Sephardi and Oriental Jews, along with their literature, philosophy, and rabbinic works, are conspicuously absent from the modish Israeli talk about pluralistic Judaism.
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The Demonic Impulse Behind Tucker Carlson’s Holocaust Denier
Meir Soloveichik sees in the so-called “revisionist” view of World War II an inversion of good and evil best explored by C.S. Lewis:
In 1942, with the world at war, an Oxford tutor wrote a book about traditional faith unlike any other ever published. It consists of missives from a senior devil in a demonic bureaucracy who is guiding a junior devil tasked with tempting one specific soul to achieve that man’s damnation. The senior devil is named Screwtape, and his letters are addressed to his nephew, Wormwood. . . . Screwtape refers to God as “our Enemy above,” and to Satan as “our father below.” For this bureaucratic demon, Hell is a source of admiration, Heaven an object of horror. Damnation is desired, and eternal life with God is disdained. By experiencing an instinctive horror at these moral reversals, the reader is to intuit the right and the good.
Indeed, as Soloveichik explains, Lewis may have been inspired to write The Screwtape Letters after listening to a speech of Hitler’s and pondering how the Führer “utilized his rhetorical gifts to frame the most horrific position imaginable as something entirely reasonable.”
For those who have watched the course of Carlson’s career, the recent showcasing of a Nazi defender and Holocaust denier is not a surprise, but it is, unquestionably, a new low. And it is a reminder that one does not need to adopt the Christian approach to Satan . . . to understand that today, in the United States, genuine demons walk, and podcast, amongst us. They may use microphones instead of missives to advance their morally inverted cause, but what they still seek is to sway souls to embrace evil.
More about: Anti-Semitism, C.S. Lewis, Holocaust denial, World War II