Monday, April 24, 2023
Elder of Ziyon
There are always discussions on how to teach the Holocaust in a way that young people can internalize the horror of what happened. These discussions become more prominent around Yom Hashoah.
At the same time, with the upcoming Yom Ha'atzmaut, Israel haters try to frame Israel as pure evil whose existence is itself a human rights crime and which reduces the security of Jews, not enhances.it.
Last week, pseudo rabbi Brant Rosen said this on Al Jazeera:
I responded with a tweet that received hundreds of Likes:
Here, "Rabbi" Brant Rosen argues on @AJEnglish to @marclamonthill that a military cannot protect Jews, and if Jews want to be safe they should just work in solidarity with other minorities to protect themselves in the Diaspora.Six million Jews were unavailable for comment.
On Sunday night, I decided to combine these two themes.
I took actual photos of victims of the Holocaust, but I specifically chose photos that non-Jews could identify with. Except for the first, which as taken in the Birkenau camp before that family was murdered, I chose photos without the yellow star, without the emaciated victims. And I colorized them so they would look recent and not like they came from a long ago era.
I then wrote fairly angry posters noting that no one tried to save these Jews from being murdered - but if Israel existed, things might have been different.
I admit, this exercise really affected me as I was doing it. I was too emotionally drained after four posters to continue.
I don't know if others would be as impacted, but perhaps this is a direction that might be useful for teaching both about the Holocaust and the importance of Israel. It won't help for the many real Jew-haters out there (there are plenty of people on Twitter responding that Israel's crimes are worse than Nazi Germany's) but there will always be Jew-haters - the point is to reach normal people.
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