As the remaining survivors of the Shoah dwindle in number, the era of the Holocaust memoir has largely come to an end. But the 21st century has seen the rise of a new genre, in which the author tells the tale of his or her search for information about the experience of parents or grandparents during World War II, and perhaps learns something profound along the way. A fictionalized version of such a work—Everything Is Illuminated—launched the literary career of Jonathan Safran Foer, and was later turned into a movie. Now his mother, Esther Safran Foer, has written a nonfiction work about the same story, I Want You to Know We’re Still Here: A Post-Holocaust Memoir. The book, in Steven J. Zipperstein’s estimation, conveys something profound not about the Shoah, but about the American Jewish experience:

Whatever joy she has felt over the course of her life “is tempered,” Foer writes, “by shadows of the past.” One doesn’t doubt it. But, then again, this memoir-cum-genealogy is chock-full of indefatigably American nachas. . . . Amid all this joy, the shadows that haunt this memoir feel insubstantial, immeasurably less pertinent than the daily life that Esther Safran Foer so clearly relishes. Just beneath the surface of this Holocaust memoir is, in fact, an altogether different tale: a paean to the good life in America.

[I]t seems what most “haunts” [Foer]—a term repeatedly used—is not the Jewish past so much as the unsettling reality that this past intrudes so little on an ever-vital present. It is its absence that most disturbs—the simple fact that, although she was born in a European displaced-persons camp to a family of survivors, the past doesn’t bear down very heavily on Foer’s everyday life.

This speaks to one of the more oddly perplexing aspects of the American Jewish experience: its disjuncture from that long and winding road viewed overwhelmingly by Jews, whether wholly justified or not, in the darkest hues. With the exception of intermittent spikes in anti-Semitic sentiment in the interwar years and the recent increase in attacks on Jews—from street violence to far-right terrorist attacks—what is one to do with an American Jewish story that is, by and large, so disarmingly benign that even its darkest moments have rarely been all that dark?

As this newsletter noted last week, Gaza is not suffering from famine, and the efforts to suggest that it is—which have been going on since at least the beginning of last year—are based on deliberate manipulation of the data. Nor, as Shany Mor explains, does international law require Israel to feed its enemies:

Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention does oblige High Contracting Parties to allow for the free passage of medical and religious supplies along with “essential foodstuff, clothing, and tonics intended for children under fifteen” for the civilians of another High Contracting Party, as long as there is no serious reason for fearing that “the consignments may be diverted from their destination,” or “that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy” by the provision.

The Hamas regime in Gaza is, of course, not a High Contracting Party, and, more importantly, Israel has reason to fear both that aid provisions are diverted by Hamas and that a direct advantage is accrued to it by such diversions. Not only does Hamas take provisions for its own forces, but its authorities sell provisions donated by foreign bodies and use the money to finance its war. It’s notable that the first reports of Hamas’s financial difficulties emerged only in the past few weeks, once provisions were blocked.

Yet, since the war began, even European states considered friendly to Israel have repeatedly demanded that Israel “allow unhindered passage of humanitarian aid” and refrain from seizing territory or imposing “demographic change”—which means, in practice, that Gazan civilians can’t seek refuge abroad. These principles don’t merely constitute a separate system of international law that applies only to Israel, but prolong the suffering of the people they are ostensibly meant to protect:

By insisting that Hamas can’t lose any territory in the war it launched, the international community has invented a norm that never before existed and removed one of the few levers Israel has to pressure it to end the war and release the hostages.

These commitments have . . . made the plight of the hostages much worse and much longer. They made the war much longer than necessary and much deadlier for both sides. And they locked a large civilian population in a war zone where the de-facto governing authority was not only indifferent to civilian losses on its own side, but actually had much to gain by it.