My Assimilationist Christmas: 'This Too Survived Hitler'
The first party was all film industry. I asked the host's daughter about being Jewish and having a Christmas party and she laughed and said, "Yeah. Basically we do whatever's fun. Like we had an Easter egg roll." I liked her attitude. California. No baggage.
The next party was more interesting because there was a Holocaust survivor there. He grew up in a wealthy German family, then spent years in Theresienstadt. After the war, stateless, he said No to Palestine and came here. In the last few years he has been able to recover some of the family's actual property. The survivor's wife took me in the kitchen and showed me some china they had finally gotten back. "This too survived Hitler," she said, touching the beautiful Deco-styled plates.
It felt like a west coast dream. Attitudes are different out there, people are more open to new ideas. At New York parties, I get in fights about Jewishness. Not in L.A.
I sat with the wife for a while at dinner and talked about my issues. She explained that she was firmly secular. Religion is a negative force in society. Jewish identity was important to her, but worship was no real part of her children's lives, and she'd never tried to separate them from kids of other creeds. She was a little regretful about intermarriage but it wasn't like she could have stopped it. Hey, it's America. The Holocaust was not something they talked that much about. When I asked her about Israel, she said, "Israel is important." When I asked her to elaborate, she repeated that statement.
I went in to get Christmas cake and passed a pretty towheaded girl singing, "Dreidel, dreidel, dreidel." It felt surreal to me.
One of the claims of Jewish parochialists is that Where Hitler failed, intermarriage is succeeding: eliminating the Jewish people. It may be an incorrect statement (the latest Forward reports that Jewish #s in the U.S. are up to between 6-7 million). But right or wrong on the #s, it's ugly. It's guilting Americans who are making free and wide cultural choices, saying they're betraying their people. And the answer of the Michael Steinhardts and Elliott Abrams is, Segregating youth. Segregating privileged youth, at that. Think of the little blonde girls who won't get to sing the dreidel song.
I remember reading an article years ago by Alan Dershowitz in the secular magazine Free Inquiry. He was arguing against mixed marriages for Jews though he rejected the religious component. The Hitler analogies are somewhat apt in that it seems that a good deal of the argument for retaining a purely Jewish bloodline and homeland are akin to the old Third Reich exhortations of "Blood and Soil".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_and_soil
I watched "Driving Miss Daisy" for the first time the other night and saw how the Miss Daisy character loathed her son and daughter-in-law's acceptance of gentile Xmas celebrations. Assimilation was to be done on a decidedly limited basis.
Ok guys, lance, alan, Brenda, the whole crew. Intermarriage is specifically forbidden by Jewish law, follow me closely, Jewish law, not civil law. It isn't about superior blood lines but about keeping ourselves going has both a people and a religion. People like myself both believe in God, respect what came before me, and don't believe in betraying my people. People like Phil Weiss don't. Christmas and hannukah for example are mutually exclusive. A guy like Phil Weiss wouldn't be caught dead at any ritual of Judaism but he is all aboard at Christmas parties. And despite what he thinks of has his courage under fire this is not new. But when he dies, the jewish part of the story that got from Mt Sinai to him dies with him. So, again my over riding question is, why does column after column concern Judaism and Israel when he plainly doesn't give a shit. He is married to a wasp, he doesn't have Jewish kids, he can't stand the religion, he hates Israel. But yet he is driven to write column after column about his Jewish angst, Why?
Pearlman: So, again my over riding question is, why does column after column concern Judaism and Israel when he plainly doesn't give a shit. He is married to a wasp, he doesn't have Jewish kids, he can't stand the religion, he hates Israel. But yet he is driven to write column after column about his Jewish angst, Why?
It should be obvious, Bill. Phil is trying to protect the rest of us from people like you, who both endanger America in general and assimilationist Jews in particular, by always putting the interests of Israel ahead of those of your fellow Americans.
Here's what I don't understand Bill. If concern for Israel is such a deep abiding issue for you why don't you do the rest of us a favor, move there immediately, and leave America to those gentiles and assimilationist Jews whose primary concern is for this country, above all others?
Gene: I know that you think that Phil is doing the "lord's work" I believe is the term. But you know nothing about Judaism and even less about the middle east. He is protecting America and assimilationist Jews, from the international zionist conspiracy I suppose. But riddle me this caped crusader. If we're so all fucking powerful how come I can't turn on the TV without seeing Jimmy Carters smiling mug. And how come John Bolton is out at the UN. And how did we let Baker and Hamilton come back to life with their brilliant plan to make Israel give up the Golan heights in a brilliant reenactment of the Munich pact in order to buy off the Syrians. Either we're not in charge like you think we are or we're vanquished. Either way why do you give a shit.
I know that you think that Phil is doing the "lord's work" I believe is the term.
That is the term indeed, Bill, but it's entirely metaphorical. I'm neither a Christian nor a believer.
Either we're not in charge like you think we are or we're vanquished. Either way why do you give a shit.
Because I believe that American citizens should put America first. If you're incapable of doing that, move to Israel. You'll be happier and so will I.
I felt I repeopled the jews when I had 4 children - they have intermarried but I feel the jewish blood has spread - I am a survivor and I am not religious but "Hitler made me a Jew" (I wrote a small book with that title) I cannot forget nor forgive that six millions Jews were exterminated and the rest of the world stood by and let it happened -I feel attached to Israel and the Zionists
Interesting. "I cannot forgive" was the title of a book by Rudolph Vrba, the man who escaped from Auschwitz and prepared the infamous "Vrba-Wetzler report", regarded as one of the most important documents of the 20th century and which was the "first detailed information about the camp to reach the Allies that they accepted as credible".
Vrba made serious allegations against the WWII Zionist leaders and their role in the fate of 400,000 Hungarian Jews for the rest of his life. He accused them of deliberately suppressing the report, which would explain the lack of resistance of Hungarian Jews to the deportations. He wasn't welcome in Israel and had to leave. His name and incredible story vanished from Israel's memory, to the point where, in (dean of education at the University of Haifa) Ruth Linn's words:
"This was Rudolf Vrba," she said, noting that she had learned nothing of the daring escape either in her Israeli education or as an academic. "This was very strange to me, because I read a lot about the Holocaust. I never, ever read about Vrba in Israeli textbooks."
... "In terms of literature, it is in the class of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, first-class novelists of the Holocaust," said Linn. "But then I turned the book back and forth and I see on the cover, 'First published 1963.' And the year is 1994. I said to myself, 'Where has this book been for 31 years? I never read about it in Israel.' "
[From a review of Linn's book about Vrba.]
***
"Can this be accidental? Linn doesn
There is no simliarity between a human being being killed and that human being being married and having children with someone they love.
Wiping out Jewry and a person choosing to marry for love rather than something else are on two very opposite sides of the spectrum of morality
All that has happened is that the zionists of all stripes have appropriated the old orthodox rant about assimilation, which likens it to soul murder.
Hitler in his youthful days in Vienna admired the Zionists. Their secularised concept of the "children of Israel" was a model for his pure blood "deutsche Volksgemeinschaft" (German volk-community.
Many Zionists saw this similarity and after 1933 approved of the racial laws he was going to enact.
Does that make them complicit to the Holocaust? Of course not, but complicit to the Nazi apartheid system.
Klaus
Frankfurt, Germany
Klaus, Klaus, Klaus:
Your an idiot. I can't even begin to address the complete dementia that causes you to thank that Hitler was an admirer of Zionism during his floph ouse Vienna days.
Bill, Hitler was the idiot, not me.
The source for what I said is the Austrian historian Brigitte Hamman's book 'Hitler's Wien'. She based her thesis on interviews with friends of Hitler from the days when he stayed at the men's dormitory in Vienna. She says that what Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf about hating the Vienna Jews was written in retrospect to show general continuity of his views on Jews.
Klaus
By the way, I did not mean "complicit/complicity" in my 1st post but rather "accomplice".
The Austrian historian's name is (correctly spelled) Brigitte Hamann. There is an English edition, 'Hitler's Vienna'. What I was talking about is in chapter 10 "Jews in Vienna", subchapter "Was the young H. antisemitic ?" Her answer is 'no'.
I teach a Christian Bible Study. We are discussing some parallels between Hitler's rise to power, and the world situation today. Can you tell me who said(para-phrasing)that all the things Hitler was doing was not "my problem"; the Jews were not my problem because I was not a Jew, etc. Can you help me find the complete quote? Thank you