https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-801309
A few weeks after the horrifying October 7 attack by Hamas on men, women, and children in southern Israel, a letter appeared in the New York Review (November 20, 2023) signed by 16 Holocaust scholars (including Christopher Browning, who wrote Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland) criticizing the misuse of Holocaust memory. The writers were concerned about inappropriate comparisons to the Holocaust made by Israeli and American public figures in relation to the (still ongoing) war between Israel and Hamas.
Their intention was to protect the memory and uniqueness of the Holocaust. However, they have to be naive and or misinformed when they describe the Holocaust, in a narrow sense, “The Nazi genocide involved a state – and its willing civil society – attacking a tiny minority, which then escalated to a continent-wide genocide.” Do they really believe that the Holocaust began with the Nazis?
I grew up in Canada in the 1950s and ’60s and first heard about the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust as a young boy. I also learned about the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.
That a mere decade separated the Holocaust from the establishment of a Jewish state was starkly evident to me then, as it is now. Had a Jewish state existed just 10 years earlier, the Holocaust might not have occurred.
What I cannot understand is how the connection between the absence of a Jewish state and the circumstances that led to the Holocaust is not obvious to everyone; including, apparently, the 16 scholars who signed the letter.
Auschwitz concentration camp, operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during the Holocaust. (credit: WALLPAPER FLARE)Enlrage image
Auschwitz concentration camp, operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during the Holocaust. (credit: WALLPAPER FLARE)
The genocide we now know as the Holocaust was not an aberration. Its beginnings go back to a period well before the Nazis took power. Not coincidentally, the lead-up to the Holocaust coincided with the development of modern Zionism.
A few weeks after the horrifying October 7 attack by Hamas on men, women, and children in southern Israel, a letter appeared in the New York Review (November 20, 2023) signed by 16 Holocaust scholars (including Christopher Browning, who wrote Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland) criticizing the misuse of Holocaust memory. The writers were concerned about inappropriate comparisons to the Holocaust made by Israeli and American public figures in relation to the (still ongoing) war between Israel and Hamas.
Their intention was to protect the memory and uniqueness of the Holocaust. However, they have to be naive and or misinformed when they describe the Holocaust, in a narrow sense, “The Nazi genocide involved a state – and its willing civil society – attacking a tiny minority, which then escalated to a continent-wide genocide.” Do they really believe that the Holocaust began with the Nazis?
I grew up in Canada in the 1950s and ’60s and first heard about the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust as a young boy. I also learned about the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.
That a mere decade separated the Holocaust from the establishment of a Jewish state was starkly evident to me then, as it is now. Had a Jewish state existed just 10 years earlier, the Holocaust might not have occurred.
What I cannot understand is how the connection between the absence of a Jewish state and the circumstances that led to the Holocaust is not obvious to everyone; including, apparently, the 16 scholars who signed the letter.
Auschwitz concentration camp, operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during the Holocaust. (credit: WALLPAPER FLARE)Enlrage image
Auschwitz concentration camp, operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during the Holocaust. (credit: WALLPAPER FLARE)
The genocide we now know as the Holocaust was not an aberration. Its beginnings go back to a period well before the Nazis took power. Not coincidentally, the lead-up to the Holocaust coincided with the development of modern Zionism.
