It is Yom HaShoah: Holocaust Remembrance Day. This is the time we remember the 11 million people (including he 5 million non-Jews too often left out of our remembrance) who were killed by the Nazis in WW II.

Written in Pencil in the Sealed Freight Car

Here, in this freight car,
I, Eve,
with my son Abel.
If you see my older boy,
Cain, the son of Adam,
tell him that I…

--Dan Pagis, as quoted in Ariel Hirschfeld’s chapter in Cultures of the Jews, David Biale (ed.)

I read this poem, evoking the emotions of a woman crammed into a freight car on her way to the death camps during the Holocaust, right before I read Elie Wiesel's most recent edition of his book Night, describing his own experiences in the Holocaust. His book is, needless to say, chilling. But the additions in the latest edition make it even more so. If you read earlier editions, you might want to read the intro to the new one because he mentions things edited out of the original.

In Night Wiesel describes in considerable detail the experience of the freight car taking him to the Auschwitz. Everything about the experience was dehumanizing, mile by mile stripping away the humanity of the Jews not only in the eyes of the German guards, but even in the eyes of the Jews themselves. In many ways Dan Pagis’ poem is rehumanizing those who went through the experience, by framing it in terms of a Biblical incident that supposedly frames human origins. When I read the description of the freight cars in Night I kept returning to this poem, contrasting these two portrayals of the same experience in my mind. Both are born of the same experience but in many ways they are mirror images: the dehumanizing, “humans as freight” experience, and the experience that encompasses all of humanity, thus rehumanlizing those who experienced those freight cars. They are not contradictory versions, but are two sides of the exact same experience: the narrow one of what the experience meant right at the time to those directly involved, and the expansion of that highly personal experience to put it into the context of human nature and human history in general. What we do to each other now replays the family tragedy of the Biblical myth.

“We are Jewish because there are people out there who would kill us for being Jewish.”

At a time when I was simultaneously becoming more agnostic/atheist AND more Jewish (perhaps in the tradition of Isaac Deutcher who recognized a place within Judaism for non-believing Jews), I quite naturally posed the age-old question of just what it means to be a Jew. Parts of my quest to answer this question for myself have become diaries on various blogs. Genetic, cultural, tribal, religious, nationalistic and historical definitions of Judaism all combine into a mishmash (a phrase named for the biblical city of Michmash the same way we get “Armageddon” from the name of the ancient city of “Megiddo”) that must be confusing to non-Jews, but that I have come to see as a very key aspect to Jewish identity. I have come to see this identity crisis as one core part of Judaism that goes back as far as we can trace. Even within the Old Testament Jews have an ongoing identity crisis.

That’s how I think. I immerse myself in the complexity and maybe even add to that complexity some paradoxes: atheists can be perfectly good Jews, identity crisis can be a defining feature of identity, etc.

My wife thinks differently than I do. And her response to the question of Jewish identity was characteristically terse and to the point:

“We are Jewish because there are people out there who would kill us for being Jewish.”

That definition has stuck with me over the years since she said it. Because it defines Jews probably more than my identity crisis as identity does.

The Spanish Inquisition (which still exists today in a more benign form) had several targets. Jews and Protestants could be brutally killed at will. But their main target was neither. Their main target was generally the Conversos, Jews who had been forced to convert to Catholicism by the Spanish. Somehow these ambiguous people, once Jewish, now not, were seen as the biggest threat by the Spanish Catholic Church. At first the Papacy did not agree and was happy to welcome converted Jews, but some Popes, like Paul IV, took the attitude of the Inquisition and saw these converts, no matter how Christian, as suspect and was known to burn them alive from time to time. In fact, it didn’t even matter if your family had been good, practicing Catholics for generations, the taint of having once been Jewish remained and the Inquisition was always a threat. No surprise that many Conversos left Spain.

“We are Jewish because there are people out there who would kill us for being Jewish.”

The intellectual underpinnings of Nazi Germany’s anti-Semitism partly came from a British author named Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Supposedly a historian (yet seemingly ignorant of much history) Chamberlain hypothesized that civilizations and great nations rose by expelling Jews and fell when they became “polluted” by Jews. Needless to say, people like Himmler pissed themselves with glee when they read this and used it as one basis of their policy towards the Jews.

The 1935 Nuremburg Laws enshrined what many Jews already knew. It didn’t matter who you were, what you believed or what you worshipped, if you had any Jewish ancestry you were Jewish. Or, put more popularly in 1930’s Germany:

“Was er glaubt is einerlei
In der Rasse liegt die Schweinerei.”

Translated in Melvin Konner’s book Unsettled as:

“It doesn’t matter what his faith,
the piggishness is in the race.”

Which, in effect, says the same thing my wife says:

“We are Jewish because there are people out there who would kill us for being Jewish.”

The first step towards genocide is to define your target as less than human. The dehumanization of perfectly normal and nice human beings is the first step to exterminating those perfectly normal and nice human beings. This is a common motif in all of human history. Hindus and Buddhists in Sri Lanka have done this during their terrible civil war, despite the fact that both religions preach ahimsa, which translates roughly to “non-violence”. Hutu and Tutsis have done this quite infamously, despite the fact that the original designations of Hutu and Tutsi were formulated by a white colonial government based on how many cattle a family owned. Americans did it regarding blacks and Native Americans. Japanese have done it regarding Koreans and Chinese. And, of course, many have done it regarding the Jews.

The Germans used freight cars, stuffed to overflowing with perfectly normal and nice human beings, given little food, water or bathroom facilities, to dehumanize the Jews as completely as possible on the way to the camps. When the Jews arrived they had not bathed, they were half starved, dehydrated, weak, smelling of urine and feces that they were not allowed to dispose of properly. This made it so much easier for the Germans to send them to death…and so much easier for the Jews to go quietly.

Here, in this freight car,
I, Eve,
with my son Abel.
If you see my older boy,
Cain, the son of Adam,
tell him that I…

“Never Again”

That is the refrain I grew up with as a Jew. No more genocides. And yet we have not lived up to this refrain. And, in fact, the very first reaction the world had to the Holocaust was denial. Even in Israel the act of intentional forgetting played out from 1948 through 1961. Many Israelis down played the Holocaust or in part blamed the victim for remaining in the unsafe Diaspora rather than joining the aliyah, the return. It was the 1961 public trial of Eichman that led many Israelis (as well as Americans) to realize the full scope of the Holocaust and to face it honestly. But in the longer scheme of things, as, not only survivors, but, just as importantly as witnesses, the liberators die off, Holocaust denial and downplaying revives. It isn’t just the President of Iran who loves to downplay the Holocaust [1]. I hear similar downplaying by Americans as well, usually with some kind of political agenda (for example, the Institute for Historical Review and the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust). To fulfill “Never Again” we have to never forget. How are we going to keep the memory strong enough as those who were first hand witnesses and survivors die?

(As an aside, I should note that beyond even Holocaust denial, we have here in America people willing to accept the Nazi ideology, including a Republican running for office in Indiana [2])

There is also a more insidious form of forgetting: forgetting that “never again” should not mean JUST never again to the Jews, but also should mean a deliberate opposition to such atrocities in all contexts, from Burma to Darfur to Rwanda to Bosnia to anywhere where people begin to play out the original biblical family tragedy on a grand, horrifying scale. We should never forget that for every Jew exterminated by the Nazis there was, more or less, one non-Jew also exterminated in similar camps with similar brutality and with similar stupid reasons.

It is in this context that I choose this Yom HaShoah to donate to provide solar stoves for Darfur refugees through Jewish World Watch [3]. These refugees are exposed to violence every time they go out to collect firewood. Solar stoves reduce their need for firewood and makes their life safer. You can read more about this and donate here [4].

And here is a video on the project [5].

In this small way I can help face another genocide going on right now.

“Never again,” can never be literally fulfilled, because humans are humans and genocide has been part of our civilized story from the very beginning of “civilization”. But “never again” CAN mean never again turning a blind eye, never again LETTING it happen without opposition. It is in this context that Elie Wiesel’s Nobel Peace Prize (remember, that thing that so many right wing extremists on Fox News denigrated because Jimmy Carter and Al Gore are recent recipients) is so meaningful.

And speaking of Nobel Prizes (in Medicine, not Peace), I will end with an experience I had at work some 6 months ago. The NYU School of Medicine has many excellent seminars. One of them is the annual Menek Goldstein memorial lecture in Psychiatry. Last year Eric Kandel, a Nobel Prize winner, was the speaker, and a damned good one at that. What caught my attention separate from the science was that the three scientists highlighted, Menek Goldstein (being honored), Eric Simon (who introduced Eric Kandel) and Eric Kandel (the speaker) all experienced the Holocaust. If I got the stories straight, Menek Goldstein lived through the concentration camps while Eric Simon and Eric Kandel both lived through Kristalnacht but escaped before the full force of Nazism could hit them. Three such distinguished and famous scientists, all Jews targeted by the Nazis for extermination, all survived to old age, and one won the Nobel Prize. Meanwhile, those Nazis who targeted them for extermination are now dead and/or despised, becoming one of the political schoolyard taunts thrown around by left and right to describe those they don’t like, and admired by almost no one except a handful of outcast nutjobs. Those targeted are among the most admired members of our society…those who did the targeting are recognized as some of the biggest and most pathetic losers of history. Even if “never again” is never achieved, at least we know that those who committed genocide were solidly defeated at least once and therefore can be again.

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