Thoughts on today's Yom Hashoah
Do I have to be clever and witty to convince you? Maybe I'll find some insightful argument whose sheer intellectual force will magically compel you to bridge the empathy gap. Maybe Lauren Morrill's famous tweet was wrong.
Do I have to prove my historical bona fides? Confirm that I in fact got an "education in the Holocaust" before I'm allowed to say that launching the final stage of an ethnic cleansing on Yom Hashoah is in fact bad? Maybe I'll find enough historical and contemporary examples of Holocaust survivors saying something similar to convince you that I'm not a kapo.
If I do enough sociological studies and provide you with enough polling data, I might even get you to concede something about whether it's right to make any juxtaposition about the Shoah at all. That the harder some organisations push the line "the Holocaust is so unique that to make any reference between it and something happening right now is basically Holocaust denial", the more the memory of the Holocaust becomes deuniversalised. That this in itself is antisemitic, loudly screaming to the world that of course Jewish survivors of a genocide of Jews do not want any universal lessons drawn from it.
Or maybe this Yom Hashoah we can watch Ask Doctor Ruth about the world-famous pioneering sex advice columnist. We'll reach the end when [I believe] her son mentions the elephant in the room, that she's so active and outgoing because [he believes] she must keep moving so that the darkness of what she has experienced doesn't flow in. And we might tear up, or even bawl, realising how much that reminds us of many of our own relatives, even if their experiences of the Holocaust were quite "tangential", considering.
But then to take that extra step? To look at the spark of sadness in Dr Ruth's eyes or our relatives' eyes, the spark that still cannot be erased by decades of family and friendship and good experiences -- and to realise that this same spark will also be there forever for millions of survivors in Gaza? Or to realise that the impossible choice of whether to evacuate or stay is something that "us" and "them" have in common? And then to not consider these thoughts a blasphemous trivialisation of Yom Hashoah or the same as the believe that "Jews are Nazis" but an actual fucking historical and human lesson? For that I'd have to be incredibly clever and witty and erudite to convince you. And I'm not.