Journalist Dara Horn was determined to tell his story. In a revelatory Kindle Single published today by Tablet Magazine, Horn reports on how Fry came to his rescue work and what became of him after the war. (You can read a preview on Tablet.) But how did this hero decide whom to save in the first place? Horn spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivy about Fry’s exploits, the arguably eugenics-like nature of his mission, the cultural heritage that was not protected by his and other rescue missions, and why so few know of his heroic work. [Running time: 22:09]

• In a blog comment (!), Abraham Foxman appears to endorse an Israeli bill that would ban analogies to the Nazis, although he hopes it would prohibit as narrow a bandwidth of speech as possible. [NYT The Lede]

• Sherman v. Berman in Sherman Oaks gets ugly-erman. [Jewish Journal]

• A lot of public figures and writers (including me) answer the question: What does it mean to be pro-Israel today? [Moment]

• The Crimson Tide’s band announcer is a Jewish guy. Jealous I didn’t write this story. [JTA]

• One of the world’s most organ-donor-averse countries saw a steep rise in organ donations last year. [Haaretz/Forward]

George Clooney will make a feature about the recovery of European art looted by the Nazis. There has already been an excellent documentary about this called The Rape of Europa:

The novel, Auslander’s first, is both entertaining and disconcerting and Auslander, a Tablet columnist, joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss German tourguides, Palestinian cabdrivers, and the pros and cons of living with hope. (To buy tickets to see Auslander discuss the novel in person on January 25 in San Francisco, click here.) Warning: The interview includes explicit language. [Running time: 20:51.]

Last week, Tablet Magazine published our list of the 100 greatest Jewish films of all time. At the very bottom was Schindler’s List. In a brief blurb, I called it an “astoundingly stupid” movie, which, in turn, inspired some of our readers to call me a “piece of shit” and a “neo-Nazi”—all for casting an aspersion on what, if they are to be believed, is everyone’s favorite Holocaust movie.

Which makes perfect sense: More than just a regrettable film, Schindler’s List neatly reflects the Manichean mindset of many American Jews, for whom mythology trumps memory and nothing lies beyond good and evil. Those who howled at me weren’t expressing a mere aesthetic judgment; they were defending a worldview.

To understand this worldview, we need only look at Schindler’s List. The film’s two main characters are Liam Neeson’s Oskar Schindler and Ralph Fiennes’ Nazi officer, Amon Goeth. The first is a philandering and greedy German who sees a little girl in a red coat and has a nearly instantaneous epiphany, realizing that life is precious and that Jews should be saved. The other is a monster; it’s no coincidence that the American Film Institute ranked Goeth at number 15 in its list of the 100 greatest villains of all time, just one spot below the slimy creature who terrorized Sigourney Weaver in Ridley Scott’s Alien. Goeth, too, is an otherworldly sort. He is not, like the real-life murderer on whom he is based, merely a hateful, opportunistic, and cruel young man who relished the chance to play god. He is impenetrable, predatory, inhuman. We have little reason to fear him more than we fear, say, the Nazis in Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark or the shark from Jaws; all are terrifying, but all are the sort of baddies we’ll only ever see on-screen, not the kind of ordinary and crooked and all-too-human scum living quietly next door and waiting for a stab at power.

Intelligent filmmakers, like Marcel Ophüls or Claude Lanzmann, long ago forged a cinematic language with which to talk about evil. Its two great grammatical principles are the context and the close-up: Cobble together as many sources as is possible to make a mosaic of meaning, then train the camera on one specific detail and demand an explanation. When it works well, we get moments like Lanzmann’s interview in Shoah with Franz Schalling, the Chelmno guard, whose matter-of-factness about the killing process is more terrifying than any imperious expression Fiennes can conjure, particularly as it appears alongside testimonies by victims and bystanders who had lived through radically divergent versions of the same horror. This approach is superior from both ethical and artistic perspectives, giving every player in this brutal human drama a claim to agency and dignity.

Spielberg’s approach, on the other hand, does not. Schindler’s Jews do not matter. They’re abstractions, spiritual currency so that our “hero” can pay his way toward salvation. Like Goeth, Schindler, too, is busy scrubbing away everything that makes him human.

The film’s blunt simplification enraged the Hungarian-Jewish Nobel laureate Imre Kertész, himself a survivor. Schindler’s List, he argued, was kitsch. “I regard as kitsch any representation of the Holocaust that is incapable of understanding or unwilling to understand the organic connection between our own deformed mode of life (whether in the private sphere or on the level of ‘civilization’ as such) and the very possibility of the Holocaust,” he wrote in his 2001 essay, “Who Owns Auschwitz?” “Here I have in mind those representations that seek to establish the Holocaust once and for all as something foreign to human nature; that seek to drive the Holocaust out of the realm of human experience.”

Stanley Kubrick felt the same way. Abandoning his own Holocaust-themed project after Spielberg’s movie became instantly iconic, Kubrick complained that the prince of Hollywood forever simplified one of the most complex occurrences in human history by crafting, in essence, a competing narrative. “Think [Schindler’s List] is about the Holocaust?” he asked the screenwriter Frederic Raphael, a friend. “That was about success, wasn’t it? The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. Schindler’s List is about 600 who don’t.”

One can argue, of course, that there are many Holocaust stories to be told, and that Spielberg merely chose to tell his (adapted, as it was, from Thomas Keneally’s book), and that his merely happened to have a hopeful ending. But that doesn’t absolve him of responsibility. Writing of the moral and aesthetic problems art runs into when it attempts to represent pain and suffering, the 18th-century German philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing theorized that visual artists follow a two-step process when creating their work: First they choose one moment out of an endless sequence of possible moments for visual representation, and then they submit that moment to the strictures of the artistic process. If the choices they make fit together nicely—the perfect moment represented the perfect way—the result is pleasing. If not, it terrifies. In choosing Schindler’s story, and in representing it as a collection of kinetic symbols swirling in succession on-screen, Spielberg turned an infinitely complex reality into something even worse than kitsch: a spectacle. It’s of little wonder that one of Seinfeld’s funniest plots involved Jerry making out with a woman in a screening of Schindler’s List; a similar joke involving Shoah would have come off as intolerably insensitive, but necking as Neeson and Fiennes duke it out is hilarious because it concedes, however implicitly, that Schindler’s List is just a flick, overrated and overblown, best viewed while heavily petting.

But the real problem isn’t Spielberg. He is an endlessly talented filmmaker who has directed a few of the works—from E.T. to A.I.—that I consider to be among the finest ever produced. The real problem is the culture that spawned Spielberg, the culture of so many of us in the American Jewish community.

There’s no way to quantify what I’m about to say next and many ways to dismiss it as inaccurate or subjective or untrue. But consider this: From a community that was, until three or four decades ago, not only emotionally equipped but also eager to hold difficult internal debates, we’ve allowed so many of our communal vistas to become splintered terrains of intolerance and mutual suspicion. Try talking about Israel to someone who sees the country in a very different light. Try bringing up conversion next time you run into someone from a different denomination. Chances are the conversation will soon descend into chaos, with each side claiming absolute moral validity for itself and casting calumnies at the other. Put differently, we used to see the world like Lanzmann, as a nuanced and complex place where even the greatest villains deserved a few quiet moments on camera to speak their mind. We now see it like Spielberg saw the Holocaust, in black and white, all feeling and movement.

It’s an attitude we must do everything in our power to resist in every way, from commemorating the past to debating the future. Our tradition is nothing if not a yarn of complications; as appealing as simple images of victimhood (the little boy in the sewer in Spielberg’s film) and redemption (the Israeli paratroopers at the Western Wall in the iconic photograph from the Six Day War) might be, it’s our moral, aesthetic, and historical obligation to choose the difficult, the subtle, and the obscure. This, if anything, is the life for which we’ve been chosen.

Der Nister is best-known for his epic family-saga novel, Di Mishpukhe Mashber (The Family Mashber), written in the 1930s and during the war. In 1943, Der Nister published a small collection of short stories on the Holocaust under the title Korbones (Victims). Most of his wartime stories, however, were collected in book form only after his death: Dertseylungen un eseyen (Stories and Essays; New York, 1957) and Vidervuks (Regeneration; Moscow, 1969). He was arrested in February 1949 for overt nationalism and died in a labor camp of an acute blood disease on June 4, 1950.

Faithful to Der Nister’s kaleidoscopic literary style, Butler’s translation prompts readers to consider literary responses to the Holocaust within the Soviet Union, a topic fraught with tension both in Soviet and contemporary Russia. Der Nister’s heroes were often orphans—either children orphaned by the loss of their parents or parents orphaned by their children—who went off to fight with the partisans. For the heroes and Der Nister himself, loss and destruction fueled a sense of nationalism, messianism, and a re-awakening of Jewish allegiance. This motif of national rebirth subverted the master narrative of wartime Socialist Realism espoused by the Stalinist Soviet State.

Der Nister’s vision of rebirth is perhaps most readily apparent in his 1945 short story “Vidervuks,” or “Regrowth,” which explores a re-awakened nationalism engendered by loss and death. More literally, “Regrowth” is about “a man without a wife, and a wife without a man” who live “with facing doors, on the same floor of the same building, in a Soviet capital city.” The heroes of the tale, Dr. Zamelman and Mrs. Zayets, “have grown estranged from their Jewish origins and all that occurred in the thicket of their people.” The man and the woman share similar fates as both their son and daughter leave their homes in order to fight the Great Fatherland War. From the very beginning of the story we know that Dr. Zamelman and Mrs. Zayets’ fate is intertwined: Their doors face one another, they live on the same floor, and they both lose their children in the war. Toward the end of the story, Dr. Zamelman’s reconnection with the kehilla, or Jewish community, motivates him to adopt a young boy.

The figure of an orphan was a literary favorite for Soviet wartime fiction. Losing his biological parents in the war, the child had the full potential to be reborn—to claim his new Soviet family with Stalin as father. Valentin Kataev’s 1945 novel, Son of the Regiment, which won the Stalin Prize in 1946, tells the story of a young orphan who, upon enlisting in a partisan group, goes through a process of re-awakening. By the end, the boy realizes his full political self-awareness as Stalin visits him in his dream. Kataev’s equally revealing 1951 novel, For the Power of the Soviets, tells a story about an orphan who joins a partisan group. The narrative ends with the young boy listening to Stalin’s Nov. 1943 speech on the radio. Unlike Kataev’s heroes, for whom loss stimulates the hero to gain political awareness, Der Nister’s orphans join partisan groups in order to avenge the deaths of their Jewish parents.

“Regrowth” ends with a union between Dr. Zamelman and Mrs. Zayets, which brings the characters closer not to their Soviet homeland but rather to their Jewish heritage. Throughout the story, Dr. Zamelman awakens from several dreams. We may read this literary trope as another example of revived nationalism.

The tension between the individual Soviet Jew and the collective is addressed in “Rive Yosl Buntsies,” a story about a woman who loses both her father and husband. Rive, we are told, “was a marvel—a kind of historical relic—to be displayed in a museum.” The author’s acute awareness of destruction haunts his characters. Rive’s appearance in the story is always in the context of the community. She is present at births, marriages, and deaths. Before dying, Rive’s father gifts her candlesticks, which “served her both as a remembrance of what she had lost and as a guide for her everyday thoughts.” So important are the candlesticks for Rive that, when her life is interrupted by the arrival of the Nazis, she takes them with her to the ghetto. The story ends with Rive being led by Nazi SS soldiers to her death. She walks alongside a group of women; recalling that it is Friday, Rive leads the women in a Sabbath prayer. The tale ends with a Nazi police officer relieving “himself on the candles—whether for the sake of his personal needs or in order to share something with others—it’s all the same.”

The image of light, which is replete with multiple meanings in the narrative, reaches its apex in this chilling moment of desecration. The Hebrew phrase, “or l’goyim,” or “light for all nations,” originated from the prophet Isaiah. Der Nister’s conscious allusion to this expression reveals the author’s grappling with the loss of an entire nation and by extension, a moment of darkness for humanity.

Der Nister’s wartime nationalism was accompanied by an equally powerful call for vengeance. Der Nister explores the theme of vengeance in stories such as “Heshl Ansheles” and “Flora.” In “Heshl Ansheles,” vengeance is packaged in moments of acute violence and rage. Humiliated by Nazi soldiers, Heshl Ansheles, who is respected for his immense knowledge and ability to abstract from the biblical canon, bites off the finger of a Nazi policeman. His mouth filled with blood, Ansheles, “full of contentment,” closes his mouth with satisfaction.

Unlike “Heshl Ansheles,” which recasts Jewish national revival through madness and rage, “Flora” reveals the power of language as a form of resistance. “Flora” tells a story about a young girl who, upon losing her father and being thrown into a ghetto, joins an underground group of partisans. Initially told by Flora herself, the narrative abruptly ends and is picked up by a professional narrator. “There ends Flora’s record,” writes this second narrator. “And it is also understandable why: she went off to where there was neither room nor time to hold a pen in one’s hands—just a chance for something better: a rifle.” The author here makes a conscious play using the sounds of the Yiddish word for book, “bukh,” and the word for gun, “biks.” The rifle is the logical extension of the pen.

The Hidden One makes occasional brief appearances in his texts in the guise of a man “hidden among a crowd.” Uncomfortable in any one circumscribed space, this figure finds solace in the space in between things. In the famed short-story “Under a Fence: a Revue,” the protagonist is lured by a “dustman,” who resides “within walls.” In “Flora,” the father gazes lovingly upon his daughter “as always, hidden in a crowd.” In his Holocaust works, we may discern the author in the character of the Messiah who lingers in the ghetto vicinities. There, he is present as “a rider on a poor donkey headed toward Jerusalem,” who imparts meanings into the world of destruction by ushering in the messianic epoch. Der Nister’s subtle yet bold process of articulating a difference by manipulating vocabulary, literary tropes, and dominant rhetoric forges a path between acceptance and resistance.

The author’s penname, “The Hidden One,” features an additional layer of irony: Since his death, he has remained virtually unknown to both the Russian and American reader. In Butler’s translation, the strength and importance of Der Nister’s work is clearly revealed.

Revenge of the Nerds

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]

Vilnius—“the Jerusalem of Lithuania,” and only increasingly central to Jewish thought during the 19th-century Haskalah—experienced its first pogrom in 1939 and 1940, when the Soviet Union’s secret police deported 21,000 political and social elites (including many Jews) and killed thousands more. Next was the 24,000 Jews killed by Polish and Lithuanian nationalists backed by the Nazis, who in 1941 invaded in violation of the deal they had inked with the U.S.S.R. two years earlier. Only then came the systematic slaughter of nearly 100,000 people from in and around Vilnius, including (and what the desecrated memorial stands for) roughly 72,000 Jews, by the Nazis and collaborating Lithuanians.

Today, the Lithuanian government has concerns other than publicizing the role of some of their ancestors in the Holocaust, or indeed in publicizing the Holocaust itself. Politically, it casts the U.S.S.R. as Lithuania’s ultimate historical enemy, and is currently after the ex-KGB officer Mikhail Golovatov, who famously commanded a group that killed 13 protesters in 1991; Golovatov was freed from Austrian custody two weeks ago, likely under the pressure of Russia, to which he fled and which wishes to protect its own and pit former Soviet republics like Lithuania against other members of the European Union. Moreover, as Dovid Katz has written in Tablet, “Holocaust obfuscation”—in which the Nazis’ crimes against the Jews are minimized and deliberately blended into the Nazis’ crimes against the Slavs and the Russians’ crimes against everyone—is in vogue in the Baltics; complicating matters is that a not-insignificant proportion of the secret policemen who carried out the first attacks on Vilnius, in 1939 and 1940, were Jews.

“But indubitable Western ignorance of Soviet crimes is no excuse for neglecting the historical record of the tragedy of Lithuanian Jews,” Snyder concludes. “Horrible as the Soviet occupation was, the largest group of genocide victims in Lithuania were the Jews murdered by the Germans with the help of the local population.” One more reason to tell your friends about the vandalism 70 years later of the memorial to the 72,000 Jews murdered by the Nazis in a forest outside Vilinius.

Neglecting the Lithuanian Holocaust [NYRB]
Related: The Crime of Surviving [Tablet Magazine]
Devastated [Tablet Magazine]

When my grandfather went to Jerusalem for the first time, in 1968, he was given the grand tour of the city, but after just two hours, he’d had enough. “Take me to see cows,” he said to the guide, or at least that’s the family legend.

I am the inheritor of a strange and somewhat obscure legacy. I come from a long line of Jewish cattle dealers. Our family history has been tied up with cows since at least the 19th century. In fading family photographs, you can see cows as well as ancestors. In my own childhood snapshots, I am smiling, hair cropped and parted, boots high, a calf sucking on my fingers.

I grew up in Hollywood, Florida, an affluent, largely Jewish suburb of Fort Lauderdale. My father still resides for most of the week on the family farm that my grandfather founded in Okeechobee, a two-hour drive away. When I was a child, my father came home one night a week and then again, for weekends, usually a few minutes before the sun set on Friday. Some 4,000 cows live on my family’s farm. There is much to do and the days are always long. But before my father leaves the house each morning in darkness, he makes sure to put on tefillin and say the shacharit prayers. He is, as far as I know, the only full-time Orthodox Jewish farmer in the United States.

Growing up, my friends were the daughters of cardiologists who took their children to Disney World. My summers were spent in the hot Florida sun, milking cows, sorting through tool sheds, cleaning calf cages, chasing after wayward heifers, and seeking the small comforts of air conditioning in my father’s Ford F-150.

****

In Germany, Jewish cattle dealers abounded. Considered the de facto bankers of the countryside, they were particularly targeted by the Nazi propaganda machine. My grandfather, born in 1907, had been groomed to take over the family’s prosperous cattle business, based in Ellingen, a small town in Bavaria, which had branches throughout the region. Then Hitler came to power.

My grandfather escaped in 1938, and, after a few years in Cuba, he found refuge in Miami. When it came time to stake out his American dream, my grandfather turned to what he knew best. Though Bavaria is a long way away from Florida, Holsteins are Holsteins and farmers everywhere speak the same language. When he arrived in Miami, the area surrounding the city was still farm country. With an old pick-up truck, he slowly built a business buying and selling cows throughout the state. Around 1945, he decided to deviate slightly from the family tradition; he began to produce and sell milk, rather than just buy and sell livestock. It was a gradual process, and for a while, he did both simultaneously, establishing his first farm in Miami Springs, where the international airport is now located. “Cattle dealing was in his blood,” my father told me. “He was good at it, he loved it, and he could have made a very good living if he had continued.” But he made an intentional decision to shed his cattle-dealer past, a decision I learned more about when I visited his German hometown last summer.

***

I had been to Germany twice before: as a college student on a research grant, and later, as a journalist covering a conference in Berlin. But my interest in this period was always confined to my maternal side—my grandmother, who was born in Frankfurt, is a survivor of Bergen Belsen. My paternal grandfather, who never spoke about his childhood, died months before I was born and his wife—my grandmother—was a fifth-generation American who knew little of her late husband’s German past. Some photographs survived, and with them, small scraps of information about a small Bavarian town and a once-thriving business, but beyond that, we knew nothing. For the most part, my grandfather, an aloof figure, wiped a clean slate when he stepped onto American soil.

About 15 years ago, my brother went backpacking through Europe and decided to take a detour to Ellingen. There, he met a retired veterinarian named Bruno Buff who had heard of the Berman family from the farmers he worked with in the countryside. Buff also volunteered his time working in the city archives and took an interest in our family. In the years since, the family has stayed in periodic contact with him, mostly through Christmas cards.

But recently, Buff began corresponding more frequently. He told us about a German doctoral student named Stefanie Fischer, who had unearthed archival information about our family and was writing her dissertation on the relationship between Jewish cattle dealers and German farmers. He also sent us a copy of a book about the town’s Jews that had just been published by a ragtag group of amateur historians. He asked: Would we want to come to Ellingen for a visit? After some convincing, my father agreed; this would be his first trip to Germany.

Ellingen is a small, picturesque town just a short train ride from Nuremberg. We arrived from the United States, Israel, and England—more than a dozen in all, from my two-year-old nephew to a 70-year-old cousin who was born in Germany but now refused to speak the language. Ellingen boasted cobblestone streets; flowers spilling out of windowsills; the constant, somewhat maddening din of church bells; and a castle looming at the entrance of the town. Walking through the idyllic streets, I couldn’t help but think that ours was a particularly painful exile; Ellingen in the summertime seems too good to be true.

For most of us, it was our first trip to the town. My aunt was one exception; she had been to Ellingen in the 1980s, and as the story goes, she asked for directions to the Jewish cemetery. When the town’s German-speaking residents drew a blank, she started yelling, “Dead Jews! Dead Jews,” repeatedly at the top of her lungs.

Our arrival in Ellingen was a much talked-about novelty. Before World War II, the town had just a handful of Jewish residents, and now everyone—from the carpenter to the mayor to the innkeeper of a local bed and breakfast—seemed to know the name Berman. Buff, in his 80s, organized the three-day tour for us. He had fought in World War II, and won us all over with his warmth, kindness, and deep-seated regret. It was Buff who introduced us to the entourage of locals who accompanied us along nearly every stop: the retired baker, didn’t speak English, but communicated through strudels, thrusting baked goods our way with smiles; the town’s lawyer and self-appointed historian, who co-authored a book about the town’s Jews, despite what appeared to be no special affinity for Jews; and the makeshift archivist, a middle-aged, unemployed woman with bright orange hair who lived alone with her dog and spent hours sifting through the old papers, documenting the lives of the town’s Jews.

She told me that sometimes she walks the streets of Ellingen and sees the faces of the town’s Jews who have since vanished from its cobblestone pathways.

“They have become my friends,” she said with a sad smile.

***
In the years leading up to World War II, the German countryside was intensely poor. A farmer who wanted to buy cows was dependent on credit that he received from his local cattle dealer, not the bank. My family’s business, Berman-Oppenheimer, emerged as the leading cattle operation in Bavaria in the southeast region of Germany. On any given week, they would send upwards of 150 cows to market, an astronomical number for most German farmers.

“No other group was assaulted so much when the Nazis came to power,” Fischer, the German doctoral student, said of Jewish cattle dealers. “They became synonymous with ripping off farmers.” Nazis mythologized the struggling farmers in the heartland who worked the soil, and pitted them against the relatively well-off Jewish cattle dealers.

German municipalities tried to promote “Judenfrei” cattle markets, but many farmers boycotted them—not because of philo-Semitism, but because “Aryan” prices were deemed too high. For a time, German farmers prohibited the distribution of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer at their cattle auctions because it kept Jewish cattle dealers away.

Soon, Der Stürmer began to publish names of German farmers who continued to do business with Jews, branding them enemies of the state. “Jews had no soil,” Fischer explained. “They didn’t milk cows. They only traded. People looked at Jews as if they didn’t work.” The aging farmers Fischer interviewed for her dissertation told her that it never occurred them that the Jews couldn’t own land. “They saw trading as part of the Jews’ nature,” she said.

***
Walking the streets of Ellingen, our guides pointed to various buildings where Jews had once lived, and to the former synagogue, which is now a private home. The deputy mayor gave us a tour of City Hall and then invited us to show off his elaborate garden and in it, a tiny but ornamented garden shed.

“This comes from Bernard Berman’s house,” he said, pointing to the letters “BB” formed out of the wrought iron that now decorates the shed’s window sills. Bernard is the name of my great-grandfather, but also my own father’s namesake. “My father got it, but I’m not sure how,” he said.

We tried to pry more information out of him, but we didn’t make much headway. “My father bought it after the war,” the deputy mayor repeated several times in his limited English, surprisingly unselfconscious. It angered me; I waited for the deputy mayor to put on a work shirt, take the tools out of his shed, cut through the wrought iron, and return the decoration to its rightful owners—but of course my waiting was for naught. He never offered it, and we didn’t ask. In fact, he never invited us in inside his home.

Later, I asked my father about that moment; wasn’t the decorative piece his rightful inheritance? “I didn’t want it back,” my father replied. “I don’t need anything from him.”

***

One afternoon, we were sitting outside our hotel, enjoying the crisp Bavarian afternoon and sipping German beer in the cool shade when Hermann Seis, the town’s lawyer-turned-historian, came to greet us. My parents had corresponded with him via email, but this was our first meeting with a man who seemed to know more about our family than we did. Seis talked a great deal, but when he took a newspaper article out of his binder and started to pass it around, our large and somewhat unruly crowd sat in rapt attention.

What he passed around was a copy of Der Stürmer, dated December 1937, which none of us had ever seen. There, featured prominently on the front page was an article about my great-grandfather—“the greatest and most cunning of these Ellingen Jews”—who was arrested after he was accused of paying a farmer he worked with to murder a leading Nazi.

The article features three mug shots of my great-grandfather, presumably taken upon his arrest. We sat there, speechless, dumbfounded. My father had heard about an arrest once—not from his father, but from a distant relative who provided no details—but he didn’t know anything beyond that, and certainly not that it was front-page news. No one knew about the article’s existence. (It’s nearly impossible to get a copy of the paper in modern day Germany—wartime propaganda is kept under tight wraps by the country’s anti-Nazi laws—and so researchers need to jump through extensive hoops to prove their interest in the newspaper is purely academic.) To this day, we don’t know how long my great-grandfather sat in jail.

The article is long—more than 2,000 words in the English translation we commissioned—and it is extensive in outlining my great-grandfather’s alleged sins: betraying and displacing farmers, expropriating farms, destroying property, and causing poverty across the countryside. In the article, my great-grandfather is described as a “man of foreign race who corrupted farmers.”

“The Jew is a born criminal,” the article continues. “The strongest laws will not be able to change him.”

Later we learned that my great-grandfather was released soon after and fled with his daughter to London. He died there in 1943, but not before he settled his Ellingen city taxes from exile. If he were to return after the war, my great-grandfather wanted to be sure it would be as a citizen in good standing.

Presumably, my grandfather saw the article on the newsstands in Breslau, where he moved to establish another branch of the family cattle-dealing business in the mid-1930s. But he never mentioned it to his wife, children or grandchildren; we only heard of it for the first time over beer in Ellingen, church bells ringing in the background, from a man who was a stranger.

***
The next afternoon we visited the nearby town of Markt Berolzheim, home to another branch of the family cattle business. Hermann Bauer was our host. He had been mayor of the town for three decades and his father was the town’s leading Nazi politician during the war years. We talked in his garden and drank fresh apple cider. He asked my father how many cows he owned and when my father answered, the mayor blanched.

“That’s four times as many cows as in the whole village,” he said.

My father tried to downplay the success; he tried explaining how for Florida the farm is considered midsized. But it didn’t make much of an impact. Later, when we visited the home that once belonged to my grandfather’s cousins, the man who lived there shared with us a rumor that was floating through the town. “I heard that there is a man named Bill Berman who has more than 2,000 cows,” he whispered, wide-eyed, to my sister. Bill, of course, is my father, and the man’s estimate was off by half. Jews were reviled for their success in the pre-war years and here was my father being forced to return to the same situation; his discomfort—laced with pride, among other things—was palpable.

Before we left, my father took Fischer aside. “Tell the mayor we don’t sell cattle anymore,” he insisted.

Fischer obliged and the mayor nodded, as if in comprehension. But I’m not sure he understood what my father was trying to say. My father, and his father before that, were no longer traders. Family legend has it that until the day he died, my grandfather could look at a cow and remember where and how much he bought her for, even if years had passed. And though trading was clearly his passion, he wanted something else, felt it was essential to become something else. And here in Germany, my father—who has watched each of his five children choose career paths that have taken them away from the family farm—wanted to be sure that the distinction was clear.

Daphna Berman, a former Jerusalem correspondent for Haaretz, is now a senior editor at Moment magazine.

“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.

• Turns out some Nazi war criminals remain at large. Maybe. [Slate]

• Michael Tomasky says it is past time for the Obama administration to take a harsher stance against Syria’s Assad regime. [The Daily Beast]

• Careful there, Professor West. [Truthdig]

• Check out Jeopardy! tonight to watch a New Jersey rabbi—and friend of New Jersey Jewish News editor Andrew Silow-Carroll (whom it’s good to have back blogging after a month-long absence)—defend her title. [JustASC/JTA]

• Fred Malek analyzes the GOP field, counts no Jews. [The Hill]

What with Armageddon coming Saturday and all, Jewcy’s Jason Diamond has some advice for the Jews.

• An airstrike in Sudan killed two men, one of them, it turns out, a senior Hamas commander. Sudan’s furious foreign minister blamed Israel. Well, yeah. [Arutz Sheva]

• Hansi: The Girl Who Loved the Swastika is a Spire Christian Comics comic book that existed. [Scribd]

• Drop, like, everything and listen to the new Beastie Boys single. [Consequence of Sound]

• Ann Loeb Bronfman, ex-wife of Edgar Bronfman and a formidable philanthropist to Jewish causes in her own right, died at 78. [JTA]

• Finally! A Haggadah for the ADD generation. [JTA]

When Harry Met Sally … , the sequel. Kinda gross, but incredibly hilarious.

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.

About 30 people turned out for a Wednesday evening showing in Manhattan. After being greeted by earnest volunteers in Zeitgeist T-shirts and given the chance to pick up pamphlets and newsletters about the Zeitgeist movement—or TZM, as its acolytes call it—they sat through a two-and-a-half-hour film, alternately frenetic and soporific, explaining the necessary and imminent collapse of economies based on money, the root of all the world’s sufferings. The film prophesied the emergence of a superior “resource-based economy,” in which decisions about the allocations of goods and services will be made by computers free from corrupting “opinions.” Robots will do most menial work, liberating people for more creative, humanistic pursuits, and technological innovation will ensure abundance for all. The movie ends with scenes of crowds worldwide surging into the streets and, realizing that money is but an enslaving illusion, dumping their cash in great piles in front of the now-impotent central banks. Amazingly, only one person walked out.

Zeitgeist: Moving Forward is silly enough that at times I suspected it was all a put-on, a sly satire about new-age techno-utopianism instead of an example of it. But to hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, the Zeitgeist movement is entirely serious. At times, it even seems like the world’s first Internet-based cult, with members who parrot the party line with cheerful, rote fidelity. In a phone conversation, Brenton Eccles, a former member from Melbourne, described how his involvement cut him off from reality. “It’s very, very, very isolating,” says Eccles, who was part of the communications team in the movement’s Australia branch. “You’re encouraged to kind of exit the real world. There’s kind of this us-and-them attitude.” A few days later, he sent me a document recanting most of his charges and claiming that his conflicts with the organization had in fact been his fault. This did not make it seem less cult-like.

There are lots of strange things about the Zeitgeist phenomenon, but strangest is how it got started. It’s a global organization devoted to a kind of sci-fi planetary communism, but it was sparked by a 2007 documentary steeped in far-right, isolationist, and covertly anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. The first Zeitgeist documentary borrowed from the work of Eustace Mullins, Lyndon LaRouche, and conspiracy-mad Austin radio host Alex Jones to rail against the cabal of international bankers that purportedly rules the world. It was this documentary that reportedly obsessed Jared L. Loughner, the disturbed young man who allegedly shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

Since the shooting, conservatives have latched on to the Zeitgeist movement’s new-age side to argue that Loughner hailed from the left. Others, myself included, have pointed out that the original Zeitgeist film is full of fringe right-wing ideas that have migrated toward the mainstream via the Tea Party. Zeitgeist warns, for example, that the United States could soon be subsumed into a North American Union as a precursor to the establishment of totalitarian one-world government. Members of the Zeitgeist movement, not surprisingly, reject any connection between the shooting and their ideology, even as some of them welcome the new attention that it has brought their ideas. “It’s ultimately a positive thing,” says Keith Embler, the earnest aspiring actor who co-chairs the New York chapter. “It’s press. And”—with the third documentary just released—“the timing couldn’t be better.”

Meanwhile, the evolution of the movement itself remains obscure. How did a modern gloss on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion inspire a global organization of wide-eyed technophile environmentalists? What is the Zeitgeist movement?

***

The documentary that started it all began as an art project. “The original Zeitgeist was not a film, but a performance piece, which consisted of a vaudevillian style multi-media event using recorded music, live instruments and video,” the Zeitgeist website explains. The director, a young college dropout who goes by Peter Joseph, his first and middle names, says he “tossed” it up online, where it soon was getting hundreds of thousands, then millions, then tens of millions of views on Google Videos. It has since been removed from that site, but several people have posted it on YouTube, where various versions have received millions of views each, and on Vimeo, where it’s been seen almost 600,000 times in the last six months. DVDs of the first two documentaries are also for sale online.

“The work was never designed as a film or even a documentary in a traditional sense—it was designed as a creative, provoking, emotionally driven expression, full of artistic extremity and heavily stylized gestures,” the Zeitgeist website says. This might, however, be a bit of a post-facto rationalization, meant to distance Joseph from some of the reactionary ideas in his film. It certainly doesn’t explain how the piece made the transition from performance art to relatively coherent two-hour documentary.

The original Zeitgeist has a three-part structure, and if you just saw the first third, you might think it came from the left. It begins by arguing, using a characteristic mix of fact and invention, that Christianity is a colossal fraud, a set of myths appropriated from pagan sun cults for purposes of social control. Control is the film’s real theme: All our politics and our institutions, it suggests, derive from a conspiracy of international bankers who manipulate world events for their own profits. The second part argues that Sept. 11 was an inside job, engineered by these moneyed interests. Much of its footage was taken directly from documentaries created by the far-right radio host Alex Jones, whose work is devoted to exposing the global elite’s plan for totalitarian one-world domination.

From there, Zeitgeist launches into a pseudo-exposé of the international monetary system, a theme that runs through both its sequels. According to Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates, a think tank that studies right-wing movements, much of it derives from two books: The Creature From Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin, a member of the John Birch Society, and Secrets of the Federal Reserve by Eustace Mullins. Mullins hated Jews, but his references to Jews in the book are oblique. “It’s bait, written by one of the world’s most notorious anti-Semites to lead people into that analytical model,” says Berlet.

Zeitgeist works the same way. Though it says nothing about Jews, its analysis mirrors classic anti-Semitic canards. Immediately after footage of the twin towers falling, for example, the film features an excerpt from a speech that Charles Lindbergh gave to an America First group in 1941: “When hostilities commenced in Europe in 1939, it was realized that the American people had no intention of entering the war. But it was realized that this country could be enticed into the war, in very much the same way that it was enticed into the last one.” As his words play, headlines about Iraq float across the screen. “We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction,” he concluded. Lindbergh, of course, was talking about the Jews. Viewers attuned to anti-Semitic rhetoric would naturally conclude that Joseph was, too.

After Joseph put Zeitgeist online, it quickly became an Internet sensation. Clips appeared on the websites of Ron Paul supporters, white nationalists, and, before long, some Tea Party groups. Anarchists and anti-imperialists embraced it as well. Stories about it appeared in newspapers worldwide. Some were admiring: South Africa’s Cape Times compared it to An Inconvenient Truth. Even the debunkers testified to its reach. An article in the Irish Times described the “massive interest” the documentary had attracted before lamenting, “One really wishes Zeitgeist was a masterful pastiche of 21st-century paranoia, a hilarious mockumentary to rival Spinal Tap.”

As Zeitgeist’s audience grew, people started asking Joseph what they should do with his explosive information. He didn’t know what to tell them. He supported Ron Paul, but he believed the system to be too irredeemably corrupt for a political solution. That’s when he met Jacque Fresco, a radical futurist and would-be secular prophet who has been preparing for his moment in the limelight for more than five decades.

Born to a Sephardic Jewish family in Harlem in 1917, Fresco moved to Los Angeles after World War II. The journalist Lionel Rolfe, in his memoir of California bohemia, Fat Man on the Left: Four Decades in the Underground, wrote that in the early ’50s, “Fresco had a circle of disciples who considered him next only to Albert Einstein, although the friends and relatives of those disciples often thought Fresco was a fraud and a charlatan.”

Back then, Fresco, a self-educated industrial designer, had already developed his ideas about machines making traditional economics irrelevant. In the 1970s, he moved to a compound in Venus, Fla., where he and his partner, Roxanne Meadows, set about creating designs for the cities—and civilization—of the future. They call their work The Venus Project.

Joseph learned about the Venus Project when Fresco, having seen Zeitgeist, sent him one of his books. For Joseph, Fresco’s highly detailed vision of a world without money, a world where work itself is largely unnecessary and human ills like greed and crime are obsolete, was a revelation.

Soon, Joseph was devoting himself to spreading the word about Fresco and The Venus Project. His second film, Zeitgeist: Addendum, starts in much the same vein as the first, with an attack on the international financial system. But then it shifts to a worshipful examination of Fresco’s work, offering it as a solution to the ravages of the current system. Joseph’s latest film, Zeitgeist: Moving Forward, further elaborates Fresco’s irenic vision of a “resource-based economy,” one without poverty, inequality, or environmental strain.

***

The Zeitgeist movement emerged in 2008, after the release of the second documentary, as chapters formed worldwide to figure out how to prepare for immanent economic collapse and technological salvation. Joseph never acknowledged his massive ideological shift from decrying a one-world system to embracing it—he just powered through the contradictions with an intense, weirdly mesmerizing self-confidence. He seems entirely sure of his movement’s capacity to fundamentally reshape human beings. In the first Zeitgeist newsletter, he explained to a letter-writer why there would be no gluttony in a resource-based economy. “[F]or a person to want ‘more’ than another is an unsustainable, conflict invoking value which serves only a selfish conditioning generated by the current cultural climate of ‘survival of the fittest’ via the Market System of Competition,” he wrote. “TZM seeks to remove this system, hence removing the distorted values that coincide and are hence imposed and reinforced.”

Lots of right-wing fans of the original documentary have since deserted Joseph, though not all—the Zeitgeist newsletter features an essay by a former Ron Paul activist who described trying to get his Tea Party group to embrace Fresco’s ideas. Meanwhile, new cadres of progressive seekers have joined, going to meetings and throwing themselves into the movement’s vibrant online community. At 96, the bearded, impish Fresco suddenly has a large global following—last year, he visited 18 countries on an international lecture tour.

Since 2009, the movement has celebrated Z-day in March, with chapters worldwide putting on events. The New York Times covered the inaugural Z-Day gathering in Manhattan, which attracted a sold-out crowd of around 900 to hear Joseph and Fresco speak. It was, wrote reporter Alan Feuer, “as if Karl Marx and Carl Sagan had hired John Lennon from his ‘Imagine’ days to do no less than redesign the underlying structures of planetary life.” This year’s Z-Day will take place on March 13, with a main event in London and local happenings worldwide.

Most members, particularly the new ones, are probably unaware of the Jew-baiting subtext of the documentary that launched their movement. Many were genuinely baffled in 2009 when a German social networking site, studiVZ, banned Zeitgeist groups because of their implicit anti-Semitism. Others seem a bit embarrassed by the first Zeitgeist; they’ll often say it’s “irrelevant”—one of TZM’s favorite epithets—because it came out before the movement got started. But no one is disavowing it, and so a growing global movement of tech-savvy idealists continues to promote a work of far-right paranoia.

“I’m willing to accept that the filmmaker is a person who has a great energy and tremendous ignorance who inadvertently replicated the Nazi view of money manipulation,” says Berlet. “In which case he needs to repudiate it.” That seems unlikely. In a video interview available online, Joseph rails against his critics, “the self-appointed guardians of the status quo.” The first Zeitgeist, he insists, “is based on pre-existing information. There isn’t one thing in that film that doesn’t come from a source.” True enough. The problem is what the sources are.

• Over the weekend, Hamas reconfirmed its commitment to a cease-fire in an effort to head off tensions in Gaza during the two-year anniversary of Cast Lead. [NYT]

• In another instance of WikiLeaks telling us for certain what we knew was almost certainly true, a newly released 2008 cable authored by then-Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice confirms that Israel bombed a Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007. [JTA]

• Columnist Avi Shafran points out that President Obama has done pretty much every basic thing that typical pro-Israel American Jews have asked of him. [Jewish Standard]

• Henry Kissinger puts his 1973 remark, “If they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern,” “in context.” [WP]

• A must-read profile of longtime New Republic maven, owner, and editor-in-chief (soon to be editor at large) Marty Peretz reports that his controversial blog, The Spine, will soon be discontinued. [NYMag]

• Aid groups argue that the Gaza blockade is inhibiting them, not Hamas. [WP]

• Popular distress is building in Iran is building over higher prices, a result of slashed subsidies, in turn partly a result of Western sanctions. [WP]

• Hitch on Kissinger. I could read a new one every week. [Slate]

• Dov Halbertal polemicizes against Israel’s mixing of synagogue and state. [Haaretz]

• Recent revelations that even the ostensibly non-Nazi German civil service actively furthered the Holocaust and other crimes have shaken Germany of late. [NYT]

• After the Carmel fire, some are rethinking the whole everyone-should-plant-a-tree-in-Israel thing. [WP]

• The Mavi Marmara was returned to Turkey. [NYT]

• Dan Kurzman, a Washington Post foreign correspondent and historian of World War Two and the Israeli War of Independence, died at 88. [NYT]

• The argument that Cliff Lee is, in effect, a Philadelphian Jew strikes me as somewhat specious. Then again, anything to rub it in Yankee fans’ faces. [Jewish Exponent]

Donate to the United Jewish Appeal! Edward G. (as in Goldenberg) Robinson says so.

At a press conference this morning at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square, Gould appeared with an Israeli lawyer, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, and the writer Burton Bernstein—brother of composer Leonard—to show clips of Gould’s video interviews with Frank, in which Gould discussed his work for Himmler, and to announce the filing of a federal civil complaint (PDF) demanding damages from Frank on behalf of relatives murdered in the village of Korets as a result of the orders he had signed. “He is the source,” said Gould, a boyish 43-year-old with a curtain of shoulder-length brown hair and an air of outrage. “He didn’t go to Argentina. He was in the phonebook.” Gould’s claims were backed up by Stephen Smith, the executive director of the Shoah Institute at University of Southern California, who said in a phone interview that he had reviewed Gould’s research, and felt it was significant. “The focus until now has been on the people at the scene of the crime or people who gave the orders,” Smith explained. “He sits at the intersection.”

Then things got complicated.

First, the Associated Press ran an interview in which Efraim Zuroff, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s top Nazi hunter, dismissed Gould’s claims as wildly exaggerated. “He’s attributed with far more responsibility and criminal guilt than he actually deserves,” Zuroff said. “That’s not to say he isn’t a Nazi—even a zealous Nazi who still today identifies with the National Socialist movement—but there’s a big difference between that and portraying him as one of the key operatives of the Nazi Holocaust.” Furthermore, the AP noted that Frank, rather than living in willful obscurity, is known in Germany as the SS officer who arrested Hermann Goering for treason, on Hitler’s orders.

Then the New York Times—which Gould’s publicist, Larry Winokur, earlier claimed to me had been too scared to run the story—weighed in with a story by Michael Slackman, in Berlin:

Mr. Gould prefers this description: A 43-year-old college drop-out from Los Angeles who says he made a lot of money in finance, became interested in Nazi memorabilia and ended up on an undercover odyssey where he befriended a former Waffen SS officer and recorded many of their conversations with the plan to someday expose the man’s role in the Third Reich.

But an alternative description might read like this: A man on a self-appointed mission to expose an aging Nazi — one who has published an autobiography and has never been accused of war crimes — and hoping, in the process, to publish a book and land a movie deal.

Anyone who has put in the effort Gould appears to have would be little self-promoting (look what it did for Wiesenthal!). But it proved difficult to pin the Gould team down on a straightforward question—whether or not Gould is Jewish. Described in Yediot as “a young 43-year-old American Jew,” Gould was called “of Jewish immersion” in a press release put out by Winokur; it turns out, as Winokur finally explained and the Times got right, that Gould is not himself Jewish, but was adopted as a boy and raised by his Jewish stepfather. So it’s only natural to wonder about the reliability of the rest of what they’re offering.

Anyway, according to Gould and Burton’s lawyer, Darshan-Leitner, the most important thing about the case wasn’t whether one more aging genocidaire was brought to some kind of justice, but that it might open up a whole new avenue of damages claims for the relatives of Holocaust victims, and potentially for class-action suits. “We see that governments are dragging their feet when it comes to criminal prosecutions,” explained Darshan-Leitner, most of whose work has focused on pursuing similar claims in U.S. courts on behalf of the families of people killed in terrorist attacks in Israel. “He’s 97. We were afraid he would die. But this way, even if he dies, his estate is responsible for what he did.”

SS Officer Admits Signing Extermination Order [Ynet]
Nazi Hunter Skeptical About SS Officer [AP/WP]
A Nazi Is Exposed, But Did He Have Anything to Hide? [NYT]

• The CIA knew early on that Tscherim Soobzokov, who was killed in New Jersey by the Jewish Defense League, had been a Waffen SS agent, despite court filings stating the contrary.

• Otto Von Bolschwing, who aided Adolph Eichmann in planning the extermination of the Jews of Europe, was the subject of a series of CIA memos concerning what the agency should do if Von Bolschwing’s background ever came up—that is, after he had gained admittance to the United States, where he lived until his 1981 death.

• Intelligence officials were more aware, and earlier than was known, that Arthur Rudolph, who ran a German munitions factory before working on American arms after the war (he has been honored by NASA for helping create the Saturn V rocket), was directly involved in exploiting human labor.

• Justice proved as early as 1997 that Switzerland culpably bought formerly Jewish gold from the Nazis.

• A director of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations, which was created in 1979 to investigate and deport former Nazis living stateside, kept a piece of skin believed to be a part of Dr. Josef Mengele’s scalp in a drawer.

Nazis Were Given ‘Safe Haven’ in U.S., Report Says [NYT]
Secret Justice Department Report Details How the U.S. Helped Former Nazis [NYT]

The flotilla episode is fraught with complexities and ironies on both sides. While the Turkish-led mission focused on a grave human rights crisis—Israel’s oppressive treatment of Gaza’s Palestinians—Turkey’s righteous indignation toward Israel both oversimplifies Israel’s distress about Hamas and seems glaringly hypocritical in view of its own human-rights problems. Those problems, which include Turkey’s repressive and violent treatment of its large Kurdish population, some 15 million or more, and its record of legal detention, imprisonment, and torture of Turkish intellectuals, journalists, and political activists, constitutes one of the world’s worst human rights records, as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reports repeatedly show, over the past 20 years. Add to that Turkey’s occupation of Northern Cyprus in violation of international law and its international campaign to falsify the history of its genocide of the Armenians in 1915, and the ironies multiply.

While there remains a narrative among opinion-makers like New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman that frames Turkey as an exemplary friend and a real democracy, Jews should wrestle with some truths about past and present realities. Jews, like Christians, lived as designated infidels under the Ottomans, often under harsh and repressive laws; Zionists were jailed and killed outright by the Turkish government through the end of World War I (Palestine was under Ottoman rule then). The U.S. ambassador to Turkey from 1913 to 1916, an American Jew, Henry Morgenthau, said more than once that he feared that the fate of the Armenians at the hands of the Turks awaited the Jews next. It remains uncomfortable for Jews to recall that Turkey supplied the Nazis with large amounts of chromium during World War II, a mineral that was used, among other things, for killing in concentration camps. And today a virulent anti-Semitism has spread throughout Turkey so that recently a banner of the Islamic Saadet Party read: “Legendary leader Hitler, our patience is running out, we need your spirit.”

It’s a strange irony that in recent decades Israeli and Jewish diasporan groups have colluded with Turkey’s aggressive policy of denying and rewriting the history of the Armenian Genocide. In this equation the Armenian past has become a bargaining chip between Turkey and Israel, which have a regional partnership based on reciprocal needs. Turkey is an important source of Israel’s water supply and at least until recently, had been a friendly Muslim ally in a hostile region. Israel supplies Turkey with high-powered weapons, and the lucrative military manufacturing deals are important to Israel’s economy.

In 1982—by threatening the lives and livelihoods of Jews in Turkey—Turkey pressured the Israeli government to stop a genocide studies conference in Tel Aviv, at which a group of scholars were giving papers on the Armenian Genocide. As a result the Israeli government pulled out its support, Elie Wiesel decided he could not participate, and the conference was moved to an out-of-the-way location and was greatly diminished. In the 1990s, two Armenian documentaries that were to be aired on Israeli TV—one of them about the Armenian community of Jerusalem—were canceled at the last minute because of Turkish pressure. From 1989 on, Jewish-American organizations have worked at Ankara’s request to help stop a simple, non-binding Armenian Genocide resolution from passing in the U.S. Congress. When former Israeli Education Minister Yossi Sarid declared 10 years ago that he wanted to institute a new history curriculum with a chapter on genocide that would have “a broad reference to the Armenian genocide,” he was rebuked by his government and shortly thereafter left office.

In recent years, the Israeli government has mimicked at times the Turkish government’s propaganda about 1915. Shimon Peres, then Israel’s foreign minister, went as far as to say: “We reject attempts to create a similarity between the Holocaust and the Armenian allegations. Nothing similar to the Holocaust occurred. What the Armenians went through is a tragedy, but not genocide.” Peres’ crude denial elicited angry responses from Israeli scholars, and Israel Charny, the director of the Institute on Genocide in Jerusalem, crystallized the anger of many when he replied: “As a Jew and an Israeli I am ashamed of the extent to which you have now entered into the range of actual denial of the Armenian Genocide, comparable to denials of the Holocaust.”

The question remains: Is aiding Turkey’s denial of a genocidal past something Israel can continue to do? And at what cost? Amos Elon, writing in Haaretz about the “hypocrisy, opportunism, and moral trepidation” of Israeli collusion with Turkey, put it well when he asked: “But where is the boundary between the natural chauvinism of exploitation and the cheap opportunism of hypocrisy? What happens when the survivors of one Holocaust make political deals over the bitter memory of the survivors of another Holocaust?”

***

While political events provide opportunities for moments of reform, change, or introspection, it is not crass opportunism, I believe, that should dictate a change in Israeli policy on the Armenian Genocide. Rather, might this be a time—when the ironies of history have surfaced in the wake of the flotilla episode—for Israel and some Jewish diasporan organizations to rethink the moral concession Israel has made in this ethical arena—not as revenge against Turkey, but as thoughtful reflection on painful truths?

Given Turkey’s relentless campaign to deny the Armenian Genocide and insinuate its own extreme national narrative into democratic societies around the world, Israel’s call for the genocide’s proper and long overdue recognition would have important ethical meaning. It would, among other things, be a redress to genocide denial in general. As scholars have noted, denial is the final stage of genocide. The distinguished Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt has written that “denial of genocide, whether that of the Turks against the Armenians or the Nazis against the Jews … strives to reshape history in order to demonize the victims and rehabilitate the perpetrators.”

Recognizing the Armenian Genocide would allow Israel to embrace the deeply rooted relationship between Jews and Armenians in the modern age. When Hitler exhorted his military advisers eight days before invading Poland in 1939, “Who today, after all, speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?” he made it clear that he was both inspired by what the Young Turk government had done to the Armenians in 1915 and also noted that because the memory of what had been the most well-reported human rights catastrophe of the first quarter of the 20th century had been washed away, it was easier to commit genocide again.

Hitler learned a good deal from the genocide of the Armenians because Germany was Turkey’s wartime ally, and there was a great deal of documentation from German foreign officers and other German personnel in Turkey at the time. There are, of course, parallels—in bureaucratic organization, killing squad implementation, race ideology, and more—between the two events. Yet what ties Jews to Armenians even more deeply is the powerful role Jews have played in bearing witness to and later defining Turkey’s genocide.

Ambassador Henry Morgenthau’s life remains a crucial part of the history of rescue and resistance during the Armenian Genocide. As U.S. ambassador to Turkey, he had the courage to step outside his prescribed role as ambassador and confront Pashas Talaat and Enver—the two major architects of the plan; he implored both the U.S. and German governments to intercede and stop the mass killing of the Armenian population; and he was a primary force in helping to organize the first major relief campaign for the Armenians in the United States.

In the end Morgenthau would lose his job because of his stance on the Armenians. After leaving Turkey in 1916 and noting that it would remain “a place of unutterable horror” for him, he included in his acclaimed World War I memoir of 1918, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, the first full narrative about the Armenian Genocide in English.

Franz Werfel, the Austrian Jewish novelist who escaped Hitler’s death list by a hair in 1934, wrote the first major novel about the Armenian Genocide, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, which depicted Armenian resistance to massacre in a small mountain village; it was also a novel that was a specific warning to the Jews of Europe about what might happen to them. The Nazis banned and burned the book in 1934, but the novel would inspire Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and became an important text in the educational curriculum for Jews in Palestine and then Israel.

Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish legal scholar who coined the word genocide, was the first to use the term Armenian Genocide in the early 1940s—noting that it was the precise term for intended group destruction of the Armenians in 1915. He underscored that the concept “genocide” derived from his understanding of the acts committed against the Armenians in 1915 and against the Jews in the 1940s: “Examples of genocide,” he wrote in 1949, “are the destruction of the Armenians in the first World War, the destruction of the Jews in the second World War.” He also noted in his autobiography that his study of the Armenian massacres was a turning point in his life’s work.

In the modern era, the contributions to the Armenian Genocide discourse made by Jewish scholars both in Israel and worldwide has been extraordinary, and a list would be long and include Elie Wiesel, Robert Jay Lifton, Deborah Lipstadt, Robert Melson, Jay Winter, the documentary filmmaker Andrew Goldberg, Israeli scholars Yehuda Bauer, Israel Charny, and Yair Auron, who wrote The Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide. Recently, the Center For Jewish History and the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York put on brilliant exhibitions on the lives of both Raphael Lemkin and Henry Morgenthau—in which the Armenian genocide figured significantly.

Given this long-standing record of Jewish engagement and intellectual achievement concerning the Armenian Genocide, and the deep ties between the two cultures—it would seem an organic thing for Israel to finally say: The game is over. The truth of history, the meaning of genocide, the importance of ethical memory is a defining part of Jewish intellectual tradition and identity. And, in the Armenian case, the two genocidal histories commingle in deep and historical ways. As for fear of Turkey? The other 20 countries (including France, Italy, Sweden, Poland, Greece, and Canada) that have passed Armenian Genocide resolutions have witnessed Turkey’s initial diplomatic anger, an ambassador recalled for a short time, and then it’s been back to business as usual—proving that the hysteria passes and life goes on.

The Israeli government could recognize the Armenian Genocide by honoring the words of the great founding genocide scholar Lemkin—a Holocaust survivor who lost 49 members of his own family to the Nazis. In August 1950, Lemkin wrote to a colleague: “Let us not forget that the heat of this month is less unbearable to us than the heat of the ovens of Auschwitz and Dachau and more lenient than the murderous heat in the desert of Aleppo which burned to death the bodies of hundreds of thousands of Christian Armenian victims of genocide in 1915.”

As for Armenians, in the midst of this, they look on with bewilderment, anger, bitterness. For the sizable meaning and historical significance of the genocide committed against them, they feel endlessly embattled in the effort to preserve the truthful memory of what happened to them. It seems to most Armenians that the accurate memory of their history is an ethical necessity, a minimal thing to ask others to affirm in the face of the continued assault on historical truth by Turkey. Israel’s affirmation would be of distinct ethical importance given the common experience the two peoples have shared. For Israel, colluding with a denialism is too painfully ironic.

Peter Balakian, the Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities at Colgate University, is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response, among other books.

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Margarita Korol/Tablet Magazine

“Hey, Shalom, how are you doing?”

I am at a teacher-parent function at my son’s school, and the man—let’s call him K— is smiling broadly as he approaches me. K’s daughter is in my son’s class; he is in his mid-50s, with a small beard and a pot belly that hangs over the front of his pants. He smells of coffee and office machines and paperwork. I reach out to shake his hand, which he bypasses instead for an adolescent shoulder bump and a hearty slap on my back.

“Good to see you,” he says.

The thing about K is that I hate him. Hate is a strong word, but not strong enough. Abhor? Revile? Something to do with nausea? There’s not much time; let’s go with hate.

I hate K so much I can’t believe how much I hate him. He’s never done anything to me, never said anything bad about me, we’ve never been anything but cordial to one another. But I hate who K is, I hate the way that he is; I hate, I think, his soul, assuming he has one. None of this would be a problem for me except for this: K is a Jew.

The worst thing about being Jewish, for me, is that you can’t hate someone else who’s Jewish without being accused of being a self-hating Jew, even when his Jewishness isn’t the reason I hate him. I’d hate K if he was a Christian. I’d hate K if he was an atheist. I’d hate K if he was a labrador retriever. He happens to be Jewish, so all of a sudden, I’m self-hating? It really is unfair. Tell me I can’t eat bacon, tell me I can’t drive on Sabbath—but don’t tell me who I can’t hate. I can only tolerate three or four people in the world to begin with, and there’s something like 15 million Jews out there. That’s not a lot of overlap.

The situation is further complicated in K’s case because the things I hate about K happen to be the very things an anti-Semite would hate about Jews: he’s stingy, he’s sneaky, he cheats.

For the record, I don’t associate these qualities with Jews; I associate them with people, with mankind in general. I find it almost sweetly optimistic of anti-Semites to suggest that only Jews are stingy, that only Jews obsess about money, that only Jews lust for power. If only, Hitler my man, if only.

So, I’m torn.

What can I do?

Like him?

That’s ridiculous.

It’s as if the SS or the Klan or the Tea Party (trust me, they’ll get there) handed K a checklist of “Reasons We Hate Jews” and he spends his every waking moment trying to check them all off: Sleazy lawyer? Check. Obsessed with money? Check. Loose morality when it comes to business? Check. He hasn’t yet made matzo out of Christian children’s blood, not that I know of, but maybe 2012 will be the year he does so and completes the list.

“Good,” I say. “Good. How are you?”

He cheats at everything and loudly decries anyone else who does so; he manipulates teachers and coaches, donates heavily to the school in order to influence their decisions regarding his daughter; he skirts every regulation, bends every rule, he is the first one to arrive at every school function and the last one to leave, and never without a conspiratorial whisper to the principal, a calculated aside to the teacher.

“Good,” he says. “Nice to see you.”

I try to remind myself that I hate all people.

I try to tell myself I hated K before I knew he was Jewish.

And then it happens: The teacher walks in, asks everyone to sit, and while everyone else does as they are told, while everyone else plays by the rules, K approaches her, and whispers in her ear. She listens intently, pats him on the back, and says, “We’ll take care of it,” and then K takes his seat—front row center—sits upright, winks at her, gives her a thumbs-up, and she nods back. I hate her, too, now, just for falling for it.

I don’t know what they were talking about, but I know what they were talking about: some special treatment his daughter required, some special attention, some grading on a curve, some handout of a position—class president, group leader, blackboard wiper—that all the other children would have to honestly work for. And I stare at the back of his head, and I think, despite myself, despite everything I just thought before:

You fucking kike.

I feel bad for this at first, but it doesn’t last. It doesn’t last because not all Jews are kikes, but some are. It doesn’t last because I see the other parents who know K, and who have seen what I just saw, and I see them look at each other and frown and shake their heads in disgust. It doesn’t last because shouldn’t the Jews who don’t fit the stereotypes—who strive, in fact, to prove those stereotypes false—be able to call out those Jews who make them all seem true?

Listen to him, so concerned about what the goyim think.

I hear on the news that a man has stolen billions of dollars, and that he lives in New York City, and I hold my breath and I think, Please don’t be a Jew, please don’t be a Jew, and then they say his name—Madoff—and they show his doorman building and they show his synagogue, and I think, You fucking kike.

I hear Chelsea Clinton is getting married, and I hear that her father-in-law was in prison for financial fraud, and I think, Please don’t be a Jew, please don’t be a Jew, and then I see the wedding photo in the newspaper and there’s the groom, the ex-con’s son, and he’s wearing a goddamn tallis, and I think of Chelsea’s new-father-in-law, You fucking kike.

Sure, sure—all he can see is the bad Jews. God forbid he should say a nice word about his own people.

I know, I know—one person doesn’t represent an entire group. But then why are we so vocal in demanding that “good” Muslims speak out against the bad? Why do we applaud when Bill Cosby reprimands African-Americans for not being good fathers? Why shouldn’t we police ourselves, too?

Police ourselves? You hear him, police ourselves? He’s nothing but a lousy Kapo, that’s what he is. A self-hating Kapo.

Oh, well. A thousand words ago I was worried I was a Nazi. I guess I’m doing better than I thought.

But what would we have done without him? To many Jews, especially in the Diaspora, he gave at least the illusion that some of the perpetrators would be brought to justice. “Justice not vengeance,” as Wiesenthal liked to say.

Segev, an indefatigable historian and highly respected reporter for the leftist Israeli daily Haaretz, tells us he had access to 300,000 Wiesenthal-related documents, although he doesn’t say how many he read. (Among his many human sources are agents of the Mossad who believe they deserve credit for some of his successes.) But his attempt at de-mythologizing Wiesenthal can sometimes make one feel he misses the forest for the trees. Yes, the Wiesenthal behind the legend may have been all too human, and it’s always valuable to set the record straight for history, but could this be a case where the legend is more important to the course of history than the life? Is publicity-seeking intrinsically bad if one is seeking to publicize the untroubled afterlives of mass murderers in order to shame the world into action?

The fact that this question has to be asked is due to something we have chosen to forget: the world community’s stunning failure after World War II to treat the Final Solution as a crime unto itself. The 19 Nazis convicted at Nuremberg were found guilty of “crimes against humanity” mainly for planning and starting a devastating war of aggression. Wiesenthal, Segev reminds us, was always adamant that the Final Solution was a crime against humanity as well as against Jews. But it was a different crime from that for which the Nazi leaders were tried at Nuremberg.

There was a lamentable loss of distinction between the two crimes, or rather a shameful failure to prosecute the second crime, for some 15 years after the war. Hitler lost the war against the Allies, yes. But in effect he won his personal “war against the Jews” (as Lucy Dawidowicz described his greatest priority) by a factor of some 6 million to one.

The world preferred to focus on the fact that the official war was won. We are fortunate that someone—Simon Wiesenthal—made the pursuit of the perpetrators of the second war his lonely obsession. But what if there had been no Wiesenthal? What if he hadn’t started pestering people around the world as early as 1953 that Adolf Eichmann, the chief operating officer of the Holocaust, was alive and living in Buenos Aires? Wiesenthal became the Ancient Mariner of Mauthausen, the Austrian camp he’d been sent to from his native Lvov, buttonholing anyone and everyone, trying to get them to care that there was a monster of evil living a thinly disguised second life in Buenos Aires. And for a long time nobody cared enough to do anything about it. It wasn’t a priority.

Eichmann still may have been caught—Segev is meticulous in disentangling the different threads of information that finally propelled the Mossad to kidnap Eichmann in Argentina and transport him to Israel for trial in 1960—but it was Wiesenthal who seized upon the capture (and his role in it) to make belated justice for ex-Nazi war criminals a worldwide cause.

That was the significance of the Eichmann trial, making the world face the fact that it had let the perpetrators of the greatest mass murder in history walk away for the most part unscathed and unindicted.

Wiesenthal or the myth that grew up around Wiesenthal—that Nazis all over the world were being pursued by the vast inexorable forces of Wiesenthal’s all-powerful, all-knowing “Documentation Center”—served several purposes. It was satisfying to a certain extent to Jews, particularly because many ex-Nazis believed the legend and could be thought of as living in fear of capture. But however exaggerated some of his claims may have been, the exaggerations (the hyping of the so-called ODESSA Nazi escape network, for instance) may have served a purpose—not just psychic healing for Holocaust survivors who could at least imagine justice would eventually be done. Alas, the legend also served as an excuse for the indifference of the rest of the world to the murderers in their midst. It allowed the rest of the world to think that there was no need to make a systematic effort to punish the perpetrators of the greatest mass murder in history—they were being hunted down by Simon Wiesenthal.

In Segev’s account, we come to understand how Wiesenthal was driven close to madness by the indifference of the rest of the world to the pursuit of justice and ironically, his work, his legend gave the rest of the world a fig leaf for its inaction.

Perhaps the most maddening aspect of it all was the way many Jewish leaders such as the World Jewish Congress’s Nahum Goldman failed to act with any vigor on the escaped Nazi information Wiesenthal supplied. And there was the episode when Austria’s Jewish chancellor, Bruno Kreisky, found excuses to attack Wiesenthal.

“The dispute with Kreisky caused Wiesenthal great pain,” Segev writes. “He reckoned that most, if not all, Austrians were happy that someone had taken upon himself to free them at long last from their Nazi past…. ‘I am their bad conscience,’ he wrote some time later, ‘because each one of them should have taken upon himself what I have done for Austrian society.’ Never had he felt so alone.”

And indeed looking back it’s rather astonishing that of all the Jews in the world just one man, however flawed, systematically unappeasably dedicated himself to being the world’s “bad conscience” and the Nazi’s living nightmare. Segev is good at capturing the catch-as-catch-can origins of Wiesenthal’s “Documentation Center.” He makes much of what a sloppy, disorganized, out-of-pocket, one-man shop it was for much of its early history, how it depended on stacks of newspaper clippings, old phone books, barely legible letters, flawed memories from camp survivors who randomly wandered in, false trails, red herrings—this was no CSI Vienna, no Cold Case Squad. For a long time it was one irritable guy who’d lived through a hellish experience he wasn’t going to allow the perpetrators to forget.

Wiesenthal started by collecting information from his fellow camp survivors and then looking up SS murderers in Austrian phone books and pressuring authorities to prosecute them, or dismiss them from whatever important office they held (often with the tacit knowledge of everyone around them). Soon his “bad conscience” became an inconvenience not just to ex-Nazis but to the American foreign policy, which was more heavily invested in prosecuting the Cold War than on prosecuting the many Nazi war criminals West Germany allowed to hold prominent state positions.

Segev demonstrates the way Wiesenthal learned to manipulate the media, play politicians against each other, sometimes plant false stories about sightings (Eichmann in Syria!) just to keep an escaped Nazi’s name in the news. He was a combination of detective and showman. Segev sometimes makes him seem like Geraldo Rivera, which I think is a bit unfair: Look at what he was taking on—the burden the world had shrugged off its shoulders, the moral weight of the world. The immoral wait of the world.

Yes, Wiesenthal was a born tummler. He stirred things up, made things up, sometimes got things wrong, but he made it impossible for people to forget the murderers—like Eichmann.

Wiesenthal and Eichmann: the two poles of post-Holocaust consciousness. Let us take a moment to give Eichmann some consideration since he was the central figure in the drama of Wiesenthal’s life and legend.

The late Milton Himmelfarb once wrote an influential polemic called “No Hitler, No Holocaust” arguing—against pseudo-sophisticated detractors of the “great man” theory of history—that in fact it had been Hitler’s implacable drive alone that made the Jews the victims, not just of oppression or Pogroms as they had been in the past in Europe, but of systematic extermination. One could say of Eichmann, “No Eichmann, no systematic, industrialized continent-wide extermination.” He made the trains run on time. To review: Heydrich called Eichmann and told him that the Furher has given the order for the extermination of the Jews. You’re in charge.

Aside from the industrialized gas chamber/crematoria complex, Eichmann can be held responsible for the psychological component of the continent-wide extraction, concentration, and transportation of Jews with minimum fuss. The technique of promising “work in the east” to the ghettoized Jews if they’d just get on board the trains. The diabolical “wish you were here” postcards home from the dead.

But you won’t find in Segev’s book a full description of the real Eichmann. He was not merely the neutral administrator par excellence but an ideologically committed, bloodthirsty, Jew-hating killer. You have to go to a book such as Neal Bascomb’s recent Hunting Eichmann, where in five pages he tells you more than Segev’s entire book does about Eichmann’s obscene ferocity in personally coming to Budapest at the end of the war to insure that the last surviving Jewish community, the 400,000 that had been protected in Hungary from extermination by the fascist but somewhat independent Hungarian regent, Admiral Horthy, were shipped to the death camps.

Even though the war was lost, and there was no point (as if there ever was) in Eichmann’s making sure every last Jew alive in Hungary died, but Eichmann did his best, sending the last 7,500 Jews left in Budapest to Auschwitz until, Bascomb reports, Eichmann had to be summoned by Himmler himself (who was trying to make some devil’s bargain for the lives of those Jews), who ordered Eichmann to stop the final frenzy of extermination. Wiesenthal pieced it altogether from the ground up, from Eichmann’s collaborators and victim/survivors. That’s why he got into everyone’s face about Eichmann. He was no cog in a machine, he was the screeching driving wheel.

At least Segev doesn’t buy into Hannah Arendt’s fatuous pseudo-profound notion of Eichmann’s “banality of evil,” a scandalously inaccurate, philosophically meretricious phase that historically ignorant people parrot to make themselves seem intellectually sophisticated.

Actually, Segev’s attitude toward Eichmann seems inconsistent, which is a problem since he is so central to the Wiesenthal narrative and Wiesenthal’s iconic triumph, however much he may have exaggerated his role in the final denouement.

In fact, Segev seems to be of two minds about Eichmann. When he first introduces him early in the book he claims Eichmann “was never a maker of policy, he implemented it. He was one of those Nazi killers who as a rule did his work sitting behind a desk.” In Eichmann’s case this is utterly misleading considering how eager Eichmann was to get out from behind his desk to outrace the coming end of the war to complete his final evil project, the murder of the Hungarian Jews.

Which gives you the feeling that Segev buys into Arendt’s bogus “banality of evil” theory—that Eichmann was merely a paper-pushing bureaucrat who had no emotional investment in the mass murder he was enabling, a follower of orders, an exculpatory line Arendt foolishly took directly from Eichmann’s own dishonest attempt to exculpate himself—and save himself from the hangman—at his trial in Jerusalem.

But then Segev seems to have had a change of heart because a hundred pages later he tells us that he was shocked, shocked by some new Eichmann revelations in the year 2000, “when Israel permitted the publication of an autobiography written by Eichmann in prison,” and, Segev says, “a different person emerged.”

Different person! No more Mr. Nice Guy, I guess. Anyone who didn’t know the nature of Eichmann by 2000 was ignoring the well-documented history of his fanatic frenzied last-ditch crusade to kill every last Jew in Hungary.

Which leads one to wonder about Segev’s imputing a belief in Arendt’s banality theory to Wiesenthal, although Segev offers an empathetic (or perhaps patronizing) explanation.

“As a man who identified with the principles of humanistic ethics, Wiesenthal found it difficult to accept this [the profound and vicious calculation behind Eichmann’s hatred,] so he preferred Arendt’s thesis. She too refused to see in Eichmann a thinking person, she therefore erred in her assessment of him as did Wiesenthal.”

So now Segev tells us Arendt was wrong to see Eichmann as a mere paper-pushing deskman but uses the fraudulence of her theory to reprove Wiesenthal for an alleged failure to see Eichmann’s anti-Semitic “ferocity.” Somehow I doubt Segev’s claim to see Eichmann’s nature more clearly than Wiesenthal.

What’s fascinating is that, despite all his strenuous debunking and attempted debunking of the Wiesenthal myth, Segev is too good a reporter, too honest an observer, not to have developed a grudging admiration for his subject that he will sometimes allow to slip through.

What could be the cause of the demythologizing impulse that seems to drive Segev’s book, though? I believe it can be traced back to something Segev himself describes:

Many of the Israelis who had settled in the country before World War II or were born there, tended to relate condescendingly to Holocaust victims and survivors, identifying them with the Jews of the Diaspora, whom they despised as the polar opposite of the “new Hebrews” they were trying to create in the Land of Israel, in the spirit of the Zionist vision. It was the customary to blame the victims for not coming to the country beforehand, remaining in Europe instead and waiting to be slaughtered without doing anything to prevent it.

Harsh, no? And the length to which he goes to describe this prejudice suggests that part of him still shares the Israeli contempt for the survivors and that part of him treats Wiesenthal as the man who thrust the Holocaust upon Israel—an unwanted legacy for a nation founded on a vision of the future not the past, as the central focus of Jewishness. One could argue this case, but it’s unfair to take it out on Wiesenthal.

It’s hard to read Segev’s mind, but he is one of the leading “revisionist” historians of Israel. Does he resent the focus on the Holocaust of the European Jews as a rationale for the state of Israel, as a focus of Jewish identity? Does he share the early Israeli’s contempt for alleged Diasporic weakness that allowed the Holocaust to happen? This blame-the-victim attitude all too prevalent in Jewish and non-Jewish circles discounts the hideous progressive dehumanization of the victims before the slaughter. I actually think Segev has overcome a great deal of this Sabra attitude. One could speculate that Segev’s Mossad sources convinced him Wiesenthal grabbed too much credit for the Eichmann capture and other exploits. One could also speculate he sold the book as a sensational debunking project but the deeper he got into the documentation of the crimes Wiesenthal was seeking justice for, the loneliness of his quest, the more Segev’s integrity as a historian and a human being deepened his own world view to see the value as well as the hype in Wiesenthal’s work.

Try this thought experiment: What would the history of post-Holocaust Judaism have been like without Wiesenthal, this edgy irritable man who loved to spend his weekends with a stamp-collectors club at the Museum Cafe in Vienna but who managed—like pasting stamps in an album—to put hundreds of ex-Nazis in jail and redeem a portion of justice for Holocaust perpetrators?

Does Wiesenthal represent the inexorable triumph of justice? Alas no, we should be grateful for his work but realize that it was a lucky accident in a world that didn’t want to care, an aberration in a world where people and nations consciously and unconsciously fled from facing the fact of their complicity in perhaps the greatest crime in history. Sought to bury it in the past. Is too much attention to the past being paid now? How much does it matter that the Wiesenthal legend was exaggerated? Segev’s book provokes fascinating and important questions, especially when the prospect of a second holocaust (from a nuclear attack on the Jewish state) is not out of the question. If few cared then, will many care next time?

Wiesenthal was a tummler, but there’s something more to him, a moral seriousness that gets lost in Segev’s focus on the colorful fabrication of the legend surrounding him. He was a tummler but he was also kind of golem summoned up from the collective unconscious of the survivors and dead souls of the victims, someone who, as Segev points out, would almost have had to be invented if he hadn’t existed.

He was a larger-than-life figure and his stories were sometimes larger than truth, but he was dealing with a crime that was larger than death.

Ron Rosenbaum, the author of Explaining Hitler, The Shakespeare Wars, and a forthcoming book on the new age of nuclear war, is a cultural columnist for Slate.

• Yehuda Krinsky, the leader of Chabad-Lubavitch movement and Newsweek’s most influential American rabbi, accuses Mayor Bloomberg of selling out his people … for adopting the Yankees over their native Red Sox. I am making none of this up. [NYT Magazine]

• Is President Obama convinced that current sanctions are working? Or does he think further engagement is crucial? Various reporters whom the president personally briefed cannot agree. [Laura Rozen]

• Condé Nast’s decision to move to lower Manhattan illustrates its despicable insensitivity to 9/11. [Jeffrey Goldberg]

• “The original Fanta was a Nazi product.” I knew there was a reason I despised that atrocious jingle. [Slate]

• In a suit brought by the Chabad movement, a U.S. federal judge ruled that Russia is illegally in possession of thousands of Jewish documents seized during the Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War as well as by the Nazis and then in turn captured by the Soviets. [Moscow Times]

Andy Warhol, one of the Gentiles most commonly mistaken for a Jew, was born on this day in 1928. Here he is eating a cheeseburger.

The march is properly understood in the context of “Holocaust obfuscation,” which Dovid Katz reported on for Tablet Magazine. An Eastern European (and maybe particularly Baltic?) phenomenon, Holocaust obfuscation does not deny the Holocaust, but states that the crimes of occupying Nazis and the crimes of occupying Soviets were more or less equivalent. This march perhaps takes Holocaust obfuscation one step further (and several too far!) by cheering the relief of Soviet occupation that Nazi invasion brought.

“To celebrate the anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Riga on July 1,” said the director of Israel’s Simon Wiesenthal Center, “is to celebrate the mass murder of all those victimized by the Nazis in Latvia—primarily Jews, but also Communists, Gypsies and the mentally ill.”

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is slated to visit Latvia over the weekend to honor the roughly 66,000 Latvian Jews whom the Nazis murdered.

Latvian March To Mark Nazi Invasion Condemned [JTA]
Related: The Crime of Surviving [Tablet Magazine]

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

• Uruguay. Harbored Nazis after the war.

• Ghana. They (in soccer, a side are described with plural verbs) defeated Tablet Magazine’s official team, so by a certain logic they now claim that mantle. Plus, they have John Pantsil, who in the last World Cup waved an Israeli flag after scoring a goal, in honor of his then-team, Hapoel Tel Aviv.

• Argentina. Harbored Nazis.

• Paraguay. Harbored Nazis. Harbors Hamas.

• Netherlands. Compared to most other Western European countries (ahem, France?), they resented Nazi persecution and slaughter of their Jews. Plus, Anne Frank lived there!

• Germany. I mean.

• Spain.

• Brazil. You can’t root for Brazil: That’s like rooting for the Yankees or the Lakers! Plus, they harbored Nazis.

For now, Tablet Magazine is officially supporting the Netherlands, which is playing Brazil, and Ghana, which is playing Uruguay, both on Friday. We’ll revisit the matter after the quarter-finals. Happy watching!

Earlier: U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

I am all in favor of reparations for survivors—especially since, scandalously, one in four American ones lives below the poverty line. That said, I found it interesting that Col. Ellis Robinson (Ret.), a longtime Jewish Boca resident and (if I may say so) truly spectacular grandfather, is not also eligible for some Holocaust-based cash. The colonel was not a survivor of the camps; rather, as an officer who landed at Normandy, freed Paris, fought in the Ardennes, and crossed the Rhine at Remagen under General Patton, he helped free them.

So, I asked the colonel: Why isn’t he getting some cash now for his services?

He responded in an email: “Was glad to do it … FREE OF CHARGE.”

Former Nazi Slave Laborers Seek Payment from Germany [South Florida Sun Sentinel]
16,000 Floridians Get a Shot at Holocaust Pensions [UPI/Vos Iz Neias?]

(Specifically, according to Beck, Greer’s philosophy of prioritizing the common good “leads to death camps. A Jew, of all people, should know that. This is exactly the kind of talk that led to the death camps in Germany.”)

Point Two: Everyone is a Nazi to Glen Beck, says Lewis Black.

Who’s right? We report, you decide.

Beck Attacks Jewish Funds for Justice’s Simon Greer; Says Putting “The Common Good” First “Leads to Death Camps” [Media Matters]

We’re not sure whether the archive will include film, as the English version hasn’t yet launched (but should be coming soon). In the meantime, a glimpse into the delightfully “degenerate” world of filmmaker Hans Richter in his piece “One More Ghost Before Breakfast,” the original sound version of which was destroyed by the Nazis:

‘Degenerate Art’ Database Shows 21,000 Works Seized by Nazis [Bloomberg]

• The New York Jewish Week finds harmony between Hillel Halkin and Yehuda Halevi, the subject of Halkin’s book for Nextbook Press: “Hebrew literature, Zionism, Israel, the diaspora and its discontents, Jewish thought, the very essence of Jewishness itself—they all come together, over a span of 1,000 years, in the poet/philosopher and in his biographer.” [NYJW]

• Israel’s Communication Ministry has banned the Apple iPad from entering the country, and it’s not just because the company opted against a catchier name—rather, the computer’s “broadcast WiFi power levels are not compatible with Israeli standards,” whatever that means. [Arutz Sheva]

• MyJewishLearning.com is holding a contest to name its new parenting site. The prize is $500! We would offer them some rejects from before Tablet’s launch, but we doubt they will want “Pickle,” “Brisket,” or “Matzah Ball.” (What do you want, we were hungry!) [MJL]

• Eerily banal mug shots of Nazis. [Daily Heller]

• Sign a petition urging the Rabbinical Council of America to put more stock in leadership roles for Orthodox women.

This isn’t the first talk of Nazis allegedly having produced soap from human remains. Last year, Tablet Magazine covered the “Nazi Soap Myth,” with Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum asserting that the making of soap from human fat would have been financially infeasible for the Nazis, and that several tests have shown that soap presented as “human soap” has in fact been nothing of the sort. As the good folks at Montreal PD will no doubt soon learn.

Alleged Holocaust Soap To Be Tested [JTA]
Earlier: Is ‘Nazi Soap’ A Myth?

Sonya Oshman in Italy, late 1940s.
CREDIT: Courtesy of Lisa Oshman

Sonya’s speech at the podium impressed on me her sheer will to survive, gratitude for surviving, and mission to share her story. Her drive filled me with awe, but also with dread. What, I wondered, infused my life with comparable purpose and fiery will? For me, and I imagine for my peers, Holocaust stories serve a similar function as the Torah did for pre-World War II generations: They offer lessons on morality, love, death, betrayal, and triumph and provide a strong reason for maintaining a Jewish identity.

Several weeks after the film screening, I sat in Sonya Oshman’s sunny living room at her assisted-living facility in New Jersey. At 86, she was small but sturdy, with feathery brown hair, round deep-set eyes, and thin eyebrows that arched upwards when she smiled. She wore a wool vest over her button-down shirt and a shin-length pleated skirt, all in white and brown. I had arrived fascinated by the enduring image of the Novogrudek Jews clawing at the land that had been their home for generations, escaping underground like mice. I wanted to immerse myself in Sonya’s story and to find out what kept her going. She called to me from the kitchen.

“Mamale,” she said, “what can I give you?”

From the couch I scanned framed photographs on the walls and on the top of the shiny piano. Some were sepia-toned portraits of her parents and grandparents, photos that friends had found among their belongings and mailed to her from Europe after the war. Sonya returned to the couch carrying a can of ginger ale, peeled grapefruit sections in a Styrofoam bowl, and a muffin wrapped in a napkin, all of which she saved from that morning’s breakfast, knowing I was coming.

***

In 1931, Sonya Gorodinsky was 9 years old, the eldest of four children, with a sister yet to be born. The family lived on Pilsudski Street, in a home next to Sonya’s maternal grandparents, who employed two young Polish women who did housework and looked after the children. “I had a good youth,” Sonya told me. “I was one of the privileged ones.”

Sonya’s parents, Abraham and Tamara, owned an appliance store. Abraham called his daughter Sonyaleh. Many of his customers, non-Jewish state officials, befriended him and called him Abramaleh, or Meme. When there was tension between the Jews and Poles of the town, they would often turn to Meme to mediate.

During the week, the Gorodinsky children ate dinner with their grandparents and were in bed by the time their parents came home from work. But on Fridays, before the Sabbath, her parents came home early. Tamara blessed the candles, and Abraham blessed the wine and challah before the meal. Sonya watched as her father gathered tzedakah to bring to the rabbi, the Jewish orphanage and hospital, and the Zionist youth movement.

The children attended Jewish schools where they studied Hebrew, Torah, and Jewish history, as well as math, science, and literature. She went on to study to be a doctor and was accepted to medical school in Bialistok, to begin in the fall of 1939.

By September of that year Novogrudek was in danger of German invasion. The Polish authorities fled, knowing they would be overpowered. The Jews there believed the Russians would be more sympathetic rulers than the Germans, and so when Soviet soldiers marched into town on September 17, they were greeted with flowers and hugs.

***

The afternoon of June 24, 1941, Sonya was the only one at home on Pilsudski Street. As she passed the tall brick chimney in the center of the house, she heard a bomb fall. Then another. She stood frozen while the entire house collapsed in a heavy sigh of dust and boards. After the smoke settled, Sonya stood stunned next to the brick chimney.

The Germans had invaded Novogrudek and turned the Jewish neighborhoods to rubble. The shops in the marketplace, mostly Jewish-owned, were burnt and smashed, as were the Jewish libraries and schools. Of all the synagogues, only a few walls remained. There were 300 casualties, mostly Jewish.

***

It was bitterly cold six months later, on Saturday, December 6, when 6,500 Jews, half the town’s population, were instructed to assemble at the courthouse yard. The Gorodinskys trudged toward the town center clutching pillows, boxes of photographs, and sacks of clothing. Soldiers locked the gates of the courthouse yard behind them.

For two days, the Jews neither slept nor ate. On December 8, Sonya’s grandparents and little brother were sent to their deaths, while Sonya, her parents, and her remaining siblings were locked into the courthouse compound along with Novogrudek’s remaining 1,500 Jews. It was a makeshift ghetto surrounded by a barbed wire and armed guards. The people inside were craftsmen saved for their skills. Each morning the ghetto gates would open and tailors, shoemakers, metalworkers, carpenters, saddlers, and mechanics, along with their families, were ushered under gunpoint to their workshops to sew fur linings into boots, manufacture guns, or mend German army uniforms.

***

On May 7, 1943, there was another roundup in the courthouse square. SS guards swarmed around the exhausted crowd. Among the guards was Zbisheck, Sonya’s former neighbor, who looked her in the eye.

Zbisheck’s family had lived across from the Gorodinkys on Pilsudski Street. Zbisheck and Sonya were playmates for years. Perhaps when Zbisheck saw Sonya in the crowd he was reminded of her bicycle, her summer dresses, the scallions in her garden. Zbisheck motioned for Sonya to follow him. They entered a room in the courthouse where the skilled workers waited, including her father. Sonya grabbed Zbisheck’s arm and whispered, “You saved my life and I thank you. But please, can you help my sister and my mother too?” Zbisheck answered under his breath that he had already risked his life to save her.

That day the ghetto population was reduced by half. Sonya heard later that her mother linked arms with relatives and her 11-year-old daughter and said “Come, let’s go together to the grave.” Now only an essential 250 workers, along with some children, remained. They began to plot their escape that night.

***

Sonya Oshman.
CREDIT: Courtesy Lisa Oshman

The original breakout plan had been to storm the ghetto gates on a Sunday night, when the guards notoriously drank and grew lazy. In preparation, some people had bribed hand grenades from guards, others smuggled in guns from peasants outside the ghetto, still others stole iron rods and knives from their workshops. The Jews would throw everything they had and run. The casualty rate would be high, but it would be better than certain death at the hands of their oppressors.

Everyone was ready in their places on the appointed evening. A man near the front gate was poised to throw the first grenade. Sonya, waiting in the bunk, fingered a small gold ring in the pocket of her tattered skirt. A few weeks before her death, her mother had pulled her daughter aside and tugged at her finger. Pressing something small and warm into Sonya’s palm, she said, “Listen my daughter. Have this ring. Maybe you will need it. Maybe you will survive.”

Before the first grenade was thrown, a reinforcement of guards arrived at the main gate, braced for action. The action was called off. Each subsequent night, a reinforcement of guards arrived at dusk, and the Jews eventually abandoned their escape plan. The wife of an injured doctor had leaked word of the plan, not wanting her husband to be left behind and killed. But the younger Jews didn’t want to wait for death. “We saw that everything was finished,” Sonya told me. “What was left was only one person from each family. The young people started to scream, ‘We don’t want to die like our parents died. We’ll run away.’ ” But the older people didn’t want them to run, because the Germans would kill whoever remained in retribution.

Berl Yoselevitch, a carpenter, thought of a tunnel as a compromise. The weak and injured wouldn’t have to run fast or fight. They would hide themselves when everyone else left. The Jews would dig a passage from under a bed located along the northern barracks wall, closest to the outer walls of the ghetto and the woods. The tunnel would drop four and a half feet, then run north under the ghetto to a field next to the forest. They would escape on a moonless July night, when the wheat and grass were uncut and high enough to provide cover as they ran. Once out, they hoped to join the Bielski partisans and seek revenge.

“We wanted to show the world that Jews are not sheep that go to the slaughter,” Sonya remembered. “We decided whoever will make it will make it and whoever would not would not. It was better to die this way than the other way. And maybe someone will survive to tell the world what happened.”

Digging began right away, and details were kept to a select few in order to prevent information leaks. Not everyone was for it. Some Jews feared the tunnel would be impossible to complete before the Germans found out about it. There was one man whom nobody trusted; to ensure that he wouldn’t talk to the Germans, the Jews killed him.

Throughout the summer of 1943, Sonya clawed at the soil underneath the courthouse to escape a place she had, until recently, loved her whole life. Much of the tunnel was dug by children and small men, who could maneuver within its narrow walls. An electrician named Rakovski diverted a current from the ghetto and strung electric bulbs along the tunnel ceiling. He also figured out how to disconnect the searchlights that surveyed the ghetto grounds, and he did so occasionally, so the Germans would get used to these “shortages” and not suspect anything when one took place on the night of the escape.

The children dug lying down, bellies pressed against the earth. I asked Sonya if she remembered the smell of the earth, how it felt on her cheeks and under her fingernails. “I did not smell or feel a thing,” she replied. “We were anxious to get out as fast as we can because we had death waiting for us. I don’t even know whether I was breathing or not. I didn’t care at all, Mamika. We were full of worries that we forgot about anything else. We just wanted to get out. We wanted our lives.”

In order not to soil their only clothing and arouse suspicion, the children dug naked or wore robes of burlap sacks or old cloth sewn especially for the task. Sonya dug with her brother, Shaul, sometimes with a cousin, and with her new friend, Aaron Oshman, who at 30 was 10 years older than she and had been moved with his brother to the Novogrudek ghetto about a year earlier, when his ghetto in Ivinitz, a small town in White Russia, was liquidated. Theirs had been a wealthy family before the war; their father owned a hardware business. When Aaron arrived in Novogrudek, he sat in an empty workshop crying for his parents. In a Shoah Testimony video interview, given before his death in 2004, Aaron recalled the first time he saw Sonya. “In walked a beautiful woman. She was 19 years old. She said, ‘Don’t cry, young man, you still have your life.’” Aaron discussed philosophy and Zionism with Sonya. He was articulate and kind. Four feet underground, muddy with damp soil, Sonya and Aaron fell in love.

To remove dirt displaced by the tunnel, the diggers filled sacks of it that they then passed back until it reached the hole under the bed in the ghetto. Half a million pounds of earth were packed into false double walls built in the courthouse barracks. Soil was hidden in corners where the attic ceiling slanted to meet the floor, and buried under floorboards that were ripped up and then replaced. Ghetto residents smuggled sacks of soil to toilets—holes in the ground—outhouses at the end of the camp. One of the group’s carpenters laid a wooden track along the tunnel floor so they could use a cart to haul the dirt out.

By July 1943, the tunnel was about 240 feet long and near completion. But July was rainy that year, and the soppy earth leaked, muddying the tunnel. The group feared the tunnel would collapse. Determined not to let his plan fail, Berl Yoselevitch stole wood slats from his workshop to reinforce the walls and ceiling. He also organized the digging of small drains and channels in the floor to divert water.

In the meantime, the wheat fields were harvested, leaving a vast area of open ground between the camp and the forest. Rumors floated that the ghetto was to be liquidated further, leaving just 20 people alive. Many of the Jews wanted to leave immediately, but more decided to delay departure and dig 100 feet farther, which would put the tunnel’s exit closer to the forest. They’d leave the digging of the actual exit until the night of the escape. The first people to go through would be the young, carrying shovels to dig the final distance and guns and hand grenades should they face guards when they surfaced. The older people would wait take up the rear so that if they moved too slowly or fainted they wouldn’t hold everyone else back.

In August, the tunnel was complete. It was 750 feet, and the Jews watched the late summer sky for signs of a storm that would provide cover during an escape. But the nights were clear, and the moonless days passed. While they waited, 11 skilled craftsmen, including Sonya’s father, were transferred to Koldichevo, a camp that ran a weapons factory. Of Sonya’s family of seven, only she and her brother Shaul remained in Novogrudek.

Over the next several weeks the Jews rehearsed their escape to see how long it would take. Two to three hours seemed enough time for 240 people to pass through the tunnel. They submitted names of those they wanted to leave with, and were instructed when to appear at the mouth of the tunnel.

***

Sunday, September 26, 1943, was a moonless stormy night. Around 8 p.m., Rakovski, the electrician, cut power to the ghetto searchlights and turned on the tunnel lights. Nails in the barracks’ tin roof were loosened, amplifying the sounds of the falling rain in order to mask sounds of escape. The Jews quietly assembled, waiting in the darkness for their turn to lower themselves into the lighted earth. Sonya stood with Aaron and her brothers. Some families tied themselves to one another; others held hands.

One couple had secretly given birth in the ghetto. Before the escape, the mother strangled her child to death—the group could not take the chance that the baby would cry during its escape and alert guards above ground.

Like the Jews fleeing Egypt, the Jews of Novogrudek crawled as quickly as they could through the dirt. Sonya was in the middle. At her hands were people’s feet, at her feet, others’ hands. She felt like a mouse in a line of them, crawling silently. She hypnotized herself with a chant: Sonya, you got to make it, you got to make it. She then changed it to, God, please let me go through. Don’t bury me. Don’t bury me. Don’t bury me. Every movement she made, she was sure that the world would bury her alive.

At the end of the tunnel, it was pouring rain, and the escapees couldn’t see in the new darkness above ground. Seventy of them accidentally ran toward the ghetto and were shot by guards who thought partisans were ambushing them. Among them were two of Sonya’s cousins and Berl Yoselevitch, the tunnel’s mastermind.

When Sonya emerged, she immediately lost Aaron and her brother in the confusion. She heard shots and shouting from the right, and to her left she could just make out a road. “I got into a little ditch and out from the ditch I went through a cornfield where the leaves and the stalks were quite high. During the night I crawled around. During the day I sat in the bushes and waited.” She had no shoes. Her dress was torn. She ate nothing.

Early the morning after the escape, Germans stormed into the barracks to see why no Jews had lined up for the daily roll. By one account, they found an ironically formal letter explaining that Jews were needed elsewhere. In another version, the letter informed the Germans that they were liberating themselves and that they would take revenge. Afraid to enter the tunnel in case bombs or traps had been set up inside, the Germans forced a member of the Judenrat to crawl through. When he arrived safely on the other end, he was hanged. Peasants crowded into the courthouse to gaze at the gaping hole the Jews had left behind.

For two weeks Sonya ran through the forests during the night and tried to rest and hide during the day. She grew so hungry that when she finally saw a little house with a light on at the bottom of a hill, she couldn’t resist trying for help, despite the frightening prospect that her fate depended on the kindness of the person inside. Through the window she saw an old man at a table, patching clothes. He looked like pictures she’d seen of St. Nicholas, with white hair and beard. Sonya knocked on the window and when he came to the door he simply said, “I know who you are. I want to help you.”

The Novogrudek escape had been on the radio, and the Nazis announced that anyone who turned in a Jew would receive several pounds of sugar. But the man offered Sonya his cellar, about 10 feet from the house, where he stored potatoes. Sonya buried herself there, thinking about a future without her family and friends. During the day, she didn’t move. Late each night the old man would bring her bread, a little milk, a cooked potato, whatever he had. After six weeks, he came with only a small bit of bread. He had nothing left for either of them to eat. Sonya looked at the ring her mother had given her and said, “Please take this. Sell it for food.” The man refused. The whole town knew he was poor. If he came to them with a gold ring, they would know he was hiding a Jew.

Nearby, at the edge of the forest, there was a house where people often came and went by horse in the middle of the night. He had heard that these were the Bielskis, and he offered to cover Sonya with straw in the back of his wagon and take her to that house. Sonya agreed. There she found her brother Shaul, some surviving relatives, and friends from neighboring ghettos. She also found Aaron, whom she asked to marry her.

In the Bielski group, everyone had a job to perform. While Sonya’s relatives made fur hats and boots, Sonya stood look-out on a hill. One morning about two weeks after she arrived, Sonya saw a group of men walking toward her. From their skeletal frames, she could tell that they were escapees hoping for refuge. They told her they had recently fled Koldichevo, the camp where her father had been held. Sonya asked about him. “He had escaped with us,” they told her. “He’s probably on his way to see you now.”

Sonya stood guard for two days and nights, forgoing sleep, watching for a familiar figure. Finally, on the third day, a man approached. He was smaller than her father, but, she thought, perhaps he’d shrunk under hardship. She sobbed waiting for him to reach her, to see the crinkle in his eyes, to hear him call her Sonyaleh.

When the man was near enough, Sonya saw that it was not her father.

“Why are you crying, child?”

“I am waiting for my father, Abraham Gorodinsky, from Koldichevo.”

“Stop crying, my child,” he said. “Your father is never coming.”

The man had been a doctor at Koldichevo, while her father had worked fixing watches and appliances. Each night, the Germans appointed a different inmate to guard their jewels. When it came for Abraham’s turn, he knew he was too tired to stay awake and hired a friend to take his turn rather than risk falling asleep on the job and being killed for it. But his friend was exhausted too and fell asleep in the barracks before even taking up the post. When a guard came to check that a watchman was there, he discovered an empty chair. The next day, the Germans made all the inmates gather around as they beat Abraham so badly that his body lost its shape. “However,” said the doctor, “your father yelled to the soldiers when the beating began, saying, ‘You will kill me today, but I have a son and a daughter and they will survive and tell what happened here.’ ”

When they heard that the war had ended, the remaining Jews of Novogrudek marched back to their hometown. They found nothing but painful memories. With other refugees, Aaron and Sonya walked across Europe to a displaced persons camp in Italy. They hoped it would be a stopping point on the way to Israel, but Sonya got sick and needed penicillin, which was available then only in the United States. The couple married and departed for Brooklyn shortly after the birth of their first son.

Aaron died six years ago, after 56 years of marriage. Sonya has two sons, both lawyers, and four grandchildren. She travels to schools, synagogues, community centers to share her story. “My name is Sonya Oshman,” she says, “and I wish to speak of my father. From 30,000 Jews [in the region], perhaps only 150 survived, and from the Gorodinsky family, I am now the only living member. My brother who escaped with me died five years ago. He was a major in the Israeli army. But I want to keep my father’s promise, so I am standing here tonight and filling out the last wish of my dad. I am telling you a little fragment of my story. In this way, I hope my father’s life will be one of the lives remembered.”

Meanwhile Novogrudek’s Jewish graveyard is overgrown, its headstones mostly missing; peasants have scavenged the granite slabs to line their basements and the walls of cisterns. Once home to 6,500 Jews, Novogrudek now has one.

Gila Lyons has written for the Forward, the New York Press, and the Berkshire Review. She is a staff writer at the health site Go Ask Alice and a correspondent for The Faster Times, and she is working toward an MFA in nonfiction creative writing at Columbia University.

• The United States and Russia agreed to a mutual nuclear arms reduction pact. [JPost]

• Rumors have surfaced that White House economic adviser Larry Summers will depart by the end of the year. [Fox Business]

• A store in Montreal’s Mont Royal neighborhood is selling what it claims is actual Nazi soap made out of actual … Nazi victim. [CBC/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Sink the matzo ball in the hoop. Do it! [Ultimate Matzoh Balls]

• iPesach.

• Polish anti-abortion activists are using Hitler’s image on billboards, reminding folks that the Nazis legalized abortion in conquered Poland. [Haaretz]

• In an op-ed, Ireland’s foreign minister blasts the Gaza blockade as “unjust and completely counterproductive … inhumane and completely unacceptable.” [IHT]

• Interesting interview with the son of a Hamas leader who, he just revealed, was an Israeli informant during the Second Intifada. [BBC]

• Speaking of! An important Danish journalist has come forward to admit he also worked with the Mossad. [Haaretz]

• Watch the launch of the Sabbath Manifesto.

The second strain comes from 19th-century Europe, where religious Jew-hatred had given way to modern anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Thus the Hamas charter states that Jews “control the world media [and use their] wealth to stir revolutions… They stood behind the French and the Communist Revolutions… They also used the money to establish clandestine organizations which are spreading around the world, in order to destroy societies and carry out Zionist interests.” (Among these Zionist front organizations, you will be interested to learn, are the Rotary Club, the Lions, and B’nai Brith.)

Last but not least, the Hamas charter incorporates the 20th-century rhetoric of apocalyptic anti-Zionism. “Today it is Palestine and tomorrow it may be another country or other countries. For Zionist scheming has no end, and after Palestine they will covet expansion from the Nile to the Euphrates.” It follows that peace between Israel and Arab countries is, by definition, impossible: “Leaving the circle of conflict with Israel is a major act of treason and it will bring curse on its perpetrators.”

Koranic anti-Judaism, European anti-Semitism, Arab anti-Zionism: mix them together and you have an intoxicatingly paranoid worldview, in which Jews are all-powerful and totally malevolent, and Israel is not just a state but the latest incarnation of an eternal evil. You have, in fact, a 21st-century version of Nazism. The revelation of Jeffrey Herf’s new book, Nazi Propaganda in the Arab World, is that this affinity is not coincidental. Rather, between 1939 and 1945, Germany tirelessly used radio and print media to spread Nazi ideas about the Jews to Arab countries, especially Egypt. Herf, who is a historian of Nazi Germany and not a student of Arabic or Arab history, makes clear that his book is not a study of the way this propaganda was actually received. But simply by documenting, in great and horrible detail, what the Nazis were telling the Arabs about the Jews, he raises the question of whether “the impact of fascism and Nazism on the Middle East [is] inseparable from contemporary political controversies about anti-Semitism, radical Islam, ‘Islamofascism,’ and international terrorism since the attacks of September 11, 2001.”

The key source for Nazi Propaganda in the Arab World are transcriptions of German and Italian radio broadcasts made by experts at the American Embassy in Cairo. Between September 1941 and March 1945, the embassy sent the State Department weekly reports on “Axis Broadcasts in Arabic.” After the war, these transcripts, totaling thousands of pages, ended up the National Archives, and Herf is the first historian to consult them extensively. In addition to showing just what these broadcasts said, Herf puts them into historical context, showing how the German message evolved in response to wartime events. As the author of a definitive study of the Nazis’ domestic propaganda, Herf is also able to show how the Nazi message was specifically tailored for Arab and Muslim listeners.

Before World War II, German attempts to reach out to the Muslim world were made very awkward by the Nazis’ racial doctrines, which held Arabs, Persians, and Turks to be biologically inferior to Aryans. In Mein Kampf, Hitler openly declared, “I am prevented by mere knowledge of the racial inferiority of these so-called ‘oppressed nations’ from linking the destiny of my own people with theirs.” Accordingly, the Nazis frowned on marriage between Germans and Muslims; in 1935, the Hitler Youth expelled a boy whose father was Turkish, leading to a public-relations disaster in Turkey. When the 1936 Olympics were held in Germany, Egypt and Iran threatened to boycott to express their insulted racial pride. Significantly, what smoothed over these diplomatic quarrels were the Nazis’ assurances, private and public, that their anti-Semitism was directed solely against Jews, not against other Semitic peoples.

Once the war began, Germany turned its attention to the Muslim world in earnest. In particular, the Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa were important to the Nazis’ geopolitical designs. During World War I, the British had inspired the Arabs to revolt against Ottoman Turkey with promises of independence. But when peace came, the region was divided up between the British and French empires, breeding a resentment among the Arabs comparable to the Germans’ feelings about the Treaty of Versailles. Adding fuel to the fire was the Balfour Declaration, in which the British promised to support a Jewish home in Palestine.

The key themes of Nazi propaganda, accordingly, were anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism, with a sideline in anti-Communism. It may seem incredible that, at the very moment Germany was occupying almost every country in Europe—and exploiting them for slave labor—it could pose to the Arabs as a champion of native peoples against foreign rule. But in some quarters, the Arab resentment of Britain was so intense that Germany could be taken for a potential liberator.

The Nazis found a valuable ally, for instance, in Haj Amin el-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who found refuge in Berlin after fighting the British in Palestine and Iraq. Germany’s Arabic-language radio made great use of Husseini’s speeches, such as the one he delivered in Berlin in 1943, explaining that the Jews “lived like a sponge among peoples, sucked their blood, seized their property, undermined their morals…. All this has brought the hostility of the world down on them and nourished the Jew’s hatred against all the peoples that had been burning for two thousand years.” As Herf notes, despite spending the war as a guest of Hitler and Himmler, the Mufti was never tried for war crimes, but returned to Egypt as a national hero.

One of the things Husseini and Hitler talked about, when they met in November 1941, was their plans for the Jews in Palestine and throughout the Middle East. Hitler, who still hoped that he was on the verge of a quick victory over Stalin, promised that once the USSR fell, German forces would cross the Caucasus mountains and proceed to the “destruction of the Jewish element” in the Middle East. That plan was blocked by the resistance of the Red Army, but eight months later, when Rommel’s Afrika Korps invaded Egypt, it seemed that the Nazis might reach Palestine from the west instead. At that desperate moment for the Allies, German radio issued a broadcast in Egypt whose title was “Kill the Jews Before They Kill You.” “It is the duty of the Egyptians to annihilate the Jews and to destroy their property,” the announcer said. “Egypt can never forget that it is the Jews who are carrying out Britain’s imperialist policy in the Arab countries and that they are the source of all the disasters, which have befallen the countries of the East.” If it were not for Montgomery’s victory at El Alamein, it is certain that the Holocaust would have extended to Palestine and North Africa. In fact, the SS had already set up an Einsatzgruppe for the region, like the ones that initiated the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.

Given the extreme vulnerability of the Jews in Palestine, and the utter destruction being visited on the Jews in Europe, what is most striking in the Nazis’ Arabic-language propaganda is the unquestioning assumption of Jewish power. Again and again, the British and the Americans are described as pawns of the Jews; Roosevelt is alternately said to be Jewish or surrounded by Jews (including Eleanor); Chaim Weizmann is considered as powerful as Roosevelt and Churchill put together. “Had it not been for the Jews, neither London, Washington, nor Moscow would have been linked together,” explained one broadcast in December 1943. It is a perfect example of the Nazi “Big Lie,” for of course the truth is exactly the opposite: it was Germany’s aggression that brought together those unlikely allies.

Reading Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World is a reminder of how powerful such lies can be. They are so shameless, so contrary to every evident fact, that they seem to render facts meaningless. If you could believe, for instance, that following the American landings in North Africa, “the Jews” bestowed on Eisenhower the title “the Glittering Sword of Israel”; or that on the way home from the Tehran Conference, Roosevelt and Churchill stopped in Jerusalem to confer with their Zionist masters; or that the tiny Jewish settlement in Palestine was the nucleus of a planned Jewish empire that would include the entire Middle East and all of North Africa—then what wouldn’t you believe?

Herf does not show that such Nazi propaganda claims were actually accepted by Arab listeners, and surely the vast majority discounted them. But sadly, as the Hamas charter shows, we have not yet heard the end of the ideas whose birth Herf documents in this frightening, necessary book.

We could focus on that. Or we could focus on the fold-out that 2009 cover model Bar Refaeli got, or the appearance of Refaeli’s fellow Israeli model, 19-year-old Esti Ginzburg. Come on, people. Let’s keep our eyes on what’s important.

UPDATE: To be clear, the Nazi flags represent kills that particular plane made. Each one, in other words, represents at least one dead Nazi. What, we should be upset about this?

Nazi Swastika Adorns Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue [Haaretz]

Wuff pulled the ad after the Jewish community (and, hopefully, everyone else) complained. Though for the record, Wuff’s publisher insists that he didn’t intend the image to remind viewers of Jewish persecution. Really.

This seems like a good time to remind folks that Puppy Bowl VI is right around the corner. Some fierce competitors this year.

Austrian Magazine Pulls Ad of Dog Wearing Nazi-Era Jewish Badge [AP/Haaretz]

Miep Gies, Protector of Anne Frank, Dies at 100 [NYT]

The notion of Union anti-Semitism has some truth. In 1862, General Grant issued his heinous General Order No. 11, effectively expelling all Jews in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky under the pretense of shutting down the cotton black market. An outcry prompted Grant to quickly revoke it and deny responsibility; President Lincoln, meanwhile, thoroughly condemned it. The notion that Nazi lebensraum policy traces its roots here is—to use the historically rigorous word—insane.

Still, we appreciate Emison’s sensitivity to the plight of those Southern Jews, to say nothing of the Nazis’ victims. We’re left wondering only why his heart does not also bleed for, you know, the millions of slaves.

Now, Germany has belatedly restored her record, acknowledging it as an “act of justice and a symbolic gesture” that “can in no way make up” for what happened. Lambert responded: “That’s very nice and I appreciate it. I couldn’t repeat the jump today. Believe me.”

Germans Restore 1936 High Jump Record [AP]

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)]

About That Heidi Klum Post [Forward]
Earlier: Is Heidi Klum a Nazi ‘Project Runway’ Host?

We’ll leave the charges that Friedman’s post is racist to her commenters.

‘In or Out’: Why Heidi Klum Makes Me Nervous [Forward]