Sunday, December 16, 2007
Terrific piece by Jeff in today's Globe on what it is to be a Jew in America:
Moreover, Hanukkah, like other Jewish holidays, was often chosen deliberately by the Nazis as an occasion for murdering Jews. In "Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust," the historian Yaffa Eliach recounts one such slaughter:
"The men selected were marched outside. SS men with rubber truncheons and iron prods awaited them. They kicked, beat, and tortured the innocent victims. When the tortured body no longer responded, the revolver was used. . . . The brutal massacre continued outside of the barracks until sundown. When the [Nazis] departed, they left behind heaps of hundreds of tortured and twisted bodies."
Last week, on the 7th night of Hanukkah 2007, I was in the White House. President and Mrs. Bush have made it an annual tradition to host a Hanukkah celebration in addition to the customary White House Christmas parties, and my wife and I were honored to receive an invitation to this year's reception.
It was a beautiful and festive event. It was also an undeniably Jewish one, from the lavish buffet dinner prepared in a carefully "koshered" White House kitchen, to the Hebrew songs performed by the Zamir Chorale, to the several hundred guests drawn from every segment of the American Jewish community...
Worth reading in full. Now, how do I score one of those invites?
Keep doing what you're doing ... if there is any justice in the world, you'll score an invitation sooner or later.
I couldn't help juxtappose this account:
"ON THE 7th night of Hanukkah in 1944, my father was in Auschwitz. He had been deported with his family to the Nazi extermination camp eight months earlier; by Hanukkah, only my father was still alive. That year, he kindled no Hanukkah lights. In Auschwitz, where anything and everything was punishable by death, any Jew caught practicing his religion could expect to be sent to the gas chambers, or shot on the spot."
With an account I found on Finkelstein's blog, which I'm linking here only in case someone needs to verify its veracity:
"I once asked my late mother, who survived Maidanek concentration camp, about Dawidowicz's depiction of all the Jews in the ghettos and camps furtively staying faithful to their religion until their final steps into the gas chambers. "When I first entered my block at Maidanek, all the women inmates had dyed-blond hair," my mother laughed. "They had been trying to pass as Gentiles." The shocking accounts of Jewish corruption that could be found in conveniently forgotten memoirs like Bernard Goldstein's The Stars Bear Witness were deleted in Dawidowicz's fantasy.
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=3&ar=102
The first thing that leaped at me was the malevolence of the interpretation that Jews who wanted to survive and therefore tried to pass off as non-Jews were somewhat deemed "corrupt" by Finkelstein. I am only aware of it because I did a short research in this man's writings in preparation for a comment I left on bald-Headed Geek's blog. I swear, I felt physically sick after reading some of his stuff first hand.
Solomon,
You continue to be an excellent source of good reading material. Jacoby's article is very touching, as is the article by Yaacov Ben Moshe at Breath of the Beast.
I'm an atheist Protestant Christian who works with a Jew. We have no trouble wishing all of our clients a Merry Christmas at the foot of all of our letters (Christmas in Oz is the holiday season and most offices shut from 21 December to 7 January so we put a note of closure at the foot of each letter with our greeting). It's hard to see anything but good in such a lovely greeting.
Christmas is Summer here. An extravaganza of ham, pork, shell fish and barbies. I get to eat all the non kosher food and he only gets to wish everyone Merry Christmas.
Maybe he was conflicted in his attitude to Christmas, like Yaacov, but I've known him for 45 years and he never expressed it to me.
Jeff Jacoby writes from the heart. He is a good person and it says a lot for the American system that a good person feels gratitude towards the system that governs him.
Merry Christmas to you Solomon.
youcancallmemeyer
Thanks for the reminder of who we are, where we are and what we are - Happy New Year