Today is יום הזיכרון לשואה ולגבורה/Yom HaZikaron LaShoah v’LaGivoora/The Day of Remembrance for the Holocaust and Heroism. That’s the name selected by the כנסת/Knesset in Israel but we normally refer to it as יום השואה/Yom HaShoah/Holocaust Day (Holocaust Remembrance Day). The idea behind the name is to point out that the day is for us to mourn and be inspired by the Jewish spirit that refuses to die. We mourn those we lost and we honor those who fought back against the Nazis and their collaborators.
Just yesterday I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, Wandering Jews, with Mijal Bitton and Noam Weiss. Mijal’s name should be familiar to our community as her father, Rabbi Bitton, was once the rabbi of our community. The subject of this episode was יום השואה and their special guest was author Dara Horn. She’s the author of the provocatively titled People Love Dead Jews. This book discusses the obsession the world has with our small group’s demise. When we’re powerless and dead people care and when we have power and are alive people look at us with disgust. The opening article in her book is about Anne Frank, “Everyone’s (second) favorite dead Jew.” She uses this term because Jesus is the most favorite and because both of these people have been separated from their Jewish personhood.
Horn tells the story of two disturbing occurrences at the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam. The first story is about an employee who wore a כיפה/Kippah to work each day. He was asked to cover it with a hat. At the Anne Frank house?!? They were asking a Jew to hide his Jewish identity in the place where Jews were forced to hide their Jewish identities. He refused and it took six months for the leadership to agree to change their view. The problem is that the Anne Frank house aims to be universalist. The story it tells is about every group that’s been marginalized and not about Jews. The problem is the Holocaust is a uniquely Jewish event. It happened to our people. Yes, others were denigrated and murdered. This is all true, but the main object of the Nazis, after world domination (or perhaps before), was the eradication of the Jewish People. This problem of removing the Jewish part of the Anne Frank house was seen another time. There are narration headsets in many languages one can use while touring the house. All of them are labeled with the name of the language and the flag associated with that language. English had a British flag (it is Europe after all), French had a flag of France and so on. The Hebrew one had no flag. Why no Israeli flag? I think we all know what’s behind that.
The issue at play here, time and again, is that antisemitism is not dead. To this very day, the Jewish people continue to contend with the same bigotry we’ve confronted since Pharaoh and Haman and others crafted it. We continue to be othered and marginalized. We continue to be scapegoated and demonized. We continue to have our very existence called into question. To add insult to injury, we even have our stories stripped from us and made to belong to others outside of our community. Nothing is sacred (Anne Franks’s house) and no public venue is immune (Google Coachella Irish band and see for yourself).
The only way we can answer all of this is to love living Jews as much as we love dead Jews. The only way to counter this is to love Jewish life and Judaism more than we love our tragic past. The only way to counter this is to recognize that we memorialize and honor those who gave everything. We recognize that we fight back and never allow them to take anything away from us.
