Monthly Archives: May 2018
Note: This column originally ran on April 23 but has not previously been posted on my website
Holocaust Remembrance Day is observed in Israel just a week before Independence Day, and for Israelis, those days are thematically as well as temporally connected: One of many reasons why a Jewish state is needed is to save Jewish lives. Young American Jews also acknowledge a thematic connection. Shockingly, however, the connection many have been taught to see is the exact opposite: that the Holocaust is why a Jewish state shouldn’t exist—or at least, why they as Jews shouldn’t care about it.
Two weeks ago, I wouldn’t have believed this. But then I read the column that Haaretz published on April 11, the eve of this year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day.
In it, Steven Davidson described the standardized Holocaust-education curriculum he teaches his sixth-grade Hebrew-school class in Brooklyn, N.Y. As he noted, he is just “one of hundreds of Jewish educators across Canada and the U.S. to utilize the Holocaust curriculum developed by the nonprofit organization, Facing History & Ourselves.” Since 1976, this curriculum “has educated over half a million students in the U.S. and Canada about the Holocaust.”
So what does it teach Jewish students? “The lesson,” Davidson explained, “tasked me with writing a quote on the board: ‘I love my daughters more than my nieces, my nieces more than my cousins, my cousins more than my neighbors. But that doesn’t mean that we detest our neighbors.’ ” He asked his students’ opinion of this sentiment; unsurprisingly, all but one approved it.
And then, “I revealed to the class who said that quote: Jean-Marie Le Pen, Holocaust-denier and renowned xenophobe.” And also renowned anti-Semite, though one can see why Davidson didn’t mention that. After all, the whole point of this lesson is that loving some people more than others is evil—the kind of thing only a Jean-Marie Le Pen would do. Why confuse the message by mentioning Le Pen’s hatred for Jews, in particular, as if that were something Jewish students should care about?
The ensuing discussion drove the point home. One student soon “realized” that this quote is “like America First,” Donald Trump’s slogan, and Trump is a far greater symbol of evil to these students than Le Pen, whom most had never heard of before. As Davidson noted, “My sixth-graders generally hate Trump because nearly all their parents do.” Soon, students were explicitly connecting Trump to the Nazis: “During another lesson, a couple of students related the Brownshirts and Nazi rallies to Trump encouraging and retweeting violence on his behalf.” The conclusion of this logical progression was clear: Loving some people more than others is Nazi behavior—something no good Jew can countenance.
Of course, any parent who actually cared no more for his own child than for some random child down the block would probably be indicted for child neglect. But the curriculum’s designers know the instinctive parent-child bond is strong enough to overcome such indoctrination; that isn’t their target.
Rather, their target is the bond Jews feel for their fellow Jews. Because that isn’t one of humanity’s deepest instincts; it’s very much a learned behavior.
The canonical Jewish texts taught it by intertwining universal principles with particularist messages about the special obligations owed one’s own people, like “All Israel are responsible for one another” (Talmud Shevuot 39a) or “The poor of your own city take precedence” (Talmud Baba Metzia 71a). Yet even American Jews who never studied these texts used to be taught this behavior. Most Jews of my generation can remember charity boxes at home in which we put money for Israel or Hebrew-school events when we wrote letters to imprisoned Soviet Jews; the unambiguous message was that we had a responsibility to our brethren.
Today, many American Jewish children are taught the exact opposite: that feeling any special responsibility toward their fellow Jews is Nazi-like behavior, and only if they eschew such feelings can they be good Jews who have internalized the Holocaust’s lessons. Given this, is it any wonder that in a 2013 Pew Research poll, 73 percent of American Jews deemed remembering the Holocaust an essential part of being Jewish, but only 43 percent said the same for caring about Israel and just 28 percent for being part of a Jewish community?
This also explains why many young American Jews are “distancing” themselves from Israel. American Jewish leaders from across the political spectrum have increasingly blamed this on Israeli policy (see, for instance, last month’s New York Times op-ed by World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder, a longtime Republican and supporter of Israel’s ruling center-right Likud Party).
Yet even if Israeli policy fulfilled American Jews’ wish list in every particular, that still wouldn’t give them any reason to care about Israel one whit more than they do about any other country. Only if they felt a special affection and concern for their fellow Jews—and hence for the Jewish state where almost half of world Jewry lives—would American Jews have reason to feel any special affection and concern for Israel.
Instead, they are taught that special affection and concern for their own people is wrong. And if so, then special affection and concern for the one country on earth belonging to their own people is doubly wrong. In fact, the Jewish state’s very existence is wrong, because states shouldn’t be concerned with the fate of one particular people any more than individuals should.
Thus it’s no surprise that when the National Survey of American Jews asked respondents in 2007 whether they would see Israel’s destruction as a personal tragedy, about 80 percent of Jews aged 65 or older answered yes, but only 50 percent of Jews under 35 did. After all, why should Jews who have been taught that particularism is evil feel bereaved at the loss of the world’s only Jewish state?
And that is the tragic irony of Holocaust education in America today: Young Jews are being taught that the only way to internalize the Holocaust’s lessons is by becoming indifferent to the possibility of a second one. For the destruction of Israel, with its 6.6 million Jews, would assuredly be nothing less.
This article was originally syndicated by JNS.org (www.jns.org) on April 23, 2018. © 2018 JNS.org
Note: After this article was published, Paraguay also moved its embassy to Jerusalem
After President Donald Trump announced in December that he was moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, a friend lamented that the move would have less impact than it should because Trump was so widely disdained both in America and overseas. Yet since then, I’ve heard more foreign acknowledgments of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital than I can ever remember before.
So far, only one other country is definitely moving its embassy—Guatemala, whose Jerusalem embassy is slated to open two days after America’s does. But at least four other countries—two in Latin America and two in Europe—are actively discussing an embassy move. And even if none actually happens, the very fact that this issue is now openly being debated in regions of the globe where Israel has faced considerable hostility in recent years is a remarkable change.
In both the European Union and most of Latin America, official policy has long been that eastern Jerusalem should be the capital of Palestine, while western Jerusalem should be . . . well, nothing. Few countries in either region have ever said that any part of Jerusalem should be Israel’s capital; in fact, some still explicitly declare the city a corpus separatum. In other words, they think Palestinians should get the eastern half while the western half should be an international city.
But now, a decades-old taboo has been broken. Suddenly, several other countries are where America was 20 years ago, with different branches of government actively arguing over Jerusalem’s status.
On April 12, the Honduras National Congress voted to move its embassy to Jerusalem by a sizable majority (59-33), though the decision hasn’t yet been approved by the executive branch. Later that month, Paraguay’s president said he’d like to move his country’s embassy before leaving office in mid-August, though buy-in from the rest of the political system is uncertain.
On April 19, Israeli Independence Day, Romania broke an even more significant psychological barrier by becoming the first European country to announce plans to move its embassy. The president of Romania’s Chamber of Deputies told a Romanian television station that the decision had been made the previous evening. Whether it will actually happen remains unclear; the country’s president opposes the move, and the cabinet hasn’t yet approved it. But the prime minister has formally asked the cabinet to do so.
And in the Czech Republic—whose parliament passed a resolution urging its government to promote “respect” for Jerusalem as Israel’s capital by a vote of 112-2 seven months before Trump’s announcement—the Foreign Ministry broke with E.U. policy by declaring, the day after Trump’s announcement, that it recognizes “West Jerusalem” as Israel’s capital. President Milos Zeman wants to move the embassy as well, but Prime Minister Andrej Babi refuses to defy E.U. policy to that extent.
There has also been a notable change in the conversation even in countries where an embassy move isn’t on the table.
In March, for instance, Belgian Secretary of State Philippe de Backer (whose position is equivalent to a deputy cabinet minister) told the local Jewish paper Joods Actueel: “There is no doubt that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital. It’s clear; it’s reality. There’s no discussion on this issue.”
Former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls—who, admittedly, was the most pro-Israel member of former President François Hollande’s otherwise hostile government—made similar statements that same month in an interview with the Times of Israel. “I am very clear on this subject: Jerusalem is the capital of the Jews and of Israel—historically, religiously, and politically,” he said. “It’s at the heart of the foundation of the State of Israel.”
Neither statement heralds an imminent change in official policy. As De Backer explained, action isn’t possible now because “we’re in a political context where Europe sees Jerusalem as subject to negotiations toward a two-state solution.” But the very fact that current and former senior European officials suddenly feel they can openly acknowledge Jerusalem as Israel’s capital is new.
Another intriguing example is Russia, which actually preceded Trump in recognizing “West Jerusalem” as Israel’s capital. A statement issued by Russia’s Foreign Ministry in April 2017 said that while Moscow continues to believe that eastern Jerusalem should be the capital of a Palestinian state, “we must state that in this context we view west Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.” Yet after Trump’s December announcement, Russia voted to condemn the U.S. decision in both the U.N. Security Council and the General Assembly, making it seem that the April decision had either been rescinded or was meaningless.
Then, in March 2018, Russia’s embassy in Israel issued a statement praising “the wise position of West Jerusalem” on a recent controversy (the poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Britain, which Israel condemned, but without specifically mentioning Russia). Though it’s common to use a nation’s capital as a metonym for the country (“Washington” for the United States or “Moscow” for Russia), I can’t recall any use of “Jerusalem” to refer to Israel; that has always been taboo. So Russia is apparently sticking by its recognition; it just isn’t willing to give Trump any credit on the issue.
Obviously, Jerusalem isn’t going to be flooded with new embassies anytime soon, for reasons having little to do with Trump, as the Czech case makes clear.
But the more acceptable it becomes for people to admit that Jerusalem is and always will be Israel’s capital, the harder it becomes for others to maintain their decades-old denialism. And Trump has played an important role in moving this process forward.
In that sense, he’s like the little boy in Hans Christian Andersen’s famous fairy tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” A young child obviously isn’t a respected role model for the adults around him, yet it was only after that little boy publicly declared the emperor naked that the adults could bring themselves to admit the same.
Andersen’s point was that telling the truth has a power of its own, regardless of the speaker. And Trump’s truth-telling on Jerusalem is already demonstrating a similar power, regardless of the speaker’s flaws.
This article was originally syndicated by JNS.org (www.jns.org) on May 8, 2018. © 2018 JNS.org