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.

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, who later worked with Alfred Hitchcock. But everyone (initially) said no. Nobody wanted to work on this film.

ZEEK: How did Harlan win them over?

CEDAR: Harlan was able to convince them because he was giving them his passion. It's not until just prior to the film's release that he finally realizes that he's being manipulated himself. When he realizes that he's done something that he regrets, he can't live with it. He doesn't know what to do. Then, after the war, when he's acquitted (on charges of anti-Semitism), he's just stuck. One of the things Harlan realizes about Suss is that he has nothing to lose. [When Suss is executed] he can finally be who he is. He doesn't have to lie to anyone. He can say what he wants, and not care about the consequences. And Harlan says, ‘I never had that."

ZEEK: That's an extremely complex portrait of the director.

CEDAR: It's still changing, but I found out that that's what most of the film is about. When it's done, we'll see what the film is really about. (Laughter)

Continue reading...

Max Mosley: discretion, or dehumanization? Henri is a Jew. He operates a semi-private BDSM bar in Berlin. The first night we met, he wept into my camera. We drank shots of Campari and I promised to keep rolling as he kept talking. The bar was loud, had about a half dozen other kinky people in it flirting and drinking, and some details of our conversation were lost in the classic rock soundtrack. Henri told me, "My parents took part in a mapping project. This was right before the war. They knew what it was for. How else were they going to get the money to get me out of Germany? When I came back, in the '60s, no one in the community would speak to me. The perverts were the only people who took me in."

He told me that he doesn't believe there's such a thing as a really dominant woman.

"They're only acting what men tell them to, even bossing the men around."

Would apparent Nazi roleplay fetishist and (soon to be former) Formula One mogul Max Mosley agree? Would he also tease me, the (almost former) professional fetish mistress, the fair-skinned, blue-eyed, passably WASPy blonde who can carry off a whip? Would he want to hire me, too? I very rarely whipped anyone, and of all my clients, only one ever asked me to play the "cold German type"—nervous and novice submissive client code for "Nazi She Wolf."

That client's name was David, and he used to make appointments with me from a number identified on my phone as the Jewish Community Center. I kept the rosary he brought me to wear when we played. He was never one to step back from his fantasy, to dissect it. The intellectual part of me would have wanted to ask him about the death wish implicit in his desire for me to play the role of a calculating gentile woman seeking to overthrow the JCC. To ask that wasn't my job. I would never demand he let me hold his hand as he reckoned with genocide just to make myself feel less complicit—and as anti-Semitic roleplay goes, the JCC seemed the quaintest target he could choose.

David is a submissive, a bottom.  Henri is a top, which means he gets off on being in erotic control.  But Mosely appears to be a switch. Outside of my professional persona, I'm a switch, too. Switches confuse our myths about SM. When someone claims as a part of their sexual identity that they like to be mostly in charge, or mostly overtaken, we understand that. It already fits a neat power law around intercourse, where one person, even in the vanilla sense, is doing the other.

To watch Mosely go from victim to perpetrator in the course of this SM scene (and we can, thanks to the leaked lo-fi video still online) makes no easy sense, especially to a viewer unfamiliar with the cues of sensual power play. There's something in his ability to take both roles that only throws the theatre of historic cruelty in our face.

I wish I could have introduced Henri to one of my lovers, the only man who exclusively topped me. His father was black, and committed suicide after never being able to really make sense of his life after the Vietnam War. His mother's parents are Polish Jews, Holocaust survivors who came to America to start over. My lover told me he knew a little German because, on a long car trip as a kid, his grandfather had taught him a work song. It turned my lover on to sing this. When he gave me an SS pin to wear to a sex party with him, I didn't know whether to thank him for confiding in me about the fantasy, didn't know if I could do right by it without breaking down utterly. We parted ways before I ever found the words for where the sex we had—rough, passionate, brutal, raw, connected to something bigger than we could bear as just two people—took us. Maybe that's why he wanted to see me gangbanged in a uniform. It wasn't only to see me used and on display. The act and what it signified just needed that many witnesses.

If Max Mosely had that kind of trusted access to people who understood and accepted his fantasies, we'd have no reason—other than those demonstrated by history—to call him monstrous. Whatever demons he had to face, be they his family's fascist past or the annoyance of an afternoon hard-on, he made the choice to hire players and a beige-carpeted "torture chamber" in which to enact his sex games. More power to the man for trying to carry out this encounter with an effort towards minimizing real harm to anyone. Mosley thought he was paying for discretion, not dehumanization. Of course, how well or not he treated the sex workers who entertained him isn't the story of dehumanization anyone is interested in telling—maybe because it's clear he was very fair with them. If there's one thing we can fault him for, it's imagining that his "transgressions" weren't a story worth telling anyone but the women he paid to enact them with.

Related: Howard Jacobson on the British Race Car Nazi Sex Scandal

The Herald Tribune reports that a home furnishings company in India will destroy all promotional materials for its "Nazi Collection" linens, after India's Jewish community complained.  The Nazi Collection packaging also featured swastikas. 

"Furnishing dealer Jagdish Todi met Jewish community leaders to assure them that the family-owned company did not intend to hurt the sentiments of Jews, said Jonathan Solomon, chairman of the Indian Jewish Federation." 

The swastika, as is fairly well-known, is an ancient Hindu good luck symbol.

The company claimed Nazi stood for "New Arrival Zone For India." Which sounds like a perfectly reasonable name for a linen collection?!?

For decades, popular wisdom insists that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only the German soldiers had refused to follow orders.  Of course, that naively takes for granted that your ordinary German had some moral objections to persecuting, dragging to ghettos and murdering Jews.

Two summers ago, in Israel, many soldiers were terribly upset by their orders to evict, exile innocent law-abiding Jews from their homes in Gush Katif and Northern Shomron.

Thirty-eight years earlier the world saw Israeli soldiers cry uncontrollably after liberating the kotel, the Western Wall.  What a difference when we saw soldiers crying, in 2005, as they didn't have the guts to go with their morals and feelings.  We saw soldiers breaking down, because they knew that they were obeying evil laws made by immoral politicians.  The Nazi soldiers didn't cry when they murdered Jews.

Many of the soldiers of Disengagement, two years ago suffered the worst of Post Traumatic Stress, and that's why yesterday IDF soldiers from an elite fighting unit refused to evict innocent, patriotic Jews from homes in Hebron.

Today's soldiers are stronger than their elder brothers. Yasher kocham!

It's the Little Things: What color are your suspenders?This essay in Moment Magazine is not an especially impressive piece of writing.  The author himself states that he's past his days as an intrepid reporter, that he has set limits for himself on risk-taking, and so his foray into the world of the Nazi web-world, accompanied by a plate of cholocalate chip cookies,  is less than compelling.

The most chilling thing about the article is this bit of awfullness, a quote from a Nazi-site:

... according to the Talmud, Jews believe that “only Jews are humans... a Gentile girl who is three years old can be violated... A Jew is permitted to rape cheat and perjure himself—so long as he is not found out... Jews may not give fair evidence in a court of law against another Jew.”

But the article, however bland, did get me thinking...

About my high school experience.  About some of the people I knew when I was a bitchy little teenager, hanging around the fringes of the Baltimore hardcore scene.  Because there were white-power kids in the mix.  Tossed in among the skaters and the ex-metalheads and the straight-edge vegan skins. 

But that isn't the weird part. The weird part is that they didn't scare me. Much.  I partied with them.  My Jewish friend "Tova" dated one such starter-Nazi, and explained to me that he "didn't mean it".  She said it was just a "style."  The color of the laces in his ox-blood boots.  His suspenders. The patches on his bomber.

He went to a prep school, a good one.  Graduated with honors and went on to a fine college.  The last time I saw him he looked like every other kid you went to college with.  I have no idea what happened to him after that, or to the other punks he ran with.  I'll never know how much of a Nazi he really was in those years, or wasn't.  I'll never know whether he loved "Tova". 

Though it's pretty fucked up that she loved him.

But even that isn't what concerns me. 

My thought today... is about how an article like this one makes the Nazis in our world all seem to be rednecks living in the rural south somewhere. Caricatures. Ignorant asshats with thick accents and pickups, people you'd never know in your world. People you'd never work with. People who didn't go to your college. People who don't date your friends.

And I thought I'd ask you guys what your experiences have been?  Because I have a hard time accepting that I'm the only Jewish girl who ever drank Boon's Farm with a punk rock boy, and then realized what his white laces meant. 

So I want to know what you've bumped into... and how you reacted. 

Whether you think there's really, as "Tova" suggested, a "style" to it, that sucks in youngsters before they really have racist ideas and politics.   When they're still young and dumb enought to date a Jewish girl, spout Nazi bullshit, and think that makes a kind of sense...

We have to be able to do better than the author of the above article.  At understanding this messed-up culture.

Anti-Semitic Rhetoric On School WallsLooks like my apt. wasn't the only place that came under attack over the weekend. A Jewish kindergarten in Berlin was defaced this weekend and the Nazi sympathizers also threw a smoke bomb into the school.

A tragedy was avoided on Sunday after a smoke bomb, thrown through a window of a Jewish kindergarten in Berlin, failed to ignite.

However, the school, located in a northwest neighbourhood of the German capital, was not spared by the spray painting of swastikas, other Nazi symbols and anti-Semitic phrases, such as “Auschwitz,” “Juden Raus” (Jews, get out) and “Sieg Heil”, on its outer walls, as well as on toys that had been lying around in the school’s playground.

According to the EJP,the attack is exactly three months to the day after a similar incident occured in Croatia where a man who called himself "Adolf Hitler" confessed to taking a crowbar to a Chabad School and smashing all the windows.

• Congress gets involved in stopping the spread of Nazi paraphernalia across America's Heartland. [The Consumerist]
• The French say oui, bien sur to the idea that Jewish Liberals are contributing to the rise of antisemitism in America.[The Jewish News Weekly Northern California]
• "Londonistan" author Melanie Phillips doesn't fancy Independent Jewish Voices, official or otherwise. [The Nether World Blog]
• Lawsuits can't buy happiness, but a nice settlement can provide for a phat down payment on a Bentley. [Orlando Sentinel]
• Only liberal pseudo Jews shun cow.[Jewschool]
• Forget the food pyramid. There aren't enough brachas. [The Jew And The Carrot]

Hitler's not funnyGermans aren't getting a big kick out of a new comedy that portrays Hitler as a bed-wetting drug addict. Sheesh, these guys have no sense of humor.

Germany's first comedy about Adolf Hitler is being panned by reviewers ahead of its opening this week and has provoked a debate about whether the country should be laughing about the man who ordered the Holocaust.

"Mein Führer: The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler" portrays Hitler as bed-wetting drug addict who takes baths with a toy battleship and dresses his Alsatian dog Blondi in an SS uniform. Swiss Jewish director Dani Levy says he wants to follow in the tradition of Charlie Chaplin's 1940 classic "The Great Dictator."

He also wants to explore the theory that Hitler was taking revenge on the world for being beaten by his father.

What, you're not laughing yet, either?  Is it that you can't laugh at Hitler comedy, or the film is simply not amusing? After all, look at what the Germans think is hilarious about Hitler:

Levy had plenty of material given that the real Hitler offered so much scope for humor with his manner of speaking, his Hitler salute and the huge discrepancy between his own physique and the Nazi ideal of a blonde, blue-eyed master race, writes Welt am Sonntag.

Huh. With comic material like that, how can you miss?

Levy, who won critical claim for his 2004 comedy "Go For Zucker" about two Jewish brothers in post-unification Germany, told SPIEGEL ONLINE he was trying to "demystify" Hitler with scenes such as the one in which pet dog "Blondi" mounts the dictator as he walks on all fours around his giant Chancellery office.

Hey, dogs humping legs is a time-honored comic tradition in film and TV! Obviously, Levi went a step farther. We should honor this advance in cinematic comedy.

So it's not The Producers. And Daniel Levy isn't Mel Brooks. One has to wonder if the film is truly unfunny, or if the Germans aren't at the point where they can laugh about their Nazi past. Whoops, that can't be it. Hogan's Heroes was a long-time cult hit in Germany. Perhaps this movie simply sucks.

Or maybe it's just my problem with Nazi comedies. I didn't get the humor behind "The Bonker," either.

In a stunning deviation from rational thought, I've been forced to come to terms with the fact that the internet is wholly and irrevocably saturated with racist idiots.

While working to increase the size of Jewcy's userbase through popular community websites YouTube, MySpace, and flickr it's become increasingly apparent that these sites are 24-hour nonstop havens for Neo-Nazis, confederate sympathizers, and other pre-Homo Erectus species.

Far from providing intellectual discourse to stimulate debate on why Jews (or blacks, or PC users) are evil (or thieves, or smelly), there are literally tons (yes, I measured) of pages with content devoted simply to promoting hate seemingly for the sake of promoting hate.

If it's not a video shrine to Hitler, it's an animation rationalizing Middle East unrest in a light-hearted, Children's setting. And it goes deeper than you think. If it's not those, it's some jingoistic redneck eager to blame all of Islam for the world's troubles. How many different ways can we present "Lake America" images before it stops being funny? ("Well, gee, I guess that depends on the number of countries considered to be in the Middle East...")

To top it off, the comments that these videos incite are crimes not only against sundry ethnic groups and religions, but the entire English language. One person posts:

viva hitler

Another cleverly responds:

SHIT HITLER!!!

I thought it would be more clever to say, "Shitler!" to express your sentiment in fewer words, but I'm not the one shitlering, I guess. Then of course, there's always the people who can form complete sentences (sort of):

Why are you guys watching clips glorifying the Fuehrer if you don't want to see him? Fucking morons. Hitler was a great man and a political genius. The jews will skew his image to gain sympathy for their fucked up agenda until Israel is the greatest power on earth. Hail Hitler.

And this guy just doesn't know what to think:

Hitler was genius and a piece o shit too. fuck the nazis!1

What's the story? Why are people on the internet so fucked up? Is it anonymity? Are there really not that many of them, but it seems like it because the majority of internet users are too busy posting "What's up? LOL" messages on their buddies' MySpace pages?

Either way, I want out. I want Canada, or better, some place that people don't hate. To quote Disney's The Lion King:

If this is where the Monarchy is headed
Count me out!
Out of service, out of Africa,
I wouldn't hang about
This child is getting wildly out of wing

While I realize that may not totally apply, I also was hoping that most readers were so enflamed by these YouTube postings that they had already left the Blog to register their hate (via YouTube comments utilizing gratuitous use of the word "Fag") and I would get off scott free. HAIL DISNEY.