The Novel That Warned of the Holocaust Just before It Began

First published in 1933, and swiftly translated into English and several other languages thereafter, Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel The Oppermans depicts a German Jewish family during the Nazi rise to popularity and then to power. While it remained influential in Germany after World War II, the book has largely been forgotten in the U.S. A newly published and revised English translation seeks to remedy the situation. Ari Hoffman writes in his review:

Reading The Oppermans is like riding a Ferrari into a slow-motion car crash; the ride is a pleasure if you can ignore the wheels spinning out and look away from what’s coming around the bend. . . . The Oppermanns shines when it aims a spotlight on the small-scale gains that made Hitler possible. A Nazi schoolteacher bullies [one young member of the family] and changes the curriculum, and both students and staff are too morally supine to stop it. “The boys,” we are told, “quickly come to terms with their first Nationalist teacher.” The Oppermans believe that “they had won a place for themselves in this country.” They hardly stood a chance.

The signs are everywhere, but so are the misreadings. A salesman notices that a gang tries to push a Jew in front of a train, but reassures himself that they were stopped in time. The butler at a private club turns up for work one day wearing a swastika. . . . Hitler, “the Leader,” is dismissed because his prose is turgid.

It is to Feuchtwanger’s credit that we like and respect his characters enough to resist blaming the Oppermans for their own misfortune. The novel is populated with major and minor characters who are allowed petty anxieties and grandiose dreams. They yearn for more marks, or a plate of piping hot schnitzel, or a joyride through Berlin. They try to keep the Nazis in the background because their foreground is full of life.

Read more at New York Sun

More about: German Jewry, Holocaust, Jewish literature

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society