Illustration by Arthur Rackham, 1909

Children have been told horror stories for as long as storytelling has existed. Should a child become traumatized hearing a story like Hansel and Gretel, where the witch plans to throw the children into the oven to make a nice meal, parents can tell the child not to worry, “That’s just a fairy tale. Things like that don’t really happen.” But they do.

The Jewish cemetery in my parents’ village of Lututow, Poland had disappeared; I walked through the thick forest, vividly green, pushing aside branches that had overgrown what once had been pathways, running my hands through the earth seeking anything – a stone, some mark from a gravesite; but only some fragments of human bones strewn on the forest floor suggested that this had been a burial site for hundreds of years. Somewhere beneath the earth was my family, my kin. How I ached for them. I had come here because of a restlessness I could not understand; somehow I think I needed to bring my parents back to what had been their home. I had, in fact, brought a photograph of them – their marriage picture taken in Germany in a DP camp just after their liberation from concentration camps that had become a kind of demonic home. Here, in this place of absence, I left their picture among some leaves, in the dirt. I said Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, as I stood in this emptied, lost space, and wept.

Like so many children of Holocaust survivors, I had flown to Poland to experience my parents’ village. But unlike others who had made such pilgrimages, one trip had not been enough for me. I’ve made three altogether, each a step in a process of healing I could never have envisioned, and each in response to that restlessness that I could not understand.

The drums of war with Iran will be beating increasingly loudly in the three months leading up to AIPAC’s policy conference early next March. The Republican candidates for president (with the exception of Texas Rep. Ron Paul) will try to outdo each other in professing devotion to Israel coupled with calls to inflict more “crippling sanctions” on Iran, while pledging to keep the war option “on the table.”

The White House will dispatch deputies throughout the country to assure Democratic donors that the president is as hawkish on Iran as any Republican and that the war option is on his table, too.

It would be a very bad idea for either Israel or the US to attack Iran; today’s NY Times op-ed article by Malfrid Braut-Hegghammer, a Norwegian security expert, reinforces this conclusion. But an article in Salon by Gary Kamiya, “The Boys Who Cry ‘Holocaust’,” conveys a wrong-headed notion that the crisis about Iran’s nuclear program is Israel’s fault. Yes, Netanyahu and the neocon hawks need to be countered, but not like this, in a way that removes all responsibility from Iran.

Jeffrey Goldberg (a liberal, not a neocon) is absolutely correct in this statement, quoted by Kamiya only to dismiss it:

Anyone driving through Madison, Wisconsin in April and May would have recognized those nine beeps of car and truck horns, ubiquitous throughout the city: This is what democracy looks like!

Wisconsin State Capitol

The mainstream media focused on unions, of course, public and private, coming together in unexpected solidarity, but not everyone realized that spiritual and religious groups played a significant role as well. And here’s something that will challenge your prejudices: evangelical groups were among them. Together with the religious organizations that form the usual progressive “suspects,” they chanted their own variation on a theme: This is what religion looks like.

Bruno, Hawkings, Dowling at WCSA

Houses of Worship: the new “public” spaces for political action?

Churches, temples, synagogues, and mosques have an ambivalent history with social justice, but a panel at the Working Class Studies conference in Chicago this June offered evidence of deep and innovative support for justice movements, worker rights in particular, which really inspired me. Not everyone knows, for example, that during the Wisconsin Uprising, a Shabbat service was held in the Capitol with Hebrew songs in which Rabbi Renee Bauer played a key role. Or that four hundred clergy signed a statement of support, and one hundred fifty of them marched in the protests. Robert Bruno, author of Justified by Work, moderated an impressive panel consisting of Father Larry Dowling, a Catholic priest from a 50 percent unemployed, 55 percent ex-incarcerated parish, and Rev. C. J., . Hawking, Executive Director of Arise Chicago, and Minister of Social Justice at the Euclid Avenue Methodist Church. Unfortunately, Rabbi Brant Rosen, leader of an activist Jewish Reconstructionist congregation, and a Muslim Imam were not able to come.

The Zohar, like many other Jewish mystical texts, is veiled in a shroud of secrecy. Part of its power resides in its illusion of exclusivity, its silent challenge to the novice who dares to break open its pages. Artist Michael Hafftka animates stories from the Zohar in the context of his personal life, inviting all of us to search for an element of the sacred within.

Book of Concealment 16: " The Ancient One to the Short-Tempered One - separated and cleaving, not really separate..."

To see more of Michael Hafftka’s work, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery and visit the artist’s website.

In conservative Jewish tradition, there is an aura of spiritual elitism surrounding the Zohar; access to the Kabbalah is limited to those over the age of thirty-five, settled down, and married. Hafftka rejects these regulations. “I think those rules are nonsense, they were instituted specifically for control,” he says. “There’s nothing that I’ve read in the Zohar that shouldn’t be read by anybody and everybody.”

For Hafftka, the poetic Zohar inspired a much stronger emotional connection to Judaism than prayer, services, and the requirements of religious ritual. He believes that the poetry of the Zohar has the potential to reinvigorate a more fluid side of Judaism that might have greater appeal for young, questioning Jews like me. It also offers fodder for artistic creativity. I agree that the Zohar has a special resonance for my generation. In a 2010 survey by LifeWay Research, 72 percent of young adults aged 18-24 characterized themselves as less religious than their parents, yet more spiritual. The Zohar, Hebrew for “splendor” or “radiance,” explores the relationship between the “universal energy” and man. The fierce self-examination and personal growth it inspires is relevant to both Jews and non-Jews, theists and secularists.

Self-portrait of the artist at work

It turns out that Art Spiegelman’s factually-based graphic novel, Maus, was not the first use of a comic book format relating to the Holocaust. Life? or Theatre? A Play with Music by Charlotte Salomon, a German-Jewish refugee who perished in Auschwitz at the age of 25, consisted of a remarkable series of 1300 vividly colorful frames (known technically as “gouches”). These were based on her life and that of her family, and completed in the year prior to her being arrested by the Gestapo in the south of France in September 1943.

These generally include text (mostly in German, some in French), either as explanatory captions or embedded within the paintings themselves. Salomon advances her tale as well through suggesting that it be staged as an opera, indicating lyrics and tunes. This conceit is perhaps inspired by her step-mother, who was in fact an opera singer, Paula Lindberg (née Paula Levy, a secular Jew, like Charlotte and her physician father, Albert).

Salomon’s work features two love stories, probably unrequited and perhaps fictionalized. One is the Charlotte character’s infatuation with Paula Lindberg’s voice coach, and the other is this same man’s (imagined?) longing for Ms. Lindberg.

What adds poignancy is that her art was a personal triumph over clinical depression, which apparently plagued the women on her mother’s side of the family. Her mother committed suicide during Charlotte’s early childhood

Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, falls this year on the evening of May 1, until nightfall, May 2nd. (There are slight overlaps in this post with the online essay I wrote for Tikkun‘s 25th anniversary and what I’ve posted earlier today at the Meretz USA Blog.)

Last year, within the space of a few days, I saw two very different films related to the Holocaust: A Film Unfinished is a documentary about a Nazi faux-documentary; the other is the 2009 Quentin Tarantino sensation, Inglourious Basterds, which I saw on the Showtime cable network. The former makes the Nazi cameramen into honest documentarians despite their intentions; the latter fictionalizes World War II in an outlandish way, to make Jewish characters into uber-avengers who shorten the war by wiping out most of the Nazi leadership, trapped in a burning cinema.

'Inglourious Basterds' Poster

If Inglourious Basterds were simply a spoof, it would be in exceptionally poor taste and not worth commenting upon. Instead, it is surprisingly serious and even riveting. Fortunately, it is not just about the buffoonish squad of Jewish “Golems” (the Hitler character even uses this term in describing them) commanded by Brad Pitt as a cartoonishly-crude Tennessee gentile who has them scalp their German victims. Its more compelling revenge fantasy is that portrayed by the French actress Mélanie Laurent as the sole survivor of a French-Jewish family slaughtered three years before by the “Jew hunter,” SS Colonel Hans Landa.

Ms. Laurent perhaps deserved an Oscar as much as Christoph Waltz, who won in the Best Supporting Actor category for his bravura role as Col. Landa — the brilliant, charming, cruel and ever-conniving SS officer. Part of what makes the film so engrossing is the intelligent and emotionally-fraught dialogue (often in French or German) of major characters—including the role portrayed by Daniel Brühl as the handsome German war hero, Private Fredrick Zoller, who takes a fancy to Laurent’s Shoshanna character (not knowing that she’s Jewish), and of Diane Kruger, playing the German actress turned Allied agent, Bridget von Hammersmark.

In 2004, the U.S. officially recognized a genocide taking place in the Darfur region of Sudan. Although atrocities continued, the weight of this acknowledgment reverberated throughout the world. The global citizen could no longer claim ignorance regarding the atrocities taking place in Sudan. But neither the U.S. nor Israel have taken what you might think would be an easier stand, to recognize the almost century-old Armenian genocide. It’s important that they do so.

During the Holocaust, Pope Pius XII might have saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Jews by publicly denouncing Hitler early in the War. A public, vocal, and direct denunciation of Hitler’s murderous intentions would have reached the ears of Catholics throughout the world, including German Catholics, who were one third of the population of Germany. Clearly stating the deadly ambitions of the Nazis and serving as a vocal defender of the Jewish people might have prevented the destruction of countless lives. Jews throughout Europe, especially in Poland and Russia, might have been warned of impending danger from the words of such an influential and global figure.

Today, Israel and the U.S. are not in the same position as Pope Pius XII. The Armenian population of Turkey, or anywhere else in the world currently does not face the same threat as European Jews during the Holocaust.

However, they once did face the same fate.

A reader of a draft of my article, “Hannah Arendt: From Iconoclast to Icon” (published recently in Tikkun‘s new online edition), asked me something that triggered my elaborate response, which evolved into another article. It begins with Arendt, but it’s really not about her. “Finding Refuge: Why Palestine?” was published in the March/April 2011 issue of Outlook: Canada’s Progressive Jewish Magazine. I am making it available on Tikkun Daily because Outlook did not choose to publish it on its website. It also seems opportune at this time because Holocaust Remembrance Day falls this year on May 1, with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising commemorated on April 21:

It may surprise some admirers of Hannah Arendt, the renowned German-Jewish intellectual, to learn that when in exile from Nazi Germany in the 1930s, she worked in Paris for Youth Aliyah, a Zionist agency that assisted European Jewish young people to enter Palestine. Although Arendt is well known as a critic of Israel and Zionism, she recalled toward the end of her life in an interview on West German television that this was the most satisfying work she had ever done.

Hannah Arendt as a graduate student

The final chapter of an anthology of Arendt’s work entitled The Jewish Writings (Schocken Books, 2007) is an afterword by her niece, Edna Brocke. This warm, personal remembrance confirms Arendt’s enthusiasm:

She understood Zionism as a concrete way of combating rising National Socialism, … rescuing Jews and above all children and young people by sending them to Palestine. … [She] considered that to be her active contribution to the defense of the Jewish people.

I’ve recently been asked to explain why such efforts by Arendt — and others associated with the Zionist movement in the 1930s and ’40s — to facilitate Jewish immigration to Palestine, were justified. This question was presumably posed because the mostly hostile Arab reaction to Jewish immigration led to war and the eventual widespread displacement of the indigenous Palestinian-Arab population.

The questioner mistakenly assumed that other destinations, such as South Africa and Latin America, were readily open to Jews. This assumption grossly underestimates the dimensions of the Jewish predicament at the time. And how ever one views historic and current events in the Middle East, Israel’s origins as a haven from oppression and genocide are worth recalling.

The conference center at Caux, Switzerland

I spend my summers, like many Swiss, up in the mountains. But my summer ‘chalet’ is a former Palace hotel, now an international conference centre, with hundreds of participants, from around the world (see: www.caux.ch).

We enjoyed a magical evening of Klezmer music in the Caux theatre. It’s slightly amazing that after the almost total destruction of the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe that gave birth to this musical idiom, this haunting, joyful, dancing, sad music is played and enjoyed by many. I’m not well-known for my dancing, but it is almost impossible NOT to dance to this music! A moving revenge on Hitler.

I’ve also taken part in a workshop on ‘Religious diversity and anti-discrimination training’, a training that has been modeled by an NGO called CEJI and is billed as ‘A Jewish Contribution to an Inclusive Europe’ (www.ceji.org). And there were also a number of people taking part in this conference on ‘Learning to Live in a Multicultural World’ from the pedagogical movement for children’s rights inspired by the Polish-Jewish victim of the Holocaust, Janusz Korczak.

Towards the end of the Second World War, the former Caux-Palace, then the Esplanade Refugee Camp, housed some 1,600 Jews. In 1999, we inaugurated a plaque at the foot of an oak tree planted in 1997 to mark this little-known chapter of history. The simple plaque looks out over the breath-taking view over the Lake of Geneva to the Franco-Swiss pre-Alps. The text on the plaque reads: ‘In remembrance of the Jewish refugees who stayed here, and of those who were not admitted to enter Switzerland during World War II. We shall not forget.’

WE WILL ALL PERISH, No. 18. (From the picture): "October 15, 1942. We left our house for good and walked down to the road. Mottel sat in the front wagon holding the Torah. My parents went to join him while my brother helped my little sisters settle into the rear wagon with my aunt Trushel, her sister Golda, my uncle Ruven, and my five little cousins. Suddenly Mottel's daughter-in-law stood up and cried to my mother, 'Rachel, we will never come back! We will all perish!' Everyone began to cry. Mania and I followed quickly behind the woman who was to take us to Dombrowa and the house of Stefan, my father's friend. The wagons left for the Krasnik station, and we never saw our family again." Embroidery and fabric collage, 1998. To see more "Through the Eye of the Needle: Fabric of Survival," visit Tikkun's gallery.

In the 1970s a Holocaust survivor with no formal art training tried to show her daughters what her lost childhood home and family looked like. Trained as a dressmaker, Esther Nisenthal Krinitz used embroidery, fabric collage, and fabric wash to recreate images of 1930s Poland, and her parents, siblings, neighbors, community, and friends who died under the Nazis. Over the next two decades, the project transformed into a visual narrative of her story, entitled “Through the Eye of the Needle: Fabric of Survival.” Her work takes the viewer from her happy childhood, through Nazi occupation, to the loss of her loved ones and the resourceful daring that kept her alive, and finally to a new life in the U.S. Most pieces include brief hand- stitched captions, but the images alone tell a moving and remarkable tale. You can view the whole series sequentially, as it’s intended, in our gallery or on Art and Remembrance’s website. Art and Remembrance’s online gallery also includes expanded audio narration of the work.

Krinitz’s art tells of how, at 15, she resisted the Nazi command that all the town’s Jews board trains for “relocation.” Instead, she and her younger sister turned to non-Jewish friends and neighbors to hide them in exchange for work. Soon this became dangerous, however, and briefly taking refuge in the woods, she and her sister disguised themselves as Catholic farm girls. With their new identities, they found work in a new town and hid in plain sight for the rest of World War II. Neither ever saw the any of their other family again.

What began as a personal memorial became a mission to educate about injustice, war, and genocide. Krinitz passed away in 2001, but her work lives on through Art and Remembrance, a nonprofit founded by her daughters. Art and Remembrance oversees exhibitions of Krinitz’s complete work, as well as educational programs. In particular, the organization focuses on educating children. Krinitz’s vivid images and accessible storytelling allow even young children to learn about the Holocaust. “Through the Eye of the Needle” has also been made in a children’s picture book called “Memories of Survival.”

Visit Tikkun Daily’s Art Gallery to see more of Esther Krinitz’s fabric art.

Mike Godbe, a young American on a free Birthright tour of Israel, continues his diary and photos of the tour, reporting his experiences and the ways the tour staff present the history and politics of the country. Earlier posts from Jerusalem, a kibbutz, and Caesaria can be accessed by clicking the corresponding links.

Sunday, March 14th, 2010
Today we met the six IDF soldiers that will be joining our group for the remaining five days of the program. All of them are between the ages of 19 and 21, half women, half men. When birthright was started around 2000, participants in the program were not allowed to walk through many parts of Jerusalem or go out at night, like we now are, because of the high level of danger during the second intifada. We are told that the IDF “encounters” program was incorporated into birthright to allow participants to meet and interact with Israeli citizens . . . The implication being that the soldiers were here to provide that connection between participants and Israelis, not participants and the Israeli military.

We played some name games and ice breakers in the morning, the soldiers still in full military garb (no guns). We then got ready for a somber day at Yad Vashem and Mt. Herzl Cemetery, the Holocaust museum / memorial and the burying place of nearly every prominent Israeli statesmen and soldier – among many others of lesser fame.

Like most Jewish kids in postwar America, Starhawk grew up believing that Israel was the salvation of the Jewish people. She collected pennnies to plant trees in the Holy Land, learned Israeli folk songs and Israeli dances, and dreamed of going to Israel. At 15 she finally attended a Zionist program in Israel.

Star believes that she was raised with a compelling story — that Jews were kicked around for 2,000 years, almost exterminated in the Holocaust, and out of those ashes, finally got their own land again. “And by God,” she adds, “nobody’s going to take an inch of it away from us.” This is a persuasive story for many people, according to Starhawk. But unfortunately, the Palestinians aren’t in it.

For Starhawk, as for many American Jews of her age, it was painful to face the injustice that Israel was carrying out against the Palestinian people. Star senses that much of this injustice stems on a deep psychological level from an inability to see the Palestinian people as people — with their own humanity, their own rights, their own desires and flaws. Denying Palestinians that full range of humanity — and acknowledging that their ranks include the good, the bad, the vicious, the kind, the compassionate — is at the root of the unjust treatment they receive. Seeing every Palestinian as a suicide bomber who wants to kill an Israeli will not resolve this conflict. Nor will denying the existence of the Palestinians.

Starhawk hopes that another compelling narrative will begin to take the place of the one that she grew up with. This is a tale that’s very familiar to readers of Tikkun. It’s the story that Judaism stands for justice, for the regneration of the world, for tikkun olam. This, too, is a powerful story. And Star believes that if we can call people back to that story — as painful as it is to face the truth of what Israel has done to Palestine — then we can actually stop this injustice.

As we drove into the parking lot at the high school in Palo Alto Sunday evening, we were greeted by a group of about two dozen protesters, waving American and Israeli flags, and holding signs. One woman moved her sign so that I could see it clearly as I drove past her… “If you hate America so much, why don’t you just leave?” Further down the line a man pushed his sign towards my window emblazoned with the horrific symbol of Nazi Germany, the Swastika.

Blind loyalty to Israel is the primary form of idolatry today in the Jewish world.

Go into any synagogue in the US or Israel and you can tell people that you don’t believe in God, don’t observe the commands of Torah, don’t observe the Sabbath, or even that you plan to be eating a pig sandwich on Yom Kippur and the majority of people will shrug their shoulders, and welcome you in. But dare to say that you think that Israel is violating human rights or, worse, that it really is just a political entity like all other political entities and does not have any particular claim on your loyalties, and you will be treated as though you had just spoken the greatest of Jewish heresies.

And that is what it means to be the god of a particular people — when critiquing it is seen as the one belief that you cannot critique without being dismissed as hurtful, evil or perverse. When Aaron facilitated the creation of the Golden Calf, he proclaimed “These are your Gods, O Israel.” Today, in word and deed, most of the synagogues in the world proclaim “The state of Israel is the ultimate holy God, O Israel.” Israel is the new idolatry.

It’s not hard to see how this happened.

Zella and Helga are best friends, middle-aged women, traveling together, talking about children and grandchildren, very normal. But some have difficulty accepting their friendship. Zella Brown is daughter of Holocaust survivors Wolf and Barbara Kaplansky. Seventy five members of her family died… Helga’s father was a Gestapo chief responsible for the deaths of 40,000 people.

I asked my old friend Michael Henderson to send me a true story from his latest book, No Enemy To Conquer: Forgiveness in an Unforgiving World. I had no idea he would have one so central to Tikkun‘s mission. This is a shortened version of the one that appears in the book.

So let’s start again, from the top: