Italy always has the best Shoah commemoration adverts. See the flyers for the migrant rights benefit gig above (in yellow) and the squat gig, to the upper right. The collage is of course telling, if accidental. Turin, on my birthday.
The last time I went to San Francisco’s Legion of Honor, it was to attend a Yom Ha’atzmaut (independence day) party hosted by the Israeli consulate. I’d been invited by the consular press officer at the time, a sarcastic, American who was always interested in hooking me up with offbeat Israeli filmmakers and novelists that the government thought would be appreciated by the idiosyncratic, bohemian sensibilities of local Jewry.
Since the apartment we’re subletting is only six blocks away, I walked over to the museum yesterday, only to stumble upon this rather intense display. A memorial to Jews who died in the Holocaust, it points north, slightly west of the Marin Headlands, out towards the Pacific Ocean. On the other side of this pile of ceramic corpses stands a ghostlike mannequin, staring through a well-worn fence made of wood and barbed wire.
CEDAR: When you compare the rebels on Masada to the wise men in Yavneh, the rebels died as lions, and the wise men lived as dogs . But the dogs had puppies, and we are those puppies. So, there was something about blowing up Beaufort, blowing up the fortifications, blowing up the mountain, at the end of the film, that was also about blowing up a symbol of (the lion’s) power. It’s about our power to create something else that, at least for me, makes us different from our enemies.
ZEEK: It means that as Israelis, we can start over. That we have the ability to reinvent ourselves.
CEDAR: Not only that. It means that we have an identity without the geographical symbol, that we have an identity that is as powerful and as firm as concrete and fortifications, flags and pride.
To read the rest of my interview with director Joseph Cedar, check out the new issue of Zeek.
The best stocked section (aside from the Health and Diet shelf) in San Francisco’s Green Apple Books bargain media annex.
Perhaps the single most frequently asked question posed by my interns at Tikkun was why we continued to receive so many books about Nazism and the Holocaust to review.
Indeed, every day, new books about the Shoah would inevitably outnumber arriving titles on Israel and Judaism. “It’s one of the occupational hazards of being a Jewish magazine,” was my stock reply.
If the National Intelligence Estimate published on Monday is true, and Iran is not actively pursuing a nuclear weapons program, it poses a potential problem for the Bush administration’s relationship with American Jewry. Given how the US President said last August that Iran is aggressively expanding its military capabilities in order to trigger a nuclear ‘holocaust’ - using such explicit language – how might we reconsider Bush’s willingness to employ such loaded terminology when no such preparations are actually taking place? In light of this revelation, should Jews reproach the head of state for employing terms that unnecessarily stoked our deepest-held fears?
Invoking the specter of the Nazi genocide for political purposes is nothing new. In the Jewish community, nearly sixty three years after the Second World War, the legacy of the Holocaust continues to exercise enormous influence over how we think and talk about politics. From the slightest turn of phrase to the ways in which we understand our relationship with the Christian and Islamic worlds, the Shoah (‘catastrophe’), as we call it in Hebrew, is almost always a point of reference. Though there are numerous problems with the manner in which we grapple with this patrimony, there’s something even more problematic when its memory is ideologically leveraged by non-Jews.
If Israel were not locked in a long distance conflict with Iran, it would be easier to overlook the inflammatory nature of the American leader’s language. The problem is that Israel is in a heightened state of tension with the Islamic republic precisely because of American policies in the region. Frequently treated by its enemies as though it were an extension of the United States, witness Iraq’s repeated missile attacks on Israel during Operation Desert Storm as but one example. Factor in Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s repeated denials of the Holocaust, and his threats to ‘wipe Israel off the map’ and Jews have every reason to take the US President’s warnings with the utmost seriousness.
That is why it is incumbent that Israel’s self-declared friends express their care for the country a little more wisely. To stand in solidarity with Israel, in opposition to demagogues who threaten its dissolution is one thing. But to take at face value the words of a crazed paper tiger, and repeat them as though they were the genuine item is another. Instead of assessing their empty threat responsibly, by repeating them as though the threat was indeed real, the former Governor of Texas ended up reinforcing the feelings of fear many Jews already felt instilled in them by the Iranian leader’s racist rhetoric.
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