Samuel Gruber's Jewish Art & Monuments: Selling Jews, Judaism, Jewishness and Anne Frank (again)

Samuel Gruber writes the following in Selling Jews, Judaism, Jewishness and Anne Frank (again)

Its one thing when Gene Wilder plays a rabbi and dons payes in The Frisco Kid – a funny film that actually is both an affirmation of Judaism and a historic corrective – since there were plenty of Jews who helped shape the American West. And the case can be made for Barbara Streisand dressing up as Yentl. But it is quite another thing when an Ukrainian café owner encourages customers to dress up as Hasids to laugh and eat and drink on the very site the Lviv’s destroyed Beth Midrash, in the shadow of the ruined Golden Rose Synagogue, whose worshipers were rounded up an murdered. No matter what one thinks of the strictures of the Hasidim, the place of their death is no place for caricature. There is no one to answer back.

Commercializing Holocaust suffering (or stoicism or heroism) – through ignorance or malice cannot be condoned. Even when done in way that is meant to celebrate the victim (Ann Frank), such exploitation actually belittles her. Maybe the apartment owner figured if Broadway, Hollywood and publishers around the world could make money selling their version of Anne Frank “why not me, too.” After all, the Ann Frank House is a big Amsterdam tourist destination. Why shouldn’t the neighbors cash in? For the real Anne Frank apartment, click here.

Not only is it hard to argue with the apartment owner's logic when one is confronted with The Most Important Hanukkah Gift: The Holocaust Survivor Cookbook!, but this sort of commercial exploitation is hardly as evil of the Zionist use of the Holocaust to justify the theft, murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide of the native population of Palestine by Eastern European invaders and interlopers.

Harvard Professor Noah Feldman was employing the Holocaust and lying (probably unconsciously) in precisely this way at Harvard Law School last night. (See the end of Greg Mankiw's Blog: Larry Summers as Treasury Secretary?)

Please, don't get me wrong about this subject. I consider it important to restore sites important in Jewish history (just as I consider it important to restore Palestinian sites and even more important to repatriot Palestinians that were brutally ethnically cleansed in cold-blooded acts of Zionist rapaciousness), but to write about "the ruined Golden Rose Synagogue, whose worshipers were rounded up an murdered" simply boggles the mind and is a true rape of history.

The members of the Soviet Ashkenazi Yevsektsia (Jewish Section of the Communist Party) wiped out practically every trace of Jewish religious practice long before the Nazi Germany invaded the Ukraine. They waged a relentless war against Yiddish culture (considered bourgeois and internationalist) in order to prove that Ashkenazi Communists constituted the quintessential Soviet Class.

While Soviet Ashkenazi communists mistreated some Soviet Jews -- mostly the religious and Yiddishists, they treated non-Jews even worse, and some Soviet Ashkenazi Communist leaders were among the greatest mass murders of modern history.

Jewish memorialization of Jewish life in E. Europe is unfortunately a whitewashing of Jewish history, and there needs to be some way to keep some perspective on the positive and negative achievements of Eastern European Jews over the last 400 years if only so that we can discuss Middle East issues rationally.

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