Thanksgiving Day yesterday, Native American Heritage Day today and after enjoying a Thanksgiving meal with family and friends I'm thinking about the ongoing crisis for Jews everywhere and the conflict in Israel, Gaza and Palestine. And yes, the crisis for Jews everywhere weighs on me. As anyone paying attention to what I've written and posted over the years, I am the child of survivors of the Holocaust, the grandchild and nephew of many family members who I never knew because they were murdered in the Holocaust, and I emphasize murdered because that was what happened to them, as well as a member of a community of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, as well as the few who survived that are still with us more than 78 years after the end of WWII.
This is not a history of antisemitism, it is some of my thoughts on where we are now and where we've been. This is my blog, my space to say something, my bully pulpit.
Antisemitism is a recurring human disease that refuses to die away and probably will not even were there no Jews for the antisemites to revile. In Poland in the 1960s and 1970s after all but a very small handful of elderly Jews were forced out by the Communist, Soviet supported government, they still held antisemitic campaigns, reviling the Jews who weren't there for their country's economic ills. I guess after the uprisings in Hungary in 1956 and the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 they were not so stupid as to blame the Soviet Union and the Communist system for their problems.
In the Middle East, in Syria, Iran and Iraq where substantial Jewish communities existed for two millennia and more, after the establishment of the State of Israel there were pogroms and every Jew living there was forced into exile. To show I'm not unbalanced, I recognize that Palestinians and their allies won't let us forget that many of them left their homes during and after the Arab League's war to crush the new state, some forced out, most leaving voluntarily but those same Palestinians and their allies don't want us to remember what happened to the Jews and their communities in their states.
It's curious that Jew hatred occurs at all levels of society. The ruling groups use it to motivate people in lower social levels, the hoi polloi act out of sense of resentment, that these people are pushing them down, taking something from them, despite this being demonstrably false. The blood libel laid on the Jews has deep historical sources and though obviously false to anyone who knows anything about the Jewish revulsion to consuming anything with blood, has lasted in one form or another for more than a millennium. The counterfeit "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a product of the Russian Tsarist secret police continues to find currency in contemporary antisemitism. The contradictory belief that there is a conspiracy of both global capitalists controlled by Jewish bankers and Jewish communists and socialists working to overthrow capitalism would be laughable if it wasn't taken seriously by antisemites who refuse to recognize the obvious dissonance in this belief.
Recognizing the usefulness of antisemitism in motivating resentment and action against Jews by people who don't understand or see where there own lower economic status comes from is a stimulus to both the right and the left to use Jews as convenient scapegoats. Against these deeply held beliefs that are comforting to the holder of these beliefs, finding an outsider to blame for the systemic biases that hold them in place doesn't help us resolve the problem of antisemitism. What we can do is stay alert and take defensive actions against antisemitism as well as irrational bias against other peoples.
Keep in mind, it is Jews and Israel being attacked for the crisis in the Middle East but why aren't these attackers also standing up against genocide in Sudan, Ethiopia, Yemen and China among others?
Just my opinion.
Anyway, in catching up here's a bunch of photos I took in April, exactly six months ago at the Chabad Center of Northeast Queens where the Radomer Mutual Culture Center gathered for our annual Holocaust memorial service and luncheon. It is a good thing that more than 70 years after the survivors of one of the fiercest antisemitic, institutionalized violence against Jews founded the society as a way to show we are stronger than those who would destroy us and are still standing and ready to fight.
Forgive me for posting this many pictures.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Leave a comment if you wish. Comments will be moderated.