I always want to ask Douglas Feith sincerely about the effect of the destruction of his father’s family — "Both of his parents, four of his sisters, and all three of his brothers– my grandparents, aunts, and uncles–were murdered in the Holocaust," the architect of the Iraq war writes in War and Decision– on Feith’s ideas about Trusting non-Jews (I bet he doesn’t) and the Necessity of the Jewish state (from the river to the sea!) and the need for militancy to preserve the Jewish state against its enemies (Arabs are the new Nazis). If I were Feith, I wonder if I wouldn’t have reached similar conclusions under the distorting impact of this grievance. (Achievement-oriented sons of Feith, how are you doing with the baggage?)
It turns out David Frum also has direct Holocaust connections. I never knew this before, me, a collector of the annotated works of Frum. Frum at Sullivan’s blog:
Today, July 12, is not only Orange Day, but also the birthday of my paternal grandfather Saul Frum. Born in the Czarist empire in 1904, he migrated to Canada with his wife, my grandmother, in 1930. My father was born the next year. That lucky bit of timing is the reason I am typing at this computer today: Those in his family who remained behind in Europe were all murdered, with only one survivor.
I think of my grandfather often, more and more as I near the age when I knew him. My own son is named for him.
These confessions are inter alia. You don’t see the neocons going into these identity-formative backgrounds. I wish these neocons would talk about this stuff more directly, so that other Jews can offer their own testimony about history and identity. In fact, it’s past time that Yivo had a panel on Blaming the gentiles, in which supporters of Israel like Jeffrey Goldberg, for whom the Holocaust record was also formative, publicly accuse the former non-Jewish U.S. establishment of letting the Jews down, and people have it out.
