Nobody likes Jews. You can’t say people like Jews. We’re not popular. We’re too smart to be liked. But it has been unacceptable to express anti-Semitism since the Holocaust.
I always, always have the Holocaust on my mind.
Ukraine and Israel have long-standing historical ties. Our nations have together experienced all the tragedies in recent history – the Holodomor and the Holocaust, the Second World War, and the totalitarian Soviet regime.
For while the threat of nuclear holocaust has been significantly reduced, the world remains a very unsettled and dangerous place.
Unlike the Holocaust, Stalin’s murders are forgotten: dust blowing in the wind.
Since Hiroshima and the Holocaust, science no longer holds its pristine place as the highest moral authority. Instead, that role is taken by human rights. It follows that any assault on Jewish life – on Jews or Judaism or the Jewish state – must be cast in the language of human rights.
If I’d been living in Berlin in 1933-34, could I possibly have foreseen the Holocaust and all the corollary horrors of World War II? And if I had, would I have done anything about it? I also started to wonder: how does a culture slip its moorings?
It seems unavoidable that history will always link the reestablishment of the State of Israel with the tragedy of the Holocaust.
Our culture is being shaped by trolls and the Holocaust deniers are a very extreme example of the trolls. Ignoring them has not worked. It doesn’t mean that confronting them will work completely but I think it’s a debate we have to have.
As a Jew, there’s a need to keep that atrocity alive. There were Catholics and gypsies and homosexuals who died in the Holocaust, too. It’s amazing that people allowed this slaughter to take place. There’s a need to make these films and reiterate it happened.
In the First World War, there was the sudden passion of nationalism, and the killing took place because of these emotions. But the Soviet case is different, because you had systematic murder, like the Holocaust.
Phil is a child of Holocaust survivors.
I was born in Israel, to Canadian parents. My father immigrated in 1948, part of a wave of young men and women who came as pioneers, to fight for a Jewish homeland. Their motive was in large part a reaction to the Holocaust, and their slogan was ‘Never Again.’
You can’t portray wartime Shanghai without writing about the Holocaust – about 25,000 Jews survived the Nazi death machine by taking refuge there.
What I’m trying to say is the Holocaust was a horrific crime against humanity and frankly, I would never want to see that repeated.
The United Nations was founded in the aftermath of World War II, just as the world was beginning to learn the full horrors of history’s worst genocide, the Holocaust that consumed 6 million Jews and 3 million others in Europe.
From its earliest days in the nineteenth century, and until the Holocaust, the Orthodox rabbinate in eastern Europe was not enthusiastic about the Zionist movement, which at the time was led by irreligious Jews.
Never to forget the Holocaust was not only against Jews. It was mostly against Jews but it was also against homosexuals, gypsies and, let’s not forget, people with disability.
Once the war started, my grandfather went to England, where he was under house arrest on the Isle of Man, and then to Ireland, but not to Germany. In no way did he, or my grandmother for that matter, ever support either the war or the Holocaust.
Modernity has been largely shaped for Jews by three momentous experiences: the acquisition of citizenship by individual Jews in secular nation-states, the destruction of one-third of Jewry in the Holocaust, and the founding of the State of Israel.
Like the assassination of JFK, everybody alive then can remember where they were that Doomsday Week of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. That Saturday, 27 October, was, and remains, the closest the world has come to nuclear holocaust – the blackest day of a horrendous week.
