Something remarkable about a moment of silence where a whole nation comes to a stop, gets out of their cars, and commemorates & remembers something as monumental as The Holocaust.

I don’t need to say much here, I will let the article speak for itself:

Podezin then ushered Margit and 15 of the more senior guests to a store room, gave them weapons and ammunition and invited them to “kill some Jews”.

The prisoners were then forced to strip naked before being shot by drunken guests, who returned to the castle to continue to drink and dance until dawn. The following morning, they were heard bragging about the previous night’s atrocity: one Stefan Beiglboeck even claiming that he had “slain” six or seven Jews with his own hands.

Simply amazing and the best part, if you read the “talkbacks” on this Haaretz article, somehow this has become about the Palestinians. Can we keep it on target and not be intellectuality dishonest here?

I am preparing for Yom Kippur around the house and am listening to Fresh Air. It is a recap of an interview with Daniel Mendelsohn about his book The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. It is astonishingly moving. The pain of the missing of his greats and grands is palpable over the radio.

I am thinking about how I am pretty lucky to live in the place where I live and the time I live. Where I am not afraid to be who I am. But more importantly, I am aware of how I am willing to die to not be who I do not what to be. The survivors, those who died in the camps, and those who were forced to convert in 1490’s Spain will be on my mind as I sing up Kol Nidre in a few hours. As will the stories from Legends of Our Time, specifically, Testament of a Jew in Saragossa.

Oddly enough the NPR webpage and I thought the same clip was worth calling out:

“The physical remains — the synagogues, the storefronts with Yiddish lettering still on the bricks … the ritual-bath buildings, still with Stars of David carved above the lintels — all of these things are still there. … To be confronted with that is [to know that] Europe is completely other than it would have been, in a way from which it will never recover.”

Wow.

Today is a bad day for Jews. Traditionally we are all sad because we lost our Temple. In general, the more, well, modern amongst us, see this as a time to be insightful and think about the big plan as manifested through events then, now and in the middle - we are talking about 2000+ years of history.

Today I would like to talk about how we are all doomed.

While we Jews cannot get along with our cousins the Arabs, I have real faith that we will figure out how to be friends someday - by we I don’t mean Americans I mean Jews.

But, the real enemy hates us both and that is what we should come to terms with. We both should fear the Christians. Yes, the Christians hate us both, my Arab cousin.

These are the people who brought us the original terrorism in the form of forced conversions, holocausts, inquisitions, crusades, etc… all because they hate true-blue monotheists like the Jews and the Muslims.

I am not certain exactly why they hate us both, cousin, but I think it has to do with the Trinity. Can you think of a larger pile of shit than saying, oh there are three g-ds, but really one, they are just parts of the same, equal parts, one the g-d part, one some kind of ghost part, and one a earthly man part. Um, what? That is a pantheon if I have ever seen one.

This isn’t even respectable Zoroastrian dualism, which is arguably monotheistic (well I will say I don’t know enough to argue either way). This is POLYTHEISM.

We, cousin, simply know how many times we are told by our prophets and by our historical rejection of adulteration by the Romans and Greeks that we are told to not only to eschew this notion, but to completely reject, dispel, and run away from this notion.

This is what I am thinking about on my 9th of Av. How come my cousin, who I share so much with, and I cannot get along, but my best friend is only waiting to off me in the name of his eternal salvation at the hand of his g-ds.

And the icing? I tell a tale:

Sunday morning I was at a local NJ diner having my eggs and toast. I was there with my friend Patrick. As I munched away I started to overhear the neighbor at the next table. Oh be warned, Tablemans are ever constant eavesdroppers! She was talking about how this lady she works with had perpetrated a series of unspeakable acts against her in the workforce as well as in their intersecting social lives. The issue at hand seemed to be that both parties were about to be fired for their inability to work together. The coup-de-christ? My neighbor diner lady made the following statement:

She acted in the most un-Christian way possible and I can never forgive that. I will never forgive that. I will make her life miserable for what she’s done.

*sigh* and I mean it, I almost said something to her. I almost did. But instead I thought about how so far her attitude is from the teachings of her lord and redeemer. About how much redemption she must need right now. About how probably no one has ever shown her what it really meant or felt like to act in a truly Christian, eg forgiving, way.

I realized just how fucked we are cousin.

I admit that I got swept up in the hype over the cartoons of The Prophet, may he not rest in peace at the horror of the actions of his followers, when I got in a fight with a cab driver and told him to chill out for he was very angry. I then suggested he might want to take out his prayer rug from the trunk and pray to Allah for peace. When he was enraged (which was the point, duh), I told him that if that upset him, I have some cartoons to show him. Score one for multiculturalism here in NYC. Anyway, I have been trying to get copies of the Iranian repartee cartoons but no luck so far, only text descriptions are online.

Most of the descriptions seem to be prerecorded, phoned in from the normal set of stereotypes of Jews. But this one is great:

That sentiment finds expression in a split-image cartoon from a Brazilian entrant in which a stand-up comic is portrayed performing in a venue called the West Club. In one image, captioned ‘Making jokes about Islam’, the comedian is greeted with raucous laughter. But the accompanying picture, marked ‘Making jokes about the Holocaust’, shows him being booted out of the window.

Did this genius miss the whole The Producers hype? The whole thing is a spoof on accounting, production, and THE HOLOCAUST! Maybe someone should send him a copy of the soundtrack so he can sing along to the mocking of Hitler, Germany, and so on. I cannot imagine anyone reading this has not heard of The Producers…

As has been noted, no one is burning anything in the streets, in fact this topic is hardly in the news here. I even would relish the MoMA or The Met doing an exhibition on the history of antisemetic or racist cartoons which includes both the Danish and the Iranian cartoons. Often you can examine your own perceptions of race, the changes in culture, and just laugh at the cliches. Do I need to point out the juxtaposition here, I doubt it.