A few months back a friend told me that the business of this blog was to produce the prose equivalent of the classic French movie, La Guerre Est Finie. In that movie, a Communist played by Yves Montand comes to understand, in 1966, that the wars over Communism are over. It's a dead issue, the west is moving on. With that, the man's life is over, all his conceptions are of the past. (And yes, there's a ton of sex, just like on this blog.) My friend was saying that the people on this blog were bringing the news to young Jews, the war is over. The Holocaust is over.
Well Israeli Avrahum Burg, who like me is 53, but Israeli, is doing that job, which is why I'm so wild to see his forthcoming book, The Holocaust Is Over; Let Us Rise From Its Ashes. I believe he is saying a lot of the same things, from an Israeli perspective. I will be very curious to hear what he says about assimilationism–this son of an Orthodox rabbi who describes his own religion in "transcendental," non-Orthodox, "pluralist" terms.
The continuing business of this blog is to connect the end of the Holocaust to the end of the Israel lobby. The Israel lobby is intimately associated with the Holocaust. The Holocaust licenses the Israel lobby–as Mike Desch wrote in his landmark paper "The Myth of Abandonment", as Jeffrey Goldberg indicates in his book Prisoners; and as my mother said to me constantly growing up–because it is widely perceived that the State Department abandoned the Jews of Europe, and Roosevelt too, when he didn't bomb the trainlines. The Israel lobby is belated and meager compensation. The Holocaust is what gives Goldberg his aggrieved indignation about any challenge to Jewish power in the U.S. The Holocaust is the driver in the truly scary Iraq-war-tome-made-living-movie, The End of Evil, by Frum and Perle, in which they state, "Victory or holocaust," and say that it is fine to knock off Arab society after Arab society.
When Jimmy Carter spoke about apartheid on the West Bank at Brandeis nearly 2 years ago, the older Jews stuck their fingers in their ears and talked about the Holocaust. Alan Dershowitz angrily described the pre-'67 border as the "Auschwitz" lines, making the Jews vulnerable. I asked Jacob Cohen, an older Brandeis prof who introduced Dersh, about all the Holocaust talk–
I said, young
people want to have a hopeful view of history. They don’t want to hear
about the Holocaust all the time. They don’t want to see history as
having a tragic destination.
Cohen became angry: “You’re talking about a symbol, the desecration of
which deeply hurts the Jewish people …” He went on to say that if I
thought that “the elimination of Israel” would end Islamic world’s
hatred of the West, I was wrong. “Osama bin Laden is still remembering
the Crusades.”
These people want to believe all this hysteria. Thus their talk of the new antisemitism. They want us at dagger points with the Arab world. They demand that Jews stop thinking freely, that these issues are decided, and dangerous. And it has taken Walt and Mearsheimer to look at things in a new way, and Avrahum Burg too.
A great intellectual liberation is afoot. We're post-Iraq. Post-Holocaust. And post-the-need-for a Jewish state. We're discovering the Nakba. And inventing Barack Obama because we need him.
