Is There Room for a New Jewish Universalism?

Size: px

Start display at page:

Download "Is There Room for a New Jewish Universalism?"

Lenard Copeland
5 years ago
Views:

A bestseller in Israel, where it provoked intense debate and recrimination, Avraham Burg s book challenges Jews to look beyond the Holocaust as the Is There Room for a New Jewish Universalism?

1 A bestseller in Israel, where it provoked intense debate and recrimination, Avraham Burg s book challenges Jews to look beyond the Holocaust as the Is There Room for a New Jewish Universalism? MIDDLE EAST 1 by Marina Gersony central theme in all domestic and foreign policymaking Shoah is at the heart of all teaching in Israel. There s simply The no school trip that compares in emotional terms with the walk of life or the trip to Poland. This doesn t even count the Shoah s obligatory role in final exams. Olycim_Sipa Press 8

2 MIDDLE EAST 1 Sometimes it seems like our children are proxy survivors in a manner of speaking. A best-seller in Israel, where it provoked controversy and considerable discomfort, Avraham Burg s 2007 book Defeating Hitler: Toward a New Universalism and Jewish Humanism (In Italy translated by Elena Loewenthal and titled Sconfiggere Hitler. Per un nuovo universalismo e umanesimo ebraico, Neri Pozza, 416 pages, 19) focuses on the omnipresence of the Holocaust in Israeli public life. Hitler is dead, the book seems to say, but his ghost alights untouched. Burg, a former Labor Party deputy and one-time speaker of the Knesset, recently helped found a new political group known as Hatnua Hahadasha (see box). He explains the constant and to him invasive presence of the Holocaust in political, military, social and cultural circles while at the same time recognizing the act of remembrance as central to the maintenance Israel s spiritual health and identity. The Jewish people, my people, my family, had to endure incredible trauma, he says. But to put that trauma behind us we have to begin our own painful journey, which is difficult but necessary to require faith. We can t use the Holocaust as an excuse to explain why everything happens in Israel. The Holocaust is already shameful in and of itself, and needs to be increasingly more part of our memory and less an ingredient of daily politics. Burg supports his views with numerous examples, including the harshness with which Israel governs the occupied territories, general indifference to the suffering of the dominated, and the militarization of a society that emphasizes institutional formalities to the point of seeming on the defensive. Official visitors to Israel, notes Burg, are compelled to visit the Holocaust memorial of Yad Vahsem, a rite he says represents part of the new Israeli religion : Visitors show contrite faces, carry flowers, bow their heads, pray. Burg carries it a step further. The Holocaust, he writes, has been transformed not only into an essential ingredient of the collective Israeli conscience but also that of 9

IS THERE ROOM FOR A NEW JEWISH UNIVERSALISM? the West. It s a cumbersome and unique obligation, unrivaled by the approach to any other global genocide.

3 IS THERE ROOM FOR A NEW JEWISH UNIVERSALISM? the West. It s a cumbersome and unique obligation, unrivaled by the approach to any other global genocide. Our generals speak of Israeli security in terms of guarantees against a new Shoah. Politicians hide behind it to conceal twisted policies. Common folk are compelled to reckon daily with mention of the trauma. For more than 90 percent of those asked, it s the most important even in the history of the Jewish people. More than the creation of the Earth, the revelations of the Torah, the destruction of the Temple on the Mount, the Diaspora, the Messianic, creative culture, the birth of Zionism The Holocaust has turned into a kind of tactical armor at the disposal of Jews, Israelis and inhabitants of the Diaspora, transforming a vital memory into the mundane and burning pain into sweet and sticky mannerism almost devoid of meaning. The Holocaust also becomes a means of expression, a word used to compare, justify, judge, or even insult as in the case of the ultra-orthodox youth who accused a police officer of being a worse Nazi than the Germans. Burg s stinging views are sometimes difficult to swallow. They reflect the depth of a trauma with which Israeli society has yet to fully come to grips and which only future generation may be able to put behind them. Though time has gradually eliminated most eyewitnesses, Holocaust remembrance remains an obsessive act. American Jews, writes Burg, have slipped into the Auschwitz and death camp bog, using the genocide to define their identity and their politics. This makes it seem that the Holocaust abyss has so deeply conditioned American leadership that it s predisposed to support all big-power wars and throw its support behind the hardest right wing foreign police line the White House can generate. The same question emerges. How to maintain a tragic memory without making the effort seem dogmatic, repetitive, apologetic or, worse still, the reflection of a kind of institutionally narcissistic contemplation of the past? Burg says the televised trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1960 for war crimes was collective therapy for Israelis. Before the trial the Shoah was synonymous with taboo, horror, a sense of guilt and shame among those born or settled in the new state of Israel. Nazi survivors were forced to justify Grazia Neri_M. Pinzauti 10

4 the fact they d survived. They faced the wrath from the sabra (Israel-born Jews), who deeply and intimately loathed the weakness the living victims represented; from idealistic Zionists; from Jews who d come from Africa and Islamic states. The latter had little common with the survivors and paid a price for this difference. While many hoped Eichmann s trial in Jerusalem (he was hanged in Ramla in 1962) would close a dark chapter in human history and give young, multi-racial Israel a fresh sense of unity, the opposite occurred. After a long stretch of silence, survivors began speaking out. The few became the many and their stories turned urgent. Daily life in modern Israel now inevitably includes some mention of the Holocaust, whether a new study, a new film or book, a remarkable interview or a rare eyewitness account. Insisting on the trauma, for Burg, clots the country s forward progress. Fear has congealed and helped fuel incipient nationalism, making Israel into an aggressive, rancorous, fragmented society, a homespun and unstable enemy even to itself, a state based on corruption, oppression and injustice. I discovered to my horror that the state structures that most parallel those of present-day Israel are the one that existed in late 19th century unified Germany, beginning with the II Reich and running through the anarchy and chaos of the early 20th century and the rise of the Nazi Party. Burg isn t through. Even the role of Israel s enemies becomes paradoxical. What cements Israeli society? War. How many times have we said it: thank God for the Arabs because otherwise we d destroy ourselves. We re great at denouncing war with Jacobean formulas, but we re holding Esaù s sword. We re huddled in this warlike cocoon all around which is rage. Burg s book is difficult. It s alternately contradictory, pained, disconnected in form, and at times masochistic. He moves back and forth between recollections of his youth in Jerusalem s Little Germany and personal history and reflection, often registered in minute detail. He refers to the Torah and the leading thinkers of the so-called Short Century, between the end of World War I and the fall of the Soviet Union. Whiffs of social and political indignation emerge whenever he speaks of his loved ones, Contrasto_Xinhua / Gamma / Eyedea Presse / 11

Corbis_A. Rahim Khatib/epa particularly his father Yossef, a charismatic German-Jewish Israeli pioneer whose presence is embedded in the narrative.

5 Corbis_A. Rahim Khatib/epa particularly his father Yossef, a charismatic German-Jewish Israeli pioneer whose presence is embedded in the narrative. Can a foreigner ever reach an intimate understanding of Israel s complexities, asks a worried Burg at a certain point? Despite his radical criticism of stereotypes, his disdain for Zionism as a dream and a failed ideology, his disenchantment toward the religious and political ruling class, he still considers Israel the best place for him, the most democratic, where I can say what I want, associate with those I wish. It s a place where 80 percent of the Israeli Arabs would like to live in the event of an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement and the creation of a Palestinian state. It comes as no surprise that Burg s uncompromising views have irritated many Israelis and Jews in the Diaspora. Nor is it surprising to imagine such views being manipulated. In any event, Burg s book shouldn t be read merely as a denunciation of modern Israel but as an invitation to look Israel s bloody air and land offensive against Hamas in Gaza divided opinion domestically and internationally. ahead, to reinvent, and to repossess the ideological pillars on which Israel was built. Independently of his contentious assertions, Burg s vision is one of immense hope that includes the witnessing a rebirth of Jewishness closer in tone to Judaism s universal values. Utopian? I don t think so, he says. If you don t have a grand plan, if you re not illuminated, all becomes irrelevant. Only when you reach something of significance, with explanations that are larger than life, only then to people feel ready to follow with a positive leap. It s not a matter of utopia but working hard and being devoted to ideals in which I happen to believe, in which we believe, and which many Israelis dream of and hope for: peace, a normal life, solidarity, tranquility, and a little hope. 12

Appeared in "Ha'aretz" on the 2nd of March The Need to Forget

Appeared in Ha'aretz on the 2nd of March The Need to Forget Appeared in "Ha'aretz" on the 2nd of March 1988 The Need to Forget I was carried off to Auschwitz as a boy of ten, and survived the Holocaust. The Red Army freed us, and I spent a number of months in a