Auschwitz: portal to invisibility?One day I just happened to drop by Auschwitz for the afternoon.  

Just like in the movies…the claustrophobic gas chamber, the metal sliding trays used to shove bodies into the ovens as well as a kind of stench that hung over the place.  It was all clearly labeled, sanitized and free from any emotion.  Strangely, none of this had much impact on me.

As I continued to tour the “museum” (as they call it) I walked into what looked like a bunker.  In the corner I saw a stack of grey blankets which I assumed were used by the prisoners.  I asked one of the guards about them.  I was told that they were made from the prisoners.  Pause.  I am now paralyzed.  This pile of blankets was made from human sheep, Jewish sheep.  That’s when the horrors of lamp shades from skin and medical experiments filled my mind.  For me, Auschwitz was not about the mass killing--that’s too abstract a thought for me to fully digest--but it was about the one-on-one inhumanity, the daily interaction between one person and another.  How do you look at a man, woman or child and see them only as a blanket or a conical lampshade that emits a certain type of filtered light?  It is this thought that has stayed with me for twenty years since that visit.

On the train back to Lodz, I wondered why people hate us so much, since the very beginning.  Has there ever been a day in Jewish history where we have not been hated?  

Every group seems to get their turn on the wheel of hate but we seem to get our turn more often than others.

Ellis Island: change your name and never look back?Because my father was dubbed “Smith” when he landed at Ellis Island at the turn of the last century, I have had a bit of a unique vantage point.  I’m kind of an invisible Jew.  Because my last name is not Bernstein or Rosenblatt, people feel a bit freer to unload their casual “Jew” remarks in front of me.  Growing up in the segregated South, I heard it a lot but surprisingly, just as much today.  I don’t know if this dislike for Jews is cultural, genetic or what.  And, in some ways, I think modern American Jews have internalized these ideas and therefore rushed to become mainstream and abandon their uniqueness, their religion.  I don’t have the numbers or the evidence, but I would bet that the vast majority of American Jews do not know much about their religion beyond Hanukkah and Yom Kippur with little interest in either. 

As a Chinese woman said to me years ago, “You Jewish people are crazy.  You come to this country and change your name.  We Chinese would never do that.  That is our family, our history.”  May I say that this woman makes a major point, as I am still not sure of my real name nor the real history of my family.  What does that do to a person, to make them history-less?  Once you push the “erase” button it is nearly impossible to reconstruct the missing data.  As American Jews, we are missing mountains of data.

What’s interesting to me, is that if you want to talk about minorities, what are we, chopped liver?   We are THE microscopic minority.  Well, Jains and Zoroastrians are probably pretty small too.  In a way, I am grateful for Madonna and the far right in that both are raising the profile of Judaism beyond moneychangers, owners of the media, controllers of Hollywood and just plain dirty people.  For Madonna and the ultra right, Jews have something to tell the world, something rich and textured, something to be embraced not scorned.  

So many Jews who immigrated to this country dumped their religion wholesale when they landed in this beautiful country of opportunity.  The only thing they passed on to their children was that it was OK to have a Christmas tree and the love of bagels. I fully understand that they wanted a break with the ugly past and looked forward to reinventing themselves free from persecution and hatred.  Who wants to live like that?  

All this rambling leads to the point that sites like JEWCY are important.  It opens up the dialogue, raises the profile and encourages people to think, talk and embrace who they are.  Without this conversation, no group can survive.  With silence we disappear.  Keep talking.

Philip Smith, author of Walking Through Walls, is guest blogging for Jewcy, and he'll be here all week.  Stay tuned.

Joel Teitelbaum, the Rebbe of Satmar and the most coercive of all modern day ultra-Orthodox leaders, passed away 29 years ago this month.  A vociferous anti-Zionist, Teitelbaum is known for having exhorted his followers to stay in Europe.  Later, as the Nazis approached, he was one of many Hungarian ultra-Orthodox rabbis who told their flocks to remain calm.  There is nothing to worry about, these rabbis announced, God will protect us because of our anti-Zionism.

Unfortunately for Teitelbaum’s followers, God didn’t go along with his promises. While most of his followers perished in Auschwitz, Teitelbaum went into hiding and later escaped to freedom. He did not do this through his own ingenuity or through some divine intervention – Joel Teitelbaum, uber-anti-Zionist, was saved from certain death by a Zionist leader.

That Zionist, Rudolph Kasztner, organized the largest Holocaust rescue of Jews by another Jew.  He did it with smoke and mirrors, with bravado and slight of hand. Kasztner saved thousands of his people by negotiating with Adolph Eichmann – short of Hitler, the most feared Nazi in the world. Oskar Schindler of Schindler’s List fame said Kasztner was the bravest man he knew.

After the War, Teitelbaum lived for a brief time in Palestine, where he became a leader of the rabidly anti-Zionist, rabidly anti-modern, Edah HaCharedit. When you read about Jerusalem video stores being torched or Internet cafés trashed, chances are the thugs who did it are proudly affiliated with Edah HaCharedit.

Teitelbaum couldn’t stand what he saw as the ‘destruction’ of the Holy Land by the irreligious and imperfectly religious – in practice, pretty much everyone who wasn’t a Teitelbaum follower or acolyte. So, in 1946, Teitelbaum moved to Brooklyn and set up what was then his small hasidic court.  Teitelbaum found America’s Orthodox welcoming, and America’s Jewish welfare agencies helped to resettle many of his followers in Brooklyn.

You’ve probably heard the stories about these American Jews – the same ones who were so hospitable and supportive of Teitelbaum when he first arrived: Pious Jews fled pogroms in Eastern Europe.  The need to make a living in America forced them to give up strict Shabbat observance and other Orthodox practices. Their children, lacking the example of fully Orthodox parents, became even less observant. If those pious Jews had just kept Shabbat, the story goes, their descendants would still be Orthodox today.

The flip side to this story is another story you’ve also probably heard: Seemingly pious Eastern European Jews board a ship bound for America. As the ship leaves the harbor and gets beyond sight of the shore, they cut off their beards and pitch their tefillin into the sea.

Both stories probably happened, although the first was probably far more common than the second. But even though these are iconic stories, neither really tells the tale of Eastern European immigration to the United States. That is because both are based on a lie – the idea that these immigration ships were filled with characters out of Broadway’s Fiddler On The Roof: long-bearded shtetl-dwellers with untrimmed earlocks, whose only brush with secular culture had taken place moments before.

By the 1920s, the masses of Eastern European Jews were secular or only nominally religious. Emancipation, which spread throughout Europe during the 19th century,  made belonging to a religious community – and following that community’s laws – optional. Ultra-Orthodox Judaism, itself a reactionary movement to the Enlightenment that preceded Emancipation, lost its state-sponsored coercive powers as did all forms of Orthodoxy. And Jews, no longer forced to be Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox, left Orthodoxy by the tens of thousands as a result.

Most Jews who came to America during the great wave of immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were neither ultra-Orthodox or rabidly secular – they were somewhere in between. They were Jews with a respect for Jewish law and tradition, but they were also Jews who appreciated and enjoyed secular culture and the freedoms it gave them.

The Orthodoxy they found in America was more suited to this hybrid outlook than the Orthodoxy of Eastern Europe. Never subject to state enforcement of religious law, American Jews – even American Orthodox Jews – took any type of religious coercion badly.

These new immigrants developed their own versions of Orthodoxy, too, founding shuls grouped around country or city of origin. In part, they did this to preserve the unique customs they grew up with. But they also did it for coarser, more practical reasons. These new shuls also served as affinity associations, and the social networking they provided helped immigrants land jobs and acclimate to American life. These shuls were rarely coercive – you paid your dues and you helped out with a minyan when you were able, and you were in.

These old and new American Orthodox Jews founded yeshivas like Torah Vodaas in Brooklyn and what would later become Yeshiva University in Manhattan. They also founded or helped to found many of the leading national Jewish organizations of their day, including what we now know as the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and other welfare organizations meant to help suffering Jews in Eastern Europe and beyond.

Despite this, and despite the fact that these same American Orthodox Jews would be instrumental in rescuing and resettling Eastern European Jews during and after the Holocaust, Teitelbaum rejected American Orthodoxy as impure and watered down by compromise and modernity.  He sought to impose Edah HaCharedit standards on it, demanding stricter forms of kashrut and the rejection of all secular values, including basic secular education. He created a community virtually walled off from the rest of society. And, when that was not enough, he created another in Upstate New York that now carries his name.To this day, when Satmar hasidim choose to leave Brooklyn or Kiryas Joel and the hasidic life, they often leave it illiterate in English. An entire organization, Footsteps, exists primarily to help these former hasids adapt to American life.

Yet the pull of a closed life and the allure of rebuilding a fantasy version of pre-Holocaust Satmar Jewish life was strong. Teitelbaum’s group grew to be largest hasidic court in America, although that growth has far more to do with the fertility and fruitfulness of its members (not to mention the difficulties those members face when defecting) than it does with the attractiveness of its lifestyle to outsiders.

Like the Edah HaCharedit, Teitelbaum and the movement he founded are ultra-Orthodoxy unvarnished, presented without PR agencies or concern for anyone else’s opinion.

Although he had opportunities to do so, Joel Teitelbaum never thanked the man who saved his life. Teitelbaum even refused to acknowledge that a Zionist had saved him. His pat answer when pressed was that he was saved by God, not by man, and would discuss the issue no further. Perhaps most shockingly, despite the failure of his theology and the success of Israel, Teitelbaum continued his anti-Zionist agitation, becoming the leading anti-Zionist in the world.

He showed little if any respect for the American Orthodox community that initially welcomed him, and he eventually shunned its leaders just as he shunned their schools, shuls, and organizations.

Many of the men and women who immigrated to pre-Holocaust America did so to flee men like Teitelbaum and the extremism that so often surrounds them.  That did not mean they threw their Judaism into the sea.  It meant they wanted to live a life free from religious enforcers and from antisemitism – a life where they could rise or fall based on their merits, not on their religious observance. In short, they wanted an American life, not an ultra-Orthodox one.

In a fit of rabid theodicy unmatched in modern times, Teitelbaum ultimately blamed Zionism for the Holocaust itself.

From: Adam LeBor

To: Shmuel Rosner

Dear Shmuel,

Thanks for your perceptive letter, and I think you are right to move the debate along to explore Jewish responsibility for stopping genocide, if indeed Jews have such a responsibility. But before we go there, let me share with you the latest news from the United Nations, which only confirms my increasing belief that the organization is in a terminal political decline.

Each year the General Assembly, which opens in September, elects a president and twenty-one vice-presidents. The General Assembly is dominated by the G77 group, non-aligned states from the developing world, including many Arab and Islamic nations, which accounts for its obsession with Israel, but let's leave that for the moment. The 2008 President of the General Assembly is Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, of Nicaragua. Señor d'Escoto Brockmann, a Catholic priest, is a former Sandinista foreign minister. He does not much like the United States and swiftly condemned what he called acts of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan. So far, so familiar.

Now comes the list of twenty one vice-presidents. Vice-President of the GeneralDevastation In Myanmar: The Junta blocked UN aid to its own citizens Assembly is mainly an honorary position, but still counts for something in the carefully delineated diplomatic hierarchy of the United Nations. The VPs include Egypt, Russia and Afghanistan, as well as the United States and the United Kingdom. And Burma. Yes, Burma. Cyclone-ravaged Burma, which is ruled by a junta so paranoid and downright evil that it deliberately obstructed the flow of UN aid to its own citizens. Burma, which promised Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon that aid would flow freely after his visit, and then immediately reneged on that promise. Burma, whose intransigence forced the World Food Programme, the UN's food agency, to suspend further supplies while the junta simply confiscated its aid and equipment. Burma, which obstructed and delayed visas for UN aid workers. Apart perhaps from North Korea, no other UN government has shown such contempt, even murderous disregard for its own citizens. No matter, for in the Alice-in-Wonderland world of the UN General Assembly, Burma's anti-western credentials make it an honored member.

And this same moral blindness has shaped the United Nations' response to Darfur. I was amazed and depressed to learn, while researching Complicity with Evil, how much reflexive anti-Westernism still shapes international diplomacy there. Colonialism in Africa and Asia ended decades ago, but still shapes the mentality of governments from Jakarta to Algiers. Sudan's greatest defenders at the United Nations are the Arab, Islamic and African blocs, and of course, China, which buys Sudan's oil and so keeps the government in power and funds the genocide. Time and time again, since the crisis in Darfur erupted in spring 2003, Sudan's allies have blocked or watered down attempts by the United States, Britain and France to exert diplomatic pressure on Sudan. (It's fascinating to compare the response of the Arab and Islamic countries at the UN to Bosnia and Darfur. They pressed the West hard to intervene in Bosnia, where Bosnian Muslims were being killed by Serb and Croat Christians. They now try and stymie any attempts to intervene, even diplomatically, where black Muslims are being killed by their own Muslim government.)

So, to a large extent, as you rightly say, it has been left to Darfur lobbying groups, which have a substantial Jewish presence, to take the lead. You ask if Jews have a special responsibility over Darfur? In absolute terms, no. Darfur is the world's responsibility, a moral incumbency no more or less on Jews than anyone else. But perhaps that is mere sophistry. You write that we should feel proud that: "Jews, who suffered the most from genocide feel compelled to raise their voices against such actions in every part of the world. They feel they have the moral authority, and the obligation to do so. And they do." I absolutely agree. While objectively speaking, Jews do not have a special responsibility to combat genocide, they believe they do, and act on it, which should indeed make us proud. (Although it's notable that in my homeland of Britain, Darfur has never become a hot-button issue, neither among Jews nor the wider population.)

I thought your second point was especially interesting: that American Jews got tired of investing all their political capital in supporting Israel. Especially, in my opinion, when it has become impossible to justify Israel's actions in the Occupied Territories, and the endless, creeping wave of settlements and annexations. It seems to me, Shmuel, that you are right, that there is a drift, even a movement away from the Israel-right-or-wrong school of thought and towards a more independent position, which can only be healthy in the long run. But here's an idea: maybe Jews support the 'Save Darfur' campaigns for another reason, so that they can argue that however bad things are in Palestine, they are nowhere near as bad as what is happening in Darfur. Which is true.

You ask what happens when the preservation of Israel contradicts stopping genocide.Yad Vashem: "Never Again" means more than remembering the six million I don't see a contradiction here, at least in today's world. Such a dilemma, thankfully, has not arisen. But I do think, that Israel, whose coming into existence was to some extent accelerated by the Holocaust, has a special responsibility to act humanely and with compassion towards refugees. I am critical of the way, for example, that foreign dignitaries are taken to Yad Vashem by Israeli government ministers. It's good that Yad Vashem exists, but it should be independent of politics. These visits seem to me an almost cynical attempt to draw a historical continuum between the Holocaust and the need to support Israeli government policies. And considering Israel's patchy record in dealing with refugees from a current genocide, Darfur, such visits could even be distasteful. Consider the Prevention of Infiltration Act, which has already passed a preliminary reading in the Knesset.

It allows the expulsion of refugees without judicial process, and seven year prison sentences for refugees from Sudan. It even allows for 'hot returns,' meaning that Israeli soldiers would force the refugees back over the border into Egypt, to face imprisonment or execution. Israeli soldiers have repeatedly witnessed and testified to how Egyptian troops deal with fleeing Sudanese: they shoot them.

Shmuel, we've covered a lot of ground in this enjoyable and thoughtful exchange, despite its depressing subject matter. But I leave you with this thought about Jews and Genocide. The Holocaust was the determining event in modern Jewish history, and has greatly shaped Israeli identity. But if 'Never Again' means anything, it means not just memorialising the six million, but also trying to stop present day genocides, or at least helping their victims. And that's true in Jerusalem as much as Washington DC.

Yours,

Adam

I was struck last week by several Holocaust-related stories in the news, and specifically how they all have the typical tunnel vision we’ve come to expect from anything vaguely related to the Holocaust. 

The first covered a former suburban Cleveland automaker, who may be extradited to Germany to face charges of murder. German authorities claim John Demjanjuk, 88, was a guard in Sobibor, a concentration camp in Poland more than 60 years ago. John Demjanjuk: formerly a Nazi guard?Demjanjuk has already been extradited once, to Israel, when he was under suspicion of being the notorious Ivan the Terrible, a guard at Treblinka. Demjanjuk was convicted, but Israeli officials eventually received evidence that Ivan the Terrible was a different old Ukrainian guy, so Demjanjuk was released and returned to the US. Germany is hoping to have him in their custody within the next few months. Demjakjuk’s lawyer says his client cannot get up from a chair by himself, and John Demjanjuk Jr. says his father is “not in good health right now.”

In another story, we learned that the Vatican is continuing to restrict some archives having to do with Pope Pius XII, who reigned from 1939 to 1958, and who is often derided by various Jewish organizations for not doing enough to ensure the safety of Jews and Catholics during the Holocaust. A Vatican official recently said that Jewish archives should be opened before people get angry at the church for restricting access to its documents. Jewish groups responded by declaring that their archives are already open.

Finally, Yad Vashem is being asked to recognize the work of a man named Peter Bergson, who was a major player in all of the public work and activism done by American Jews during the Holocaust. Among other things, Bergson initiated a Rabbis’ March on the White House with more than 400 Orthodox rabbis. It was the only protest demonstration calling for Holocaust rescue activities ever held in Washington during World War II. Bergson was deeply involved in shaming the Roosevelt White House into creating the War Refugee Board, which helped save more than 200,000 lives during the final 18 months of World War II. Bergon’s family presented Yad Vashem with a petition signed by more than 100 public Jewish figures asking that the museum recognize Bergson in some way. Thus far the museum has refused.

All three of these stories demonstrate an intense connection and sensitivity to the Holocaust—and this intensity is baffling. Even in the best case scenario, the stakes in these cases are extraordinarily low. John Demjanjuk may be a bad guy, he may have done terrible things, but is there anything that can be done to him now that would be even remotely humane? The man cannot stand up. He is already a prisoner in his body. What is to be gained by extraditing him to Germany?  The Vatican’s finger pointing is embarrassing, but regardless, what’s the advantage of knowing just how much Pope Pius didn’t do to save more people?  And Peter Bergson was no doubt a remarkable man who did exemplary things, but does that mean Yad Vashem should be pressured into honoring him?

The world has real problems right now—Darfur, the rising cost of food, global warming—and I don’t see any benefit in constantly focusing time, money, and energy on minor issues just because they are tangentially related to the Holocaust. ‘Never again’ means we have to be vigilant about our behavior and advocacy in the present.  It doesn’t mean investing all of our resources in digging up the past.

Berlin mayor Klaus Wowereit (who happens to be gay) and Culture Minister of the Federal Republic Bernd Neumann recently unveiled a memorial to the gay people murdered by the Third Reich near the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe that opened a few years ago just south of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. Via Radley Balko, who has an adaptation of the famous Martin Niemöller lines appropriate for the occasion, this small act of decency by the people and city of Berlin has Michael Medved incensed:

Across the road from Berlin’s monument to Jewish HolocaustBerlin's Holocaust Memorial: Aerial view victims, the new shrine features a pavilion-sized concrete slab with a window through which visitors view a video of two men kissing. This commemoration follows a longstanding, misleading attempt to depict homosexuals as prime targets of Hitler. In fact, even historical material released with the memorial noted only "an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 gay men deported to concentration camps"–and by no means all of them were killed. While homosexuals surely outnumbered the less-than-one-percent of the German population that was Jewish, Jewish victims of Nazi death camps outnumbered estimated gay victims by more than 500 to 1. Persecution of any group deserves condemnation and remembrance, but it's wrong to exaggerate the extent of victimization for politically correct P.R. purposes.

More succinctly: fags have cooties. In addition to its loathsome downplaying of the scale and natureMemorial For Gay Holocaust Victims of Nazi war crimes against the gay populations of Germany and its captive nations, in addition to its perhaps even more loathsome attempt to lay proprietary claim to the Holocaust, this passage is grossly misleading about the monument. The memorial for Jewish victims of the Holocaust (see aerial view above) takes up a large city block in Berlin and is composed of 2711 "stelae." The memorial for gay victims of the Holocaust (see right) is one single slab four meters high. By Medved's grim, cynical arithmetic, the twin Berlin monuments overstate the relative toll of the Holocaust on Jews by a ratio of more than 5 to 1. Medved cannot possibly sincerely believe this memorial "exaggerates" the extent of the victimization of gay people during the Holocaust --- not if he knows what "to exaggerate" means. Notwithstanding his empty lip service to the notion that "persecution of any group deserves condemnation and remembrance," Medved's problem is with any recognition of Nazi atrocities inflicted on gay people as a part of the Holocaust. In other words, he's a sad old bigot for whom the Holocaust isn't a crime but a trophy to be fought over.

Two weeks ago, I spoke with Barack Obama about the Middle East, Zionism, and his favorite Jewish writers. Since my blog is both fair and balanced, I had a lengthy conversation with Senator John McCain earlier this week about many of the same subjects.

The two candidates, who are scheduled to address the AIPAC policy conference in Washington, D.C. early next week, have well-developed thoughts on the Middle East, and their differences are stark. Obama sees the Israeli-Palestinian dispute as one of America’s central challenges in the Middle East; McCain names Islamic extremism as the most formidable challenge. Obama sees Jewish settlements as "not helpful" to peacemaking between Israel and the Palestinians; McCain does not offer a critique of the settlements, instead identifying Hamas’ rocket attacks on the Israeli town of Sderot as the most pressing problem. And both men take very different positions on the issue of Philip Roth.

In our conversation, McCain took a vociferously hard line on Iran (and a similarly hard line on Senator Obama’s understanding of the challenge posed by Iran). He accused Iran of not only seeking the destruction of Israel, but of sponsoring terrorist groups – Hamas and Hezbollah – that are bent on the destruction of the United States. And he said that the defense of Israel is a central tenet of American foreign policy. When I asked him why he is so concerned about Iranian threats against Israel, he said – in a statement that will surely placate Jewish voters who are particularly concerned about existential threats facing Israel – “The United States of America has committed itself to never allowing another Holocaust.”

Here is an edited transcript of my talk with McCain:

Jeffrey Goldberg: Is the Zionist cause just, and has it succeeded?

John McCain: I think so. I’m a student of history and anybody who is familiar with the history of the Jewish people and with the Zionist idea can’t help but admire those who established the Jewish homeland. I think it’s remarkable that Zionism has been in the middle of wars and great trials and it has held fast to the ideals of democracy and social justice and human rights. I think that the State of Israel remains under significant threat from terrorist organizations as well as the continued advocacy of the Iranians to wipe Israel off the map.

JG: Do you think the Palestinian cause is just?

JM: In respect to people like Mahmoud Abbas, who want to have a peaceful settlement with the government of Israel, to settle their differences in a peaceful and amicable fashion. If you are talking about Hamas or Hezbollah, which are dedicated to the extinction of the state of Israel, then no. It depends on who you’re talking about.

JG: Senator Obama told me that the Arab-Israeli dispute is a “constant sore” that infects our foreign policy. Do you think this is true, and do you think that the Arab-Israeli dispute is central to our challenges in the Middle East?
JM: Well, I certainly would not describe it the way Senator Obama did –

JG: He wasn’t referring to Israel as an “open sore,” he was referring to the conflict.

JM: I don’t think the conflict is a sore. I think it’s a national security challenge. I think it’s important to achieve peace in the Middle East on a broad variety of fronts and I think that if the Israeli-Palestinian issue were decided tomorrow, we would still face the enormous threat of radical Islamic extremism.

I think it’s very vital, don’t get me wrong. That’s why I’ve spent so much time there. The first time I visited Israel was thirty years ago, with Scoop Jackson and other senators, when I was in the Navy. I visited Yad Vashem (Israel’s Holocaust memorial) with Joe Lieberman the last time I was in Israel. So my absolute commitment is to peace between Israel and the Palestinians. But the dangers that we face in the Middle East are incredibly severe, in the form of radical Islamic extremists.

JG: Do you think that Israel is better off today than it was eight years ago?

JM: I think Israel, in many respects, is stronger economically, their political process shows progress – when there is corruption, they punish people who are corrupt. The economy is booming, they have a robust democracy, to say the least. Bin Laden has not limited his hatred and desire to destroy the United States to the Israeli-Palestinian issue, though Israel is one of the objects of his jihadist attitude. What you’re trying to do is get me to criticize the Bush Administration.

JG: No, I'm not, what I'm --

JM: Yeah, you are, but I’ll try to answer your question. Because of the rise of Islamic extremism, because of the failure of human rights and democracy in the Middle East, or whether there are a myriad of challenges we face in the Middle East, all of them severe, all of them pose a threat to the existence to the state of Israel, including and especially the Iranians, who have as a national policy the destruction of the state of Israel, something they’ve been dedicated to since before President Bush came to office.

JG: What do you think motivates Iran?

JM: Hatred. I don’t try to divine people’s motives. I look at their actions and what they say. I don’t pretend to be an expert on the state of their emotions. I do know what their nation’s stated purpose is, I do know they continue in the development of nuclear weapons, and I know that they continue to support terrorists who are bent on the destruction of the state of Israel. You’ll have to ask someone who engages in this psycho stuff to talk about their emotions.

JG: Senator Obama has calibrated his views on unconditional negotiations. Do you see any circumstance in which you could negotiate with Iran, or do you believe that it’s leadership is impervious to rational dialogue?

JM: I’m amused by Senator Obama’s dramatic change since he’s gone from a candidate in the primary to a candidate in the general election. I’ve seen him do that on a number of issues that show his naivete and inexperience on national security issues. I believe that the history of the successful conduct of national security policy is that, one, you don’t sit down face-to-face with people who are behave the way they do, who are state sponsors of terrorism.

Senator Obama likes to refer to President Kennedy going to Vienna. Most historians see that as a serious mistake, which encouraged Khrushchev to build the Berlin Wall and to send missiles to Cuba. Another example is Richard Nixon going to China. I’ve forgotten how many visits Henry Kissinger made to China, and how every single word was dictated beforehand. More importantly, he went to China because China was then a counterweight to a greater threat, the Soviet Union. What is a greater threat in the Middle East than Iran today?

Senator Obama is totally lacking in experience, so therefore he makes judgments such as saying he would sit down with someone like Ahmadinejad without comprehending the impact of such a meeting. I know that his naivete and lack of experience is on display when he talks about sitting down opposite Hugo Chavez or Raul Castro or Ahmadinejad.

JG: There’s no rationale for sitting down with Iran?

JM: Yes. I could see a situation hopefully in the future if the Iranians would change the policies that you and I have just talked about, but there would have to be negotiations and discussions and all kinds of things happening before you lend them the prestige of a face-to-face meeting with the President of the United States of America. As you know, our ambassador in Iraq, Ryan Crocker, has met with the Iranian ambassador in Baghdad on a couple of occasions. Those discussions, according to Ambassador Crocker, have been totally unproductive, because Iran is hell-bent on the destruction of Israel, they’re hell-bent on driving us out of Iraq, they’re hell-bent on supporting terrorist organizations, and as serious as anything to American families, they’re sending explosive devices into Iraq that are killing American soldiers.

JG: Tell me how engaged you would be as President in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, and give me a couple of names of plausible Middle East envoys.

JM: I would have a hands-on approach. I would be the chief negotiator. I have been there for thirty years. I know the leaders, I know them extremely well. Ehud Barak and I have gone back thirty years. I knew Olmert when he was mayor of Jerusalem. I’ve met many times with Netanyahu. I’ve met with Mahmoud Abbas.

In terms of envoys, there are a large number of people who could be extremely effective, and I apologize for ducking the question, but it would have to be dictated by the state of relations at the time. For example, we know that there were behind-the-scenes conversations Israel was having with Syria. Now it’s broken into the public arena. So it would depend on the state of things. If they were more advanced in talks, which they are not, with Hamas, then you need someone like a mechanic. If it’s someone who needs to lay out a whole framework, it would have to be someone who commands the respect of both sides, someone who has an impact on world opinion.

JG: What is the difference between an American president negotiating with Ahmadinejad and Ehud Olmert negotiating with the Syrians?

JM: You don’t see him sitting down opposite Bashar, do you? (Bashar al-Assad is president of Syria.) I mean, that’s the point here. It was perfectly fine that Ryan Crocker spoke with the Iranian ambassador in Baghdad. The point is you don’t give legitimacy by lending prestige of a face-to-face meeting, with no preconditions.

JG: But Obama has shifted off that position.

JM: Sure, and the next time he sees where he’s wrong, maybe he’ll shift again. The point is is that he doesn’t understand. Look, in the primary, he was unequivocal in his statements. And now he realizes that it’s not a smart thing to say. I didn’t say he wasn’t a smart politician.

JG: Do you think that settlements keep Israel and the Palestinians from making peace?

JM: There’s a list of issues that separate them, from water, to the right of return, to settlements. Look at the Oslo Accords, which basically laid out a roadmap for addressing these major issues. And settlements is one of them, but certainly one of the issues right now is the shelling of Sderot, which I visited. As you know, they’re shelling from across the border. If the United States was being rocketed across one of our borders, that would probably gain prominence as an issue.

JG: Do you believe that Israel will have to go into Gaza in force to deal with the rockets, and if Israel did, would you support it?

JM: It depends on what you mean by force. They’ve responded with air strikes, and identifying Hamas leaders and, you know, quote, responding. Would they respond with massive force? I don’t know. I know from my conversations with them that they are deeply concerned. They’re a democracy. How would an American government, how would American public opinion respond, if there were constant shelling, and kids had fifteen seconds – fifteen seconds – to get into a bomb shelter. I don’t know what the government of Israel is going to do. It somewhat depends on whether these attacks will discontinue or if other things happen. I did get the distinct impression, nothing specific, but I got the impression that the patience of the Israeli government and the people is growing short.

JG: Let’s go back to Iran. Some critics say that America conflates its problem with Iran with Israel’s problem with Iran. Iran is not threatening the extinction of America, it’s threatening the extinction of Israel. Why should America have a military option for dealing with Iran when the threat is mainly directed against Israel?

JM: The United States of America has committed itself to never allowing another Holocaust. That’s a commitment that the United States has made ever since we discovered the horrendous aspects of the Holocaust.

In addition to that, I would respond by saying that I think these terrorist organizations that they sponsor, Hamas and the others, are also bent, at least long-term, on the destruction of the United States of America. That’s why I agree with General Petraeus that Iraq is a central battleground. Because these Shiite militias are sending in these special groups, as they call them, sending weapons in, to remove United States influence and to drive us out of Iraq and thereby achieve their ultimate goals. We’ve heard the rhetoric -- the Great Satan, etc. It’s a nuance, their being committed to the destruction of the State of Israel, and their long-term intentions toward us.

JG: Do you think their intention is the actual destruction of America?

JM: It’s hard for me to say what their intentions are, but the effect – If they were able to drive us out of Iraq, and al Qaeda established a base there, and the Shiite militias erupted and the Iranian influence was expanded, which to my mind is what would happen, then the consequences for American national security would be profound. I don’t know if their intention is to destroy America and what we stand for, but I think the consequences of them succeeding in the destruction of the state of Israel and their continued support for terrorist organizations – all of these would have profound national security consequences.

JG: A question about democratization in the Middle East. Imagine a continuum, Brent Scowcroft on one end, Paul Wolfowitz on the other. Where do you fall on that continuum, five years after the invasion of Iraq?

JM: I think that we’ve got to always balance the realism of a situation with idealism. I’m committed to that fundamental belief that we’re all created equal and endowed with inalienable rights. But there are times when realism has to enter into the equation as well. If you look at Darfur, we don’t want this to go on, but how do we stop it? And what would the consequences of our initial intrusion be? After the initial success, what are the long-term consequences?

I enjoy hearing this debate. There’s no one I love more in the world than Brent Scowcroft. He’s one of the most selfless people I’ve ever seen, never a trace of personal ambition, which is the rarest thing in Washington. But I lean also toward the historic idealism of America. Which means that every situation that confronts us, we have to try to maintain that balance. Have I always been right? No. But I try to learn from the lessons of history.

JG: You bring up an interesting question about the Holocaust, to which you say never again. But do you have an absolute commitment to stop genocide wherever it occurs?

JM: That has to be the fundamental goal, but it has to be tempered by the idea that you have to actually be able to do it, that you can succeed. If you fail in one of these efforts, that encourages others, and increases feelings of isolationism and protectionism in America. It’s hard to convince Americans to send young Americans into harm’s way, as it should be.

JG: It sounds like you’re talking about Iraq.

JM: Well, we haven’t talked about the four years of mishandling this war, which has been devastating, in particular to the families.

JG: A final question: Senator Obama talked about how his life was influenced by Jewish writers, Philip Roth, Leon Uris. How about you?

JM: There’s Elie Wiesel, and Victor Frankl. I think about Frankl all the time. “Man’s Search for Meaning” is one of the most profound things I’ve ever read in my life. And maybe on a little lighter note, “War and Remembrance” and “Winds of War” are my two absolute favorite books. I can tell you that one of my life’s ambitions is to meet Herman Wouk. “War and Remembrance” for me, it’s the whole thing.

Then there’s Joe Lieberman, who lives a life of his religion, and who does it in the most humble way.

JG: Not a big Philip Roth fan?

JM: No, I’m not. Leon Uris I enjoyed. Victor Frankl, that’s important. I read it before my captivity. It made me feel a lot less sorry for myself, my friend. A fundamental difference between my experience and the Holocaust was that the Vietnamese didn’t want us to die. They viewed us as a very valuable asset at the bargaining table. It was the opposite in the Holocaust, because they wanted to exterminate you. Sometimes when I felt sorry for myself, which was very frequently, I thought, “This is nothing compared to what Victor Frankl experienced.”

[Cross-posted from The Atlantic]

Wowed by the example of Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim, museums around the world have raced to commission brilliant, experimental architects to build structures at least as noteworthy as their collections. Architect Daniel Libeskind has become the star of the Jewish museum world with his stunning designs for the Jewish Museum Berlin, Danish Jewish Museum, and now the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum.

Unique in being a museum without a permanent collection, the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum has, for over twenty years, devoted itself to exhibitions that explore contemporary perspectives on Jewish culture. Libeskind's new building, opening June 8, 2008, will allow the museum to remain flexible in defining Jewish identity by offering a variety of differently shaped and purposed spaces, including ones specially designed for music, film, and hands-on art education, as well as the more typical white-wall galleries.

Daniel Libeskind has become best-known for winning the World Trade Center design competition (and the resultant brouhaha). Yet his most important work may well be found elsewhere, ranging from the severe angles and sharp edges of the Royal Ontario Museum to the graceful, curving, almost bowed forms of his Reflections project in Singapore to the San Francisco museum with its almost aggressive blue beacon jutting out from the shell of an old water pumping station.

Zeek talked with Libeskind about creating a specifically Jewish space for the San Francisco museum in the conversation that follows.

ZEEK: I've had an opportunity to tour the Jewish Museum of San Francisco and I was very impressed-the spaces are complex visually and yet open and inviting. I understand they are deeply symbolic, with a physical "chet" and "yud"-the word Chai-- defining the space. Can you talk about the design for our readers?

Libeskind: I conceived the project as a new Jewish institution that is looking forward and celebrates life. And what better emblem and symbol of Jewish culture and identity than life itself? That is what Judaism is all about. So I created a museum which is almost an illuminated manuscript in three dimensions, which in its margins interacts with others' history, the history of the power station [which was already on the site and is incorporated into the design], the history of Yerba Buena Gardens [the site], the history of the Bay Area. The building in itself is a conversation with different levels of history.

ZEEK: I noticed that this museum differs from the Jewish Museum in Berlin or the Danish Jewish museum, both of which you also designed, in that those museums look backwards while this one looks forward. In fact, it

Jewish Museum Berlin (Juedisches Museum Berlin)

only looks forward, since it doesn't have any permanent exhibits. I was interested in your understanding of a Jewish identity that is not connected to a Jewish past, and what the challenge was for you?

Libeskind: This project was very different from my Jewish projects in Europe, because those always have the memory of the destruction of European Jews--that is part of the dark history of Europe. That is certainly not the case in San Francisco and America. So this building is a celebration of America, American Jews, American openness, and the vitality of the Jewish community in America. In that sense, you are right, it is a museum that really looks forward. But I would say it is still based on emblems and symbols that are rooted deeply in the Jewish tradition. The inextinguishable light of the building itself, and the meaning of those Hebrew letters, is not just symbolic or metaphorical--you cannot disassociate the symbols from the meanings they contain, which is quintessentially Jewish as well.

ZEEK: As you are talking, it seems that one of the challenges was the challenge of working in an interfaith environment without assimilating.

Libeskind: Absolutely. The building had to grow out of a turn of the nineteenth century building, a power station, and also the bottom of a twentieth century hotel [the Jewish museum shares a basement and carves a first floor room space from the Four Seasons hotel next door]. Then the building needs to find an identity that is not compromised, not blending in, but cutting across these existing structures and establishing an identity that is not ambiguous.

ZEEK: A lot of people have suggested that Jewish identity is undergoing a fundamental transformation post-Holocaust and post-State of Israel; some people say that Judaism itself is post-diasporic and we need to have a new idea of what it means to be a Jew. I was wondering if you had been engaged in these ideas and how you see Jews and Judaism in the 21^st century?

Libeskind: That's a great question. I can only answer for myself. For many complex reasons the Jewish world has become very polarized. We have on one hand a growth of religion, a growth of the religious movements, and on the other hand we have the increasing assimilation of Jews. For me, the 21^st century is about bringing back to the center a Jewish identity, an identity that is free, that is open, that is complex.

ZEEK: So what you are doing with this museum is creating spaces that have a kind of ambiguity to them-they can become anything. I am thinking particularly of the auditorium space. There is flexibility built in.

Libeskind: Absolutely, flexibility and fluidity. At the same time, each of the spaces is not just iconic superficially, by its shape, but because they are rooted in other dramas of Jewish history--the drama of contemporary Israel, the drama of what the synagogue means, the drama of Talmud and its commentaries. It's a break in space.

It's certainly true that for so long, it was a cliche that Jews were not a visual people. That Jews were forbidden to engage in spacial affect. But that's certainly not true. If you go to the biblical text, we know there are the cherubim in the Temple, we know there was a rich visual world. It was not the world of pagan idolatry, but it communicated to people.

ZEEK: Yes, there's a huge section of Torah devoted to describing spaces.

Libeskind: And very rich spaces. Jews are so implicated in architecture. Such great chapters are devoted to the tabernacle and the Temple and the ark and the eruv, because space and what it means is so importantly embedded in Jewish memory. In a sense this is a presentation in contemporary terms of a very historical topic.

ZEEK: I had a question about the beautiful blue tiles you used on the new parts of the facade. They made me think of water. When I think of a Jewish element, I usually think of fire.

Libeskind: Fire, but you also have to think of revelation, which is blue. It's not a coincidence that tallit are white and blue, that the State of Israel's flag is white and blue. The blue is not just a naturalistic idea of the blue that comes from the tallit and from water. It comes from the idea of eternity, of coming out of blue into reality.

ZEEK: As you talk, you talk about the fluidity and transitory nature of the space, and you also talk about eternity and the things that remain unchanging, and that tension seems very essential to an ancient religion like Judaism.

The Danish Jewish Museum (Dansk Jodisk Museum)

Libeskind: That's a good way of putting it. I think the reason Judaism is open is because it is based on something eternal. Because freedom is built so deeply into the Jewish tradition, everything is new, everything is possible.

ZEEK: As a writer, that's why I love the way our text is written over so many times, it's very freeing. You have layers of text, which means you can keep writing on them.

Libeskind: Exactly. People coming to this museum will inscribe themselves into the text of the museum. By moving through the spaces of L'Chaim, each person will inscribe themselves in a unique way, through a text that is endless. That is part of the notion of the building. It is not just a plan, but a permanent encounter which depends on the participants to make it live.

ZEEK: Thank you.

 

 

Markovics plays Salomon "Sally" Sorowitsch, a character based on the real-life Russian Jew and world-class counterfeiter Salomon Smolianoff who had the misfortune of being captured by the Nazis during World War II. Like the real-life Smolianoff, Sorowitsch is eventually given special treatment in the Sachenhausen camp to mass-counterfeit the pound sterling and the dollar.

Throughout this Oscar-award winning film, Markovics never lets that scowl leave his face, even when he cracks a half-smile. Sally's abject refusal to let his guard down, whether at a Monte Carlo poker table or facing the humiliation of having an SS agent urinate on him, forms the core of The Counterfeiters, one of the most daring, innovative Holocaust films ever made. As Spielberg proved, it's easy to hate monstrous Nazi guards and sympathize with abused prisoners. It's much harder to depict a Jew in a camp who's just as Machiavellian as the guards, and it's even harder to depict the S.S. as a pathetic, almost Keystone Kops-esque set of mental weaklings.

It's true that there is much in this movie that will initially dismay the Jewish viewer. The unusually multi-dimensional approach to the Nazis may alienate some who reject any shred of humanity in Nazism altogether. The movie's implicit thesis that, no matter who you are, in a life-or-death situation like World War II your principle motivation is going to be your own survival, will dismay those of us who prefer death-defying moral heroics. All I can say to these points is: watch the film.

There's a payoff for watching The Counterfeiters to the end. It turns out that Sally, who seems willing to do anything to survive, actually has a political conscience. He not only picks the right moment to fight back, but reveals that he had been orchestrating the right moment almost from the onset. This is a different, perhaps more contemporary, kind of heroism.

The cat-and-mouse metaphor for the Holocaust is nothing new, but The Counterfeiters may be the first film to effectively and fairly depict a Jew as the cat. It well deserves the Oscar.

On Holocaust Remembrance Day we tend to focus on the six million Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis. We read from Night, sing that song by Hannah Szenes, and light six Memorial candles for the nearly two thirds of Europe’s Jewish population who were systematically wiped out by the Nazis. It’s important to remember that Jews bore the brunt of the Nazis wrath, but also that they were far from the only group singled out.
Hans-Jürgen Massaquoi: the retired managing editor of Ebony magazine was born in Germany and narrowly escaped being sent to a concentration camp with his mother
Homosexuals, Communists, Socialists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Romani Gypsies, blacks, and all kinds of political dissidents were also sent to concentration camps and murdered in large numbers. In total, an estimated 5 million non-Jews were killed by the Nazis. Civilian deaths in Europe add many more millions to that number.

A lot of Jewish discourse about the Holocaust rightly focuses on the great Jewish suffering and loss. The other groups who were persecuted, put in camps and executed are generally glossed over, an after-thought to our own grief. It’s natural that we should focus on the community that is closest to us, and that we would fixate on our own families and the stories of those we are familiar with. But the five million others who died deserve more than lip service, more than a footnote.

Related: Third Generation Descendants of Holocaust Survivors and the Future of Remembering

Memory: across the generations"Why are Holocaust survivors obsessed with future generations remembering? Why do they command us all to Zachor, to remember? What is it they want us to remember?" That is the challenge every post-Holocaust generation will continue to face, just as all Jews at the Passover Seder are asked to think of themselves as slaves freed from Ancient Egypt. The significance of re-thinking the past and what it means in the present is best explained by Leon Wieseltier, social critic, literary editor of the New Republic and a 2G—second generation descendant of a survivor—who writes, “A tradition that is transmitted more or less as it is received will not live long.”

Survivors wonder if the 3Gs—third generation descendants—will continue to tell of the destruction of European Jewry, or if the story will die with them. It took two generations—40 years—for the silence to be broken, for psychological denial to erode, and for survivors to have an audience that did not silence them the moment they attempted to share the stories of their horrific experiences. Parenthetically, it took 40 years after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain before the liturgical poems to commemorate the loss of that era were written. And after slavery in Egypt, according to tradition, God waited 40 years before deciding that the Israelites were ready to the enter the Promised Land.

Sixty-three years after the liberation, is there an identifiable group of Third Generation descendants of Holocaust survivors? Second Generation became a visible group in America in the mid-1970s, when a large cadre of survivors’ sons and daughters in their 20s searched for their own identities—along with others in the “roots” generation.

The Second Generation was transformed from invisible to visible with the publication of Helen Epstein’s watershed New York Times Magazine article, “Heirs of the Holocaust,” on June 19, 1977. It was read by more than 2,000,000 people nationwide. The article described awareness groups for children of Holocaust survivors that Bella Savran and I led in Boston, inspiring others to begin similar groups elsewhere. Grassroots activities were reinforced by the publication of Epstein’s book Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors, followed several months later by the First Conference on Children of Holocaust Survivors in November of that year.

The conference brought approximately 600 participants to New York City from all over the United States. In June 1981, many of these same young adults accompanied their survivor parents to the World Gathering of Holocaust Survivors in Jerusalem and formed the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. The political, educational, and commemorative activities of this international organization, along with local groups, gave the Second Generation a voice of moral authority.

Claude Lanzmann: renowned for his unprecedented "cinematic history of the Holocaust," the 9 ½ hour documentary film SHOAH The Third Generation coalesced as a group in Israel—not in the United States. During the Demjanuk war crimes trial in 1985, Israeli teenagers flocked to the court house, lining up at dawn to try to get seats inside. At the same time, Claude Lanzmann’s marathon movie, Shoah, was screened. Many youngsters saw survivors being interviewed on-screen about their lives in concentration camps, in ghettos and in hiding. In hearing of their escapes and of masquerading as non-Jews, the Third Generation was learning its grandparents’ history, imbibing the language they would need in order to communicate with them.

Many of these high-school students found their own parents to be virtually useless when it came to answering questions about family history. And yet, without hesitation, they approached their grandparents and simply asked them for their stories. This phenomenal intergenerational dialogue became a national sensation recorded in documentary films and television programs.

Nava Semel: author of The Rat Laughs Nava Semel’s novel, The Rat Laughs, begins with a granddaughter wanting to know what happened to her grandmother, the Holocaust survivor, and what would happen to her memories in 100 years. The Rat Laughs was adapted as an opera and regularly performed at the Cameri Theater in Tel-Aviv.

Psychologist Dan Bar-On, and his students (like Julia Chaitin at Beer-Sheva University) researched this phenomenon in Fear and Hope and Children in the Shadow of the Holocaust (Julia Chaitin and Zahava Solomon, in Hebrew). They found that survivors found it much easier to communicate with their grandchildren than with their own children. The 3Gs normalized the process of dialogue. Bar-On and his team developed a paradigm for working through the Holocaust through knowledge, understanding, emotions, attitude, and behavior. They discovered that for 3Gs, the Holocaust either has no relevance—“under generalization”—or it has so much relevance, everything is seen through its prism—“over generalization.” A normal reaction to a Shoah family background is “partial relevance”: A moderate and more balanced perspective.

When Julia Chaitin interviewed survivors—2Gs and 3Gs in 20 Israeli families—she discovered a fourth reaction, one of “paradoxical relevance.” She posits that “under generalization” does not work in Israel because the Shoah keeps popping up, and some 3Gs cannot understand it at all. Others react with emotion but have no detailed knowledge of their grandparents’ survival. On the other hand, they may have an abundance of information and no emotion. These individuals know where their grandparents came from, what they suffered, but personally feel distant from the events. Then there are those who are haunted by their grandparents’ Shoah past, but do not know the significance of their family history.

Compared to the 2Gs, the 3Gs have a more balanced view. They did not grow up with the concept of “Jews who went like sheep to the slaughter.” The 2Gs heard this many times from the non-survivors around them. Many had parents who were ostracized and shunned as victims. The 3Gs also lack deep-seated fears of antisemitism, fears that are generally more pervasive in the lives of Holocaust survivors and 2Gs.

March of the Living: offers a collective experience and voice The 3Gs in America only recently became visible group, but with less intensity than the 2Gs. Demographically they range in age from newborns to 40-year-olds. 3Gs in their 20s and 30s are grappling with identity formation, with establishing intimate relations, and with having children. The 3Gs have no collective voice that distinguishes them from others in their generation, with the exception of those who participate in the March of the Living pilgrimages to Poland, where they light memorial candles, share their family narrative, or say Kaddish for those who were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators.

In the United States, intergenerational communication is similar to what is found in Israel—specifically that it was easier for survivors to share their stories with their grandchildren. Psychologist Bonnie Bienstock also found that survivors have a warmer relationship with their grandchildren than do American Jewish grandparents.

The flood of psychological research on the impact of the Holocaust on 3Gs follows a parallel pattern, similar to research on the 2Gs. Articles in psychological journals on the subject started with a case study of an emotionally-disabled grandchild of survivors in treatment, and concluded with generalization to the group as a whole.

A note of caution is necessary to readers of professional and popular publications: The reader must be aware of the sample being presented. In most cases it is challenging to get a representative sample of this population in order to generalize findings. Also, most studies are based on very limited or skewed samples (e.g. hospitalized grandchildren of survivors or those in psychological treatment).

There is also a phrase that repeatedly crops up when 2Gs and 3Gs are discussed: “intergenerational transmission of trauma.” It is a phrase with negative connotations, and an a priori assumption that all effects are emotionally debilitating. The phrase has been misused since 9-11. According to Freud, trauma is an overwhelming experience that emotionally shatters the person who is going through it so that s/he cannot cope. Trauma cannot be transmitted to others. 3Gs are not experiencing Nazi racism or genocide. What is transmitted to 3Gs are values, worldview, family interaction and love—not trauma. It is time for this hackneyed phrase to be retired. 3Gs are not suffering from “silent scars.”

Being a 3G is not a personality syndrome. Grandchildren of survivors do not exhibit more depression, more anxiety, more psychosis, borderline-narcissistic symptoms, or any other diagnosis than do comparable groups. A Montreal survey by John Sigal and Morton Weinfeld found that 3Gs function better than similar groups whose grandparents came to Montreal before World War II. 3Gs tend to be more affectionate, happy, friendly, self-confident, peaceful, and easy going.

From the psychological research the only significant finding is that grandchildren of survivors as a group are higher achievers than their peers. In 2002 Ellisa Ganz found that 3Gs, like 2Gs, are twice as likely to choose an occupation in the helping professions. Ganz also found, however, that those 3Gs who are in therapy are in treatment for longer periods than comparative groups.

Flora Hogman conducted a case study of 2Gs and 3Gs, and noticed that in her sample of the grandchildren, there is sense of pride in—and awe of—the survivors. This awareness of the suffering that grandparents endured is part of the fabric of their lives, but it is channeled into empathy, political activism, greater consciousness of others’ suffering, and a reluctance to intermarry.

The above findings are further elaborated in Mark Yoslow’s recent doctoral dissertation The Pride and Price of Remembrance: An Empirical View of Transgenerational Post-Holocaust Trauma and Associated Transpersonal Elements in the Third Generation. He acknowledges “the Third Generation takes great pride in being the scion for the family that survived the Holocaust.” Feelings of anger and PTSD symptoms decrease if one is not driven by apocalypse and by an archetype of Nazi Germany.

He goes on to explain a presence of a “culture complex,” which shows that when individuals can experience “dispositional forgiveness”—the ability to forgive trauma within oneself rather than forgive the Germans—they are able to escape post-Holocaust trauma. Yoslow observed that the 3Gs have a deep affection for humanity, which is a transformation of the post-Holocaust trauma. This process is the ability to transform the emotional effects of the Holocaust by letting go, and thus increases the quest for meaning in ones life and concern for social issues.

I interviewed grandchildren of survivors for whom the Holocaust is a central part of their identities and found that they had a close intimate relationship with one or more grandparents. This relationship increases the propensity to embrace a commitment to remember the destruction of European Jewry. A second factor that enhances the propensity towards Holocaust remembrance is a strong Jewish education that combined the Shoah with other relevant historical understanding of Jewish peoplehood.

Today, 3Gs whose professional lives have been shaped by their grandparent’s ordeals are found in the creative arts, in helping professions, human rights work, and in Jewish studies and communal work. The 3Gs are no different from those 2Gs who gravitated towards the creative arts in order to remember the barbarity committed against the Jews living in German-occupied countries and the Jewish life that was destroyed.

Dan Sieradski: orthodox anarchist 3Gs like Dan Sieradski, now in his late 20s, have created Jewish communities both online and off, in Israel and the U.S., that are life-confirming and committed to exploring Jewish tradition. Aaron Biterman created a Facebook for 3Gs that now numbers more than 500 participants. They raise consciousness about present-day racism, human-rights violations, and genocides. Everyday one hears of new projects—a musical to commemorate the courageous deeds of Raoul Wallenberg and a film on the American eugenics movement and how it influenced Hitler’s Final Solution.

Much attention was paid to Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2002 novel, Everything is Illuminated, in which a 3G goes out to find the woman who may or may not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. He tells a tragic story with wit, truth, and humanity. Poet Sabrina Mark’s imagination published in her book Babies is eerie. “…..It is lonely in a place that can burn so fast.”

Miri Ben Ari: hip-hop violinist This is a trans-national phenomenon. In Israel, for example, Miri Ben Ari is a Hip-Hop violinist who won the Grammy and the Israeli Martin Luther King Jr. Award for her song and video “Symphony of Brotherhood,” a unique attempt to reach African-American youth through culture.

Some 3Gs are gravitating towards interacting with others from similar backgrounds. Daniel Brooks attended a 2G meeting and felt that he did not belong, and so he founded the “3GNY” group. Today, hundreds of young adults are meeting on a monthly basis to share a common family history, to socialize, and to educate themselves about common political concerns, such as Israel, Rwanda, and Darfur.

Daniel Gillman, a sophomore at Brandeis University, is always on the lookout for Holocaust-related programs. In the spring of 2008, Gillman drove all night to meet diplomatic rescuers at Ellis Island’s Visas for Life opening program for the exhibit. He is Charlotte Gillman’s grandson, and she is one of three hundred children saved by Père Benedictine monks in Bruges, Belgium. When he was 12, Charlotte took him to Belgium, and he has since eagerly listened to her stories and to his aunt, Flora Singer, who wrote I Was But a Child. This summer he will be an intern at the Office of Special Investigations at the Justice Department and will assist with Nazi War Crimes cases.

There has been a paradigm shift between 2Gs and 3Gs. As the world has validated the suffering and resilience of the Holocaust survivors, the central dynamic has shifted from shame to pride. With 3Gs like Jody Rosensaft, Jessica Meed, Elana Berkowitz, Daniel Brooks, Daniel Gillman, Danielle Tamir, Neil Katz, Dan Sieradski, and Leora Klein, the Holocaust survivors can rest assured that the Third Generation will not forget their great grandparents—or their experiences. The Holocaust will never be forgotten.

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, and if you’re like most of us, you’ve already seen Schindler’s List, Escape From Sobibor, and Life is Beautiful. You read Number the Stars and Anne Frank’s diary in middle school, and you know the basics from the Nuremberg laws and the Warsaw ghetto to Bergen-Belsen and Terezin. Here are some books and movies with distinctively different ways of looking at the events of World War II, and the way they still affect us today.

	The Reader by Bernhard Schlink: A German teenager has an affair with an older woman and later realizes she was involved in some of the worst Nazi cruelty. Beautifully and simply written (translated into English by Carol Brown Janeway) it stays away from the detailed descriptions of Jewish suffering, and instead wonders about the complicity of average Germans, and how to make amends.
	The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story by Diane Ackerman: A fictionalized account of the true story of Jan and Antonina Zabinisky, who hid more than 300 Jews and Polish resisters in the Warsaw Zoo that they ran. I’m only half way through, but the writing is fantastic, and the subtext and commentary about how people, animals, and the way we treat each other is subtle and fascinating.
	The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman: Spiegelman produced what the Wall Street Journal called “the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust.” He tells the story of his rocky relationship with his father, Vladek Spiegelman, and intersperses the story of his father’s survival in WW II Europe. Winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize.
	The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn: Part Memoir part history, the book is the story of Mendelsohn’s journey to find out as much as he could about the six members of his family who died in the Holocaust. Instead of focusing on big numbers and statistics he uses a microscope to look closely at just a few people, and the results are tender and moving. Listen to a Nextbook podcast interview with David Mendelsohn here.
	Somewhere in Germany by Stefanie Zweig: Zweig’s family escaped the Nazis by moving to Kenya, but they return to Germany once the war is over, and the novel, translated by Marlies Comjean, looks at postwar Germany, the anti-Semitism that remains, the difficulties of returning home, and the pain of exile. Otto Frank has a memorable cameo appearance. A gorgeous sequel to Nowhere in Africa (see below).
	The Devil’s Arithmetic by Jane Yolen: 12-Year-old Hannah travels back in time from a Passover Seder in 1988 to Poland in World War II. As Chaya she is sent to a concentration camp where she learns about growing up and survival in a harrowing and poignant young adult novel. They made a movie with Kirsten Dunst, but the book is much better, and accessible to middle schoolers and adults alike.
	Bent Directed by Sean Mathias: Max, a gay man in Germany at the start of WW II is sent to Dachau, where he pretends to be Jewish, instead of gay, and then falls in love with an openly gay prisoner. An effective look at the way the Holocaust effected other minorities.
	The Counterfeiters Directed by Stefan Ruzowitzsky: The story of a German man, Sally Sorowitsch, in a concentration camp where he’s forced to help the Nazis produce fake foreign currency in order to weaken the Allies’ economy. When a friend and fellow counterfeiter refuses to help the Nazis Sorowitsch is faced with a dilemma that could mean life or death. Winner of this year’s Oscar for best foreign film.
	Nowhere in Africa Directed by Caroline Link: Based on the book by Stefanie Zweig, the movie tells the story of Zweig’s family’s departure from Germany on the eve of the Holocaust, and their strange and difficult lives in Kenya, where they enjoy relative safety from the Nazis, but must wonder constantly about the rest of their families. Winner of the Oscar for best foreign film in 2003.
	Forgiving Dr. Mengele Directed by Bob Hercules and Cheri Pugh: A documentary about Eva Mozes Kor, who, along with her twin sister Miriam, was used as a guinea pig by Dr. Josef Mengele in Auschwitz. In the 80s, Kor persuaded former Nazi doctor, Hans Mnuch, to return to Auschwitz with her to declare that the Holocaust happened. During a press conference at that event Kor said she forgave Munch, and when she was asked if she could forgive Dr. Megele, she said said yes. The movie looks at the ways we forgive, the meaning of forgiveness, and how we look back on a painful history.
	The Rape of Europa Directed by Richard Berge, Bonni Cohen and Nicole Newnham: A documentary narrated by Joan Allen, this film looks at the devastating effects of Nazi art theft during World War II, and the heroic efforts of American military personnel, and American art historians who try to recover and return as much of the lost art as they can.
	Walk on Water Directed by Eytan Fox: An Israeli film about a contemporary Israeli secret service agent tasked with following around the grandchildren of a Nazi war criminals. A beautiful and provocative movie, it looks at everything from what it means to be an Israeli man, to sexuality, to forgiveness.

Towards the end of Joseph Cedar's Beaufort, the first Israeli film nominated for an Academy Award since 1984, an activist opposed to the war in Lebanon excoriates himself on a television talk show for the death of his son, Ziv, a bomb specialist in the Israel Defense Forces.

By having this grieving parent blame himself rather than generals or politicians for what happened to his child, Joseph Cedar makes a distinct ideological gesture, underlining how Israel as a whole is responsible for the continuation of the now sixty-year-old violent status quo. And by placing the responsibility for communicating such a message on the shoulders of a peace advocate, Cedar makes it clear why he believes we ought to take seriously what liberal Israelis like Ziv's father have to say.

In his earlier feature-length films, Time of Favor (2001), and Campfire (2004), as in Beaufort, the New York-born director created studies of Israel's internal struggles so detailed and accurate that they could almost function as academic monographs. Always guided by an identifiable set of political positions, Cedar's commitments consistently structure his narratives, providing a sense of optimism and resolution at every hopeless juncture. In each instance, Joseph Cedar's outlook and artistry are mutually reinforcing, making his stories speak to us that much more strongly. We walk away from his films understanding Israel better because we saw it through his eyes.

I spoke to Cedar at the end of March about Beaufort, and his next project, on which he's already hard at work.

- Joel Schalit, Zeek Media Editor

ZEEK: The last time you and I spoke, you had just decided to make a film about Veit Harlan, the director of the legendary anti-Semitic drama, Jud Suss (1940). In Harlan's film, Jewish businessman Suss Oppenheimer destroys a dukedom and rapes a German girl. What exactly is your film about? I take it that it's a lot bigger than just a biopic.

CEDAR: So far, most of the scenes are about an artistic drive that overrides everything: Harlan's moral sensibilities, his personal loyalties, and his common sense. What he's really out for is to tell a good story. Harlan thinks he understands Suss, he thinks he identifies with him, and he loves the kind of villain he's making. Harlan thinks he understands who this Suss is, but forgets the whole context. That's how he convinces his actors, that's how he convinces his entire crew - and this is a top notch crew - to go along with such a project.

ZEEK: They'd all worked with directors like Fritz Lang, right?

CEDAR: The production designer was Otto Hunte, who did Metropolis. The composer was a man named Zeller. But everyone (initially) said no. Nobody wanted to work on this film.

ZEEK: How did Harlan win them ov