Comments on: My Lord; Why Have You Forsaken Me?

By: Simon Holloway

Simon Holloway — Thu, 22 May 2008 11:30:50 +0000

E-kvetcher, I’m so sorry that it took me this long to respond to you. You ask a good question, and I am not so sure where I obtained that information myself. I have done a little bit of searching around on the internet and, while I have found some websites that express this same opinion, they can hardly be replied upon for their balanced nature. Not being a student of modern history, I also don’t really know of any resources for information concerning it. I may have read this somewhere, or (worse still, perhaps) simply heard it from somebody.

Perhaps it is apocryphal? I would certainly prefer to believe that it is, for I think it is abominable if true.

By: e-kvetcher

e-kvetcher — Mon, 12 May 2008 02:45:45 +0000

When the heroes of the Warsaw ghetto requested arms from Zionist partisans, the response given was that these weapons were needed in Palestine, where there was a cause worth fighting for.

Simon, where can I find more information on this?

By: Simon Holloway

Simon Holloway — Mon, 05 May 2008 06:39:51 +0000

On the contrary, I would argue that the Israeli perspective (that the declaration of a state was a necessary corollary of the Holocaust) is a luxury and, hence, is completely untrue. I find it a continual source of irony that Zionism was created by the Emancipation, and only sporadic episodes of racial prejudice. One would expect the Holocaust to have played a larger part but, already during the dark decade in which European Jewry was decimated, more Jews cared for the fledgling state than gave a damn about the dying of their European heritage. When the heroes of the Warsaw ghetto requested arms from Zionist partisans, the response given was that these weapons were needed in Palestine, where there was a cause worth fighting for. In that sense, there was already an “Israel” before there ceased to be a “Europe”, and it was already more important, ideologically-speaking.

I also don’t agree that mainstream scholarship views the Holocaust as inexplicable. There are too many examples in the world today of people treating other people with the same baseless contempt, and I do not believe that “my people” (a concept that I vacillate back and forwards as regards whether or not I believe in it) would – or are – exempt from that. But I do agree that Israeli scholarship on the Holocaust has a different timbre to scholarship outside of Israel, and that the belief in Israel’s declaration as a result of the Holocaust may have done much to inform that.

For my part, I’m more inclined that view history as a discrete series of events, the imposition over which of a narrative structure is arbitrary at best and propagandistic at worse. But, like most things I believe, I don’t live by it.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Sat, 03 May 2008 06:08:21 +0000

Wow, harsh. I wonder if the Pope blogs (strangely, more* people seem to ask whether he is Catholic, which, to me, sounds like the somewhat simpler question).

Yom HaShoah, here, seems to be very different. Here, everyone has grown up with the knowledge of the Shoah and with a very clear connection between it and the importance of a Jewish state.

Even the physical structure of having a siren at 10am ordering one minute’s silence for the victims of the Holocaust, followed one week after by a siren at 10am ordering one minute’s silence for the soldiers killed in the wars of the Jewish State, followed the same night by a siren announcing the end of mourning and the commencement of celebration of the country’s independence, shows a clear (chrono)logical progression.

I think that in many ways, Holocaust scholarship outside of Israel has taken the view (which, depending on your view on my next sentence, may be considered, the “luxury”) that the Shoah was inexplicable and impossible to understand and integrate into the human worldview. One of the many odd things about this country was, I believe, that the opposite was the case, and it is possible that such opposite indeed was necessary in order to exist. But existential questions are a little beyond me, and I am left with a feeling that this may be yet another luxury lost.

* 54,300 Google results, as against only one result: http://voodootime.com/archives/22