Friday, May 02, 2025
From Ian:
Melanie Phillips: The fatal flaw in memorializing the Holocaust
Melanie Phillips: The fatal flaw in memorializing the Holocaust
They didn’t realize that the West had a visceral aversion to hearing about the Holocaust. Since this had taken place at the very epicenter of high Western civilization, even nations not directly involved felt an inescapable and unbearable guilt by association.How “The Brutalist” Tries to Rewrite American Jewish History
The way the guilty West dealt with this was effectively to sanitize Nazism. If it could say everyone could be a Nazi, including the Jews themselves, this would let the West off the guilty hook.
Darker still, the genocide of the Jews challenged the narrative of Jew-hatred that was embedded in Western culture. Although the Holocaust drove this underground, people still widely believed the paranoid, antisemitic tropes of covert Jewish power and malign intent.
They resented the fact that the Holocaust prevented them from expressing these views. Calling Israelis “Nazis”—the demonization lie perpetrated by those who wanted Israel destroyed—enabled antisemites to resume hating Jews once again, sanitized and camouflaged as anti-Zionism so that they couldn’t be accused of the very thing that had produced the Nazi Holocaust.
In her article, Wisse noted the perversity of teaching about hate to prevent hate. Societies that concentrate on their self-improvement, she observed, generally rely on positive instruction and reinforcement. “A pedagogical fixation on hate, by contrast, has been associated with societies like fascist Germany and Soviet Russia that wish to direct blame and hate against designated alien or undesirable groups,” she wrote.
The focus of post-Holocaust education should be not on hatred but on admiration. Most people have never met a Jew, whose numbers make them statistically insignificant.
Rather than confront the wider community with the almost inconceivable horror of the attempt to destroy a people about which they know nothing and care less, the focus should be on educating them about Judaism, the Jewish people and the State of Israel.
People should be taught about the key precepts of Judaism that have been absolutely essential to the development of civilized values in the West, including political freedom, the rule of law and respect for human life.
They should be taught that the Jews are an ancient people whose religion is centered upon the land of Israel; that they are the only people for whom it was ever their national kingdom; and that this is why the U.N.’s forerunner gave them alone the right to settle what is now Israel, the disputed territories of the “West Bank” and Gaza.
So many in the West think wrongly that Judaism is only a religious faith, which therefore shouldn’t have a land. So many think wrongly that the Jews are latter-day interlopers into that land from where they displaced its indigenous inhabitants. So many think wrongly that Israel is in illegal occupation of the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria.
They think this because they only hear Palestinian propaganda to this effect and are never told that these are wall-to-wall lies. As a result, they think that Israel is on the wrong side of fairness, justice and the rule of law, while the truth is the very opposite.
Antisemitism will always be with us. The best that can be hoped for is that it’s shoved firmly back beneath its stone. If there’s any chance of doing so, memorializing dead Jews should give way to celebrating the culture of the living ones.
Normally this newsletter wouldn’t link to two separate articles reviewing the same movie, but a writer like Edward Rothstein reviewing a much-praised film like The Brutalist is something that demands attention. Rothstein praises the acting and the score of this film about the career of a Hungarian Holocaust survivor, Laszlo Toth, as an architect in America, and praises the director for the film’s ambition and scope. Yet he finds the film marred by its muddled understanding of its subject—modern architecture—as well as its ideological agenda, which “reinforces so many contemporary mythologies that caricature the American dream as a nightmare.”Seth Mandel: The Passion Play of Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders
One of the surprises of The Brutalist is that Tóth is depicted as a committed Jew, and the film takes his religious commitment seriously, though it is under siege by nearly every American he encounters. . . . When Tóth takes refuge in a Catholic homeless shelter, he is pressed to attend church. Later on, at a public meeting, his design of a chapel . . . is challenged partly because he’s a Jew. A mediocre Protestant architect is brought in to modify his designs. As Tóth says to his wife, “They don’t want us here!”
But this assertion seems more influenced by contemporary political talking points than by the Jewish experience in mid-century America; the opportunities that émigré Jewish professionals had from the 1930s through the 1950s transformed nearly every aspect of American culture. And the intense demand for immigration to the United States by all peoples, despite real prejudice and discrimination that often greeted their arrival, has persisted through the decades because more important liberties were being realized.
Despite all of this heavy-handed polemicizing, [the film] treats the Jewish aspects of Tóth’s life soberly, without condescension or irony or sentimentality. In fact, they are insisted upon. We see Tóth in a traditional synagogue on Yom Kippur, chanting the ancient litany of communal sins and beating his breast with each one mentioned—“We have trespassed, we have betrayed; we have stolen; we have slandered”—and we feel that we are in the presence of genuine and ardent religious feeling. In a development that has inspired palpable discomfort among some progressive critics, even Zionism is taken seriously.
Too bad a film willing to convey such a message insists on drawing incoherent parallels between capitalist America and Nazi-ruled Europe, and ignores the circumstances that drew real European Jews, like the fictional Toth, to America’s shores.
The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act—a measure before the Senate that, inter alia, would grant legal status to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism—has for some time been caught in the legislative switches. Now, as its supporters try to move it forward, four amendments have been introduced that will serve as poison pills. Leading the charge to undermine the bill are Senators Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul, who have both claimed, falsely, that the bill criminalizes speech. It does no such thing. Seth Mandel explains:
Sanders . . . has taken criticism of the bill to new levels by doing more than just lying about what the bill actually does. The text of his amendment . . . includes literal Hamas propaganda in demanding the right (already protected under the bill) to “oppose the Netanyahu-led war effort, which has killed more than 50,000 and wounded more than 113,000, 60 percent of whom are women and children.”
These numbers have been repeatedly debunked, most recently by Hamas itself. . . . Obviously Congress cannot and will not enshrine in its legislation proven falsehoods designed to aid the enemy force currently keeping Americans hostage after massacring U.S. citizens. Sanders knows this. He just wants to demand anti-Israel propaganda be put on the congressional record.
Rand Paul’s attempt at scaremongering this legislation out of contention took a different form: . . . “This bill would subject to punishment speech claiming that Jews killed Jesus,” Paul said, repeating a popular white-nationalist talking point. He explained that the Gospels blame Jews for killing Jesus and therefore—and here he offered a solid candidate for the craziest thing ever said in Congress—“you’re no longer allowed to read John 18 and 19.”
He then . . . “entered into the record a list of the names of 400 Jewish American comedians who he said have referred to Jews in stereotypical language, and who he says may be targeted by the bill.”
Most informed readers would consider Paul’s interpretation of the Gospel of John misleading if not tendentious, and even if it were not, the bill proposes no punishment for speech of any kind. The Orthodox Union’s policy director, Nathan Diament, put it thus to Jewish Insider:
Let’s be clear: these amendments are a disgrace. They don’t just weaken the Antisemitism Awareness Act—they mock it. . . . Some lawmakers in Washington are abdicating their responsibility to ensure that this country’s civil-rights laws are used to protect American Jews as much as they protect any other community targeted with discrimination and harassment.
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