Courtesy of Anne Frank Museum
“In the long run, the sharpest weapon of all is a kind and gentle spirit.” – Anne Frank
Dear Anne,
What would you make of it all?
What would you think of what has become of the world? What would you feel about how we still behave? Would you be surprised at what has happened to the Jewish people since your death and how the Jewish story is unfolding in the 21st century? Would you be shocked at how we have misused the memory of the Holocaust? Would you be dismayed at the mess we have made of your legacy?
What words would you be writing in your diary today, Anne Frank? What would you hope for and dream of?
It was supposed to be the genocide to end all genocides. The final warning of the monumental power of hatred. But then there was Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia. And now Darfur. And all that we have learnt is that we will never learn. Each generation must discover that there is no victory over hatred, only reprieves and endless vigilance.
I, and many others, (most notably Professor Marc Ellis), have asked, what should it mean to be a Jew after Auschwitz, after Belsen, after Treblinka? What should it mean to be a Jew after Anne Frank?
Anne, you have become the representative of the one and a half million Jewish children murdered by Hitler and the Nazis during their war against the Jewish people. We cannot comprehend all of those lost lives but we can treasure yours. As you said once in your diary: “I wish to go on living after my death.” That’s what I would like for you too. Your faith in humanity and your belief that goodness can triumph in the most harsh of times, is a message we must hold onto tightly.
But what happens when your death, and all of those you have come to represent, becomes abused by your own people and used to justify the blotting out of another people, their identity, their history and their heritage?
What have we done to your memory, Anne, when we choose to label every critic of Israel as anti-Semitic and every Palestinian a modern-day Nazi? What happens to the meaning of your life when we choose to see ourselves as endless victims, endlessly threatened?
The truth is that after seventy years the Jewish people are still suffering from a terrible trauma. It is a trauma that has skewed our collective thinking and our sense of identity. A trauma that has sent our moral compass into spasm. In Israel, and throughout Diaspora Jewry, the Holocaust has been used to explain and justify every aggression, every Palestinian family dispossessed, every piece of land stolen, every house bulldozed, as necessary acts of security to prevent a second Holocaust.
As the Israeli commentator Boaz Evron wrote in 1980: “Two terrible things happened to the Jewish people in this century: the Holocaust and the lessons learned from it.”
We have lifted the Holocaust out of history. We have given it metaphysical significance, claiming it a horror like no other, an evil beyond comparison. To mention any other atrocity in the same breath is treated as a heresy. I hope you would agree, Anne, that this is dangerous nonsense. The scale of the Holocaust is unique and its mechanised methods of murder are yet to be repeated, but the mindset and the suffering were nothing new and have been repeated many times since.
Zionism took the Holocaust as the ultimate vindication of its theory of Jewish history. Jews had no future in Europe, they were outsiders who would never be totally accepted and only a Jewish state of our own could bring us normalcy and safety. But in the 21st century what looks more abnormal and anachronistic than an “ethno-cratic” Jewish state that by its very nature must favor one group of citizens over another.
With tragic irony, we have created for ourselves an ever more strident nationalism based on beliefs of ethnic, religious and cultural superiority. We have recreated in our ancestral homeland the very factors that caused our persecution in Europe and yet we describe it as a miraculous rebirth.
Anne, there are two women I would like to introduce you to. Both have helped me to understand how we as Jews can think about the Holocaust and how it should inform our lives.
Sara Roy is the daughter of Holocaust survivors and has spent more than 25 years studying the effects of the 40 year Israeli occupation and now economic siege of the Gaza Strip. Her father was one of only two known survivors from the death camp at Chelmno–he also survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald–and gave evidence at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961. Her parents’ experience profoundly influenced her commitment to study in-depth the on-going disintegration of the society and economy of Gaza. Here she explains why her mother chose not to live in Israel after the war: “Her decision not live in Israel was based on a belief, learned and reinforced by her experiences during the war, that tolerance, compassion and justice cannot be practiced nor extended when one lives only among one’s own.” She recalls her mother saying, “‘I wanted to live as a Jew in a pluralist society, where my group remained important to me, but where others were important to me too.” Sara goes on to say: “The lessons of the Holocaust were always presented to me as both particular (that is Jewish) and universal. Perhaps most importantly they were presented as indivisible. To divide them would be to diminish them both.”
Irena Klepfisz escaped with her mother from the Warsaw ghetto as a small child. Her father was killed soon after the start of the ghetto’s Jewish resistance uprising. She grew up to be a poet and feminist in America. Irena believes that the way to pay tribute to those who struggled, resisted and died in the Jewish uprising in Warsaw is to hold on to their vision and their fierce outrage at the destruction of the ordinary life of their people. Here’s what Irena says:
The hysteria of a mother grieving for the teenager who has been shot; a family stunned in front of avandalizedor demolished home; a family separated, displaced; arbitrary and unjust laws that demand the closing or opening of schools; humiliation of a people whose culture is deemed inferior; a people left homeless without citizenship; a people living under military rule. Because of our experience we recognize these evils as obstacles to peace.”
Irena has recognized the cruel trick that the Holocaust has played on Jewish moral sensibility: “Has Nazism become the sole norm by which Jews judge evil, so that anything that is not its exact duplicate is considered by us morally acceptable?”
These are the Jewish voices of conscience that we must open our hearts to as well as our ears. They are also the voices that are daily drowned out by a noisy arrogance and chauvinism that prefers might to right, Jewish power to Jewish ethics.
Anne, today we need your simple good faith in human nature like never before. We need you to live on after your death just as you wished to. Do you remember writing these beautiful words? “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” Anne, may your bright spirit be remembered. May your hopes live on through others. May your learning be our learning.
Yours in search of justice, kindness, and humility,
Robert A.H.Cohen
Micah’s Paradigm Shift
What an extraordinary remembrance on the day we commemorate the sobering and humbling extent of unstopped evil, cruelty and hideous hate that made the Shoah, in all its catastrophic dimensions, happen.
Truly, the antidote to hurting the world is to help improve it. This beautiful, insightful, witness-bearing reflection of Robert A.H. Cohen does that powerfully.
Thank you, Robert, may we join you in finding and establishing justice, kindness and humility in ourselves and our world, and may we NEVER forget the holocaust and its learning legacy, nor the millions of precious souls who perished in its flames.
Yours truly, Aminah
Robert
the decency, the eloquence, and the soul searing examination for those of us with Jewish heritage is stunning and beautiful. Thank you for this. You can not know how profoundly this touched me and those with whom I have shared this open letter.
Thank you, Robert (and Aminah), for reminding us of Anne’s words, giving us hope and direction to move beyond this crazy time of ongoing genocides.
I understand how this post inspired my sister to make this comment, but there was a protracted and difficult battle over what Anne Frank actually wrote. Meyer Levin, a journalist and novelist who often wrote on Jewish themes, championed the original version of her diary, which was more assertively Jewish than what became popularized.
When writer/director Garson Kanin came across Anne Frank’s actual words from her diary as transmitted by Meyer Levin in his initial draft script of the play to be made from her story, he reportedly dismissed them as Jewish “special pleading.” Toward the end of the Levin play, shortly before the Nazis find their attic hideout and cart them off to the camps (where only Anne’s father, Otto, survived), Anne engages in a monologue (taken from her diary) that speaks of Jewish suffering through the ages and asks if somehow there’s a purpose to it. She also indicts all of humanity for going along with the wars and hateful schemes of their leaders. This passage also includes her famous declaration that in the end, she sees “all people as good at heart.” But it does not culminate with this statement.
Kanin and Hellman de-Judaized Anne Frank’s own words and made her statement about “people being good at heart” into her bottom-line pronouncement. And her words on the ongoing suffering of the Jewish people were replaced with an utterance on how at various times, many peoples suffered persecution at the hands of others.
Hence, conscripting Anne Frank in a critique of Israel and Zionism may be inappropriate. It’s not that Israel doesn’t have its moral failings, but the conflict is also driven by the other side, a point I was making in my post today: http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2012/04/19/the-holocaust-and-arab-antisemitism/.
Imagine if Israel existed 70 years ago Ann Frank would have had a place to run and she would be enriching our lives well into her advanced age. She’s among the many young souls lost in the Holocaust when the world abandoned us, the Jewish people. This is why we as Jews need a home land.
I have news for you. I am not happy with the current state of affairs and would be more than happy to give almost all of the West bank to the Palestinians. I say give instead of returned, because it really was never theirs in the first place. It had been part of the Ottoman empire, the British Mandate and Jordanian annexation. We obtained it in a war not of our choosing.
I have more news for you. Palestinians are not victims of Israeli oppression, They are victims of their divided and self serving leadership. Arafat walked away from a good deal in 2000, just like they walked away from partition in 1948. The fact is that the Israeli right wing has taken advantage of Palestinian intransigence.
As for Gaza, well I know many like to compare it to the Warsaw Ghetto. Many also make compare alleged israeli atrocities with documented Nazi atrocities. Anyone with half a brain and a moral character would not do such a thing. Yes, Gaza is occupied. Yes, Gazans are hurting, but DON’T blame Israel. The occupying power is Hamas. They are using Gaza as a launching pad for rockets into Sderot,, Beer Sheva Ashdod and Ashkalon. Every time Israel sends troops in to stop the rocket fire, they face charges of war crimes from much of the world, and especially the Lerner Left. Gazan are not starving, The border between Gaza and Egypt is open. If Gazans cannot leave, that is because Hamas is keeping them in. This has been documented. The sea access is blocked for one reason only, to prevent the open importation of significant arms from Iran. The Israeli government. has an obligation to defend its citizens first.
You might want to guess why Israelis are anxious about concessions. You only has to look at the shadow of Iran and their nuclear weapons program. You might also want to look at Iran’s partner, Syria and its proxy army, Hezbollah. They have been stirring the conflict and keeping it on a slow boil. Partnered with Hamas, Iran, Syria and Hezbollah have not given up the dream of eliminating Israel as a sovereign state. This leave a people who feel under siege.
May we never see another Shoah ever again and I pray the world will not throw us under the bus again,.
You want peace, send petitions to Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian leadership and plead with them to give up that dream of destroying Israel. Perhaps equal pressure to both sides wold make a difference.
Since this is Yom HaShoah and you are also looking back at the acts of genocide in Rwanda, Cambodia, Darfur and Bosnia. You might also might want to recognize the atrocities in Syria. Since last spring close to 10,000 civilians have been slaughtered, many of them unarmed protesters. This is not the first time a member of the Assad family has been behind massacres. We recall the 1982 Hama Massacre i
So here’s my message. Zionism is not evil, Gaza is not the Warsaw Ghetto and the Palestinians are advisories not victims.
This ws one of the most nauseating things I’ve ever read. Considering what happened to her and her family I think she would have been the strongest proponent of Israel you’d find.