Category Archives: Anti-Semitism

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s Alleged Sin

I haven’t written publicly about the brouhaha that erupted when Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez referred to the detention facilities on the southern border as “concentration camps.”

But my personal feeling is that if she was guilty of any sin with that reference it wasn’t maligning the memory of the Holocaust, but rather consciously using a phrase that she likely knew would seize attention – although she did so in the cause of concern for asylum seekers.

But was that really wrong?

A thought experiment to entertain:

Imagine if it were Jews, not Guatemalans, who were fleeing abject poverty and violence in their country and arriving at the US border, and who were relegated to guarded camps, without adequate provisions and with even small children separated from their parents.  And then some activist Jewish public figure used the term “concentration camp” to refer to the outrage.  Would he be roundly condemned for having desecrated the memory of the victims of the Holocaust?

Maybe he would.  But I very much doubt it.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was not equating the current situation at the border with the Holocaust. She was just using rhetoric that (as she and others have noted) was not inaccurate (since “concentration camps” is a phrase used for any such confinement, including of Japanese citizens during WW II) and which she hoped would call attention to the plight of refugees today.

Anyone who believes she is insensitive to Jewish concerns or Israel is welcome to view her use of the phrase as an outrage.  To me, though, the real outrage is how readily some of us fall into the cesspool of political brawling and knee-jerk accusations that have come to characterize our country of late.  

Love, Hate and the Holocaust

Considering that a survey last year revealed that 31 percent of Americans, and 41 percent of millennials, believe that two million or fewer Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and that 41 percent of Americans, and 66 percent of millennials, cannot say what Auschwitz was, a large and impressive Holocaust exhibit would seem to merit only praise.

And praise the “Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away” exhibit currently at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan has garnered in abundance. It has received massive news coverage in both print and electronic media.

First shown in Madrid, where it drew some 600,000 visitors, the exhibit will be in New York into January before moving on.

Among many writers who experienced the exhibit and wrote movingly about its power was reporter and author Ralph Blumenthal.  In the New York Times, he vividly described the artifacts that are included in the exhibit, which includes many items the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland lent for a fee to the Spanish company Musealia, the for-profit organizer of the exhibition.

Mr. Blumenthal wrote that the museum, within sight of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, had to alter its floor plan to make room for large-scale displays like a reconstructed barracks. Outside the museum’s front door, there is a Deutsche Reichsbahn railway cattle car parked on the sidewalk, placed there by a crane.

Inside, among the 700 objects and 400 photographs and drawings from Auschwitz, are concrete posts and barbed wire that were once part of the camp’s electrified perimeter, prisoners’ uniforms, three-tier bunks where ill and starving prisoners slept two or more to a billet, and, “particularly chilling,” an adjustable steel chaise for medical experiments on human beings.

There is a rake for ashes and there are heavy iron crematory latches, fabricated by the manufacturer Topf & Sons There is a fake showerhead used to persuade doomed victims of the Nazis, ym”s, that they were entering a bathhouse, not a death chamber about to be filled with the lethal gas Zyklon B.

And personal items, like a child’s shoe with a sock stuffed inside it.

“Who puts a sock in his shoe?” asks Mr. Blumenthal.  “Someone,” he explains poignantly, “who expects to retrieve it.”

Another essayist, this one less impressed by the exhibit – at least in one respect –is novelist and professor Dara Horn, who teaches Hebrew and Yiddish literature.

Writing in The Atlantic, Ms. Horn approached the exhibit carrying in her mind the recent memory of a swastika that had been drawn on a desk in her children’s New Jersey public middle school and the appearance of six more of the Nazi symbols in an adjacent town. “Not a big deal,” she writes. But the scrawlings provided a personal context for her rumination on her museum visit.

In her essay, titled “Auschwitz Is Not a Metaphor: The new exhibition at the Museum of Jewish Heritage gets everything right – and fixes nothing,” she recalls her visit to Auschwitz as a teenager participating in the March of the Living, and reflects on Holocaust museums, which she characterizes as promoting the idea that “People would come to these museums and learn what the world had done to the Jews, where hatred can lead. They would then stop hating Jews.”

And the current exhibit, she notes, ends with a similar banality. At the end of the tour, she reports, “onscreen survivors talk in a loop about how people need to love one another.”

To do justice to Ms. Horn’s reaction would require me to reproduce her essay in full.  But a snippet: “In Yiddish, speaking only to other Jews, survivors talk about their murdered families, about their destroyed centuries-old communities… Love rarely comes up; why would it? But it comes up here, in this for-profit exhibition. Here is the ultimate message, the final solution.”

Ouch.

“That the Holocaust drives home the importance of love,” she writes further, “is an idea, like the idea that Holocaust education prevents anti-Semitism, that seems entirely unobjectionable. It is entirely objectionable.”

Those sentences alone would make the essay worth reading.  And the writer’s perceptivity is even more in evidence when she writes:

“The Holocaust didn’t happen because of a lack of love. It happened because entire societies abdicated responsibility for their own problems, and instead blamed them on the people who represented –have always represented, since they first introduced the idea of commandedness to the world – the thing they were most afraid of: responsibility.”

Har Sinai is called that, Rav Chisda and Rabbah bar Rav Huna explain, because it is the mountain from which sinah, hatred, descended to the nations of the world. (Shabbos 89a).  One understanding of that statement is precisely what Ms. Horn contends. Although her essay appeared the week before Shavuos, she didn’t intend it to have a Yom Tov theme.

But in fact it did.

© 2019 Hamodia

Bad Times, Good Times

The third one, at least for me, did the trick. The third New York Times apology, that is.

The venerated publication, as most readers know by now, not long ago published an overtly anti-Semitic cartoon in its International Edition.

It depicted a guide dog with a face resembling Benjamin Netanyahu leading a blind, grotesquely overweight Donald Trump wearing dark glasses and a black yarmulke. A magen Dovid dangled from the dog’s collar.

When the cartoon was shared online, it was met with broad outrage. With its Jewish symbols and theme of an Israeli Prime Minister leading an unsighted American president, its Der Stürmer-keit was unmistakable. The Times issued a quick but brief apology – #1 – and then, after a wide and loud public outcry, a more comprehensive one – #2.

Then, last week, came #3, in the form of an unusual “Editorial Board” lead editorial.

When it appeared, Agudath Israel of America had been poised to issue a strongly worded statement about the cartoon, and a subsequent one depicting Mr. Netanyahu descending a mountain carrying a tablet featuring the Israeli flag, taking a picture of himself with a “selfie-stick.”

The ready-to-release statement pointedly suggested that The Times take a selfie of its own, and examine it closely and critically. Since the paper essentially did that, the statement was quashed.

The April 30 Editorial Board offering, titled “A Rising Tide of Anti-Semitism” and representing the view of the highest echelon of the paper, admitted, inter alia, that the first cartoon was “appalling” and that “an obviously bigoted cartoon in a mainstream publication is evidence of a profound danger – not only of anti-Semitism but of numbness to its creep, to the insidious way this ancient, enduring prejudice is once again working itself into public view and common conversation.” [Emphasis mine.] Indeed.

The editorial went on to list recent acts of violent anti-Semitism, to acknowledge that “anti-Zionism can clearly serve as a cover for anti-Semitism,” and to bemoan the fact that “In the 1930s and the 1940s, The Times was largely silent as anti-Semitism rose up and bathed the world in blood. That failure still haunts this newspaper.”

The editorial board statement also admitted that “apologies are important but the deeper obligation of The Times is to focus on leading through unblinking journalism and the clear editorial expression of its values.” And that, while “society in recent years has shown healthy signs of increased sensitivity to other forms of bigotry… somehow anti-Semitism can often still be dismissed as a disease gnawing only at the fringes of society. That is a dangerous mistake. As recent events have shown, it is a very mainstream problem.”

It is a problem that The Times, unfortunately, has helped feed, with its reportage, editorials and op-eds over more recent years, from misrepresentation of the 1991 Crown Heights riots to harsh criticism of Israeli actions of self-defense to repeated, unwarranted criticism of the Orthodox Jewish community.

Late last year, a group of representatives from Agudath Israel and the Orthodox Union met with The Times’ editorial page editor with the express purpose of trying to call attention to the dearth of Orthodox views on the paper’s op-ed page – a wrong compounded by the frequent criticism of the community that appears there.

The editor, who had at first tried to rebuff the charge, did some research and admitted the problem. And he pledged to be more open to Orthodox views.

So far, slim pickings. Although an opinion piece I submitted about Chanukah was published by The Times online, it was a “thought piece,” not a presentation of a position on a contemporary issue. And while ideas for examples of the latter, on topics like yeshivah education and the measles outbreak, to be written by qualified, credentialed members of our community were put forth, they were not accepted.

Does The Times recognize that part of the “creep” of subtle anti-Semitism involves negative coverage of the most recognizably Jewish of Jews, and the vacuum of Orthodox views on its op-ed page? Or has “numbness” set in there too?

It’s easy, even for an inveterate optimist like me, to be pessimistic. After all, there hasn’t been much positive movement to date, at least not visibly so.

But the willingness of the Old Grey Lady to publicly and prominently confess to sins both distant and present, and her pledge to be alert to the “insidious way this ancient, enduring prejudice” of Jew-hatred “creeps” into societal (and journalistic) discourse, and to the danger of “numbness” to that creep, leaves some hope in my heart.

Time, as the truism has it, will tell.

© 2019 Hamodia

Blessed Bang for the Buck

Across an ocean but hot on the heels of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s not-so-subtle invoking of the hoary stereotype of Jews’ wily wielding of wealth – “It’s all about the Benjamins,” she contended, referring to $100 bills and pro-Israel influence on Congress – comes an exhibit at London’s Jewish Museum titled “Jews, Money, Myth.”

It features, well, a wealth of anti-Semitic imagery, from an 1807 British board game called “Game of the Jew” to a money-dispensing figurine of an Orthodox Jew sold last year in Poland. Other awful offerings include the opening sentences from a Nazi-era children’s book. “Money is the god of the Jew,” the Teutonic tykes were tutored. “He commits the greatest crimes to earn money. He won’t rest until he can sit on a great sack of money.” And a helpful cartoon of that image ensures that the lesson was learned.

Greed, of course, is a pan-human phenomenon. But if any lives are lived in obsession over possessions and the means of acquiring them, it’s those of the typical westerner, craving cars, music, jewelry, clothing and high-tech toys. Most Orthodox Jews – who are those usually depicted in the ugly imagery – have always had more rarified priorities in life.

And yet it is the Jew who is accused of obsession with money. Jewish success born of business acumen and, more importantly, divine blessing has for centuries been twisted into the ugly trope that Jews are more prone to greed and malfeasance than other groups of humanity.

We aren’t, of course, but since when has anti-Semitism ever been linked to logic?

There’s an “on the other hand,” though, here. Because there is a kernel of truth to the charge that we believing Jews have a special relationship with money.

Rabi Elazar informs us (Chulin 91a) that Yaakov Avinu was dangerously “left alone” at Nachal Yabok because he crossed back over the river to retrieve some pachim ketanim, small jars. A lesson to us, the Tanna explains, that “the property of the righteous is dearer to them than their bodies.”

That comment is not meant to counsel miserliness; it conveys an important Jewish thought: Every penny has true worth, for it can be turned into something meaningful. We might think of someone who rinses out and re-uses foam cups as some sort of miser; and maybe he is. But the cups might also be his pachim ketanim, and he might also be a righteous man, reluctant to waste something usable. If he’s generous to the needy, we know which one he is.

And so, while stinginess is ugly, frugality is not. It is a meaningful Jewish trait.

Money’s worth is not only a function of what Rabi Elazar observes elsewhere, that “Each and every penny contributes to a large sum” (Bava Basra, 9b), but because there is inherent value in every thing. As Rabi Yitzchak reveals (ibid), “One who gives a penny to a poor person is blessed with six brachos.” Pretty good deal.

Money, moreover, offers us opportunities for honesty. A believing Jew carefully keeps an accounting of his assets and obligations – including his debts and charitable responsibilities.

And cash can yield great Kiddush Hashem as well.

My wife and I had the pleasure several weeks ago of spending a Shabbos in the lovely community of Scottsdale, Arizona, as guests of the local shul, Ahavas Torah, and its esteemed Rav, Rabbi Ariel Shoshan.

We stayed in the home of a Rebbi at the Torah Day School of Phoenix, Rabbi Noach Muroff, and his wife and family. Back in 2013, the Muroffs lived in Connecticut and Rabbi Muroff, an unassuming, modest person, found himself the subject of incredulous reports in international media. He had purchased a desk and discovered $98,000 that had fallen into the back of the piece of furniture. (During our stay, I wrote a Hamodia column on the desk!)

He decided to return the money to its owner, and a Gadol to whom he confided the story told him that it was an opportunity for a Kiddush Hashem that shouldn’t be squandered. And so a member of the media was apprised of the happening, and the rest was, as they say, history.

Many might have counseled the Muroffs to just keep the windfall. After all, they had bought the desk “as is.” But farther-seeing eyes counseled otherwise. And the world saw a true picture of how a Jewish-minded Jew looks at money, as a valuable means, not a meaningless end.

He may have forfeited a large sum, but, actually, he got a really great deal.

© 2019 Hamodia