Here’s an interesting interview at Tablet of David Simon, the creator of HBO’s The Wire, who talks about the need for more righteous Jews in New Orleans. The exchange reflects a controversy Simon, the son of a Jewish community leader, started last year at the Jewish Federation meeting, when he described American black urban life as a “slow-motion Holocaust” and called on Jews to do more.
Simon makes a wonderful comment about giving the lawyers in the Wire Jewish names: “The Wire was about all of us being complicit in the same rigged game. The Jewish writer does not get to self-censor that theme when it comes to that particular place in reality where some very talented and very ambitious Jewish lawyers did their city a real disservice.”
Yes, David: Jews/Palestine. There we self-censor. As the late Leon Golub said, what is a Jewish artist? An artist who doesn’t mention Palestine.
Read this long quote where, at the urging of Tablet writer Vince Beiser, who says that ethnic groups actually sought to segregate themselves in Bosnia, Simon compares West Baltimore and New Orleans to Bosnia. Of course there actually is barbed wire in Palestine, for which many many Jews are responsible, but that goes unaccounted.
“No, there is no barbed wire around West Baltimore. No, there is no political imperative to segregate them from the greater society, or ultimately, to murder them en masse. That would be a Holocaust at normal speed. Instead, we have simply participated—either tacitly or actively—in constructing a national economic model that throws away 10 to 15 percent of our poorest and most vulnerable citizens. There is no work for more than half the adult black males in Baltimore. Other than the drug corners, of course. Can anyone argue that the percentage of human destruction among adult males of color in these neighborhoods has not for generations approached the genocidal?”
“I know there were people at that federation gathering who resolved not to listen to me because of the Holocaust reference, self-righteously claiming a higher perch on the pyramid of collective martyrdom. That’s the corruption of holding the Holocaust experience to be something beyond any possible point of comparison for other collective tragedy. We like to tell ourselves that we are educating the world about the extraordinary nature of the Shoah, that we are sensitizing them to the breadth and depth of the horror. In fact, the opposite occurs. By holding ourselves aloof from the rest of human tragedy, by denying any possible points of comparison, we desensitize ourselves. And we only manage to alienate the rest of the world from their natural commonalities with the Holocaust experience.”
