the Israeli occupation forces for affording protection to the extremist settlers as they raided and took over its land.”

Andy O'Gorman
Andy O'Gorman
1 year ago
Reply to  Richard Ross

Thanks. It’s not always the usual suspects as I say in my reply.

Seth Edenbaum
Seth Edenbaum
1 year ago
Reply to  Richard Ross

https://twitter.com/301arm/status/1619761135418490880
BREAKING: Israeli extremists just attacked the Armenian Patriarchate in the Armenian Quarters of Jerusalem in an attempt to take down the flags of Armenia.
One Armenian was detained while protecting the Patriarchate.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20230130-israel-extremists-attack-armenian-patriarchate-in-jerusalem/
“The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem on Saturday condemned the takeover of its land in Wadi Hilweh in the Silwan neighbourhood of occupied East Jerusalem by an extremist Israeli settler group on 27 December.
In a statement sent to mass media, the Patriarchate shared: “This radical group has no right or judicial backing in their favour to allow them to enter or occupy the land.”
The Patriarchate also condemned the Israeli occupation forces for affording protection to the extremist settlers as they raided and took over its land.”

a aa
a aa
1 year ago
Reply to  Abe Stamm

I hope they enjoyed their ancestory like i enjoy the skin of a rotisserie chicken

dont know what good it does for you but at least you know nobody cares about you or them anyweay

Sarit Mashal
Sarit Mashal
1 year ago
Reply to  Abe Stamm

We have to have something at the centre of our collective id. No? If not the Shoah, persecution, or the shul…. What about our jokes?

Last edited 1 year ago by Sarit Mashal
Alan Osband
Alan Osband
1 year ago
Reply to  Sarit Mashal

Oh you are just using id as short for identity ! It was puzzling me what the Freudian id had to do with Shul , Shoah and Jewish jokes and what was collective about it .

Alan Osband
Alan Osband
1 year ago
Reply to  Sarit Mashal

Oh you are just using id as short for identity ! It was puzzling me what the Freudian id had to do with Shul , Shoah and Jewish jokes and what was collective about it .

Gary Burchill
Gary Burchill
1 year ago
Reply to  Abe Stamm

Yes it’s is terrible what was done to Jewish people in ww2. But to me the holocaust was the millions that died during that time, not just one group.

Andy O'Gorman
Andy O'Gorman
1 year ago
Reply to  Abe Stamm

And the antisemitism is perpetuated by whom? That needs to be highlighted and addressed if there is to be any progress in the scourge of antisemitism.
Jews need to realise, that people who they think they are helping are not necessarily their friends. They see wealth being held by a tiny proportion if the populace and never really understand the hard graft that went into acquiring that wealth. Sacrifices made to educate their brethren and then working a lifetime to make sure the next generation also benefit and is given every opportunity to succeed.

J D
J D
1 year ago
Reply to  Abe Stamm

Earliest European persecution of Jews was in 1348? What about the expulsion of Jews from England in 1290?

Seth Edenbaum
Seth Edenbaum
1 year ago
Reply to  Abe Stamm

It’s Palestine. The European Jews came to conquer, and now Israel is allied with Neo-Nazis.
Herzl: “The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies. We want to emigrate as respected people.”
Herzl wanted the respect of anti-Semites, as long as they were white, and so do you. Netanyahu was willing to negotiate with Hungary over the Holocaust museum: Holocaust revisionism. His son is the poster boy for the AFD.
Palestinians are killed every day. Civilians, women and children. And you don’t care.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vn0JytPgcgg

Richard Ross
Richard Ross
1 year ago
Reply to  Abe Stamm

Anti-Semitism is indeed flourishing, everywhere in the West, but (in the main) it’s no longer a *product* of the West. The Palestinian problem, aggravated by a growing Islamic presence, has been able to bloom here, where Jews are perceived as “white”, and white is perceived as “bad”.
As Andy O’Gorman says below, (although pointed differently), “perpetuated by whom?” needs to be highlighted.

Last edited 1 year ago by Richard Ross
a aa
a aa
1 year ago
Reply to  Abe Stamm

I hope they enjoyed their ancestory like i enjoy the skin of a rotisserie chicken

dont know what good it does for you but at least you know nobody cares about you or them anyweay

Sarit Mashal
Sarit Mashal
1 year ago
Reply to  Abe Stamm

We have to have something at the centre of our collective id. No? If not the Shoah, persecution, or the shul…. What about our jokes?

Last edited 1 year ago by Sarit Mashal
Gary Burchill
Gary Burchill
1 year ago
Reply to  Abe Stamm

Yes it’s is terrible what was done to Jewish people in ww2. But to me the holocaust was the millions that died during that time, not just one group.

Abe Stamm
Abe Stamm
1 year ago

Antisemitism is flourishing in the 21st Century in America…just look at the FBI statistics for perpetrated hate crimes against a specific religious group. The Jews are the #1 targets, even in supposed safe havens like the New York metropolitan area [31.9% of all religious hate crimes in U.S. in 2020 were anti-Jewish according to the U.S. Department of Justice. By comparison anti-Muslim incidents were 9.5%.]
Yesterday, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, a Palestinian man walked into an East Jerusalem synagogue during Sabbath prayers and murdered 7 worshippers. Today, a 13 year old Palestinian boy shot and wounded 2 people outside of another synagogue in East Jerusalem, the section of the city where Jews live. These antisemitic acts generated very little western major media coverage.
The author of this article obviously doesn’t realize that the Holocaust was just the most concentrated and recent Pan-European effort to eliminate Europe of its Jews. My ancestors escaped the pogroms of Eastern Europe between the 1880’s to 1890’s at a time when Jews were expelled from their ancestral homes, or simply murdered in cold blood, which was just European history repeating itself. The earliest European persecution and mass murder of European Jews can be traced back to the Black Death of 1348-50, when the bubonic plague had to be blamed on somebody, and the Jews were a convenient target. That butchering of the scapegoated Jews spread across Europe and lasted until the end of the 14th Century.
January 27th has been chosen as International Holocaust Remembrance Day…which makes sense, since it marks the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps, where almost 1 million Jews were exterminated like vermin, like a maus (mouse) in the cartoon comic book. Maus is the perfect birthday present for a Jewish father to present to his child in order to educate him/her about the uncomfortable truth of being born a Jew in a world that historically hates Jews.
Jews proclaim ” Never Forget “ on Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, as they should…as they hopefully always will, in America and around the world. The next planned pogrom might be just around the corner…and, all Jews need to be vigilant, and prepared to fight back.

Last edited 1 year ago by Abe Stamm
Ben Shipley
Ben Shipley
1 year ago

A people that still celebrates Masada isn’t likely to let go of the Holocaust anytime soon. Nor should they. Are present-day Jews more persecuted than all of the other groups crying out for our attention in the Olympics of Victimology? Maybe, maybe not, but that doesn’t mean anyone should forget one of the two or three worst cases of bestiality in world history.

What most disturbs me about present-day America is the trivializing of the Holocaust, mainly by other groups that use its reference points as quick and dirty hammers against their opponents. 90% of the idiots who call each other Nazis or Fascists have no idea what the terms really meant or what it meant day to day on the ground to live in their shadows. And I don’t know if trivializing the Holocaust makes it more likely that we’ll see a recurrence, but this kind of crude and shallow public discourse is just ugly on its own terms.

Linda Hutchinson
Linda Hutchinson
1 year ago
Reply to  Ben Shipley

Not much to celebrate at Masada – commemorate more likely,

Ben Shipley
Ben Shipley
1 year ago

True that

Ben Shipley
Ben Shipley
1 year ago

True that

Jeff Cunningham
Jeff Cunningham
1 year ago
Reply to  Ben Shipley

Surely you meant something other than beastiality?

Linda Hutchinson
Linda Hutchinson
1 year ago
Reply to  Ben Shipley

Not much to celebrate at Masada – commemorate more likely,

Jeff Cunningham
Jeff Cunningham
1 year ago
Reply to  Ben Shipley

Surely you meant something other than beastiality?

Ben Shipley
Ben Shipley
1 year ago

A people that still celebrates Masada isn’t likely to let go of the Holocaust anytime soon. Nor should they. Are present-day Jews more persecuted than all of the other groups crying out for our attention in the Olympics of Victimology? Maybe, maybe not, but that doesn’t mean anyone should forget one of the two or three worst cases of bestiality in world history.

What most disturbs me about present-day America is the trivializing of the Holocaust, mainly by other groups that use its reference points as quick and dirty hammers against their opponents. 90% of the idiots who call each other Nazis or Fascists have no idea what the terms really meant or what it meant day to day on the ground to live in their shadows. And I don’t know if trivializing the Holocaust makes it more likely that we’ll see a recurrence, but this kind of crude and shallow public discourse is just ugly on its own terms.

Hendrik Mentz
Hendrik Mentz
1 year ago

I agree. Trauma and grief are intensely private processes, and should be dealt with accordingly, because if they are instead used to trigger what RenĂ© Girard identified as the ‘scapegoat mechanism’ a little-understood past morphs into another tyranny with a new class of overlords, and their victims.

leculdesac suburbia
leculdesac suburbia
1 year ago
Reply to  Hendrik Mentz

Yet that’s precisely what’s operating in extreme Israeli Zionism, no?

No excuse for Palestinians to use terrorism, but a lot of the land was theirs and not for the Brits to “give” so “generously.” I still don’t understand how half of Bavaria wasn’t cordoned off to provide 1-acre home lots to every European Jewish family remaining after WW2. The Germans should have paid in land, transferring it from their own citizens, rather than handing over Palestinians’ lands to strangers based on a 3-4k year old religious doctrine and then claiming how evil those pesky Palestinian people are for wanting to remain on their own family land.

Alan Hawkes
Alan Hawkes
1 year ago

So should surviving Jews have been forbidden to leave Germany in particular and Europe in general, to go to Israel?

harry storm
harry storm
1 year ago
Reply to  Alan Hawkes

Nobody “handed” anyone anything. There was a War of Independence in 1948 and the Jews won. The same as every other tract of land on this earth other than Antarctica, and many times over.

harry storm
harry storm
1 year ago
Reply to  Alan Hawkes

Nobody “handed” anyone anything. There was a War of Independence in 1948 and the Jews won. The same as every other tract of land on this earth other than Antarctica, and many times over.

Abe Stamm
Abe Stamm
1 year ago

After WWI, and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the entirety of the Middle East was basically carved up by two guys …a Mr. Sykes and a Mr. Picot, which resulted in what was ostensibly a map that would stake claims for Britain and France, the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
When it was all said and done, the old Ottoman Empire was apportioned to lots of heretofore unrecognized nations (Bulgaria, Greece, Egypt, Israel, the Palestinian territories, Macedonia, Romania, Hungary, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, parts of Arabia and the north coast of Africa). Why is it, that the only nation that has borders that are still contested are that of modern day Israel? There’s a whole history which outlines why there’s no country of Palestine, and why the generations of ethnic Palestinians are scattered by the millions in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, the Gaza strip, and the “Palestinian territories”.
It should be remembered that while 500,000 Palestinians were displaced from what is now Israel, at the same time 700,000 Jews were chased out of Egypt, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Algiers, Morocco, Iran, Iraq, Tunisia, Libya, and Turkey. Most of these Jews ended up forming the core population of modern day Israel. There’s never been a global discussion about the Jewish “right of return” to these nations, just as there was no right of return to the former homes of Jewish Holocaust survivors in post-WWII Europe located behind the Iron Curtain (e.g East Germany and Poland).

Mike Fraser
Mike Fraser
1 year ago

This is NOT about Israel. It is about the Holocaust. Hitler’s so called final solution for the Jewish race.
Please do not make the so often made mistake of conflating antisemitism with Israel/Zionism.

Samuel Ross
Samuel Ross
1 year ago

There was never a country called “Palestine”. No kings and queens, no money coined, no language, no parliament, etc. It’s a polite fiction, that’s all. The last sovereign state here was Jewish. Now it is again.

Alan Osband
Alan Osband
1 year ago
Reply to  Samuel Ross

When was there a Jewish state in Palestine before 1948 with its own Kings and Queens , coining its own money ( with the tiny exception of a handful of years during the fist and second revolts against the Romans )? And , as for ‘parliament ‘ ,not even the Bible suggests the fictional Kings Solomon and David had parliaments .

Last edited 1 year ago by Alan Osband
harry storm
harry storm
1 year ago
Reply to  Alan Osband

The Davidic line (until 586 BC), the Israel-kingdom line (until 722 BC), and the Hasmonean line (until 63 BC, and client kingdom(s) after that). Three times there was a Jewish state with its own Kings and Queens.

harry storm
harry storm
1 year ago
Reply to  Alan Osband

The Davidic line (until 586 BC), the Israel-kingdom line (until 722 BC), and the Hasmonean line (until 63 BC, and client kingdom(s) after that). Three times there was a Jewish state with its own Kings and Queens.

Alan Osband
Alan Osband
1 year ago
Reply to  Samuel Ross

When was there a Jewish state in Palestine before 1948 with its own Kings and Queens , coining its own money ( with the tiny exception of a handful of years during the fist and second revolts against the Romans )? And , as for ‘parliament ‘ ,not even the Bible suggests the fictional Kings Solomon and David had parliaments .

Last edited 1 year ago by Alan Osband
Stephanie Surface
Stephanie Surface
1 year ago

I grew up in Bavaria and one of my great friends was Jewish. All German Jews could claim their houses/properties back after the war. Don’t know what you would achieve by giving half of Bavaria to European Jewish families, who wouldn’t want to settle in Germany. Konrad Adenauer, W Germany’s Chancellor after the war, committed to paying billions in compensation to Jewish families over a 20 year period. In 2013 another German government decided to extend payment to worldwide survivors of the Holocaust. Of course money and property will never compensate for the unprecedented evil done by the Nazis. But I can assure you, that the German generations born after the war still carry the burden of ancestral guilt.

Last edited 1 year ago by Stephanie Surface
Alan Hawkes
Alan Hawkes
1 year ago

So should surviving Jews have been forbidden to leave Germany in particular and Europe in general, to go to Israel?

Abe Stamm
Abe Stamm
1 year ago

After WWI, and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the entirety of the Middle East was basically carved up by two guys …a Mr. Sykes and a Mr. Picot, which resulted in what was ostensibly a map that would stake claims for Britain and France, the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
When it was all said and done, the old Ottoman Empire was apportioned to lots of heretofore unrecognized nations (Bulgaria, Greece, Egypt, Israel, the Palestinian territories, Macedonia, Romania, Hungary, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, parts of Arabia and the north coast of Africa). Why is it, that the only nation that has borders that are still contested are that of modern day Israel? There’s a whole history which outlines why there’s no country of Palestine, and why the generations of ethnic Palestinians are scattered by the millions in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, the Gaza strip, and the “Palestinian territories”.
It should be remembered that while 500,000 Palestinians were displaced from what is now Israel, at the same time 700,000 Jews were chased out of Egypt, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Algiers, Morocco, Iran, Iraq, Tunisia, Libya, and Turkey. Most of these Jews ended up forming the core population of modern day Israel. There’s never been a global discussion about the Jewish “right of return” to these nations, just as there was no right of return to the former homes of Jewish Holocaust survivors in post-WWII Europe located behind the Iron Curtain (e.g East Germany and Poland).

Mike Fraser
Mike Fraser
1 year ago

This is NOT about Israel. It is about the Holocaust. Hitler’s so called final solution for the Jewish race.
Please do not make the so often made mistake of conflating antisemitism with Israel/Zionism.

Samuel Ross
Samuel Ross
1 year ago

There was never a country called “Palestine”. No kings and queens, no money coined, no language, no parliament, etc. It’s a polite fiction, that’s all. The last sovereign state here was Jewish. Now it is again.

Stephanie Surface
Stephanie Surface
1 year ago

I grew up in Bavaria and one of my great friends was Jewish. All German Jews could claim their houses/properties back after the war. Don’t know what you would achieve by giving half of Bavaria to European Jewish families, who wouldn’t want to settle in Germany. Konrad Adenauer, W Germany’s Chancellor after the war, committed to paying billions in compensation to Jewish families over a 20 year period. In 2013 another German government decided to extend payment to worldwide survivors of the Holocaust. Of course money and property will never compensate for the unprecedented evil done by the Nazis. But I can assure you, that the German generations born after the war still carry the burden of ancestral guilt.

Last edited 1 year ago by Stephanie Surface
0 0
0 0
1 year ago
Reply to  Hendrik Mentz

Obsessing on past traumas is a sure-fire path to permanent unhappiness and neurosis–and not only for the putative victim.

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
1 year ago
Reply to  0 0

Last edited 1 year ago by Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Hendrik Mentz
Hendrik Mentz
1 year ago
Reply to  0 0

Hi OO, perhaps although much might be said for entering, living, thereby integrating transgenerational trauma which, admittedly, isn’t easy although preferable to weaponizing or projecting it onto others.

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
1 year ago
Reply to  0 0

Last edited 1 year ago by Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Hendrik Mentz
Hendrik Mentz
1 year ago
Reply to  0 0

Hi OO, perhaps although much might be said for entering, living, thereby integrating transgenerational trauma which, admittedly, isn’t easy although preferable to weaponizing or projecting it onto others.

leculdesac suburbia
leculdesac suburbia
1 year ago
Reply to  Hendrik Mentz

Yet that’s precisely what’s operating in extreme Israeli Zionism, no?

No excuse for Palestinians to use terrorism, but a lot of the land was theirs and not for the Brits to “give” so “generously.” I still don’t understand how half of Bavaria wasn’t cordoned off to provide 1-acre home lots to every European Jewish family remaining after WW2. The Germans should have paid in land, transferring it from their own citizens, rather than handing over Palestinians’ lands to strangers based on a 3-4k year old religious doctrine and then claiming how evil those pesky Palestinian people are for wanting to remain on their own family land.

0 0
0 0
1 year ago
Reply to  Hendrik Mentz

Obsessing on past traumas is a sure-fire path to permanent unhappiness and neurosis–and not only for the putative victim.

Hendrik Mentz
Hendrik Mentz
1 year ago

I agree. Trauma and grief are intensely private processes, and should be dealt with accordingly, because if they are instead used to trigger what RenĂ© Girard identified as the ‘scapegoat mechanism’ a little-understood past morphs into another tyranny with a new class of overlords, and their victims.

Garrett R
Garrett R
1 year ago

I think a good rule of thumb is that if the trauma is in living memory, then you have no business asking those affected to move on. One can experience lots of success and still endure immense pain in private (Churchill after all suffered greatly from depression). Again, UnHerd authors shy away from data. Antisemitic attacks have risen. US politicians routinely hawk the Holocaust to serve their own perceived victimization ( Marjorie Green for example). Finally, children of Holocaust survivors might have themselves endured pain. PTSD rates among Holocaust survivors must have been sky high, which is tied to a host of issues later on. The Holocaust is a multigenerational trauma that takes decades to process. Furthermore, people are living longer. 200 years ago there would be almost no one alive from an event that happened some 80 years ago. This prolongs the cultural memory of trauma. Finally, if you believe what the author says, then you must also ask veterans of world war 2 to move on and that their sacrifice be erased from public memory. The past is never dead.

Garrett R
Garrett R
1 year ago

I think a good rule of thumb is that if the trauma is in living memory, then you have no business asking those affected to move on. One can experience lots of success and still endure immense pain in private (Churchill after all suffered greatly from depression). Again, UnHerd authors shy away from data. Antisemitic attacks have risen. US politicians routinely hawk the Holocaust to serve their own perceived victimization ( Marjorie Green for example). Finally, children of Holocaust survivors might have themselves endured pain. PTSD rates among Holocaust survivors must have been sky high, which is tied to a host of issues later on. The Holocaust is a multigenerational trauma that takes decades to process. Furthermore, people are living longer. 200 years ago there would be almost no one alive from an event that happened some 80 years ago. This prolongs the cultural memory of trauma. Finally, if you believe what the author says, then you must also ask veterans of world war 2 to move on and that their sacrifice be erased from public memory. The past is never dead.

Alan Hawkes
Alan Hawkes
1 year ago

I don’t see how those Jews who survived the camps can be asked to, “let go of the Holocaust.”

Maurice Austin
Maurice Austin
1 year ago
Reply to  Alan Hawkes

Obviously they can’t. Who ever could?
However, I suspect the author (as he almost says explicitly) is aiming his comments mainly at modern US Jews whose ancestors were in the US at the time, and who actually fought as Allied soldiers in the War.

Maurice Austin
Maurice Austin
1 year ago
Reply to  Alan Hawkes

Obviously they can’t. Who ever could?
However, I suspect the author (as he almost says explicitly) is aiming his comments mainly at modern US Jews whose ancestors were in the US at the time, and who actually fought as Allied soldiers in the War.

Alan Hawkes
Alan Hawkes
1 year ago

I don’t see how those Jews who survived the camps can be asked to, “let go of the Holocaust.”

BW Naylor
BW Naylor
1 year ago

I see the same thing in South Africa, where black leaders have had 30 years of rule since ending apartheid, to prove they can govern. We all know this has been a disaster, as they have done nothing but loot government funds and watch the infrastructure collapse. Meanwhile, they still play the victims. Persecuted groups don’t want you to forget – it ultimately means they’ll have to put on their big-boy pants and join the rest of us in doing the hard work.

Last edited 1 year ago by BW Naylor
Mike Fraser
Mike Fraser
1 year ago
Reply to  BW Naylor

as a Jew I can evidentially say that your last sentence is rubbish

Janos Boris
Janos Boris
1 year ago
Reply to  BW Naylor

Exactly what are you implying? That Jews in America “have done nothing but loot government funds and watch the infrastructure collapse” rather than “put on their big-boy pants and join the rest of us in doing the hard work”?
Maybe you’d better think again.

BW Naylor
BW Naylor
1 year ago
Reply to  Janos Boris

I was sharing an example of how a massive and devastating event can infiltrate a culture, even for generations that did not experience it, and my words were related to my experience in South Africa, as stated – your ‘Jews in America’ paraphrasing of my comments is not cool.

Last edited 1 year ago by BW Naylor
Graeme McNeil
Graeme McNeil
1 year ago
Reply to  BW Naylor

Racist and anti-Semitic. You must be a Trump fan!

Bengt Dhover
Bengt Dhover
1 year ago
Reply to  Graeme McNeil

You ARE aware that Trump’s own daughter is married to a jew, right? Or are you reaching for the tiresome “token” trope? I shouldn’t be surprised I suppose, seeing how white couples who have adopted and lovingly raised black children as their own for two decades can be derisively dismissed as “posers” merely wishing to get a smokescreen for their deep, secret racism underneath it all.

Graeme McNeil
Graeme McNeil
1 year ago
Reply to  Bengt Dhover

Oh, hey Mr Irrelevant! I was wondering what had happened to you!

Graeme McNeil
Graeme McNeil
1 year ago
Reply to  Bengt Dhover

Oh, hey Mr Irrelevant! I was wondering what had happened to you!

Bengt Dhover
Bengt Dhover
1 year ago
Reply to  Graeme McNeil

You ARE aware that Trump’s own daughter is married to a jew, right? Or are you reaching for the tiresome “token” trope? I shouldn’t be surprised I suppose, seeing how white couples who have adopted and lovingly raised black children as their own for two decades can be derisively dismissed as “posers” merely wishing to get a smokescreen for their deep, secret racism underneath it all.

Graeme McNeil
Graeme McNeil
1 year ago
Reply to  BW Naylor

Racist and anti-Semitic. You must be a Trump fan!

jane baker
jane baker
1 year ago
Reply to  Janos Boris

No he’s saying that blacks are cupidaceous and greedy and incapable of long term planning which is why Slavery was endemic in Africa in the first place and exploited by the Arabs for at least a thousand years before European whites turned up. I know im not supposed to say this but I am.

BW Naylor
BW Naylor
1 year ago
Reply to  Janos Boris

I was sharing an example of how a massive and devastating event can infiltrate a culture, even for generations that did not experience it, and my words were related to my experience in South Africa, as stated – your ‘Jews in America’ paraphrasing of my comments is not cool.

Last edited 1 year ago by BW Naylor
jane baker
jane baker
1 year ago
Reply to  Janos Boris

No he’s saying that blacks are cupidaceous and greedy and incapable of long term planning which is why Slavery was endemic in Africa in the first place and exploited by the Arabs for at least a thousand years before European whites turned up. I know im not supposed to say this but I am.

Mike Fraser
Mike Fraser
1 year ago
Reply to  BW Naylor

as a Jew I can evidentially say that your last sentence is rubbish

Janos Boris
Janos Boris
1 year ago
Reply to  BW Naylor

Exactly what are you implying? That Jews in America “have done nothing but loot government funds and watch the infrastructure collapse” rather than “put on their big-boy pants and join the rest of us in doing the hard work”?
Maybe you’d better think again.

BW Naylor
BW Naylor
1 year ago

I see the same thing in South Africa, where black leaders have had 30 years of rule since ending apartheid, to prove they can govern. We all know this has been a disaster, as they have done nothing but loot government funds and watch the infrastructure collapse. Meanwhile, they still play the victims. Persecuted groups don’t want you to forget – it ultimately means they’ll have to put on their big-boy pants and join the rest of us in doing the hard work.

Last edited 1 year ago by BW Naylor
Stephanie Surface
Stephanie Surface
1 year ago

Thank you for this great article, which is basically about human physical and more important spiritual survival. The only way to come to terms with personal and ancestral horror is to first have it acknowledged by yourself and others.
Some years ago at a fund raising I listened to a therapist, who happened to be a Holocaust survivor, helping trafficked women to survive. She said that the first step of recovery is listening to the victims stories and confirming their suffering. I guess for Holocaust survivors this finally happened through Jewish literature, art and films. The victims and their children had their suffering not only confirmed, but ultimately used trauma as their creative force.

Last edited 1 year ago by Stephanie Surface
Stephanie Surface
Stephanie Surface
1 year ago

Thank you for this great article, which is basically about human physical and more important spiritual survival. The only way to come to terms with personal and ancestral horror is to first have it acknowledged by yourself and others.
Some years ago at a fund raising I listened to a therapist, who happened to be a Holocaust survivor, helping trafficked women to survive. She said that the first step of recovery is listening to the victims stories and confirming their suffering. I guess for Holocaust survivors this finally happened through Jewish literature, art and films. The victims and their children had their suffering not only confirmed, but ultimately used trauma as their creative force.

Last edited 1 year ago by Stephanie Surface
Ian Stewart
Ian Stewart
1 year ago

“For if historical trauma begets present-day ills, then why are Jews so successful”
And therein lies the rub for todays claimants of victimhood and trauma.

As an aside, but related to the theme of this article, I just read a review of a newly published book (in the Daily Mail!!) about the Holocaust by Dan Stone (link below) and the sheer breadth of complicity in its implementation by many countries across Europe with no direction from the Nazis.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11685693/How-European-countries-Norway-France-colluded-Holocaust-mass-slaughter-Jews.html

I had to think a while before deciding to buy the book – having read plenty of Holocaust histories previously – could I face reading another aspect of this awful event, with all its depressing case histories like that given above? On the basis that I’d buy a new book about a different aspect of other historical events, I decided to get it. But, as the writer says, too much dwelling on this atrocity may not be ‘a good thing’.
On the other hand, having looked up the book Maus (which I was unaware of) on Wikipedia, there is an interesting quote: “Art talks about the book with his psychiatrist Paul Pavel, a Czech Holocaust survivor. Pavel suggests that, as those who perished in the camps can never tell their stories, “maybe it’s better not to have any more stories”. Art replies with a quote from Samuel Beckett: “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness”, but then realizes, “on the other hand, he said it”.”

I’m going to get Maus too.

Last edited 1 year ago by Ian Stewart
chris sullivan
chris sullivan
1 year ago
Reply to  Ian Stewart

Excellent Article thanks Ian – reaffirms my gut feeling that if I had been a holocaust survivor in 1945 a ‘land of our own’ would have seemed an entirely just and appropriate scenario – the foolish ‘palestinians’ missed out on a huge opportunity to co-create a paradise in the desert. But then again no surprizes there since the arabs are vicious antisemites. Given world history ALL jews must feel the need for a nuclear defended bolthole – if not this generation, then maybe the next, or the one after. 2000 years of oppression will tend to do that to a diasporic-never safe nation. They have my deep sympathies.

chris sullivan
chris sullivan
1 year ago
Reply to  Ian Stewart

Excellent Article thanks Ian – reaffirms my gut feeling that if I had been a holocaust survivor in 1945 a ‘land of our own’ would have seemed an entirely just and appropriate scenario – the foolish ‘palestinians’ missed out on a huge opportunity to co-create a paradise in the desert. But then again no surprizes there since the arabs are vicious antisemites. Given world history ALL jews must feel the need for a nuclear defended bolthole – if not this generation, then maybe the next, or the one after. 2000 years of oppression will tend to do that to a diasporic-never safe nation. They have my deep sympathies.

Ian Stewart
Ian Stewart
1 year ago

“For if historical trauma begets present-day ills, then why are Jews so successful”
And therein lies the rub for todays claimants of victimhood and trauma.

As an aside, but related to the theme of this article, I just read a review of a newly published book (in the Daily Mail!!) about the Holocaust by Dan Stone (link below) and the sheer breadth of complicity in its implementation by many countries across Europe with no direction from the Nazis.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11685693/How-European-countries-Norway-France-colluded-Holocaust-mass-slaughter-Jews.html

I had to think a while before deciding to buy the book – having read plenty of Holocaust histories previously – could I face reading another aspect of this awful event, with all its depressing case histories like that given above? On the basis that I’d buy a new book about a different aspect of other historical events, I decided to get it. But, as the writer says, too much dwelling on this atrocity may not be ‘a good thing’.
On the other hand, having looked up the book Maus (which I was unaware of) on Wikipedia, there is an interesting quote: “Art talks about the book with his psychiatrist Paul Pavel, a Czech Holocaust survivor. Pavel suggests that, as those who perished in the camps can never tell their stories, “maybe it’s better not to have any more stories”. Art replies with a quote from Samuel Beckett: “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness”, but then realizes, “on the other hand, he said it”.”

I’m going to get Maus too.

Last edited 1 year ago by Ian Stewart
William Fulton
William Fulton
1 year ago

The role of the Holocause today is this:
To remind how incredibly depraved the State Mob can become.
To value the 2nd Ammendment (US only, sorry). An armed population has options. When the SS or KGB knock at 2AM, you can surprise them and reduce their numbers!

Last edited 1 year ago by William Fulton
Billy Bob
Billy Bob
1 year ago
Reply to  William Fulton

The American military is the best equipped on the planet. If they ever turned on their own citizens what do you think the couple of rifles you stock are going to do against tanks and aircraft?
Also how many people have to lose their lives due to guns in the meantime? Is losing tens of thousands of people annually a price worth paying to be able to take a few potshots at an authoritarian government home wayward in your eyes?

Bengt Dhover
Bengt Dhover
1 year ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

Leaving aside the fact that the US military primarily consists of the kind of people who are more interested in fighting totalitarian thugs than working for them, tanks and aircraft have very limited use in the kind of small-scale action we’re talking about. When the enemy consists of small cells of highly motivated resistance fighters rather than regular troops formed up in battalions, there’s not a whole lot a tank can do except fire blindly into the trees and hope they don’t get picked off by a sniper as soon as they step outside to take a leak. Vietnam demonstrated this well, I believe. Afghanistan too. And the early days of the Ukraine war.

Last edited 1 year ago by Bengt Dhover
Graeme McNeil
Graeme McNeil
1 year ago
Reply to  Bengt Dhover

“small cells of highly motivated resistance fighters”
Ragtag circuses of dimwitted hicks. There – fixed it for ya!

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
1 year ago
Reply to  Bengt Dhover

In Vietnam they were fighting trained soldiers in the Viet Cong in unfamiliar terrain. In Afghanistan they were fighting Taliban battle hardened from fighting the Soviets again in unfamiliar terrain. Ukrainian troops have been trained by the west since Crimea was invaded and the Russian tactics in the early days of the war verged in incompetence. They’re all completely different situations to what would be a few boys trying to take on the US military in the US

Graeme McNeil
Graeme McNeil
1 year ago
Reply to  Bengt Dhover

“small cells of highly motivated resistance fighters”
Ragtag circuses of dimwitted hicks. There – fixed it for ya!

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
1 year ago
Reply to  Bengt Dhover

In Vietnam they were fighting trained soldiers in the Viet Cong in unfamiliar terrain. In Afghanistan they were fighting Taliban battle hardened from fighting the Soviets again in unfamiliar terrain. Ukrainian troops have been trained by the west since Crimea was invaded and the Russian tactics in the early days of the war verged in incompetence. They’re all completely different situations to what would be a few boys trying to take on the US military in the US

William Fulton
William Fulton
1 year ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

This was actually debated by the Founders 246 years ago. They concluded, correctly, as recorded by the Federalist and AntiFederalist Speeches – that the entire armed population would be more than adequate to overwhelm any standing army. That is why they insisted on an armed population. It wasn’t to hunt ducks. It was to deter despots.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
1 year ago
Reply to  William Fulton

And at the time they were probably right (plus they’d just come off the back of a bloody revolutionary war), but the armies of 200 years ago had weapons not much more advanced than those of the general population. It’s chalk and cheese compared to today

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
1 year ago
Reply to  William Fulton

And at the time they were probably right (plus they’d just come off the back of a bloody revolutionary war), but the armies of 200 years ago had weapons not much more advanced than those of the general population. It’s chalk and cheese compared to today

CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
1 year ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

The French Army was arguably the finest in the world in 1789, and one that had recently administered a “damn good thrashing” to the British in 1779-81.

However between 1789-1792, with the notable exception of the Swiss Guards, it simply disintegrated, with somewhat unfortunate circumstances for Bourbon France.

Could the US military suffer a similar fate?

Warren Trees
Warren Trees
1 year ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

I realize it’s hard to imagine how vital our 2nd amendment is here in the States, but I’m sure there are millions of Europeans who wished they had that right over the last 100 years or so. Guns are already very, very illegal in most U.S. cities, yet the illegal use of them by drug gangs inflates the numbers of death enormously. The percentage and numbers of people killed by legal gun owners is miniscule.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
1 year ago
Reply to  Warren Trees

I’d wager there’s not a civilised country on earth that would swap their gun laws for the Americans personally

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
1 year ago
Reply to  Warren Trees

I’d wager there’s not a civilised country on earth that would swap their gun laws for the Americans personally

Bengt Dhover
Bengt Dhover
1 year ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

Leaving aside the fact that the US military primarily consists of the kind of people who are more interested in fighting totalitarian thugs than working for them, tanks and aircraft have very limited use in the kind of small-scale action we’re talking about. When the enemy consists of small cells of highly motivated resistance fighters rather than regular troops formed up in battalions, there’s not a whole lot a tank can do except fire blindly into the trees and hope they don’t get picked off by a sniper as soon as they step outside to take a leak. Vietnam demonstrated this well, I believe. Afghanistan too. And the early days of the Ukraine war.

Last edited 1 year ago by Bengt Dhover
William Fulton
William Fulton
1 year ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

This was actually debated by the Founders 246 years ago. They concluded, correctly, as recorded by the Federalist and AntiFederalist Speeches – that the entire armed population would be more than adequate to overwhelm any standing army. That is why they insisted on an armed population. It wasn’t to hunt ducks. It was to deter despots.

CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
1 year ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

The French Army was arguably the finest in the world in 1789, and one that had recently administered a “damn good thrashing” to the British in 1779-81.

However between 1789-1792, with the notable exception of the Swiss Guards, it simply disintegrated, with somewhat unfortunate circumstances for Bourbon France.

Could the US military suffer a similar fate?

Warren Trees
Warren Trees
1 year ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

I realize it’s hard to imagine how vital our 2nd amendment is here in the States, but I’m sure there are millions of Europeans who wished they had that right over the last 100 years or so. Guns are already very, very illegal in most U.S. cities, yet the illegal use of them by drug gangs inflates the numbers of death enormously. The percentage and numbers of people killed by legal gun owners is miniscule.

Graeme McNeil
Graeme McNeil
1 year ago
Reply to  William Fulton

Utterly deluded fantasy.

Warren Trees
Warren Trees
1 year ago
Reply to  Graeme McNeil

You have the right to be unarmed and watch your family succumb to any intruder or despot who seeks to overwhelm you. That does not give you the right to trample on my right to protect and defend my family.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
1 year ago
Reply to  Warren Trees

That’s the difference though isn’t it. If somebody broke into my house in NZ or the UK I can be fairly certain they’re not armed, so I’ve no need to arm myself either. In my opinion having an armed intruder and armed homeowner would be much more likely to result in the family being harmed than having no guns in the situation at all

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
1 year ago
Reply to  Warren Trees

That’s the difference though isn’t it. If somebody broke into my house in NZ or the UK I can be fairly certain they’re not armed, so I’ve no need to arm myself either. In my opinion having an armed intruder and armed homeowner would be much more likely to result in the family being harmed than having no guns in the situation at all

Warren Trees
Warren Trees
1 year ago
Reply to  Graeme McNeil

You have the right to be unarmed and watch your family succumb to any intruder or despot who seeks to overwhelm you. That does not give you the right to trample on my right to protect and defend my family.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
1 year ago
Reply to  William Fulton

The American military is the best equipped on the planet. If they ever turned on their own citizens what do you think the couple of rifles you stock are going to do against tanks and aircraft?
Also how many people have to lose their lives due to guns in the meantime? Is losing tens of thousands of people annually a price worth paying to be able to take a few potshots at an authoritarian government home wayward in your eyes?

Graeme McNeil
Graeme McNeil
1 year ago
Reply to  William Fulton

Utterly deluded fantasy.

William Fulton
William Fulton
1 year ago

The role of the Holocause today is this:
To remind how incredibly depraved the State Mob can become.
To value the 2nd Ammendment (US only, sorry). An armed population has options. When the SS or KGB knock at 2AM, you can surprise them and reduce their numbers!

Last edited 1 year ago by William Fulton
Gayle Rosenthal
Gayle Rosenthal
1 year ago

The author seeks to undermine remembrance of Jewish suffering by pairing it with Siegelman’s art and personal story. Personally I don’t like it one bit. Jews do NOT define themselves by the Holocaust. If American Jews want to wallow in a confused state – that’s fine but frankly modern Israel says much more about who Jews are today than American Jews possibly can. American Jews also want to obsess over Israel’s “origin story” which is all the rage now with woke culture demarcating indigenous lands. News flash – history doesn’t move backward. Remembering the Holocaust is the attempt to avoid the mistakes of history, not wallow in it.
Current anti semitism is fueled by Arab and Muslim nations. The distortive modern narrative of “Palestine” … no it’s actually a lie …. is fueling today’s anti semitism. Palestinians have no history and no future, largely because they were simply garden variety Arabs colonizing yet another land that was conquered with Islamic imperialism. There’s nothing holy or sacred about political conquest, although they’ve successfully duped many in the West that this is the case, including many American Jews.
So. … NO …. it’s not time to abandon memory. We must continue to place memory and history in an appropriate context. What IS holy and sacred is survival of the Jewish people in the land of Israel.

Gayle Rosenthal
Gayle Rosenthal
1 year ago

The author seeks to undermine remembrance of Jewish suffering by pairing it with Siegelman’s art and personal story. Personally I don’t like it one bit. Jews do NOT define themselves by the Holocaust. If American Jews want to wallow in a confused state – that’s fine but frankly modern Israel says much more about who Jews are today than American Jews possibly can. American Jews also want to obsess over Israel’s “origin story” which is all the rage now with woke culture demarcating indigenous lands. News flash – history doesn’t move backward. Remembering the Holocaust is the attempt to avoid the mistakes of history, not wallow in it.
Current anti semitism is fueled by Arab and Muslim nations. The distortive modern narrative of “Palestine” … no it’s actually a lie …. is fueling today’s anti semitism. Palestinians have no history and no future, largely because they were simply garden variety Arabs colonizing yet another land that was conquered with Islamic imperialism. There’s nothing holy or sacred about political conquest, although they’ve successfully duped many in the West that this is the case, including many American Jews.
So. … NO …. it’s not time to abandon memory. We must continue to place memory and history in an appropriate context. What IS holy and sacred is survival of the Jewish people in the land of Israel.

PAUL NATHANSON
PAUL NATHANSON
1 year ago

I wrote what follows in response to another essay from UnHerd (Nicole Lampert, “Holocaust Memorial Day Is for Everyone — Except Jews,” UnHerd, 27 January 2023), because the topic of both, directly or indirectly, is what to do with horrific collective memories.
*
Nicole Lampert’s essay is very insightful. By calling for both remembrance and repentance, it goes beyond well-meaning clichĂ©s—let alone trivializing analogies. As a Jew, however, I’m somewhat ambivalent about the public rituals that now accompany memorials of the sho’ah (catastrophe). If we can’t learn something of universal importance from this particular historical event, after all, then why study history at all? But something is missing, something desperately needed in this age of rampant and even institutionalized cynicism.
It’s easy to see why so many people ignored, excused, condoned or supported the Nazis. (Their motivations have been documented relentlessly by historians, psychologists, sociologists and so on.) Would I have been any different in their position—that is, as an “Aryan”? I doubt, as a thought experiment, that I would have gleefully thrown babies out of windows. But I have no reason to assume that I would have acted heroically. Fortunately, I don’t know. I’ve never been tested in that way.
It’s not so easy to see why a few people did precisely the opposite, risking their lives to save or at least to help the targets of Nazi persecution. Jews do honor those gentiles—the “righteous among the nations”–who chose, out of compassion, to defy evil. And, having to act secretly, they were hardly motivated by virtue-signaling. Their names are inscribed on a monument in Jerusalem, their letters and photos carefully collected and displayed, their deeds recorded in books and documentaries. But I’d go one step further by adding one day of the year, preferably the next day, to remember the ordinary people whose altruism can still–in spite of the moral corruption that we know about from both history and, to some extent, from personal experience in everyday life–make us proud to be human.
If that wouldn’t be a powerful antidote to the cynicism of woke ideology and other forms of ideology, I can’t imagine what would be

PAUL NATHANSON
PAUL NATHANSON
1 year ago

I wrote what follows in response to another essay from UnHerd (Nicole Lampert, “Holocaust Memorial Day Is for Everyone — Except Jews,” UnHerd, 27 January 2023), because the topic of both, directly or indirectly, is what to do with horrific collective memories.
*
Nicole Lampert’s essay is very insightful. By calling for both remembrance and repentance, it goes beyond well-meaning clichĂ©s—let alone trivializing analogies. As a Jew, however, I’m somewhat ambivalent about the public rituals that now accompany memorials of the sho’ah (catastrophe). If we can’t learn something of universal importance from this particular historical event, after all, then why study history at all? But something is missing, something desperately needed in this age of rampant and even institutionalized cynicism.
It’s easy to see why so many people ignored, excused, condoned or supported the Nazis. (Their motivations have been documented relentlessly by historians, psychologists, sociologists and so on.) Would I have been any different in their position—that is, as an “Aryan”? I doubt, as a thought experiment, that I would have gleefully thrown babies out of windows. But I have no reason to assume that I would have acted heroically. Fortunately, I don’t know. I’ve never been tested in that way.
It’s not so easy to see why a few people did precisely the opposite, risking their lives to save or at least to help the targets of Nazi persecution. Jews do honor those gentiles—the “righteous among the nations”–who chose, out of compassion, to defy evil. And, having to act secretly, they were hardly motivated by virtue-signaling. Their names are inscribed on a monument in Jerusalem, their letters and photos carefully collected and displayed, their deeds recorded in books and documentaries. But I’d go one step further by adding one day of the year, preferably the next day, to remember the ordinary people whose altruism can still–in spite of the moral corruption that we know about from both history and, to some extent, from personal experience in everyday life–make us proud to be human.
If that wouldn’t be a powerful antidote to the cynicism of woke ideology and other forms of ideology, I can’t imagine what would be

Madeleine Jones
Madeleine Jones
1 year ago

Maus is a great read, highly recommend it.

Madeleine Jones
Madeleine Jones
1 year ago

Maus is a great read, highly recommend it.

Maurice Austin
Maurice Austin
1 year ago

My only problem with endlessly ruminating on the Holocaust is a worry for the emotional state of modern Jews themselves.
Of course it should be remembered and taught about, but to make it central to one’s existence can be a corrosive influence on one’s own life. I KNOW the straight majority in every society has mistreated and killed gay people like me ever since the dawn of time, but if I stewed on it endlessly I’d be bitter and resentful and forget that the prosperous and largely just world I live in was mainly built by straight people. Similarly, I KNOW the “English” crushed my peasant Irish/Welsh/Cornish ancestors for centuries, but if I spent my time resenting the English I would be forgetting that most of the English led pretty miserable lives themselves for that entire period, and that eventually they created a society that allowed the development of the freedom and prosperity I enjoy today.
Remember and learn from the horrors of history, but for goodness’ sake don’t let resentment eat into you: it does you active harm and it hardly punishes the perpetrators, because they are profoundly, irrevocably dead.

Maurice Austin
Maurice Austin
1 year ago

My only problem with endlessly ruminating on the Holocaust is a worry for the emotional state of modern Jews themselves.
Of course it should be remembered and taught about, but to make it central to one’s existence can be a corrosive influence on one’s own life. I KNOW the straight majority in every society has mistreated and killed gay people like me ever since the dawn of time, but if I stewed on it endlessly I’d be bitter and resentful and forget that the prosperous and largely just world I live in was mainly built by straight people. Similarly, I KNOW the “English” crushed my peasant Irish/Welsh/Cornish ancestors for centuries, but if I spent my time resenting the English I would be forgetting that most of the English led pretty miserable lives themselves for that entire period, and that eventually they created a society that allowed the development of the freedom and prosperity I enjoy today.
Remember and learn from the horrors of history, but for goodness’ sake don’t let resentment eat into you: it does you active harm and it hardly punishes the perpetrators, because they are profoundly, irrevocably dead.

Robert Colls
Robert Colls
1 year ago

Superb piece with sharp upper-cut knock out ending

Robert Colls
Robert Colls
1 year ago

Superb piece with sharp upper-cut knock out ending

Ian Stewart
Ian Stewart
1 year ago

Maybe worth mentioning too, since the writer didn’t reference it, that a major Hollywood star, Jerry Lewis (admittedly getting to the end of his career), did try to produce a movie about the Holocaust in 1972. But it wasn’t released and seemed to become the subject of controversy and shame for Lewis – the Hollywood taboo wasn’t ready to be broken yet. We might get to see it in 2024 apparently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Clown_Cried

Last edited 1 year ago by Ian Stewart
Mike Fraser
Mike Fraser
1 year ago
Reply to  Ian Stewart

meh

Mike Fraser
Mike Fraser
1 year ago
Reply to  Ian Stewart

meh

Ian Stewart
Ian Stewart
1 year ago

Maybe worth mentioning too, since the writer didn’t reference it, that a major Hollywood star, Jerry Lewis (admittedly getting to the end of his career), did try to produce a movie about the Holocaust in 1972. But it wasn’t released and seemed to become the subject of controversy and shame for Lewis – the Hollywood taboo wasn’t ready to be broken yet. We might get to see it in 2024 apparently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Clown_Cried

Last edited 1 year ago by Ian Stewart
Sean Booth
Sean Booth
1 year ago

Should American Blacks let go of the slavery victimhood?

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 year ago
Reply to  Sean Booth

That sort of rhetorical question, while certain to still offend many, is better received when asked by someone known to be black, such as John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, or Coleman Hughes.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 year ago
Reply to  Sean Booth

That sort of rhetorical question, while certain to still offend many, is better received when asked by someone known to be black, such as John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, or Coleman Hughes.

Sean Booth
Sean Booth
1 year ago

Should American Blacks let go of the slavery victimhood?

Chris Parkins
Chris Parkins
1 year ago

So the author is essentially saying that Jews should stop banging on about the Holocaust. Very tasteful, and on International Holocaust Memorial Day, too.

Chris Parkins
Chris Parkins
1 year ago

So the author is essentially saying that Jews should stop banging on about the Holocaust. Very tasteful, and on International Holocaust Memorial Day, too.

j watson
j watson
1 year ago

I wouldn’t deem to comment on what the Holocaust means to Jews and Jewish identity specifically, but I do know it is very important to us all to remember. Ordinary people had to support what was done to the Jews and other minorities leading to the Holocaust. Ordinary people like ourselves had to go along with it. Why was that possible and what must we learn from it?
Of course there have been many writings, programmes, films etc better articulating than I ever could how a minority can be demonised and de-humanised to the point ordinary people will do things to them they would never otherwise even consider. And how language especially can be used to start this spiral of dehumanisation that prepares the ground for much worse.
It does not mean that the critics of minorities or groups today envisage mass murder, but the demonisation takes from the same play book. History tells us many can wake too late to what they helped start. Therein lies one of the reasons we should all remember.

Last edited 1 year ago by j watson
j watson
j watson
1 year ago

I wouldn’t deem to comment on what the Holocaust means to Jews and Jewish identity specifically, but I do know it is very important to us all to remember. Ordinary people had to support what was done to the Jews and other minorities leading to the Holocaust. Ordinary people like ourselves had to go along with it. Why was that possible and what must we learn from it?
Of course there have been many writings, programmes, films etc better articulating than I ever could how a minority can be demonised and de-humanised to the point ordinary people will do things to them they would never otherwise even consider. And how language especially can be used to start this spiral of dehumanisation that prepares the ground for much worse.
It does not mean that the critics of minorities or groups today envisage mass murder, but the demonisation takes from the same play book. History tells us many can wake too late to what they helped start. Therein lies one of the reasons we should all remember.

Last edited 1 year ago by j watson
LCarey Rowland
LCarey Rowland
1 year ago

Thanks, David, for your inspired encapsulation of this very old, new problem.
Having noticed some antisemitic inconsistencies in the behavior of some of my countrymen, I took a chance on contributing–as a Gentle Christian– to the stream of American literature, my novelized take on the dangers inherent in American and European antisemitism.
The novel published in 2007, Glass half-Full, tells a story about some good people in the Washington DC area who operating a restaurant. Some bad things happen to them, because of the clandestine activities of a local group of neo-nazis nearby.
Later, in 2011, I published Smoke, a novel about a young American businessman who is traveling through Britain, France, and Belgium during the year 1937. He meets a girl whose family has just fled Germany because the impact of the Nuremberg laws on their deli business in Munich.
In this day and time, we need to be vigilant.
Never Again!
I am hopeful that Jewish people are willing to accept a little literary help from a 1951-born history buff who takes the presence of Jew-haters seriously enough to try and expose their vicious activities before it is too late.
One more thing: In this present so-called maga movement we discern a beastly motive and a violent strategy that needs to be called out and confronted directly wherever possible in our literature, our journalism, our music, even our precious Sunday Christian gatherings.
As an ancient Hebrew, Amos, declared, which was later echoed by Dr. King: “Let justice roll down like the waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream!”
The justice that needs to be administered nowadays includes exposure, indictment, conviction and imprisonment of all antisemites who consider themselves privileged in their ant-woke favor enough to steal, injure or kill our citizens just because they happen to be Jewish.
Case in point: It is not true what donald trump said about the “Charlottesville” incident. Not all the people there were “good people on both sides.”
And that is true in our contemporary political divisions.
There is no place for a swastika in our United States of America!

Emre S
Emre S
1 year ago

Not sure what the ask from Jews here is. For example, are the British ready to get over WW2 and embrace the EU or Germany? For sure some are – can we claim this is broadly the case? How about Americans? Are they ready to forget their Cold War traumas which ended in the 80s, and offer a warm embrace to the Russians?

Lindsay S
Lindsay S
1 year ago
Reply to  Emre S

I think the point is that there are too many people wallowing in self pity today for traumas they haven’t personally experienced. There is almost a wistfulness about it. History is important for learning lessons of the past, however, it’s not healthy to try and live there.

Last edited 1 year ago by Lindsay S
Emre S
Emre S
1 year ago
Reply to  Lindsay S

There’s self-pity, and then there’s culture and identity by having roots. If self-pity is stopping people from succeeding and getting what they deserve, I’d agree it’s harmful. I don’t think that’s the case for everyone though.

Wim de Vriend
Wim de Vriend
1 year ago
Reply to  Lindsay S

Yes, I’ve been berated by people self-identifying as grandchildren of ‘Holocaust survivors’ for making fun of Nazis. Go figure.

Emre S
Emre S
1 year ago
Reply to  Lindsay S

There’s self-pity, and then there’s culture and identity by having roots. If self-pity is stopping people from succeeding and getting what they deserve, I’d agree it’s harmful. I don’t think that’s the case for everyone though.

Wim de Vriend
Wim de Vriend
1 year ago
Reply to  Lindsay S

Yes, I’ve been berated by people self-identifying as grandchildren of ‘Holocaust survivors’ for making fun of Nazis. Go figure.

Steve Murray
Steve Murray
1 year ago
Reply to  Emre S

We Brits ’embraced’ Germany a long time ago, but why conflate that with the EU which has been rejected, and for entirely positive reasons? If you’re looking in from the outside, you’ve been.misinformed about the nature of the EU, although these pages should’ve given you sufficient insight, if read carefully.

Germany? Our friends and neighbours in Europe, with very close links to our Royal Family.

Emre S
Emre S
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

Sorry but sounds to me like you want to have your cake and eat it. When EU was refused by people, it was on the basis that they didn’t want to be ruled by Brussels which in turn is led by the Franco-German alliance. One of the most prominent opposition arguments was about German tendency to regulate everything which would stifle British flexibility and innovation. Leaving those aside who were afraid that more brown people would come to Britain via Europe (and hence voted for Brexit), the argument was made that they wanted to open Britain to all talent in the world, why limit it only to the EU citizens?
All in all, Britain chose not to be part of the biggest closest economic union on their shores by far with the closest economic ties – including their most profitable sector finance – because they didn’t want to share leadership of a union with others, in particular Germany. This happened when many saw it’d be more prosperous to stay in the union for everyone in the long term.
So, I’d argue the referendum was a choice for identity, and the British people chose not to identify as EU citizens and share their lives with them. This shows that it was a cultural issue much like the article makes the Jewish trauma to be a cultural issue.

Last edited 1 year ago by Emre S
B Emery
B Emery
1 year ago
Reply to  Emre S

Actually for me it was that I don’t like big government. That’s very common with brits. It’s about accountability. The EU was massive and unaccountable. Too many unelected officials. It wasn’t about stopping immigration altogether at all, but allowing our services and housing needs to breath and catch up with the immigration we have already had. We had a lot in a short space of time, more than was expected. That was the main problem.

Emre S
Emre S
1 year ago
Reply to  B Emery

Fair enough, there’s an English history for preference of smaller and efficient government and light touch legislation which is absent in the rest of Europe – perhaps due to being a separated island nation.
Some traumas and historical events/differences are too wide bridge over, and they become a part of identity. This was the point I was trying to make anyhow.

Last edited 1 year ago by Emre S
B Emery
B Emery
1 year ago
Reply to  Emre S

Yes we have a fabulous English history. Light touch legislation? Yeah the brits aren’t big on police states either.
What are you talking about some traumas being to wide to bridge over? Sounds like you have swallowed the Freudian handbook.

Emre S
Emre S
1 year ago
Reply to  B Emery

I guess some discussion on trauma is to be expected on an article on trauma – perhaps not so much your thing?

Emre S
Emre S
1 year ago
Reply to  B Emery

I guess some discussion on trauma is to be expected on an article on trauma – perhaps not so much your thing?

B Emery
B Emery
1 year ago
Reply to  Emre S

Yes we have a fabulous English history. Light touch legislation? Yeah the brits aren’t big on police states either.
What are you talking about some traumas being to wide to bridge over? Sounds like you have swallowed the Freudian handbook.

Emre S
Emre S
1 year ago
Reply to  B Emery

Fair enough, there’s an English history for preference of smaller and efficient government and light touch legislation which is absent in the rest of Europe – perhaps due to being a separated island nation.
Some traumas and historical events/differences are too wide bridge over, and they become a part of identity. This was the point I was trying to make anyhow.

Last edited 1 year ago by Emre S
Steve Murray
Steve Murray
1 year ago
Reply to  Emre S

You couldn’t be more wrong, and i’m not sorry. The EU, most emphatically, is NOT Europe. The UK is very much part of the history of the continent, and your conflation of the two is intellectually bankrupt.

Emre S
Emre S
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

Given I don’t hear you make any arguments, I guess we can call it a disagreement after all.

Emre S
Emre S
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

Given I don’t hear you make any arguments, I guess we can call it a disagreement after all.

B Emery
B Emery
1 year ago
Reply to  Emre S

Actually for me it was that I don’t like big government. That’s very common with brits. It’s about accountability. The EU was massive and unaccountable. Too many unelected officials. It wasn’t about stopping immigration altogether at all, but allowing our services and housing needs to breath and catch up with the immigration we have already had. We had a lot in a short space of time, more than was expected. That was the main problem.

Steve Murray
Steve Murray
1 year ago
Reply to  Emre S

You couldn’t be more wrong, and i’m not sorry. The EU, most emphatically, is NOT Europe. The UK is very much part of the history of the continent, and your conflation of the two is intellectually bankrupt.

Mike Fraser
Mike Fraser
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

you have gone off subject

Emre S
Emre S
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

Sorry but sounds to me like you want to have your cake and eat it. When EU was refused by people, it was on the basis that they didn’t want to be ruled by Brussels which in turn is led by the Franco-German alliance. One of the most prominent opposition arguments was about German tendency to regulate everything which would stifle British flexibility and innovation. Leaving those aside who were afraid that more brown people would come to Britain via Europe (and hence voted for Brexit), the argument was made that they wanted to open Britain to all talent in the world, why limit it only to the EU citizens?
All in all, Britain chose not to be part of the biggest closest economic union on their shores by far with the closest economic ties – including their most profitable sector finance – because they didn’t want to share leadership of a union with others, in particular Germany. This happened when many saw it’d be more prosperous to stay in the union for everyone in the long term.
So, I’d argue the referendum was a choice for identity, and the British people chose not to identify as EU citizens and share their lives with them. This shows that it was a cultural issue much like the article makes the Jewish trauma to be a cultural issue.

Last edited 1 year ago by Emre S
Mike Fraser
Mike Fraser
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

you have gone off subject

Mike Fraser
Mike Fraser
1 year ago
Reply to  Emre S

you CANNOT conflate WWII with the Holocaust. WWIII happened because Hitler invaded Poland et al.
The Holocaust happened because it was the culmination of the jealousy and hatred of the Jews, who had no country of our own since the Romans threw us out, by The Roman Catholic Church, Islam, Russia, France, England, Spain to name just a few countries and then this evil man Hitler with his Final Solution…and so much more openly today
I tried to enter a shul in Nice 10 years ago to find it barred and shuttered and an appointment had to be made and armed soldiers stood by! In FRANCE!!

CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
1 year ago
Reply to  Mike Fraser

I am sorry but It is historically incorrect to say that “the Romans threw us out”.

The only place the Jews were ejected from was Jerusalem, after the Bar Kokhba Revolt of 132-136 AD. Even then they were allowed to return for one day, once a year.

In any case the majority of the Jews lived in Galilee* and happily remained there until the Islamic Conquest of the 7th century AD.

(* A place were ‘stuff’ actually grew!)

Emre S
Emre S
1 year ago
Reply to  Mike Fraser

Not sure if you have a point tbh, because I don’t see one in the above.
Out of curiosity, is there any nation you approve of given the long list above? France? USA?

Last edited 1 year ago by Emre S
Mike Fraser
Mike Fraser
1 year ago
Reply to  Emre S

The points are explicit.
WWII did not cause the Holocaust.
It was executed by Hitler who went a whole step further than the actions that rulers in those other countries, very powerfully urged by religions, took over centuries.
Antisemitism is older and deeper and religiously ingrained and does not appear to be accepted as seriously as other forms of racism.

CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
1 year ago
Reply to  Mike Fraser

It’s first major manifestation was probably in the great Hellenistic city of Alexandria perhaps two centuries before the birth of Christ.

The city had a particularly volatile cocktail of Egyptians, ‘Greeks’ and Jews who were forever “at each other’s throats “.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 year ago
Reply to  Mike Fraser

Since you are assigning a primeval, singular status to antisemitism, as being at once older, deeper, and underacknowledged in comparison to other forms of bigotry: Why is that so, in your individual view?
Above you seem to rule out the envy-of-excellence argument, so is there something related to a chosen people self-segregation, more of a religious fixation of blame for the death of Jesus, a Jew killed according to wishes of (some) Jewish people? All of the above and then some, with social contagion thrown in?
Of course antisemitism is irrational and wrong, but is it a purely inexplicable pathology?
Differently put: How do people explain their ill-will and fear toward Jews to themselves, and what are their real motives, if any?
I’d genuinely like to hear your thoughts if you’re willing to share them.

Last edited 1 year ago by AJ Mac
Mike Fraser
Mike Fraser
1 year ago
Reply to  AJ Mac

It is not a lot more than 2500 years old which is old enough, IMV, to be primeval.
It is singular in that it is driven by religious thought and commands, as well as the jealousy