How the Holocaust Came to Be about Everything but the Jews

Calling attention to some recent controversies sparked by invocations of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, Ben Cohen wonders why people “just can’t stop talking about Hitler” and addresses what this means for the Jews. On the left, it is the urge to universalize the Shoah that has proved most disturbing:

On January 17, the outgoing president, Barack Obama, appointed his deputy national-security adviser, Ben Rhodes, to the council of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Rhodes, you will remember, was the White House staffer who constructed the administration’s smoke-and-mirrors communications strategy around the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. And after having crafted the myth of a moderate, cooperative Iran—which meant dismissing the Islamic Republic’s official doctrine of Holocaust denial as rhetoric without consequence—Rhodes has landed a post that feels like a thumb in the eye to many Jews, Democrats and Republicans alike.

One can only speculate about what President Obama was thinking—it was revenge, many said, and that is probably true up to a point. Of greater import, I’d say, is what this tells us about the tensions that arise from the manner in which the Holocaust is remembered.

Obama himself has been interested only in Judaism’s universalist aspects, and there is no reason to expect Rhodes to be any different. Implicit in his appointment is the view that the Holocaust is a tragedy that belongs to everybody, and that the best response to it is an anodyne, pacifist humanitarianism, solemnly declaring that all cultures are of equal worth, emphasizing diplomacy and dialogue when confronted by nationalist and religious fanatics.

There are many, many problems with this viewpoint. One of them involves a failure to grasp that these same fanatics wield the Holocaust as a propaganda weapon. Holocaust denial is a staple in the Arab and wider Islamic worlds, along with imagery depicting Israelis as Nazis. In the Soviet Union, the Holocaust’s Jewish character was outright negated; now Russian dictator Vladimir Putin portrays Ukraine as a Nazi state in order to win support for the occupation of Crimea. Again, this is a propaganda trend that shows no sign of abating.

Read more at Tower

More about: Barack Obama, Holocaust, Holocaust denial, Politics & Current Affairs, Universalism

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