To the Editor:
"Your great-grandmother came from POLAND?" my hallmate asked in October.
"It wasn't Poland before the Great War, but yes, a little country that was about where Poland is now," I said.
"There aren"t any JEWS in Poland! It's a Catholic country," he told me.
"This was before 1939..."
"1939? What about it?"
"What about forgetting [the Holocaust]?" Alex Zubatov asks us in his column last Friday-and the conversation above is the clearest and most chilling example I can give him of this forgetfulness he advocates. What is needed in response is neither another sermon on the six million nor another line-by-line rebuttal of the familiar jumble of oversimplifications and inflammatory remarks. If he (along with others I have known, Jews and Gentiles alike) believes the Holocaust to be "the central event in the 'Jewish experience,'" perhaps what would do in reply is a brief reexamination of this 'experience' that he so blatantly and confidently misconcieves.
There are too many American Jews today for whom the fundamental unit of Jewish community is not the 10 men needed for public prayer, but the local chapter of the B'nai Brith.Their children have grown up wearing out their copies of The Diary of Anne Frank without learning a word of Hebrew. This is the assimilation, the "dying out" of the Jewish community, that Zubatov calls "a message of hope." This is the same phenomenon that did not save a generation of Weimar GermanJews from the gas chamber. Those who forgot Zubatov's "silly ethnic, racial, and religious boundaries that separate us from one another," who "achieved a degree of assimilation...unprecedented anywhere [outside Germany]," were murdered as efficiently as the Jews who remained in the ghettos of the East.
The tempting response to assimilation is to retreat once again into the ghetto, to turn inward to ourselves, pushing the outer world, that of both the Gentiles and the non-observant Jews, away from not only from our spiritual, but also from our social and intellectual lives. Political activity-not merely "politicking" in the negative sense, but any participation in the affairs of the polis, of the larger community-is given a place subordinate to the internal interests of the enclave within the walls. The spiritual life grows rich and healthy; intellectual and political awareness of the situation outside the ghetto, however, can easily wither away.
The Holocaust has obviously and irrevocably lodged itself both in the specifically Jewish and in the universally human collective memory, out of reach of Alex Zubatov's powers of suggestion. If we are to live as Jews and Gentiles, somewhere between the complete separation and the total assimilation described above, we must overcome both the tendency to sentimentalize and encapsulate a horror beyond easy comprehension, and the instinctive urge to retreat and flee in self-preservation. In as much as the catastrophe is the "central event in the 'Jewish experience,'" it is the defining horror of the 20th-century human experience as well. But we as Jews are at present actively engaged in that redemption from physical distress and emotional servitude that is at the heart of our Jewish, as distinct from our collective human, experience. This redemption began with the miracle of our physical survival, continues with the gradual process of emotional and spiritual rehabilitation, and will culminate in an intellectual and moral response at a crucial, if necessarily limited, distance from our gut reaction,
The miracle of redemption cannot be separated from the enslavement it ends, and both are given a place in our consciousness and a key religious, as well as political and emotional, significance. We were hauled out of Egypt by the hair, believer and skeptic alike, in order that we might serve an authority on which earthly cruelty had no influence. There is not a one among us who does not recognize that same deliverance at work in our own time.
-Sarah Beck, TD '99
Copyright 1996, The Yale Herald, Inc. All rights reserved.
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