In the preface to the New York edition of Roderick Hudson, Henry James explained that the chief problem of the novelist is deciding where to stop his characters’ stories—at what point to give up tracing the development of relationships. “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, a circle within which they shall happily appear to do so,” James wrote. But by telling a story about Jews in the Italian city of Ferrara during the late 1930s, the novelist Giorgio Bassani jeopardized this artist’s freedom: The circumference of his 1962 novel The Garden of the Finzi-Continis was determined for him by history. In 1943, after the northern part of Italy was occupied by German soldiers, most of Ferrara’s small Jewish community was sent to the death camps. (Out of 183 deportees, only one returned to the city.)

In a brief prologue, Bassani makes clear that the members of the Finzi-Contini family died in the Holocaust: “for Micol, the second child, the daughter, and for her father, Professor Ermanno, and her mother, Signora Olga, and Signora Regina, Signora Olga’s ancient, paralytic mother, all deported to Germany in the autumn of ’43, who could say if they found any sort of burial at all?” At this early point in the book, we do not know anything about these characters but their names, though they will go on to populate the narrator’s emotional universe. They are introduced under the sign of death, and we read about their friendships and enmities and love affairs knowing that all such complications will be annulled just a few years after the action of the novel ends.

But is death an annulment? That is the question raised by the novel’s prologue, which is set in 1957. In it, the narrator—who goes unnamed in the text, but who is conventionally referred to as “B.” just as Proust’s narrator is called “Marcel”—describes an excursion with friends to the coast near Rome. On the way back home, the small group visits an Etruscan necropolis, a complex of funeral mounds that makes “the area, really … nothing but an immense, almost uninterrupted cemetery.” One of the party is a young girl, Giannina, who sighs over the Etruscan dead. Her father explains these 5,000-year-old tombs are so ancient that it’s hard to feel any real grief for their inhabitants: “it’s as if they had never lived, as if they had always been dead.” But Giannina disagrees: “But now, if you say that … you remind me that the Etruscans were also alive once, and so I’m fond of them, like everyone else.”

It is not hard to make the connection between the girl’s affection for the ancient dead and the more recent dead who weigh on the narrator’s mind. (“Tell me, Papa: who do you think were more ancient, the Etruscans or the Jews?” Giannina asks her father.) What Bassani calls the girl’s “extraordinary tenderness” seems to release a blockage in his mind: It is possible, he realizes, to preserve the dead as they were when they lived, to refuse to allow death to invalidate life. “For many years I wanted to write about the Finzi-Continis,” he explains in the book’s first sentence, but it was not until this episode that “the stimulus, the impulse to do it really came to me.”

The gulf between the values of life and the manner of death is especially wide in the case of the Finzi-Continis, for as we go on to learn, the family was defined above all by its aloofness from the Jewish community of Ferrara. For one thing, the Finzi-Continis were much richer than their neighbors. Their ancestor, Moise—part of the first Italian Jewish generation to be emancipated from the ghetto—acquired a large tract of land near the city wall of Ferrara, and the family built a magnificent estate there, complete with a magna domus or “great house.” This is the “garden” of the title, which is not an ordinary flower or kitchen garden but a vast walled enclave. In effect, the Finzi-Continis have retreated into their own world.

To the young B., this withdrawal makes the Finzi-Continis an object of fascination. The family has children his own age—a boy, Alberto, and a girl, Micol—but because they do not attend the public school, he sees them only occasionally; above all, in synagogue. In a resonant image that haunts the whole book, B. describes being gathered under his father’s tallit for the benediction, and staring at Micol Finzi-Contini, hidden away under her own father’s tent-like tallit: “Below him, for the entire duration of the blessing, Alberto and Micol never stopped exploring, they too, the gaps in their tent. And they smiled at me and winked at me, both curiously inviting: especially Micol.”

It is not hard to guess that B. is destined to fall in love with Micol, or that the love will be unhappy. (In this sense, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis can be compared to Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, another novel about a middle-class boy who falls fatally in love with an aristocratic family.) The course of their adult relationship is foretold in an incident when they are about 12 years old. Micol invites B. to climb over the garden wall, but by the time he convinces himself to do it, she has disappeared back into the house.

If the Finzi-Continis’ wall is an invitation to B., however, most of their neighbors take it as an insult:

Oh, it still took very little to be offended by it! It was enough, say, to pass along the endless outside wall … or else … overlooking the park, to peer through the forestlike tangle of trunks, boughs, and foliage below, until you could glimpse the strange, sharp outline of the lordly dwelling, and behind it, much farther on, at the edge of a clearing, the tan patch of the tennis court: and the ancient offense of rejection and separation would smart once more.

Already in this early passage, Bassani begins to establish the paradoxical Jewishness of the Finzi-Continis. When we read of a people that has committed an “ancient offense,” that is blamed for “rejection and separation,” that is simultaneously envied and feared and despised by its neighbors, it is impossible not to think of the Jews among the Christians of Europe. The Finzi-Continis, Bassani suggests, are the Jews of the Jews themselves, embodying and raising to the second power all the ambiguities of the Italian Jewish condition. They are Jews who exemplify Jewishness by dissociating themselves from other Jews—as the narrator’s father notes with scorn:

Instead of giving themselves so many airs, they would have done much better … to remember who they were, where they came from, for it’s a fact that Jews—Sephardic and Ashkenazic, western and Levantine, Tunisian, Berber, Yemenite, and even Ethiopian—in whatever part of the earth, under whatever sky History scattered them, are and always will be Jews, that is to say, close relatives.

One might even say that the Finzi-Continis treat their fellow Jews the way the Jews themselves treat the Gentiles—whom the narrator’s father refers to, with anxious contempt, as “goyische blacks.”

Continue reading: The secret garden

“At the beginning of this century there were people called Wagnerians,” Hitler said in 1943. “Other people had no special name.” He was right. Wagner did not invent the main themes of post-Christian culture—follow your bliss, invent your own identity, do your own thing, all you need is love—but he softened us up to accept them in the intimate dimension of music. We continue to emulate him, above all in film. If we find Wagner in the original tedious, it is because the Star Wars series, the Harry Potter films, and a hundred other imitations have corrupted us with Wagner Lite.

Like Caliban, Wagner set out to people this isle with Siegfrieds. He succeeded: Luke Skywalker is the most obvious knockoff, down to the battle with and redemption of the father figure. (Wotan almost says, “Siegfried, I am your grandfather!”) Harry Potter is a younger Skywalker, except that unlike Siegfried, he doesn’t murder Dumbledore. The most popular English novel of the 20th century, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, is modeled on the Ring cycle, although Tolkien intended his epic as an antidote to Wagner rather than an imitation.

With the third installment of its new Ring cycle, the Metropolitan Opera has set a high-water mark for opera, featuring director Robert LePage’s theatrical wizardry and a strong cast. LePage devised a 45-ton mechanical set for his Ring cycle, which debuted last September with the first opera of the tetralogy, Das Rheingold. It required extra reinforcement for the Met stage, the most expensive thing the Met has ever undertaken; estimates of the cost of this cycle range up to $40 million. Much as one might wish that the Met had spent that money on Mozart and Verdi, the result is a marvel, despite occasional mechanical glitches including one in a subsequent Siegfried performance. Fortunately the big machine worked flawlessly at the Oct. 27 premiere. The set looks like a row of parallel planks, set at a 30-degree angle to the audience. As the prelude begins, the planks rotate to right angles, and we see the forest floor magnified in three-dimensional projection, with worms and insects crawling over the tree roots; it rotates again and transforms itself into the primeval forest. The Nibelung dwarf Mime takes the infant Siegfried from his dying mother Sieglinde, along with the shards of the sword Nothung. With another rotation, we see Mime’s cavern smithy next to a shimmering pool fed by a small waterfall. The morphing stage and the high-definition projections are magical.

But it is not just LePage’s shape-shifting set that lures us into the enchanted forest; it is Wagner’s music. The rhythm of a tapping anvil grows as if from primal chaos in the timpani and low winds, while a rising figure in the brass—it is the music of the Nibelung hoard—builds to a climax. Under the baton of a James Levine, the longtime Met music director now sidelined by injury, it is chilling; conductor Fabio Luisi made it sound like the Nibelungen waltz, but we will save the bad news for last.

The good news is that the Met offered the strongest cast for Siegfried in many years, headed by Jay Hunter Morris in the title role. The young heroic tenor from Texas can summon the requisite vocal brass when required but has a convincing lyrical side as well. And I cannot recall a Siegfried who looked and acted the part so well. He compares well to the leading interpreters of my lifetime: René Kollo, Siegfried Jerusalem, Jess Thomas, and James King. Opposite Morris was Deborah Voigt, one of the great dramatic sopranos of our time. The Welsh baritone Bryn Terfel sang Wotan beautifully, as he always does. Gerhard Siegel as Mime, Eric Owens as Alberich, and Patricia Bardon as Erda sang and acted wonderfully in their respective roles.

It was good enough to recall the Jewish joke about the old woman who receives a letter from her son containing horrendously awful news. “But does he write beautiful Hebrew,” she sighs. “It’s a pleasure to read.” Wagner’s news is that the West will burn, and murderous thugs like Siegfried will run wild. But the Met presented it so beautifully that it was almost a pleasure to hear.

Mime has raised Siegfried to kill the dragon Fafner, who sits upon the hoard of the Nibelungs, including on a magic ring that can make its owner master of the world. Wotan, the god of laws, had stolen the hoard to pay the giants who built his fortress, Valhalla, and the Nibelungs want it back. But Mime cannot forge the shards of Nothung. The young Siegfried will do so himself and kill Fafner as well as Mime and go on to claim as his bride the Valkyrie Brünnhilde, who lies sleeping on a mountain surrounded by magic fire.

Siegfried will overthrow Wotan with the words, “All my life an old man has stood in my way,” and replace the rule of law with the rule of unrestrained impulse, which Wagner calls love. He and Brünnhilde (who is Wotan’s daughter) shall be the redeemer and redemptrix of the world, replacing the old order of covenants with the new order of do whatever feels right. Everybody dies at the end, but they do so following their bliss.

To understand Wagner’s convulsive impact on the culture, one must hear his work in the theater. We have become accustomed to what he called Gesamtkunstwerk, or the total work of art, through film, which holds us captive and controls our visual and auditory perceptions. Wagner demands that we subject our senses to his control for many hours. (Siegfried begins at 6 p.m. and, with two intermissions, ends near midnight.)

The destruction of the covenantal world by impulsive strength, Wagner’s great theme, also involves an even subtler change in our perception of time. Western classical music subordinates individual events to a musical goal, and our perception of time depends on our progress to that goal. In the hands of the great composers, time itself can be compressed or distended for expressive reasons, but it always remains intact. In the Ring cycle, the thread of time spun by the Nordic fates, or Norns, figuratively breaks to herald the end of the old order. Wagner uses musical sleight-of-hand to evoke the illusion of a break in the continuity of time as well.

Wagner’s music usually is explained through his use of leading motifs, or Leitmotiven, short musical phrases that refer to characters or concepts. (The Wagnerheim website guides the interested listener through each use of these motifs in the cycle.) Darth Vader’s “Dum, dum-dum dumb, dum, dum-dum” and Indiana Jones’ “dee-de-dee-dee, dee-de-dee” are the idiot grandchildren of the Ring. There is something in this procedure of the handworkers’ staging of “Pyramus and Thisbe” in Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which one actor holds up brick and mortar to show that he is playing the Wall, and another holds a lantern and horns to show that he is playing the Moon.

Continue reading: Musical sleight-of-hand

The Arbiter is a weekly column dedicated to revisiting canonical works of art, high and low alike, to reevaluate their merit. All media are considered; none are pitied. As an homage to the greatest Jewish guardian of memory, Marcel Proust, each is rated on a scale of one to five madeleines, with one pastry meaning the work should be forgotten posthaste and five arguing for a spirited recollection.

“Every complaint,” Nietzsche is reported to have said, “already contains revenge.”

He could have said the same about video games.

I learned the connection between gaming and vengeance when I was 17, from a classic called Wolfenstein 3D. That, at least, is the name the game’s developer, id Software, gave it; in Israel, it was known simply as the Nazi Castle. Credited with having catapulted the first-person-shooter genre to ubiquity, the game took place in a maze-like chateau occupied by various swastika-toting baddies, chief among them Adolf Hitler, outfitted with robotic armor and several machine guns. All you did was walk around and shoot Nazis.

Killing Nazis is an appealing proposition, which made the game a hit the world over. But nowhere was its appeal greater than in the Jewish state, where many of the teenage boys who fervently pounded on their keyboards in an effort to nail Nazi scum were the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. When we played, we played in silence and in darkened rooms. We weren’t exactly sure why. To us, after all, it shouldn’t have made any difference if the pixilated enemy was a spiked-shelled beastie like Bowser, the arch-villain of the Super Mario game series, or Hitler, the very real executioner of so many of our relatives. The play experience was the same: move fast, press buttons furiously, kill, kill, kill.

Somehow, we knew better. We knew that Hitler, even robot-Hitler, was real, and it made us want to play more fervently. Curiously, we didn’t care much about completing the game’s tasks, the way we did with every other video game. All we cared about was killing as many Nazis as possible. All we cared about was revenge.

One of the game’s creators, John Romero, felt the same way. “You know what we should have in here?” Romero asked his fellow programmers in an account recalled in David Kushner’s 2003 book Masters of Doom. “Pissing! We should have it so you can fucking stop and piss on the Nazi after you mow him down!”

If only. But even without urination, Wolfenstein 3D satisfied our adolescent urges. Each level featured a powerful boss, and once each boss was defeated a so-called Death Cam was activated, playing back the moment of the kill in gorgeous slow motion and with humorous sound effects.

Before each playback, a title card flashed on the screen, reading “Let’s See That Again!” It was misleading. In reality, we were really seeing the moment of death for the first time, as the previous time we had seen it we were too busy running and shooting, too busy being to observe.

Herein lay the genius of Wolfenstein, a brilliance that hasn’t dulled with the years. It realized, instinctively and early on, that video gamers take leave of their subjectivity as soon as they grab their controllers and start playing. Once they’re in the game, they become part-avatar, seeing the game both through their own eyes and through their character’s. They lack critical distance and haven’t the ability to gaze or reflect. All they can do is move.

Which is why revenge is such a perfect theme for video games. Like very few other human emotions, revenge is the urge that can never be truly fulfilled. Try taking vengeance, and the pit you had in your stomach before the act will only give way to emptiness after it. This is because the only way to get real satisfaction would be to turn back time and undo the offending moment, which is impossible in life but is the whole point of video games, a medium that lets you play and replay a certain scenario until you master it and advance to the next level. In hanging Eichmann, our grandparents discovered how futile it had been to seek catharsis in acts of retribution. In shooting robot-Hitler, we discovered how sweet life could be if all it took to rewrite history was a personal computer and a modicum of hand-eye coordination.

Of course, none of it was real. Only our dead families were real. But for a few afternoons a week, we could step into what Johan Huizinga—the Dutch historian who died in a Nazi concentration camp a few weeks before liberation—called the magic circle. We play games, Huizinga observed, because only in games may we expect clear rules and definite results, only in games may we overcome ambiguity and regulate chance. So helpless in real life, we enter into the magic circle because it is the only place where we can, if only for a moment, order the world. This, Huizinga argued, is why games preceded culture; man, before he could do anything else, had to feel there was one realm of life in which he alone, and not some unseen and unknowable higher force, was dominant.

This is why games are so popular with children, whose sense of helplessness is acute and whose need for control, even pretend-control, is great. And this is why Wolfenstein was so popular with us offspring of survivors: In a nation built on the idea of never again, a nation whose national Holocaust commemoration museum concludes its exhibit with a recording of David Ben-Gurion reading the Declaration of Independence, there was no better way to assert control than to grab a big gun and kill Hitler.

A year or two after the game came out, my friends and I no longer had much time to play. We were now all in the army. Killing became a real-world activity with irreversible consequences, nowhere near as free and strange and magical as it had been with Hitler’s virtual goons. But we were well prepared for life as soldiers. We’d left our revenge fantasies behind, in the dungeons of the Nazi castle.

But according to a new book, it was much worse: The young Kamprad made contacts with the ultra-right New Swedish Movement during World War Two, and continued to support it and its leader, who had called Hitler “Europe’s savior” and the Jews “an alien element in the Western public body,” even after the war was over.

If Hitler were an IKEA desk, he would be called Føorheürz.

‘IKEA Founder’s Nazi Past Revealed in New Book’ [JPost]

Hitler’s Belly, a hit play currently touring China, answers the eternal question of what the world’s most notorious dictator looks like when portrayed by an overweight Chinese man pretending to be pregnant. It mixes snippets from Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, old newsreel footage, slapstick with Chinese sensibilities, and an extended fart joke. As Hitler prepares to give birth, Chaplin—also a character in the play—wanders the bunker, impersonating Hitler to his underlings. Chaplin spars with Hitler, and then everyone raps. Genocide is not mentioned.

Chaplin made his famous 1940 satire, in which he plays both a Jewish barber and Adenoid Hynkel, the blabbering dictator of Tomania, in part because of the actor’s similarity to Hitler: They each sported a distinctive mustache, they were born four days apart in April 1889, and they shared a love for Richard Wagner’s music. In his autobiography, Chaplin’s son, Charles Chaplin, recalled his father saying: “He’s the madman, I’m the comic. But it could have been the other way around.”

Meng Jinghui, the play’s shaggy-haired director, first saw The Great Dictator in 1984, he told me, and he thought it would be fascinating to watch Chaplin interact with Hitler. But he didn’t begin work on his play until he saw a glint of Hitler in his favorite leading man, Liu Xiaoye. “I was wearing a hat and put on a little mustache,” said Liu, who plays Hitler, Chaplin, and Eva Braun, often switching between characters mid-sentence. Meng recalls: “He put black on his finger and put it up here, and said hey, don’t I look like Hitler? And I said, hey, you can be Hitler.”

One of China’s best-known theater personalities, Meng has enjoyed a long string of successes adapting foreign concepts to Chinese audiences. He brought Rent to China as the story of a missing real-estate tycoon. “We don’t have bohemia, we don’t have so many drug users or gay people, and we don’t do threesomes,” he told NPR in 2009. “So, we use your structure, and we put our lives into it.” Unlike The Great Dictator, Hitler’s Belly declines to tackle questions of Judaism, focusing instead on issues relevant to a Chinese audience: corruption in the Ministry of Railways, lies from the government, and the difficulty of affording a house. Many artists prefer to satirize the present in China by criticizing the past.

“The most difficult part of the acting for me was moving between history and politics,” said Liu. To announce the birth of his son, Hitler holds a press conference. He tells the Chinese journalists in attendance that the pregnancy is a “miracle,” a loaded term because it mocks the government’s response to a recent deadly train crash—after a bullet train derailed last July, killing scores, a Railway Ministry spokesman called the rescue of one child survivor “a miracle,” invoking the ire of many. This draws a healthy laugh from the audience.

The play, which has toured Shanghai, Beijing, and will be in Guangzhou in October, has played almost exclusively to packed houses, Meng said. On the performance’s last night in Beijing in early August, the theater was filled with people in their 20s and 30s, constantly laughing and clapping at the satire and the slapstick, according to the director. Liu portrays a bumbling, melancholic side of the dictator, who shouts “Heil Myself!” whenever anyone salutes him. He does a gentle Chaplin, and his Eva Braun flashes her chest to Hitler whenever she gets excited.

In China, Hitler isn’t known for the Holocaust, but rather for achieving social stability with a very high human cost. “In general, they refer to him as very lihai, very hardcore, someone who is strong, powerful,” said Rabbi Nussin Rodin, a Chabad representative in Beijing. “You can be strong and powerful and good, and strong and powerful and bad. It’s weird. I don’t know what to say.” With China’s regime facing growing internal criticism for mishandling any number of things, from the escalating price of fuel to train safety, Hitler’s perceived image as a strong leader who was able to maintain social stability makes him an attractive figure to many.

Outside the Beijing theater, which is perched above a karaoke parlor in a wealthy part of town, college student Liu Mingyu said that he came because of the director and thought the play was funny. “There’s nothing good about him,” Liu said of the Hitler character, “except that he’s strong-willed, that’s the only advantage he’s got. But in general he’s a bad guy, I suppose.”

Some Chinese sympathy toward Hitler is fueled by a persistent—and false—rumor claiming that when Hitler was an impoverished young student in Vienna, he was taken in by a Chinese family named Zhang. “Looking at Hitler From a Different Angle,” an article published last month on the website of the People’s Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party, reported that during Hitler’s youth, a Chinese family gave him “Oriental style selfless help,” and that because of this he had a “warm and close feeling toward China.” Many Chinese believe that Hitler had secretly supported China during World War II, despite Germany’s alignment with China’s wartime oppressor, Japan. Hitler is well-known in China; rural residents especially don’t necessarily see him as a sign of evil. Olivia Kraef, a Beijing-based sinologist from Germany, related a story of a recent trip in China, where someone wanted to drink a toast to Hitler with her. “That was the first thing he came up with when he met me,” she said. “Hitler, soccer.”

Bizarrely, support for Hitler does not in any way suggest disdain for Jews. On the contrary: Chinese people on the whole are very approving of Judaism and Jewish culture, seeing Jews as experts in both moneymaking and child rearing, with a long history and a strong tradition of education. And, unsurprisingly in a country where Mao’s all-seeing portrait still hangs from Tiananmen Square, Chinese tend to shy away from comparisons between their homegrown contender for the title of history’s greatest butcher. “I don’t think there can be any comparison between Hitler and Mao,” said Meng. “Mao’s biggest spirit was to serve the people; Mao loved the people. That’s the biggest difference.”

Isaac Stone Fish is a Beijing-based reporter for Newsweek and the Daily Beast.

On Watch the Throne, his new album with Jay-Z—which dropped on iTunes Sunday morning—one track, “Who Gon Stop Me,” begins with Kanye rapping, “This is something like the Holocaust/Millions of our people lost.” Like because of Hitler?

Kanye has played with overstating the tragedy of the black experience in America—or, some would say, with arguing that what are commonly taken as overstatements of that experience are in fact apt—before. “I treat the cash the way government treats AIDS,” he rapped on “Gorgeous,” the second track on last year’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. “I won’t be satisfied till all my n***as get it. Get it?” (Get it?)

Still, to compare yourself both to Hitler and to Hitler’s Jewish victims in the span of a few hours takes plenty of chutzpah. Maybe Drake isn’t the most Jewish member of his feud with Kanye after all? In a subsequent verse of “Who Gon Stop Me,” Kanye compares himself to the sportscasters Marv Albert and Howard Cosell, two extremely Jewish men. Drake, speak up!

How Hated? Kanye West Likens Himself to Hitler [ArtsBeat]
Earlier: Jewish Rapper’s Bickering Beef With Kanye

I recently published a book about Shakespeare’s impact on the material world—on things like the existence of starlings in North America, the assassination of Lincoln, and the sexual revolution, among others—but Shakespeare’s influence on politics was the hardest part of the book to write. What were Shakespeare’s politics? Four hundred years after his death, anyone with an interest in sounding grandiloquent can cull a telling phrase from one play or another: Liberals can mumble about “the winter of our discontent” and conservatives can bluster that “the lady doth protest too much.” The greatest modern practitioner of the Shakespeare quote for political purposes was the late Sen. Robert Byrd, who repeatedly found obscure and beautiful lines from little-known plays like Henry VIII or King John. But Shakespeare, I found out, can mean many things to many people.

Take Hitler, for example. A few months after he became chancellor of Germany, the Nazi Party issued a pamphlet titled Shakespeare—a Germanic Writer, and in 1936, there were more productions of Shakespeare in Germany than in the rest of the world combined. Joseph Goebbels’ favorite professor at Heidelberg was the Jewish Friedrich Gundolf, author of Shakespeare and the German Spirit. But Shakespeare fought on both sides of the divide: The Communists under Stalin elevated Shakespeare to the ranks of the “Great Thinkers of the Age,” a list that culminated in Lenin and Stalin. During the Stalin era, more than 5 million copies of Shakespeare were published in the 28 languages of the Soviet Union, and thousands of productions of his plays were authorized. (Stalin, however, reportedly frowned on productions of Hamlet, disliking the Danish prince’s indecisiveness.)

And yet, even though Shakespeare served the nastiest totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, he also became a tool for resistance against them. Hitler’s Germany loved Shakespeare but also feared him. Ironically, the one play they couldn’t handle was The Merchant of Venice, which languished after 1933. In 1938, Merchant was placed on the blacklist, to be confiscated from libraries. The Nazis and their Ministry of Propaganda feared two of the play’s most salient features: Shylock’s “Hath not a Jew eyes” speech (and since he has only five appearances in the entire play, it becomes complicated to cut any of his speeches) and his daughter Jessica’s marriage to a non-Jew, which was illegal under Nazi law. One major production avoided this embarrassment by making Jessica a foster daughter rather than a blood relation, cutting Shylock’s key line from the third act, “My own flesh and blood to rebel!” Still, Nazi officials took no risks with that production. They hired actors to sit in the audience and shout insults at Shylock whenever he entered.

In Eastern bloc countries, in the second half of the 20th century, Shakespeare grew more and more of a worry to the authorities. Polish critic Jan Kott’s absurdist reading of the plays, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, was banned across the Communist world. After the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, productions of Shakespeare became a major avenue for protest. The Theatre on the Balustrade in Prague, in January 1969, put on a Timon of Athens rife with disillusionment and coded messages about the invading Soviets. The actors even added a rhyming couplet to the end of Act 3, scene 1: “Those that have power to hurt and smother/ Will heap one injury upon another.” The cultural officials of the state caught on to these coded performances quickly enough and banned them. But they couldn’t stop everybody from performing Shakespeare. In 1978, three dissident actors who had been banned from performing in Czechoslovakia did one of the silliest and most beautiful Shakespeare performances ever conceived: They called themselves the Living-Room Theatre, and they put on Macbeth in the privacy of their own homes. Shakespeare became a way for actors without a stage to assert themselves.

Shakespeare serves many political masters but none of them faithfully, and ambivalence about the relationship between power and art riddle his plays. After Marc Anthony’s stirring funeral oration in Julius Caesar, the enraged crowd stumbles on Cinna the poet, whom they confuse with one of the conspirators, also named Cinna.

Third Plebian: Your name, sir, truly.

Cinna: Truly, my name is Cinna.

First Plebian: Tear him to pieces! He’s a conspirator.

Cinna: I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet.

Fourth Plebian: Tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses.

Cinna: I am not Cinna the conspirator.

First Plebian: It is no matter, his name’s Cinna; pluck but his name out of his heart, and turn him going.

The crowd doesn’t just kill Cinna. They rip him apart. Which is remarkable for two reasons. Ripping a poet apart is not only exceedingly violent but also nearly impossible to stage. Not only is the crowd mad in its rampaging violence; it is consciously mad, aware that it is slaughtering an innocent for no good reason. The pathetic excuses of the plebians are even more horrifying than the violence they are trying to cover. The crowd is not just mistaken. It revels in its own stupidity, a phantom reminiscence of the self-conscious barbarism of the Nazi mobs.

In Julius Caesar, art is a casualty of power, but in Hamlet, it’s the opposite: Art redeems history. The play-within-the-play is how the prince figures out whether to kill his uncle. A work of theater proves the justness of the assassination: “The play’s the thing/ Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.” During the performance of The Murder of Gonzago in the play’s third act, the murdering usurper Claudius calls for light, and Hamlet howls, “What, frighted with false fire?” For such a complicated play, the relationship between art and power is surprisingly simple. The play-within-a-play shows Claudius a direct representation of his own crime, and he cracks. All it takes is a clear representation of the cruelty of power to reveal what it is and what to do about it.

So, Shakespeare gives us a double vision. Power rips art to pieces. And art reveals the hidden crimes of the powerful. Shakespeare predicted his own abuse and redemption. Just like with Cinna in Julius Caesar, he was torn apart by Nazi and Communist mobs, and just like with Hamlet and his uncle Claudius, his plays have offered false fire to startle the guilty heart of power everywhere.

So, how are we to judge the bard as political figure? How are we to tote up his effects on the world of power politics? After massive public criticism of a performance of The Merchant of Venice at the Habimah Theater in Palestine in 1936, the theater responded by organizing a mock trial for Shakespeare just as Shakespeare had organized a trial for Shylock. The accused were William Shakespeare, the director Leopold Jessner, who had been a major power in Berlin’s theatrical world before the Nazis came to power, and the Habimah Theater itself. Needless to say, in Israel, where any two people in an argument have three opinions, the prosecution and defense were both shambles. Traditionalists argued that Shylock could not have been Jewish, because revenge was not a Jewish practice. The socialists argued that Shylock was a warning to the creeping spirit of speculation and profiteering starting to rear its head in the burgeoning state. In other words, Shylock was the wrong kind of Jew, not a Jew, or the ultimately wronged Jew all at the same time. The Merchant of Venice has been performed throughout Israel’s history—after the founding of the state, after the conquests of 1967, after the beginnings of the intifada. In each case, it has provoked massive outcry and defense.

Germany after World War II, as the only nation in the world that has honestly tried to confront its historical crimes, has also had a fraught relationship with Merchant. After an initial series of “expiation Shylocks” in which the character was played as an innocent, more sinned against than sinning, Germans began to incorporate their own past into the play. In a 1995 adaptation, the premise was Jewish prisoners at Buchenwald performing the play for their SS guards, after which all the actors were killed. A later German production incorporated scenes from Merchant into a concentration-camp narrative that converts the play’s plot into scenes of Nazi torture. The moral simplicity of such outrage doesn’t fit the complexities of history: The Nazi guards supposedly watching The Merchant of Venice for their amusement would, in reality, have been quite offended by the play. Despite the discomfort of the Israelis and the Germans, Shylock was too human for actual Nazis. Consider his most famous speech:

I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, sense, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is?—if you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?

Does it make this passage more brilliant or less that it comes out of the mouth of a stock Jewish villain? Shakespeare insists on the humanity even of people he stereotypes. That’s the core of the Shakespeare’s politics. The 20th century produced several extended experiments in the ways that men and women can be turned into objects to be processed or destroyed at will. Our common humanity is a massive embarrassment to this programme. Shakespeare insists on this embarrassment.

If, as George Orwell claimed, the future is a boot stamping on a human face over and over, Shakespeare has put human faces on display over and over in response. He insists above all on the fascination of his characters, on their indestructible personhood. Or, to put it another way: Like everyone else, like Hitler and Stalin and Churchill, I have found in Shakespeare the confirmation of my own political views—in my case an unremarkable but passionate brand of bland 21st-century humanism. Everybody finds what he or she is looking for, and I’m no exception.

Stephen Marche is the author of the newly released How Shakespeare Changed Everything, from which this piece is excerpted.

“I really wanted to be a Jew,” he said, in response to a question about using Wagner in his latest film’s soundtrack, “and then I found out that I was really a Nazi. Which also gave me some pleasure. I understand Hitler. I think I understand the man, he’s not what you would call a good guy. But I understand much about him. And I sympathize with him a little bit.”

Cue the requisite media maelstrom: As soon as von Trier was done talking, bloggers blogged, pundits pronounced, the festival’s organizers mumbled a few disapproving words, and the din, as is usually the case with things of this sort, grew too loud for anyone to make any sense of the situation.

Let us, then, attempt to parse von Trier’s strange utterance. By which, to be clear, I mean not necessarily the actual statement—a notorious prankster, the director is perpetually in the habit of stirring sensations, both on film and in life, and might have well conjured his latest comments as a maladroit, if ultimately successful, attempt at controversy—but rather the meaning that lies at the other end of the outrage and the buzz.

To do that, we must zoom in on von Trier’s childhood. Raised by parents who were committed communists and zealous nudists, the director nonetheless grew up with a vague sense of Jewish identity, as his father, Ulf Trier, was a Jew. But Ulf Trier, it turned out, wasn’t really von Trier’s father: As she lay dying, the director’s mother confessed that his biological father was really her boss, a German by the name of Fritz Michael Hartmann.

As with most deathbed confessions, hers, too, was rich in pathos. “Before she died,” von Trier recalled the moment in a 2005 interview with the German weekly Die Zeit, “my mother told me to be happy that I was the son of this other man. She said my foster father had had no goals and no strength. But he was a loving man. And I was very sad about this revelation.” Hartmann, the mother said, had come from a long line of classical musicians, and she believed that by becoming pregnant with his child she would produce an artistic genius. “You then feel manipulated when you really do turn out to be creative,” von Trier mused. “If I’d known that my mother had this plan, I would have become something else. I would have shown her. The slut!”

The statement, of course, is enough to keep legions of psychoanalysts busy throughout a long, happy career. But note this—as soon as the interviewer asked von Trier about his personal life, he repeated more or less the same thing he had said at Cannes. “Until that point I thought I had a Jewish background,” he said at the time. “But I’m really more of a Nazi.”

Strange as it may seem, this week’s parasha is a perfect prism through which to observe l’affaire von Trier. The bulk of it consists of a very wrathful God, threatening his people with all manner of horrors should they defy his will. What horrors? The pleasure is in the details: “You will sow your seed in vain, and your enemies will eat it.” “I will incite the wild beasts of the field against you, and they will bereave you, utterly destroy your livestock and diminish you, and your roads will become desolate.” “You will eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters you will eat.” This is every bit as gruesome as, say, the bloody castration scene in von Trier’s last film, Antichrist, which shocked critics at Cannes when it showed there in 2009.

Precisely what it is that would warrant the cannibalization of one’s own children, God doesn’t say. Nor, by the way, does he explain how the devoured-kids business squares with the purported prohibition on punishing children for the sins of their parents. But let us not get too legalistic; the main thing that the parasha wants us to take away is the real and devastating wrath of which God is capable should we forget our ways and stray away from the covenant. This rage is irrational, irrevocable, pure. If he wasn’t capable of great and terrible violence, goes the logic, God’s subsequent mercy would be nothing but mush.

Let us now jump back to that deathbed in Denmark. What he thought was his affinity to the kind and loving Jew was eclipsed by the existence of the imperious and cold German, who met his biological son a few times later in life and then refused all further contact. It’s little wonder that von Trier went on to make films that highlight the unending potential for devastation to rise even amid the most serene settings and insisted—most notoriously in his Dogme 95 manifesto—on the sort of filmmaking the sanctifies honesty and rejects artifice. He realized that once we drift from the spiritual essence that makes us who we are, a Hitler, figurative or literal, is likely to emerge, a horror so ghastly it can leave nothing in its wake but ruin.

That, perhaps, is the overarching theme of all of von Trier’s films, and it is also the theme of this week’s parasha; both urge us to never forget our covenants—with God, with each other, with ourselves—or risk terrible pain. In a strange way, saying “I am a Nazi” may be the most Jewish thing Lars von Trier has ever done.

Israel has been called “a one-bomb state” in that a single megaton-sized bomb detonated in Tel Aviv could accomplish such destruction. Many prefer to live in denial of this possibility. The people of Israel don’t have this luxury. If you don’t think they’ve war-gamed this possibility, think again. Many focus on Iran’s potential nuclear weaponry and the statements of Iranian leaders such as Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani that Iran would “welcome” a nuclear exchange with Israel because while it might lose 15 million people there would be a billion and half Muslims left on earth and no Jews in what was once Israel. But there is less focus on the current reality of the so called “Islamic bomb”—Pakistan’s 60 to 100 nukes, now ever more vulnerable to takeover by Taliban al-Qaida sympathizers. Seizable by or salable to terrorists.

What happens if it happens? A “second Holocaust”? One thing we can be fairly certain of: Israel will have the capacity for nuclear retaliation. Israel has purchased and put into operation at least three German-manufactured (!) long-range “Dolphin class” submarines, capable of being fitted out with nuclear weapons.

There has been all sorts of information and disinformation about the disposition of these subs, but most analysts seem to believe they are cruising the waters of the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea, within range of the most likely targets. And, many believe, they are armed with nuclear-tipped Harpoon cruise missiles. Ready to retaliate.

This is complicated by the potential of an attack from a terrorist “bomb with no return address,” smuggled across any one of three borders, or lobbed in from off shore. Whom to retaliate against? And is retaliation moral under Jewish law?

“How could they not?” is one’s first response. But what is the point, what is the morality of killing 15 or 50 million people in order to carry out a threat that failed to deter an attack? The most famous Biblical verses are divided: “An eye for an eye,” says one but “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” says the other.

What have the submarine commanders been ordered to do if they are cut off from the chain of command in what is left of the State of Israel? Will it be up to them in any case? Nations that rely on submarine nuclear capacity as their last line of nuclear deterrence have all devised “workarounds” should their subs be cut off from home base by a decapacitating attack. The United Kingdom, for instance, has a “Letter of Last Resort” locked in a safe in their subs’ control rooms. It purportedly gives the prime minister’s orders about retaliation if he’s cut off. In other words, although they may have orders not to fire without orders, if the ones who give the orders are dead or incommunicado the submarine commanders must have the power to launch in order to give the threat of retaliation “credibility.”

I wouldn’t want that power, that decision in my hands. But what if it were in your hands? Put yourself in the place of an Israeli submarine commander knowing his family has likely perished in the Holy Land conflagration. How many missiles would you launch, how many—and who—would you decide to kill? Is there a “just” number, a “proportional” number? Is any number just? Would it be done to prevent a third holocaust? On abstract “just punishment” grounds?

In the course of writing How the End Begins, which deals with the moral dimensions of questions like nuclear retaliation, I sought to find the state of Jewish wisdom about these questions among the best, most learned Jewish thinkers on this question.

It wasn’t easy.

***

What is the moral status of such retaliation? A friend familiar with the faculty of New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary offered to put me in contact with three of the sages there most familiar with such difficult ethical questions such as justice and retaliation and the history of Jewish thinking on the question.

I asked them, separately, to put themselves in the place of a Jewish submarine commander who learns of a nuclear Holocaust in Israel, and, cut off from his home base chain of command by the destruction of land-based communications links, must decide for himself what is the just response. What, in effect, would the sages’ Letter of Last Resort say?

The results played out almost as in some biblical story, or perhaps as if I were the wicked son asking the wicked question at the Passover feast. First one sage, then a second, pronounced himself unwilling to confront the question. Almost as if it were an affront to have been asked. One just wouldn’t comment, the other claimed a lack of expertise. I hate to say it, but I had a feeling they were afraid to commit themselves. These are literally explosive issues. Better to stay in their safe tenured little patch of academia than risk saying something on urgent but controversial questions where their purported wisdom might help ordinary people wrestle with huge life-or-death decisions. Academic timidity, don’t get me started. These are the ethics of genocide and you have nothing to say?

The third sage at least left me with a memorable phrase that I felt justified the quest. When I asked him my forbidden question about the morality of retaliation, particularly in the event of second Holocaust in Israel, he said, “You’re asking something new under the sun.”

“Something new under the sun.” He understood! These are not questions that have had to be asked before the nuclear age. Perhaps the principles applied are older but the alternatives, genocide on each side of the question—this is “something new under the sun.”

And so you’re left with me to think about it and to ask you to think about it. One thing I want to think about is the possibility of nonretaliation. No striking back. Not necessarily to advocate it, but to describe my encounter with an advocate of it.

Continue reading: a second Holocaust, Falstaff, and “irregular warfare.” Or view as a single page.

• The Palestine Papers keep on giving: In 2009, Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat told U.S. envoy George Mitchell that President Obama lost “credibility … throughout the region,” adding, “people in the Middle East are not taking Barack Obama seriously. They feared Bush, despite everything.” [JPost]

• The Qatari emir told Sen. Kerry about a year ago that now is the time for the United States to engage Syria, and that Hamas will accept a deal along the 1967 borders, though won’t say so publicly. This one’s WikiLeaks. [WikiLeaks]

• Her intentions aside, Anthony Grafton condemns Sarah Palin’s invocation of the term “blood libel” for the damage it does to history and to the memories of countless Jews who suffered because of it. [TNR]

• A new entry in the “who sucked more, Hitler or Stalin?” debate from Bloodlands author Timothy Snyder. Turns out that Stalin was more motivated by ethnicity than was thought … but that Hitler really did kill significantly more innocents. [NYRB]

• Tablet Magazine contributor Nicholas Noe argues that U.S. policy toward Lebanon since the 2005 Cedar Revolution was a colossal failure, only helping Hezbollah, and that the one way to head off a really bad confrontation with Israel would be to push Israel to make peace with Syria. [NYT]

• Gal Beckerman remembers the late Samuel T. Cohen, the little-known inventor of the neutron bomb whose memoir was called F*** You: Mr. President. [Forward]

• David Nesenoff, the journalist who asked the question that prompted Helen Thomas’s infamous response, has been appointed editor and publisher of Long Island’s The Jewish Star. [The Jewish Star]

• Hélène Grimaud is a courageous, amazing, and beautiful French pianist. So naturally she has to be Jewish, right? Wikipedia, take it away: “She is descended from Sephardi Jews from Corsica on her mother’s side and from Berber Jews on her father’s side.” God, French Jews are great. [NYT]

• Weekend reading: Two articles by the late Daniel Bell. [Dissent]

• The legendary Eric Hobsbawn tackles the strange tale of the Jews of San Nicandro, ably handled in Tablet Magazine by books critic Adam Kirsch. [LRB]

• Futurist-novelist William Gibson finds Stuxnet’s roots in the world of digital vandalism. [NYT]

30 Rock makes a joke about Tablet Magazine’s official Canadian Football League head coach, the tastefully named Marc Trestman (h/t Kaplan’s Korner):

Sure, there are good reasons to pair the Jew hating Richard Nixon with the Jew hating, but self-loving Henry Kissinger. Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat go together like pastrami and kosher salami. But, deep down, you know it’s weird that Jews needed a chaperone until 2009, while Charles Lindbergh made the cut the very first time around in 1927.

Below, Time Magazine’s People of the Year who didn’t like, actively hated, or were, as we say, not very good for the Jews.

Charles Lindbergh (1927)
Pierre Laval (1931)
Wallis Simpson, duchess of Windsor (1936)
Adolf Hitler (1938)
Josef Stalin (1939)
Richard Nixon/Henry Kissinger (1972)
Ayatollah Khomeini (1979)
Yasser Arafat (1993)
You* (2006)

*Yes, you.
You could call more often.
What, do you want to kill your parents?

Person of the Year 2010 [Time]
Earlier: Jews Give It Up
‘Time’ Names Bernanke ‘Person of the Year’
Related: Why Kissinger Dismissed the Soviet Jews
Richard Nixon Explains Anti-Semitism
Why Rabin Shook Arafat’s Hand
Carl Paladino’s Betrayal of Reason

Each change of regime, each military campaign, brought death on a massive scale—from combat, but still more from imprisonment, massacre, deportation, and deliberate starvation. Between 1933 and 1945, 14 million civilians and prisoners of war were killed in this region. As Timothy Snyder emphasizes in his important new history, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books, $29.95), this fantastic figure does not include combatants, even though half of all the soldiers killed in the Second World War, on all fronts around the globe, died in Eastern Europe.

What it does include, of course, are the 5 to 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust, which took place exactly in the region that Snyder designates “the bloodlands.” Something like 40 percent of the civilians killed in the bloodlands were Jewish victims of the Germans and their collaborators. Or, as Snyder writes in another attempt to put the Jewish experience in perspective, “Jews were less than two percent of the population [of the USSR] and Russians more than half; [yet] the Germans murdered more Jewish civilians than Russian civilians in the occupied Soviet Union.”

“Jews were in a category of their own,” Snyder goes on to write. The language of history reflects this: We speak of the Holocaust as a unique event, in some way different from the mass killing that took place all around it. One of Snyder’s major achievements in Bloodlands is to preserve this sense of the singularity of Jewish experience, even while showing its complex relationship to the terrible experiences of the peoples among whom Jews lived. This is notoriously a very difficult thing for historians to do, and the ground Snyder covers in this book has often been the source of controversy and recrimination. To Jews, any attempt to put the Holocaust “in context” can sound like an attempt to diminish its importance, to relativize it.

Jews have also been troubled by any emphasis on the suffering of other nations under Hitler—of Poles, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Lithuanians—because collaborators of all these nationalities played a crucial role in the murder of the Jews. Indeed, the Holocaust could not have happened without the participation of the Slavs. To take just one of the countless illuminating statistics in Bloodlands: In Lithuania, the German unit (Einsatzkommando) in charge of killing the Jews of Kaunas “numbered only 139 personnel, including secretaries and drivers, of which there were forty-four.” Yet between June and December of 1941, such small units managed to kill 114,856 Lithuanian Jews. Clearly, the work of killing was done mainly by native Lithuanians: The Nazis “had as many helpers as [they] needed,” Snyder writes.

Yet Snyder also does justice to the experiences of the Slavic peoples, which were often as terrible as the fate suffered by Jews. The first chapter in Bloodlands is titled “The Soviet Famines,” and it centers on Ukraine in 1932-33, where more than 3.3 million people died of starvation. This is half as many as died in the Holocaust; and while they died of hunger, rather than gassing or shooting, they were deliberately killed by Stalin just as surely as the Jews were by Hitler. Snyder explains why and how, “facing no external security threat and no challenge from within, with no conceivable justification except to prove the inevitability of his rule, Stalin chose to kill millions of people in Soviet Ukraine.”

The reason was, first, economic. Intent on industrializing the Soviet economy, the Communists seized food from the peasants of Ukraine—the Soviet Union’s “breadbasket”—in order to sell it abroad, thus earning the money to pay for foreign technology and industrial equipment. In other words, there was never really a food shortage in the USSR; Stalin could have stopped the famine simply by stopping food exports. Adherence to Marxist ideology—which saw the urban proletariat as a more revolutionary class than the rural peasantry—led Stalin to make war on one section of his own population. In this way, Snyder shows, Communism led to the same kind of ideologically inspired killing as Nazism, though the victims were defined more by class than by ethnicity.

Yet Stalin did also practice what Snyder calls “National Terror,” in addition to “Class Terror.” He persecuted the Poles of the Soviet Union because of his fear of Poland, against which the USSR had fought a war in 1920, and the secret police fed these fears by inventing ludicrous conspiracy theories about Polish espionage. In 1937-38, during the Great Terror, almost 700,000 Soviet citizens were killed; of these, 85,000 were Poles, even though Poles made up less than one half of 1 percent of the Soviet population. Similar atrocities were directed against Lithuanians, Koreans, and other peoples who could theoretically look to a foreign state as a protector. Snyder convincingly argues, in the last chapter of Bloodlands, that the resurgence of Soviet anti-Semitism after 1948 can be seen as a late example of this kind of national terror. Once the Jews of the USSR could look to Israel as a homeland, Stalin began to see them as another potential threat. Before he died, in 1953, he encouraged the concoction of the “Doctors’ Plot,” which accused Jewish doctors of medically murdering high-placed Soviet officials—possibly as a prelude to another mass purge.

The relationship between Jews and Communism is probably the most explosive of all the subjects Snyder addresses, and here he benefits most from the strengths he shows throughout the book—deep learning, wide compassion, and clear, careful moral judgment. To this day, there are some in Eastern Europe who continue to minimize, or explain, or even justify the Holocaust by pointing to the atrocities inflicted on their own peoples by so-called Jewish Communists. Snyder shows the reasons why this line of argument has found adherents, especially in the war years. It was never true that most, or even many, Jews were Communists; but it is true that many prominent Communists were Jews. Maxim Litvinoff, the Soviet foreign minister during the 1930s, was Jewish—Stalin dismissed him in 1939 when he made his alliance with Hitler, in deference to Nazi anti-Semitism. Lazar Kaganovich was one of Stalin’s most loyal enforcers and played a major role in both the Ukrainian famine and the Terror.

Jews were also disproportionately represented in the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. There were historical reasons for this, which Snyder might have stated more explicitly: It was the experience of Tsarist anti-Semitism that led so many Jews to feel that Communism was their best hope. But in the 1930s, the association of Communism with Jews—fed by Hitler’s propaganda, which referred incessantly to “Judeo-Bolshevism”—made it dangerously easy for many Eastern Europeans to see patriotism, anti-Communism, and anti-Semitism as part of the same package. The fact that one of the last acts of the Soviet regime in Poland and the Baltics, before the Germans arrived in 1941, was to massacre political prisoners only added fuel to the flames. By the time the Nazis arrived, these conditions made many Balts and Slavs feel that killing Jews was somehow striking a blow for their national dignity.

While Snyder explains the feelings behind this view, he also scrupulously shows that it was factually baseless. There was, of course, no connection between massacring Jewish women and children and resisting Soviet power. What’s more, Soviet Communists were themselves active persecutors of Jews, especially in Poland. As Yehuda Bauer showed in his recent study The Death of the Shtetl, Soviet rule everywhere destroyed Jewish civilization: No one was more viciously opposed to Judaism and Jewish culture than Jewish Communists. And, of course, only a small fraction of Jews were Communists at any time, in any sense; more were socialists or Zionists. Still, the association of Jews and Communism lingered even after the war, when some of the Communist rulers imposed by Stalin on Eastern Europe were Jews.

Lithuanian or Ukrainian nationalists who helped the Germans kill Jews, hoping that it would serve their own causes, were quickly disabused. When Snyder turns from the Soviet to the Nazi side of the story, he shows that the Holocaust of the Jews was not the only genocide the Nazis had in mind. They had similar plans for the whole of Eastern Europe, involving the mass murder and starvation of Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians. In accordance with Nazi racial theory, these peoples were to be reduced to slavery, in the service of German settlers who would turn the whole of Eastern Europe into an Aryan agricultural empire. If the German Army had captured Moscow in the fall of 1941, knocking the USSR out of the war as Hitler intended, the Nazis planned to starve 30 million people to death so the invaders could feed themselves.

When the invasion stalled, the Nazis decided to focus on the one aspect of their “utopia” it was still in their power to achieve: the extermination of the Jews. “The Final Solution,” Snyder writes, “was the one atrocity that took on a more radical form in the realization than in the conception. Soviet Jews were supposed to work themselves to death building a German empire or be deported further east. This proved impossible; [so] most Jews in the East were killed where they lived.” Four of Snyder’s 11 chapters are devoted primarily to the Holocaust, a measure of how central it was to the fate of the “bloodlands.” Indeed, anyone who wants to fully comprehend the Holocaust—at least, as far as it can be comprehended—should read Bloodlands, which shows how much evil had to be done in order to make the ultimate evil possible.

At the very least, the result seems to demonstrate that Hitler was of mixed race, which was pretty much a no-no by itself, as I recall. “This is a surprising result,” said a Belgian geneticist. “Hitler would not have been happy.” Oh noes!

‘DNA Shows Hitler of Mixed Race’ [JPost]
Hitler Likely Had Jewish, African Roots [JTA]

German Faces Jail for Adolph Hitler Mobile Phone Ring Tone [Telegraph]

• If it wasn’t clear enough before, the United States can definitely no longer count on Turkey backing it on major issues. [National Interest]

• Is Turkey attempting to revive its Ottoman (read: imperial) roots? [TNR]

• A profile of Elena Kagan’s family, which managed to be Jewish, left-wing, and Upper West Side, all at the same time. [NYT]

• Bollywood is making a controversial Hitler biopic. [Arts Beat]

• Indoors this weekend? Check out Executive Editor Gabriel Sanders interviewing Kai Bird, author of the memoir Crossing Mandelbaum’s Gate, on Book TV. [CSPAN]

A song about Molly Bloom. Music (and performer): Alicia Jo Rabins. Lyrics: James Joyce.

Alicia Jo Rabins sings Molly Bloom from Tablet Magazine on Vimeo.

• The legendary Leonard Nimoy, 79, announced his retirement from show business. [Before It's News]

• The Christian Broadcasting Network features an interview with photojournalist David Rubinger, who has documented much of Israel’s history and describes the face of the first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion as “Like granite.” [CBN]

• Israel’s national museum unveiled a restored Renaissance-era Hebrew manuscript documenting Jewish law and adorned with gold and gems. [AP]

• Los Angeles’s South Robertson Neighborhood Council has elected Orthodox 15-year-old Rachel Lester, the youngest elected public representative in the city. [JTA]

• Virginia has recalled a license plate reading “14CV88,” allegedly a coded reference to Hitler. That may sound paranoid, but check out the photo of the truck that boasted it. [AP via VIN]

In his recent book Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, Jeffrey Herf claims that “The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians would have been over long ago were it not for the uncompromising, religiously inspired hatred of the Jews that was articulated and given assistance by Nazi propagandists and continued after the war by Islamists of various sorts.” One example comes from a 1942 message broadcast to the Middle East in which Hitler announced: “Your only hope for rescue is the destruction of the Jews before they destroy you!” The transcript for this and 6,000 other broadcasts were held as classified by Washington until 1977, and two years ago Herf became the first scholar to examine them.

Roots of Islamic Fundamentalism Lie in Nazi Propaganda for Arab World, Book Claims [Telegraph]

So why would New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg decide to also proclaim the date Jewish American Heritage Day, as a media alert from organizers of Jewish American Heritage Month announced?

Turns out, he didn’t.

A spokesman for the mayor, after initially confirming the proclamation, finally and definitively stated that no such announcement was made. “The only proclamation we have is about May being Jewish American Heritage Month,” said Evelyn Erskine in the mayor’s press office.

“It was just a miscommunication,” Abby Schwartz, the national coordinator of Jewish American Heritage Month, said when contacted by Tablet Magazine. She’d also announced the apparently nonexistent proclamation at a press event yesterday at a Manhattan synagogue. “We were having the event that day and somewhere along the line it got miscommunicated about Jewish American Heritage Day,” Schwartz told Tablet. “That is not accurate and I recant it.”

This, at least, is how the Internet would have it. Slapping original subtitles onto a scene from the 2004 German film Downfall, scores of YouTube auteurs have made Hitler one of the Internet’s most popular memes. The scene remains the same—the Führer, portrayed by Bruno Ganz, is livid, shouting at his generals and flailing his arms in anger—but the creative translations explore every nook of the news, from politics to pop culture. The most popular videos in this cottage industry have attracted more than 4 million viewers to date.

Much has been written about this phenomenon. For the most part, commentators either dismissed the clip as another in a long line of random and amusing Internet gags, or focused on the obvious and argued that laughing at a horror such as Hitler provided catharsis.

While such explanations are plausible, neither addresses the fundamental question at the heart of this cultural anomaly: why Hitler? Why not, say, Darth Vader? Why not Robert Duvall’s apoplectic Stalin? A host of other characters fit the bill just as well, yet we chose Hitler. And not, mind you, the Führer of The Producers or The Great Dictator; while these and other earlier comic depictions found much to mock about the Nazi leader’s power and pomp, the Internet clips find humor in Hitler’s darkest hour, when he ceases to be the bête noir of history and comes as close as we’ll ever see him to a vulnerable human being.

There’s much evidence to suggest that Internet Hitler is vastly different than former parodies of the man. Mel Brooks’s Hitler, for example, as well as Charlie Chaplin’s, made us laugh because they exaggerated the silliness evident just beneath the surface of any totalitarian enterprise, with its fetishistic approach to power and footwear and its childlike insistence on immediate gratification. Internet Hitler, however, is just the opposite. He can’t catch a break. Nothing goes his way. With few exceptions, he finds himself put down by some large and cumbersome bureaucratic organization, be it the DNC or the NFL, Microsoft or a municipality. In his energetic rant, Internet Hitler is a latter-day Howard Beale, mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.

We can ask for no better endorser of our ennui. Once we overcome the joke’s initial appeal—can you imagine Hitler going on Facebook?!?—we’re left with a pulsating feeling, not always coherent, that the joke’s funny because it’s true; that Hitler would get mad at Microsoft; that even Hitler would get mad at Microsoft; that the inconveniences and annoyances that make up so much of our days are so outrageous that even the greatest architect of evil our collective imagination could evoke would find our condition utterly intolerable.

To better understand how we’ve come to feel this way about Hitler, it’s to Hitler himself we should refer, not the film version but the real historical figure. Whatever else World War II had been—a momentous battle, shaper of geopolitical realities, engine of death—we remember it now primarily as a symbol for perhaps our last great and uncomplicated war. From the mud in Faluja or the dunes of Kandahar, all we have to do to assuage the ambiguities of our current conflicts is close our eyes and think of Normandy. But specificity, of course, fades with time, and the war and everything it represents in our memory gradually became embodied in its talisman: Hitler, the Absolute Evil. Like every religious icon, when we see Hitler, we’re supposed to feel a swell of transcendental emotion: Just as the Christian beholding the crucifix should feel Jesus’s compassion and sacrifice and love, a Jew—or, for that matter, any American, or any contemporary westerner—looking at the image of Hitler should feel hateful and enraged and proud to side with the enlightened men who risked everything to rid the world of this mustachioed menace.

But just as Christ evokes a spiritual ideal that could never be obtained by us mortals, so does Hitler. We will never again have an enemy who so purely and uncomplicatedly represents all that is foul with humanity. Milosevic, Ahmadinejad, Mugabe—none has succeeded in dethroning Hitler as the universally iconic stand-in for all of humanity’s malice. We may fear them and loathe them, but we do so as humans fearing and loathing other humans. This is why the constant rhetorical gambit abused by politicians, the one about it being 1938 and the next Hitler being right around the corner, is not only historically inaccurate but also emotionally empty. Most of us won’t let ourselves get swept up by it precisely because we know—we feel!—that there could never really be another Hitler to terrify and enrage us so purely as the original once had.

And with no real Hitler, with no real evil to fight to the death, the unpleasantnesses that dot our lives loom larger and larger. The sports franchise run by greedy executives who make disheartening choices and degrade the game, the large corporation policing our hardware and software usage to maximize its profits, the clerks who regulate our city’s parking rules: They all exert so much influence, governing how we spend our free time and available income, that we’ve come to see them not so much as necessary evils but as world-historical forces. We have no more battlefields on which to infuse our lives with meaning; the battlefields we do have are teeming with doubt and confusion. If we could only imagine another Hitler, another epic battle we might once more be called to fight for the good of the world, the parking ticket may not seem so bad. But we can’t, because the point of Hitler is his singularity, his momentous stature as the sum of all our fears. Searching for the next best thing to rail against, we rail against what we see, the ephemera and detritus that make up so much of life.

Who better to express our anger, then, than Hitler? Who better to shout about the inequities that torment us? In that sense, Hitler is like a solution to a centuries-old riddle. It is this: Human nature is to seek certainty. Modernity’s nature is to inspire doubt. How would humans live as moderns? How would they tolerate uncertainty? One solution may be the creation of modern myths, markers of absolute good and absolute evil to help them navigate their way through a world bereft of both. When we laugh at Hitler’s fictitious rants, we use him to vent our frustrations, but also to color our too-frequently-relativist world with a drop of that old-time righteous rage. This is as close to an act of faith as many of us would ever get.

And yet it’s a deeply flawed habit. To return for a moment to Hitler as religious icon, it should be noted that religious icons come with religious feelings, and those—in theory, at least—develop our tolerance for the unknown and our acceptance of the immutable. Not so Hitler: Hitler refers only to himself, he teaches us nothing, he’s all sensation and no sublime transcendence. There can be no salvation with him, no moment of epiphany, only fear and rage. So, while religion—again, at its best—teaches us to accept personal responsibility and strive for change even when we realize that change is highly unlikely, Hitler encourages us just to scream. He provides us with catharsis, but not with redemption.

Is it any wonder, then, that it’s the Internet that made Hitler a pop star? What, after all, is communications on the Web—the tweets, the blogs, the status updates—if not a steady stream of sniping and snapping and snark, an agora where malcontents can shout out their frustrations for other malcontents to criticize or praise? What a blog is to writing, what a tweet is to conversation, Hitler is to a value system: shorthand, a substitute, all sound and fury, signifying nothing.

That’s where the fairy tale ends, of course. Ulrich was a Jew in Germany in 1938. After Hitler took power, the idyll gave way to dispassionate ledger-keeping and list-making that categorized that time in history. According to a 1938 inventory of the contents of Ulrich’s apartment, this family had two Persian rugs, 20 neckties, seven purses, two oil paintings, 19 small silver ritual objects, one accordion, one set of skis, 48 linen napkins, 18 hand towels, 42 handkerchiefs, even an ice-cream maker. All markers of middle-class privilege. All markers of a family’s life.

What must Ulrich and Edith—the grandparents of my husband, Jonathan—have thought as Heidelberg changed around them? Starting in 1933, Germany’s Jews lost their government-service and editorial positions. Then they were expelled from the army, saw their citizenship revoked, were prohibited from marrying non-Jews, were banned from public school teaching. Yet relatively few Jews left Germany between 1933 and 1938. They were German. This was their home. The bad times would pass.

One day in 1938, Ulrich’s landlady whispered to him that he had to leave, fast. She’d seen a list on her son’s desk; Ulrich’s name was on it. The landlady’s son was in the SS. Her words convinced Ulrich that it was time to leave the country his family had called home for generations. He procured an invitation to lead High Holiday services at Temple Beth Sholom, a new synagogue in Fredericksburg, Virginia. If he could deliver a sermon in good-enough English, the congregation would hire him as its full-time rabbi. Ulrich’s English was iffy; he studied frantically as Edith packed. They left their home in early September 1938. As a farewell, the shul’s organist played Handel’s “Largo,” as it had at their wedding two years earlier:

Never has there been a shade

of a plant

more dear and lovely,

or more gentle.

Germany confiscated the 42 handkerchiefs, the baby’s chair and potty, the ice cabinet, the fruit plate, the five pans, the four platters, the six metal trays. The inventory notes that the family “acquired for emigration” a fur coat and a gramophone. Those they took with them. Such things, they thought, were needed in America.

A few weeks later, November 9, 1938, was the night of broken glass, Kristallnacht. The city’s synagogues burned. The members of Ulrich’s congregation were rounded up and sent to concentration camps.

But not Ulrich and Edith. They lived in Virginia for many years. Ulrich’s English was good enough. It got better. But he didn’t use it to tell his grandchildren any stories of life back in Heidelberg. Ulrich and Edith were always full of secrets, always full of their own kind of brokenness.

Like so many American Jews, they retired to Florida. Jonathan remembers visiting them in their hushed apartment complex when he was a small boy. He self-importantly pushed the elevator button and ran his fingers through their plush carpeting, leaving tracks.

Ulrich and Edith both died in 1973. The baby with whom they left Germany, Jonathan’s uncle, died in 2000. And now Jonathan is reclaiming a sliver of their past: He has decided to become a German citizen. He is working with The German Citizenship Project, which specializes in helping Jewish victims of Nazism and their descendants become re-naturalized in Germany.

It can be tricky to prove that you’re the spawn of a German citizen, what with the unfortunate combination of Germany’s longtime passion for paperwork and the Nazis’ penchant for burning everything in the waning days of the war. And since Germany follows the principle of jus sanguinis, blood law, not every Jew born in Germany actually was a German citizen. The German Citizenship Project is helping Jonathan move the process along—the organization helped around 150 Jews get German citizenship since 2006. (Other Jews, from Israel, the former Soviet Union, Australia, Canada, and the United States have completed the process independently.)

But Jonathan’s not applying alone; he’s applying for our daughters, too. And to my surprise, I am distressed. Not in that old-school, I-would-never-buy-a-Mercedes way: I think today’s Germans have done their fair share of self-examination and breast-beating, and they themselves weren’t the ones wearing the shiny scary boots. My feelings are more ambivalent and sorrowful.

Jonathan wanted our kids to be able to study and work in Europe as European Union passport-holders. I’m happy about that part. No, really. But still, I’m troubled. Maybe the thing that bothers me most is the notion of being the family member left behind. I’m the one apart, the one who’s not in the dominant group. Maybe the thought of them having this identity I won’t have is painful for its symbolism: Children grow up and inevitably go away. It’s hard to imagine when the younger one is still in kindergarten, but I know it’s inevitable.

Another part of my pain has to do not so much with them being German, but with me being an American. This was supposed to be the new Promised Land; American Jews have typically felt about America the way German Jews once felt about Germany. But nowadays, I’m growing increasingly concerned with the state of things. I’m not saying I see barbed wire and stone soap in our own futures; I’m not that kind of hyperbolic drama queen. But I haven’t felt this kind of despair about our country’s direction before. The joy I felt at Barack Obama’s election makes the anxiety I feel now that much more bitter. We have a government seemingly unable to reform health care (I can’t even talk to my friend in England about her adoptive country’s amazing prenatal, midwifery, and newborn care); we have Tea Partiers offering terrifying invective and Republican officials proposing laws that could have chilling effects on civil liberties. We deny science and our role in global warming. It’s not the president I’m freaked out about; it’s everyone else.

Despite the anxiety in the air, at least we can still take pleasure in the small things. Like reality TV: recently, my seven-year-old, Josie, became obsessed with Project Runway, busily sketching dresses and mimicking Heidi Klum’s double-cheek-kiss-punctuated Teutonic sign-off to the evicted designers: “Auf wiedersehen.”

At least if Josie has to leave her country, she’ll be prepared.

A thousand thanks to Michael Fadus for his generous German translation services.

On the back, implying the one-time owner: “Sigmund Freud, Vienna.”

Signed on the front, implying the painter: “A. Hitler, 1910.”

Both were in the Austro-Hungarian capital at the same time, which means they may have known each other.

The artifact will start at 10,000 British pounds. But still: a painting by Hitler owned by Freud? In several senses of the word, that’s priceless.

Hitler Painting That May Have Belonged to Freud Put Up For Auction [Haaretz]

Hitler is an easy scapegoat throughout history and it’s been used cheaply. He’s the product of a series of actions. It’s cause and effect … People in America don’t know the connection between WWI and WWII … I’ve been able to walk in Stalin’s shoes and Hitler’s shoes to understand their point of view. We’re going to educate our minds and liberalize them and broaden them. … Go into the funding of the Nazi party. How many American corporations were involved, from GM through IBM. Hitler is just a man who could have easily been assassinated.

Actually, many people in America do know the connection between the two world wars (briefly, the overly punitive peace imposed on Germany in 1919 cultivated a climate well-suited to Nazism). Many are also aware that IBM and others were complicit, or worse, in some of Nazi Germany’s actions. Stone’s “history,” in other words, is hardly “secret.” If he wants a better word to describe it, we have a few ideas.

Oliver Stone’s ‘Secret History’ To Put Hitler ‘In Context’ [The Live Feed via Jeffrey Goldberg]

Nazis replaced the star atop the Christmas tree with a sun, in part to “break the emotional power of the Church,” but also to ensure there was no resemblance to Jewish or Bolshevik symbols. They also rewrote Christmas carols, changing references to baby Jesus and the Virgin Mary into snowy fields and the like. It’s a good thing we already pretty much boycott the Nazis, because otherwise the American Family Association would be all over this; instead they’ll have to stick with protesting The Gap for daring to use the word “Christmas” in the same breath as Hanukkah and Kwanzaa in ads.

How the Nazis tried to take Christ out of Christmas [Times (London)]

One stat has us sincerely hoping that the children being surveyed were showing off their senses of humor: “77 percent of the children aged 9-15 recognised Hitler as leader of the Nazi party, but 13.5 percent thought he invented gravity in 1650 and seven percent thought he coached Germany’s football team.” Another seems oddly revealing about how the Holocaust is treated: “Auschwitz was correctly identified by 70 percent—but 15 percent thought it was a WWII-based theme park.” A third is simply baffling: “61 percent knew who Goebbels was but 21 percent thought he was a ‘well-known Jew who wrote a diary in the attic.’” Perhaps we’re biased, but it’s hard to imagine anyone not having a pretty clear idea who Anne Frank was, what with the constant media attention given to the girl and her diary.

Of course before proceeding to mock the sad state of education in the United Kingdom, consider the fact that more than 90 percent of respondents know who Winston Churchill is. We’re not sure the same can be said about school children on this side of the pond.

Kids Think Hitler Was German Football Coach: Poll [AFP]

Among them is Sarah Jane Stratford’s debut novel, The Midnight Guardian, published this month. Set from 1938 to 1940, it follows a group of English millennials—vampires who have been undead for more than a thousand years—as they try to sabotage Hitler’s plans for world domination. Stratford’s elegant plot device establishes that war, by killing too many humans, leads to vampire famine. “This was defense of what both humans and vampires held dear,” Stratford writes of the millennials’ quest, “although the humans did not count among their own delights their status as delicious, and necessary, food.”

But as Hitler’s intent to cleanse Europe of vampires—as well as certain other undesirables, particularly the Jews—becomes apparent, the mission’s urgency grows. Yes, that’s right: Stratford has given this latest vampire revival its first Holocaust novel.

This, of course, is not without its problems. Vampires—a secret cult with an ancient tradition, bent on world domination and feeding on human blood—fit a bit too snugly with the demented stereotypes that more imaginative anti-Semites have cultivated for centuries. Emory University professor Erik Butler traces this connection in his forthcoming book, Metamorphoses of the Vampire. Originating in 12th-century England, the blood libel—the idea that Jews ritualistically slaughter gentiles and feast on their blood—was so common by the late 19th century that Blutsauger, or “bloodsucker,” the German word for vampires, was a common derogation for Jews. Karl Lueger, the notoriously anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna, amplified the charge, in turn inspiring his admirer, Hitler, to call Jews parasites in Mein Kampf.

Though Stratford’s vampires are targeted for genocide by the Nazis, they are not allegorical substitutes for the doomed Jews of Europe. In The Midnight Guardian, there are vampires, and there are Jews. (There is even one vampire who used to be a Jew, though he no longer considers himself so: after all, blood is not kosher.) Instead, Stratford uses vampires as a double for Jews: real and stark examples of things the Jews were falsely accused of being. Lining them up together, she cleverly articulates the pseudo-biological basis of Nazi anti-Semitism and attempts to communicate what it means to wish to wipe away an entire people because of perceived biological differences.

Of course, such points about history and ideology, and the use of such literary devices to make them, are not the book’s prime focus. In the Twilight tradition, the book’s obsession is heart-rending, ecstatic, all-consuming, impossible, way too graphic, and, in one scene, pretty raunchy vampire love. Unlike Meyer’s goyishe Edward Cullen, Stratford’s protagonist is Eamon, the ex-Jew; his soulmate, Brigit, is the vampire who “made” him by biting his neck. To complicate this interfaith vampire love even further, one of the book’s subplots has to do with Leon Arunfeld, a legendary Jewish vampire-hunter, who, rather than kill Brigit, has asked her to save his children by smuggling them to safety in England. Thus, the destinies of the vampires and the Jews, those similarly persecuted, traditional, and benevolent creatures (in Stratford’s world, vampires are good, even if they literally live off murder), are sensitively intertwined.

Unfortunately, Stratford’s vampire-Jew connection is too crudely done. Because her book is only a semi-fantasy—a recognizable, historically true world that also happens to have vampires—one can never quite know where other, “different” humans stand. The line between her imagination and reality is smudged. She should have made her book either more realistic or more fantastical.

Art Spiegelman’s graphic-novel masterpiece Maus, which also uses non-human creatures to depict the Holocaust, represents the realistic route. After all, for all the artistic liberty Spiegelman takes, Maus is entirely faithful to what happened. The Jews are not anthropomorphic mice, as is frequently said; rather, they are Jewish men and women, who are merely drawn as mice. (They have tails, but they do not have a yen for cheese.) Thus, there is never confusion over what Spiegelman is trying to say about Nazism and the Holocaust, as there is in The Midnight Guardian.

As for Stratford, she ought to have taken the fantastical route. A more committed allegory—a World War II novel in which the vampires of Europe, and the vampires of Europe alone, were targeted for extermination—might have worked better. It certainly would have been more horrifying; and a good vampire yarn should always be a horror story.

Artist Ottmar Hörl Puts ‘Nazi’ Gnomes on Display [Times of London]

What’s really new here, Keating argues, is that the Holocaust may not be the sacred cow it once was: in the past, if the ADL criticized a public figure for an inappropriate Holocaust comparison, they’d make a show of contrition, while this crowd throws such accusations right back at the accusers (as in the attacks heaped on Barney Frank from the right after the congressman slapped down a questioner who equated Obama’s health plans with Nazism). “The radical right has created a new game,” he writes, “and Jewish groups haven’t yet figured out how to play it.”

The Right Calls Obama Hitler. Why Aren’t Jewish Groups Making More Noise? [NYMag.com]

The argument starts to unravel right around the point Buchanan writes that “Hitler wanted to end the war in 1940, almost two years before the trains began to roll to the camps”—which, presumably, is also the point at which the good folks at the National Jewish Democratic Council decided to intervene. Press secretary Aaron Keyak got a column up on the Huffington Post asking why Buchanan was defending Hitler, but instead of wasting time trying to outargue the pundit, the NJDC trained its eye on MSNBC, a network they would normally expect to count as a liberal friend. “There is a place on MSNBC where he may belong,” Keyak wrote, and linked to Keith Olbermann’s Countdown. And, voila! Media victory ensued: MSNBC took down the column. NJDC couldn’t, however, resist a parting shot. “MSNBC took the responsible action,” wrote president David Harris. “But no worthy news organization should employ and promote a commentator who engages in such vile fiction.” Note to Phil Griffin: Watch it!

Why is Pat Buchanan Defending Hitler? [Huffington Post]

Hitler’s Reaction to the Oasis Split [YouTube]

In fairness, there are other reasons for Germans to particularly like the movie: most notably, as anyone who saw the film over the weekend (and, according to box office numbers, quite a few did) can attest, nominal star Brad Pitt watches helplessly as the film is utterly stolen from him by Austrian actor Christoph Waltz, who plays a delightfully evil SS colonel. Still, the positive German reaction brings home an often-overlooked, and seemingly counterintuitive, point: Germans today have special cause to loathe the Nazis, since they carried out untold atrocities in the name of a people and culture that contemporary Germany rightly holds dear. You could even argue that modern-day Germans have the biggest beef with the Nazis of any group.

Well, perhaps the second-biggest beef.

Tarantino’s ‘Kosher Porno’ Thrills Germany [The Local]
Previously: You Basterds!

German Jewish Leader Backs Publication of Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ [Haaretz]

It hasn’t been a great week for her cause: on Monday, House Republicans who had once appeared sympathetic to the birthers’ claims voted unanimously for a bill that stipulated that Obama was indeed born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961—which is what his, y’know, birth certificate says. Taitz told Tablet Magazine earlier this week that her real concern is that Obama could be some sort of “Manchurian candidate.” For whom, she wouldn’t say.

You can watch her appearance below.

Previously: In Doubt’s Shadow

According to one report, in the Australian, Lieberman intended to counter the American argument that Israel should not allow a 20-apartment development on the site of a former hotel previously owned by the family of the mufti who had sat with Hitler. The site, in the eastern part of Israel’s capital city, was purchased by a Jewish group that is seeking to extend Jewish ownership in the quarter through private acquisition.

“Crude and diversionary” is how Lieberman’s line of thinking is described by the Guardian newspaper’s Middle East editor, Ian Black, who reports that the demarche is “directly related” to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “insistence that he will not give in to international demands to freeze Israeli settlement activity.” The Middle East correspondent of the Australian, John Lyons, quotes one source as telling the newspaper that inside Israel’s own foreign ministry the instruction was met with “laughter, skepticism and a sense of misplaced communication that this doesn’t help one bit the real argument.”

Maybe he should have asked the diplomats’ mothers. Certainly the fact that the Palestinian Arabs hewed to Hitler was understood by an earlier generation as fundamental. It was marked over and over again by such great liberal institutions as the Forward newspaper. The error of the Arabs was compounded as they refused—in sharp contradistinction to, say, the Germans—to make an effort to educate their people to the facts of what happened under Hitler and what it all meant. It seems they wanted the world not to regret but to forget.

The mufti whose picture Lieberman wants circulated was born in 1893, as political Zionism was being organized. I last wrote about him for the Wall Street Journal’s website, when, in August 2001, the German foreign minister was trying to organize a Mideast peace powwow in Berlin. I suggested that such a conference would be haunted by el-Husseini. The mufti didn’t just pass through Berlin during the war. He was in Berlin for three years between 1941 and 1945. Hitler, in the meeting that Lieberman wants people to remember, reassured the mufti that after dealing with the Jews the Germans would turn their attention to liberating the Arabs.

As one of the mufti’s biographers, Joseph Schechtman, tells the story, the mufti went on to build up “a truly world-wide network of anti-Allied activities,” including broadcasting propaganda against the Jews, England, and America. He maneuvered furiously to block the ability of Jews to escape Hitler by going to Palestine. After the war, the mufti ended up in France and was eventually allowed to escape to Cairo.

Sympathetic biographers have tried to suggest that the mufti’s maneuvering in Berlin fell somewhat short of outright collaboration. One, Phillip Mattar, has suggested the Zionists were so eager to prove the mufti guilty of collaboration and war crimes that they exaggerated his connections to the Nazis. But he acknowledges that “the Mufti and other Arabs were so busy justifying his statements and actions in the Axis countries that they ignored the obvious and overwhelming fact that the Mufti had cooperated with the most barbaric regime in modern times.”

Jeffrey Goldberg, in a dispatch issued by The New York Times in January 2008, considered the question of how the anti-Jewish ideas being used by Iranian agencies such as Hezbollah were able to “work their way into modern-day Islamist discourse.” He reasons that they were imported from Europe, and quoted a German scholar, Matthias Küntzel, as warning of their seriousness. Küntzel, Goldberg noted, “makes a bold and consequential argument: the dissemination of European models of anti-Semitism among Muslims was not haphazard, but an actual project of the Nazi Party, meant to turn Muslims against Jews and Zionism.”

Küntzel was quoted by Goldberg as saying that the mufti and the “Egyptian proto-Islamist” Hassan al-Banna “willingly and knowingly carried Nazi ideology directly to the Muslim masses.” Goldberg reckons that Hassan al-Banna “did not embrace Nazism in the same uncomplicated manner” as the mufti, but he quotes Küntzel as saying his movement was subsidized with German funds that enabled it to, among other things, distribute Arabic translations of, among other tomes, Mein Kampf. He quoted Küntzel as writing that across the Arab world, “Nazi methods and ideology whipped up anti-Zionist fervor, and the effects of this concerted campaign are still being felt today.”

Goldberg offered a caveat, saying that “one doesn’t have to be soft on Germany to believe it was organic Muslim ideas as well as Nazi ideas that led to the spread of anti-Semitism in the Middle East.” But he concluded that Küntzel was “right to state that we are witnessing a terrible explosion of anti-Jewish hatred in the Middle East.” Goldberg quoted his own interview with a former leader of Hamas, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, who said: “The question is not what the Germans did to the Jews, but what the Jews did to the Germans.” Goldberg ended by quoting Küntzel as arguing that we should see men like Rantisi for what they are: heirs to the mufti, and heirs to the Nazis.

In other words, the more one gets into it, the more it is plain that Avigdor Lieberman knows just what he is doing—and is doing it for good reason.

Seth Lipsky is a columnist for Tablet. He can be reached at slipsky@tabletmag.com.

First, a new program requires Polish prison inmates to take part in the rehabilitation of Jewish sites throughout the country. Hopefully this gig will be an improvement on whatever prisoners were forced to do before—otherwise the plan might be creating a new population of future ex-cons with a bone to pick against the Jews.

Meanwhile, in the latest attempt to repurpose something Nazi-related, the mayor of Jaslo, a southeastern Polish town, has decided to cut down a 67-year-old tree originally planted to mark Hitler’s birthday and replace it with a tree commemorating Polish soldiers killed by Soviet forces. It’s unclear whether honoring the dead by killing a tree is an act of vengeance or merely a misguided gesture.

And over in Warsaw, provocative Israeli film artist Yael Bartana has started construction on a mock kibbutz, as an attempt to “revive the Jewish spirit again.” (As opposed to the socialist spirit, which, presumably, is long past rekindling.) And elsewhere in town, a Reform synagogue has hired Poland’s first openly gay rabbi, Aaron Katz. The remarkable Katz has made quite an evolution, from a bearded Orthodox rabbi with a wife and kids in Sweden, to a clean-shaven man hosting dinner parties with his partner, Kevin Gleason, a convert and former reality-TV producer. Mazel tov!

And that’s all from Poland.

Polish Convicts to Renovate Jewish Sites [JPost]
Hitler’s Tree to Get the Axe [Arutz Sheva]
Israeli Artist Builds Mock Kibbutz in Heart of Polish Capital [AP]
Poland Gets 1st Openly Gay Rabbi [Fox News]

Hitler, Jesus Art in Alleged Museum Shooter’s Home [AP]
FBI Seized Hollow-Point Bullets from Supremacist’s Arundel Home [Baltimore Sun]

Earlier: James von Brunn, in His Own Words

Yet it is true that the Armenian genocide has not entered into America’s common cultural memory in the same way as the Nazi Holocaust. In part that is because it took place in the Ottoman Empire, from which few Americans come, rather than in Europe, where many Americans have their roots; in part it is because the U.S. never fought the Ottomans in World War I, as it did the Germans in World War II; in part it is because of the greater prominence of Jews than Armenians in American life. And sadly, it is also due to the continuing refusal of the Turkish government to acknowledge the crimes of its predecessor state, thus creating an illusion of controversy about a history that no historians doubt. (When the Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk spoke publicly about the Armenian genocide, he was charged with the crime of “insulting Turkishness” and forced to flee abroad.)

In 2007, the Anti-Defamation League was rightly embroiled in scandal when it supported the Turkish government’s plea to the U.S. Congress not to officially recognize the Armenian genocide. (After much controversy, the director of the ADL, Abraham Foxman, tempered his stance.) For, as many writers urged at the time, it is surely incumbent upon Jews, above all, to remember the Armenians, whose oblivion Hitler counted on.

That is why the publication of Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918 is especially noteworthy for Jewish readers. In this eyewitness account of the genocide, written in 1918 and now translated into English for the first time, Grigoris Balakian offers an Armenian equivalent to the testimonies of Holocaust survivors like Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel. Balakian, a priest of the Armenian Apostolic Church, was deported from Constantinople in April 1915, along with a large group of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders. For the next three years, until Turkey’s defeat and surrender in September 1918, Balakian lived constantly under the shadow of death. Exiled, sent on forced marches, threatened by bandits and government officials, starved and sick, he managed to survive only by a combination of luck, daring, the corruption and inefficiency of Turkish officials, and the support of righteous non-Armenians who hid and fed him.

As Balakian, along with his fellow deportees, was sent from place to place, he witnessed and heard about the unbelievable horrors inflicted on the Armenians of Turkey. The Ottoman state was far less powerful and organized than the Nazis’ would be; it did not have the resources to build gas chambers, or even the railways to bring people to them. The mechanics of mass murder, then, were primitive and face-to-face. Armenian deportees were attacked by mobs and groups of bandits armed with axes and farm tools, much as in the Hutu massacre of Tutsis in Rwanda. Balakian records many scenes of Armenians being tortured, mutilated, and decapitated, of babies torn apart by soldiers, of women raped dozens of times until they died; he shows us fields of decomposing corpses and hills of bones and skulls. Most of those who survived these organized attacks succumbed to starvation and illness. In total, an estimated 1.2 million Armenians died.

The enmity between Christian Armenians and Muslim Turks was of long standing, dating back to the Middle Ages, when Turkish invaders had conquered the ancient kingdom of Armenia in Asia Minor. By the 20th century, most of the other Christian subject populations of the Ottoman Empire—in Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, and Serbia—had broken free of the sultan’s rule. The Armenians, however, lived in the heartland of Turkey, and were deeply integrated into the region’s economy. Rather like the Jews of Poland, they served as merchants and craftsmen to the mainly rural Muslim population; also like the Jews, they attracted envy and hatred. In one terribly ironic passage, Balakian notes that “German officers [stationed in Turkey] would often speak of us as Christian Jews and blood-sucking usurers of the Turkish people.”

One signal difference between the Jewish and the Armenian cases, however, is that the Armenians had a comparatively recent history of sovereignty, and strong hopes for regaining an independent Armenian state. Many Armenians lived across the border in Russia, the Christian power that was historically the greatest foe of the Ottoman Empire. When the First World War broke out, the Russian Armenians and some Turkish Armenian rebels took up arms against Turkey. This offered the pretext for the Ottoman government to undertake a “final solution” to the Armenian problem, by annihilating the entire population, men, women, and children. (And it was a pretext: as Balakian notes, the vast majority of Turkish Armenians were totally uninvolved in the war.)

Balakian writes that he was already worried about the intentions of the Turks before the war started, and tried to alert his superiors in the Church. But no one gave any credence to the possibility of such a huge political plan, because in human history from prehistoric times, there had never been a forced displacement of an entire nationality. But as we will unfortunately see, that which had seemed impossible to everyone at that time, and even became a subject of derision, became possible during the world war, as did a litany of other tragic and criminal events. Like Hitler during the Second World War, the Turkish government used the First World War to cover and justify a scale of killing that was unimaginable in ordinary times.

Readers familiar with the literature of the Holocaust will read Armenian Golgotha with a combination of recognition and estrangement. Many of the events Balakian writes about could be taking place in Poland or the Ukraine 20 years later. Again and again, we hear about how Turkish policemen would tell the residents of a village to assemble for a long journey, herd people into carriages, then drive them to a remote spot, where they would be murdered and their possessions divided up among the murderers. Armenians were told that they were simply being relocated to the Syrian desert province of Der Zor, just as Jews were told that they were being resettled in the East; the name of Der Zor takes on, in Balakian’s account, the same aura of nightmare and death that the East” did for Jewish victims. Balakian even wonders, as have some Jewish observers of the Holocaust, why more of the victims did not fight back. They had the psychology of a herd of dumb sheep, going to their death without complaint,” he complains about one group of deportees who failed to seize the chance to flee.

Yet as the title of Armenian Golgotha suggests, Balakian’s story has a unique religious and political context. Victims of the Holocaust were often brought to question the existence of God, and even the possibility of meaning and order in the universe. Primo Levi famously wrote about Auschwitz as “a place where there is no why.” But Balakian viewed even the worst trials of his people as a prelude to the rebirth of an independent Armenia—a crucifixion that would be followed by resurrection. In one astonishing passage, he remembers how he and some fellow Armenians, meeting secretly during the war, got so excited that we started to draw the borders of tomorrow’s liberated Armenia on a map. . . and calculate the number of surviving Armenians.” This national faith went hand in hand with Balakian’s unbroken Christian faith: “But no matter, for hadn’t Christ suffered? Hadn’t he been tortured? Wasn’t he betrayed because he preached justice in this world, while perhaps justice could only be celestial and eternal, not worldly?”

Moments like these make clear that even genocide did not destroy Balakian’s faith or his belief in his nation’s future. He was, after all, a senior clergyman in the Armenian Church, and throughout his wanderings, he was treated by other Armenians as a leader. He writes movingly of the burdens of that role—having to remain rational and inspirational when he, too, was hungry and afraid. Yet without his sense of vocation, Balakian would doubtless never have survived to write this terrible, necessary book. “Like many who were going to die,” he recalls about one man he encountered, “the late Hamamjian often asked me to chronicle this tragic story of the Armenian Golgotha. And with this account, I think I have executed the will of those who are no more.”

Originally published on March 30, 2009.

Over the course of his 60-year career, Norman Mailer has tackled some pretty controversial subjects—the life of Jesus Christ, the inner workings of the CIA, the final days of murderer Gary Gilmore—as part of an ongoing effort to understand the nature of good and evil. In his latest novel, The Castle in the Forest, he imagines the early life of the 20th century’s foremost representative of evil, Adolf Hitler, as narrated by one of Satan’s minions.

At 84, Mailer is as passionate and contrary as ever. He speaks with Nextbook about his interest in Hitler—which dates back to 1932, when he was but 9 years old—and about the drawbacks of our post-Enlightenment world view, which precludes a belief in the devil. He also traces his lineage as a writer and thinker, with nods to his butcher-scholar grandfather and E. M. Forster, among others. [Editor's note: The introduction to this podcast was updated to acknowledge Mailer's death in November, 2007.]{Edit