#six million Jews murdered

[in-sightjournal]

Ask A Genius 1082: The Holocaust and German Record-Keeping

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about Holocaust denial and German recordkeeping? Rick Rosner: Let’s briefly talk about it. I’ll say the Nazis kept very gooI’llcords. So, when people talk about six million Jews being murdered by the Nazis, 200,000 disabled people being murdered, and another five million or so people considered undesirable by the regime, including Romani (what we might call gypsies),…

[scottguy]

Sigh...help me to get *yet another* mutually exclusive set of paranoid right-wing conspiracy theories straight...

The LEGAL.. invited Hatian immigrants that "took all the jobs" (that Springfield couldn't fill otherwise) now have a great income because they're smart, sophisticated, and clever enough to be employed skilled factory labor and "replace" whites.

But... those SAME Hatians are ALSO so primitive, so backward, and so hungry (despite earning a lot of money) that they will lower themselves to eat "the dogs" and "the cats" when they could afford to eat filet mignon or at least pork, chicken, and hamburger?

Please make up your mind.

Do you hate them because they're SO NORMAL that they hold jobs and you resent it? Or do you hate them because they are so low-functioning, beastly, and inhuman that they couldn't possibly hold a job?

You can't have it both ways!

People are just people. But racists think, "only white people are moral."

Oh yeah?

White German people sat idely by while Germany murdered six million Jews! White Americans enslaved, murdered, beat, and separated black family members while treating them like cattle.

So, BEFORE you IMPLY how awful brown people ....

look in the fucking mirror and consider the utter inhumanity of Caucasians in recent history.

White people have NO high moral ground regarding their history of moral purity and behavior. We white people have a lot to atone for before we DARE to cast aspersions on other ethnicities for being "inhuman." We white people have set the bar impossibly low what constitutes "civilized" behavior.

Think about THAT REALITY before you believe LIES about decent people who NEVER HURT ANYONE just because those people have a naturally darker and better tan than you.

[xtruss]

Nazis attempted to cover up their crimes in the Holocaust—and denial of the genocide persists to this day. Scholars say memorials—like this one in the former train station of Pithiviers, France, from which Jews were sent to death camps—are essential to fighting anti-Semitism. Photograph By Christophe Pitit Tesson, Pool/AFP Via Getty Images

How The Holocaust Happened In Plain Sight

Six Million Jews were Murdered Between 1933 and 1945. How Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party Turned Anti-Semitism into Genocide.

— By Erin Blakemore | Published: January 27, 2023

Six million Jews murdered. Millions more stripped of their livelihoods, their communities, their families, even their names. The horrors of the Holocaust are often expressed in numbers that convey the magnitude of Nazi Germany’s attempt to annihilate Europe’s Jews.

The Nazis and their collaborators killed millions of people whom they perceived as inferior—including Jehovah’s Witnesses, gay men, people with disabilities, Slavic and Roma people, and Communists. However, historians use the term “Holocaust”—also called the Shoah, or “disaster” in Hebrew—to apply strictly to European Jews murdered by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945.

No single statistic can capture the true terror of the systematic killing of a group of human beings—and given its enormity and brutality, the Holocaust is difficult to understand. How did a democratically elected politician incite an entire nation to genocide? Why did people allow it to happen in plain sight? And why do some still deny it ever happened?

A shop selling household goods and clocks on Pinkas Street in the Jewish Quarter of Prague, then part of Czechoslovakia. In many parts of Eastern Europe, anti-Semitism was rampant before the Holocaust and Jews were forced to live separately from the rest of the population. Photograph Via History & Art Images, Getty Images

After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Polish Jews were forced into ghettos like this one in Warsaw. This image taken by an unknown German photographer was later exhibited at the war crime trials that sought to hold the Nazis and their collaborators accountable after the war. Photograph Via Bettmann, Getty Images

European Jews Before The Holocaust

By 1933, about nine million Jews lived across the continent and in every European nation. Some countries guaranteed Jews equality under the law, which enabled them to become part of the dominant culture. Others, especially in Eastern Europe, kept Jewish life strictly separate.

Jewish life was flourishing, yet Europe’s Jews also faced a long legacy of discrimination and scapegoating. Pogroms—violent riots in which Christians terrorized Jews—were common throughout Eastern Europe. Christians blamed Jews for the death of Jesus, fomented myths of a shadowy cabal that controlled world finances and politics, and claimed Jews brought disease and crime to their communities.

The Rise of Adolf Hitler

It would take one man, Adolf Hitler, to turn centuries of casual anti-Semitism into genocide. Hitler rose to power as leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, also known as the Nazi Party, in the 1920s.

Hitler harnessed a tide of discontent and unrest in Germany, which was slowly rebuilding after losing the First World War. The nation had collapsed politically and economically, and owed heavy sanctions under the Treaty of Versailles. The Nazi party blamed Jews for Germany’s troubles and promised to restore the nation to its former glory.

Hitler was democratically elected to the German parliament in 1933, where he was soon appointed as chancellor, the nation’s second-highest position. Less than a year later, Germany’s president died, and Hitler seized absolute control of the country.

Born in Braunau am Inn, Austria, in 1889, Adolf Hitler was a skilled speaker and rose to power in Germany democratically. In the wake of its WWI loss, he blamed the country's economic woes on Jewish people and promised to restore Germany to glory. Photograph By Roger Viollet, Getty Images

The Early Nazi Regime

Immediately after coming to power, the Nazis promulgated a variety of laws aimed at excluding Jews from German life—defining Judaism in racial rather than religious terms. Beginning with an act barring Jews from civil service, they culminated in laws forbidding Jews from German citizenship and intermarriage with non-Jews.

These were not just domestic affairs: Hitler wanted to expand his regime and, in 1939, Germany invaded Poland. It marked the beginning of the Second World War—and the expansion of the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policies.

German officials swiftly forced hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews into crowded ghettoes, and with the help of locals and the German military, specially trained forces called the Einsatzgruppen began systematically shooting Jews and other people the regime deemed undesirable. In just nine months, these mobile murder units shot more than half a million people in a “Holocaust by bullets” that would continue throughout the war.

But Hitler and his Nazi officials were not content with discriminatory laws or mass shootings. By 1942, they agreed to pursue a “final solution” to the existence of European Jews: They would send the continent’s remaining Jews east to death camps where they would be forced into labor and ultimately killed.

Hitler dismisses U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's appeal for peace in a speech before the Reichstag, Nazi Germany's parliament, on April 28, 1939. Months later, Germany invaded Poland. Photograph Via Universal History Archive, Universal Images Groyp/Getty Images

Genocide in Plain Sight

By characterizing their actions as the “evacuation” of Jews from territories that rightfully belonged to non-Jewish Germans, the Nazi operation took place in plain sight. Though thousands of non-Jews rescued, hid, or otherwise helped those targeted by the Holocaust, many others stood by indifferently or collaborated with the Nazis.

With the help of local officials and sympathetic civilians, the Nazis rounded up Jews, stripped them of their personal possessions, and imprisoned them in more than 44,000 concentration camps and other incarceration sites across Europe. Non-Jews were encouraged to betray their Jewish neighbors and move into the homes and businesses they left behind.

Prisoners at Buchenwald Concentration Camp, near Weimar, Germany, in April 1945, the year it was liberated. In the eight years Buchenwald was in operation, it housed between 239,000 and 250,000 prisoners, who were subjected to medical experiments and grueling forced labor. Photograph By Eric Schwab, AFP/Getty Images

Dachau, which opened near Munich in 1933, was the first concentration camp. Five others—Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka—were designated as killing centers, where most Jews were immediately murdered upon arrival.

The killings took place in assembly-line fashion: Mass transports of Jews were unloaded from train cars and “selected” into groups based on sex, age, and perceived fitness. Those selected for murder were taken to holding areas where they were told to set aside their possessions and undress for “disinfection” or showers.

In reality, they were herded into specially designed killing chambers into which officials pumped lethal carbon monoxide gas or a hydrogen cyanide pesticide called Zyklon B that poisoned its victims within minutes.

The earliest Holocaust victims were buried in mass graves. Later, in a bid to keep the killings a secret, corpses were burned in large crematoria. Some Jews were forced to participate in the killings, and then were themselves executed to maintain secrecy. The victims’ clothing, tooth fillings, possessions, and even hair was stolen by the Nazis.

As Allied troops advanced near the end of the war, Germany sent prisoners on death marches from the western front to Dachau, near Munich. When the camp was liberated in April 1945, pictured here, U.S. troops encountered piles of dead bodies and survivors on the brink of death. Photograph By Roger Viollet, Getty Images

Life in the Camps

Those not chosen for death were ritually humiliated and forced to live in squalid conditions. Many were tattooed with identification numbers and shorn of their hair. Starvation, overcrowding, overwork, and a lack of sanitation led to rampant disease and mass death in these facilities. Torture tactics and brutal medical experiments made the camps a horror beyond description.

“It is not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so,” wrote Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi in his 1947 memoir. “Nothing belongs to us any more…if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name.”

But despite almost inconceivable hardships, some managed to resist. “Our aim was to defy Hitler, to do everything we [could] to live,” recalled Majdanek and Auschwitz survivor Helen K. in a 1985 oral history. “He [wanted] us to die, and we didn’t want to oblige him.”

Jews resisted the Holocaust in a variety of ways, from going into hiding to sabotaging camp operations or participating in armed uprisings in ghettoes and concentration camps. Other forms of resistance were quieter, like stealing food, conducting forbidden religious services, or simply attempting to maintain a sense of dignity.

In 2005, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, also known as the Holocaust Memorial, opened in Berlin, Germany. Below ground, an information center shares stories of the Holocaust's victims—which scholars say is essential to preventing history from repeating itself. Photograph By Gerd Ludwig, National Geographic Image Collection

The Aftermath of the Holocaust

As World War II drew to a close in 1944 and 1945, the Nazis attempted to cover up their crimes, burning documents, dismantling death camp sites, and forcing their remaining prisoners on brutal death marches to escape the advancing Allies.

They didn’t succeed: As they liberated swaths of Europe, Allied troops entered camps piled high with corpses and filled, in some cases, with starving, sick victims. The evidence collected in these camps would become the basis of the Nuremberg Trials, the first-ever international war crimes tribunal.l

In the war’s aftermath, the toll of the Holocaust slowly became clear. Just one out of every three European Jews survived, and though estimates vary, historians believe at least six million Jews were murdered. Among them were an estimated 1.3 million massacred by the Einsatzgruppen; approximately a million were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau alone.

Many survivors had nowhere to go. Poland had Europe’s largest Jewish population before the war, but lost 93 percent of that population in just five years. Entire villages and communities were wiped out and families scattered across Europe. Labeled “displaced persons,” survivors attempted to rebuild their lives. Many left Europe for good, emigrating to Israel, the United States, or elsewhere.

Top: Photographs of a man held captive at Auschwitz, the largest of the Nazi concentration camps established during the Holocaust. These images can be found inside the Menorah Jewish Center in Dnipro, Ukraine, which explores the past, present, and future of Jewish life. Photograph By Abbas, Magnum

Bottom: Six million European Jews were killed—and hundreds of thousands displaced—during the Holocaust. When the international community learned the extent of Nazi brutality during World War II, it became clear existing laws of war were inadequate for addressing these crimes. Photograph Via Bar Am Collection, Magnum Photos (Left) And Photograph Via Bar Am Collection, Magnum Photos (Right)

Holocaust Denial

Despite the enormity of evidence, some people sowed misinformation about the Holocaust, while others denied it happened at all. Holocaust denial persists to this day, even though it is considered a form of antisemitism and is banned in a variety of countries.

How to counter the hate? “Educating about the history of the genocide of the Jewish people and other Nazi crimes offers a robust defence against denial and distortion,” concluded the authors a of a 2021 United Nations report on Holocaust denial.

Though the number of Holocaust survivors has dwindled, their testimonies offer crucial evidence of the Holocaust’s horrors.

“The voices of the victims—their lack of understanding, their despair, their powerful eloquence or their helpless clumsiness—these can shake our well-protected representation of events,” said Saul Friedländer, a historian who survived the Holocaust and whose parents were murdered at Auschwitz, in a 2007 interview with Dissent Magazine. “They can stop us in our tracks. They can restore our initial sense of disbelief, before knowledge rushes in to smother it.”

[spacelazarwolf]

i really do wish gentiles understood how utterly decimated the jewish diaspora was by the end of the 20th century in the wake of the wave of pogroms in eastern europe, the shoah and its aftermath, and the expulsions across north africa and south west asia. in the early 1900’s, around 50% of the world’s jewish population lived outside of eretz yisrael or the us. today, that number is 13%. there are countries who had large jewish populations at the turn of the 20th century that now have no jewish presence. there has not been such a large wave of expulsions and fleeing since the spanish inquisition — which is another horrifically traumatizing series of events that gentiles don’t understand the enormity of.

during the spanish inquisition, almost half a million jews were forced on pain of death to convert or flee. thousands were killed, hundreds of thousands fled. until the shoah, it was the single most massive trauma in jewish history since the siege of jerusalem and expulsion from judea. jews made up nearly a quarter of spain’s population and had been there for centuries. some of our most important texts were written there. ladino developed there, sephardic music, culture, and identity. and then it was gone. everywhere the inquisition could reach, from spain to naples to sicily to malta to the americas, the jewish populations were brutalized, genocided, and expelled. it changed the course of jewish history forever.

in the 20th century, within the span of 50ish years, hundreds of thousands of jews were killed in or fled horrific pogroms in eastern europe, a third of the entire jewish population was systematically murdered within the span of a few years, centuries old jewish communities weren’t just expelled but almost entirely wiped out which led to the loss of centuries old diaspora languages and traditions, and nearly a million jews were expelled from places they’d lived for hundreds or even thousands of years.

like. do you understand? do you understand the kind of communal trauma that kind of massive global upheaval has on a people? the expulsion of 300,000+ jews from spanish territories was enough to leave a centuries old mark on the jewish community. do you understand the impact that the murder of over six million and violent displacement of over 2 million jews will have on the jewish psyche and on jewish history? do you have any idea how earth shattering the last century has been for the jewish people? do you have any idea what we’ve lost? what’s been violently stolen from us? can you try?

[jewish-vents]

I saw someone taking a Dara Horn quote where she’s talking about an intracommunity concern — whether or not the way we teach Holocaust education is doing more harm than good — and spin that completely on its head to say that Holocaust education is evil Zionist propaganda to make us all feel bad so we’ll support Israel. At this point they may as well just be full-on Holocaust deniers; there’s a world of difference between saying “the way the Holocaust is taught often has an adverse effect on Jewish students and gives their peers ideas about how to harass them more” and “the evil Zionists are trying to make us feel bad for the Jews so they can get away with child murder.” Even thoughtful intracommunity conversations get taken and twisted until they’re unrecognizable; there’s absolutely nothing that won’t be appropriated For The Greater Good.

I remember during Charlottesville, I was so angry and horrified that someone would say that six million wasn’t enough. I’ve felt that same horror and anger every day this year, and I’m tired.

.

[eretzyisrael]

by Debbie Weiss

Anti-Israel protesters on Monday disrupted an event at Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi concentration camp in Poland, commemorating the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust by the Nazis.

The International March of the Living, an annual Holocaust education program founded in 1988, brings people from around the world to Poland each year for Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day — known as Yom HaShoah — to march on the path leading from Auschwitz I to Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the Nazis’ largest death camp where 1 million Jews were murdered during World War II.

Survivors of the Hamas terror group’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel joined 55 Holocaust survivors in this year’s march. However, amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and the coinciding record surge in global antisemitism, anti-Israel protesters gathered near the grounds of Auschwitz, sparking outrage.

Local police put up a barricade to prevent dozens of demonstrators from approaching the marchers, who passed by as the protesters shouted slogans including “stop the genocide.”

Anti-Israel protesters hold flags on the route of the annual International March of the Living, outside former Auschwitz Nazi German death camp, in Oswiecim, Poland, May 6, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Kuba Stezycki

Marchers, many of whom carried Israeli flags, responded by changing, “Free Gaza from Hamas!” and singing “Am Yisrael Chai.”

[girlactionfigure]

mir_velen_zay_iberleben

Six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. That’s what a genocide looks like. The population of Gaza grew this year, that’s not what a genocide looks like. It’s war, a just war against Hamas, perpetrators of some of the worst evil the world has ever seen

[perfectlyvalid49]

Today is Yom HaShoah, which is Israel’s (and by extension large portions of the Jewish diaspora’s) Holocaust Remembrance Day. Back in January, I wrote this post for International Holocaust Remembrance Day, in which I basically said that I thought that International Holocaust Remembrance Day really should line up with Yom HaShoah, but that I choose to take the “Holy shit! Two cakes!” attitude towards it, because the Holocaust is certainly a large enough tragedy to support two remembrance days.

The one in January’s date was selected to be in remembrance of the day Auschwitz was liberated. Because that date was selected to celebrate a non-Jewish achievement, I think it should be a day for the goyim to focus on how they can do better. If it is in remembrance of what good allies they were, then it should be used as a day to do some learning and reflection in order to be better allies to us now, in the present.

But the one today is timed to commemorate the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Yom HaShoah is the day we picked not just to remember the 6 million who died, but also the ones who decided to die fighting. It is a day to remember that we must stand up for ourselves, even if the price is high, because the price for not standing up for ourselves is higher.

In January I gave some topics for goyim to think about in remembrance of the day. Because today is the Jewish remembrance day, I will share what I am thinking about today as a Jew, and invite others to think about it too.

I saw a post a few days ago where someone commented on a different post about why Jews didn’t leave Germany after Kristallnacht, and how moving to another country because some people broke your window feels like an overreaction. And that you will always be overreacting until it’s too late. How do we know the difference between “just” broken windows and a sign to flee? Knowing antisemitism is on the rise globally, where would we even flee to? How do I help my children avoid the fate of their great-grandfather (who survived) or their great-great-grandfather (who did not)?

We picked this day to commemorate the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, but also to remember that even in the middle of one of the worst attacks on our people (and that’s fucking saying something) there were Jews who stood up and refused to accept their fate. I have seen many Jews say that they’re getting “1930s Germany” vibes from current events. If things are headed in the same direction, what can we do to fight our fate? Ideally with words now, so that we don’t have to fight with pistols and homemade explosives like they did in Warsaw.

The reason for a remembrance day like today is to acknowledge the past, but also to learn from it. What can we learn so that when we say, “We will outlive them” we can mean all of us, not just the ones who are lucky enough to be geographically removed from the worst of it, or to survive despite the odds?

This is a little more downbeat than I had hoped, which is unsurprising given the nature of the day. I like to try to stay positive though, so I’ll say this: Six million people were murdered. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising did not succeed in its goal of liberation. But the Nazis did not succeed in their goal of eliminating the Jews either. We did outlive them. We are still here to remember.

Am Yisrael Chai

[historicity-was-already-taken]

someone in my circle said the holocaust was the biggest genocide in history and I'm like? was it? and by what metric? body count? effect on european history?

Such a vague hyperbolic statement regardless

Look dude, this is ask giving Holocaust denial. And after all the shit I’ve put up with on this website since October, I don’t trust that you’re not trolling me.

Hitler was directly responsible for the murder of approximately six million Jews across Eurasia and Northern Africa. It was and still is the largest, most industrialized, most effectively, bureaucratically organized genocide in history.

But also, and most importantly, it’s not a contest! All genocide is bad! It’s not like The Jews (tm) are winning anything over here by having a claim to the “biggest” genocide. We lost millions of our own and saw our ancient civilizations, languages, and cultures across Eurasia and Northern Africa destroyed, probably forever, as a direct result of this cataclysmic event you’re so bothered by.

Also, read this post, it might help you work out some of your….weird attitude here:

[allthecanadianpolitics]

A BC Conservative candidate who is facing calls to be removed from the ballot also shared a graphic comparing public health policies to the Nazi Holocaust. Brent Chapman, the BC Conservative candidate for Surrey South, shared a graphic on one of his campaign’s official social media account a little over a month ago that equates public health “harm reduction” strategies with the murders of six million Jews by the Nazis during the Second World War. Chapman is currently facing calls to resign or be removed as a candidate after posts surfaced earlier this week showing the BC Conservative candidate falsely claiming Muslims and Palestinians are the products of inbreeding. Chapman was also a prolific participant in private right-wing Facebook groups. In one now-deleted posting surfaced by PressProgress, Chapman promoted a “boycott” of Air Canada to stop airlifts evacuating Syrian refugees.

Continue Reading

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

[secular-jew]

Yom HaShoah - Holocaust Remembrance Day

In memory of the six million Jewish men, women, the elderly and children who were starved, tortured and mass murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators.

Also remembering the millions of non-Jewish victims, Russian, Polish, Serbian, Roma etc. that were exterminated based upon Germany’s virulent genocidal racial policies.

Let's also remember that Islam also attempted to kill as many Jews as possible and partnered with Nazi Germany. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem went to Berlin and trained Islamic troops with the Nazis in order to kill Jews wherever they could find them in the indigenous Jewish homeland.

[storiesfromgaza]

Have you heard of the term Holocaust before? Surely, you have, without a doubt, there is hardly anyone who hasn't heard before about the genocide that occurred during World War II, in which nearly six million Jews were killed by Nazi Germany and its allies.

The Holocaust, ladies and gentlemen, was a systematic process of persecution and murder with the purpose of annihilating a specific race (the Jews) Eighty years ago, and today, we witness a new Holocaust, but this time, the lamb has become the wolf, and it has unleashed its claws on others, delighting in shedding their blood after isolating them from the world completely, cutting off all means of communication, and even electricity and water.

Enough talking; witness it for yourselves this time.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Andrew Wallace

Today, radical left-wing protestors breached parliamentary security and led an abhorrent protest from the top of Australian Parliament House.

Shouts like “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free” and “Sovereignty Was Never Ceded” echoed across the Parliamentary Lawn as radicals clad with balaclavas and keffiyehs made a delusional equivocation between Israel, Australian Indigenous issues and Australia’s peacekeeping and military operations abroad.

This is a shameful display. It’s vile. And it’s illegal.

This was an attack on the Jewish people and the people of Israel, at a time when antisemitism has reached levels we have not seen since we stood on the threshold of Hitler’s Holocaust.

It was an attack on our parliamentary democracy, disrupting the important work of parliament while families contend with crises in Australia’s economy, society, and national security.

It was an assault on the memory of those who have paid the ultimate price to protect Australia’s security and sovereignty, and to preserve peace in the global rules-based order.

In the conflicts of Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and East Timor, Australian servicemen and women stood up to the tyranny of communism, Islamic extremism, and dictatorship. They purchased our freedom with their sacrifice, and that is a debt we cannot repay.

This extremist behaviour is made possible by a government which has been slow to act on antisemitism and virulent hate of extremists on the far-left and far-right.

It’s not just virulent; it’s viral, and it’s infected our campuses, communities, social media and now our Parliament.

I call on the Federal Labor Government to legislate for a Judicial Inquiry into Antisemitism on Australia’s University Campuses.

I call on the Federal Labor Government to step back from its unqualified support for a Two State Solution, without acknowledging how the war in Gaza actually started, after the atrocities of October 7, 2023.

I call on the Prime Minister to sack Senator Fatima Payman and anyone else who defends the use of terror slogans such as those we have seen today.

And I call on every Australian, from every walk of life, to call out antisemitism wherever you see it or hear it.

Last time the world failed to act, six million Jews were murdered.

We must show “never again” is more than mere words; it is a promise made to a people whose share of oppression has been unrivalled through many centuries.

We must show that Australians keep their promises.

[strangesmallbard]

i really don’t think most goyim understand the magnitude of the holocaust in general, and for jews in particular. six million jews were murdered in five years. our population still hasn’t recovered. it affected every aspect of my jewish upbringing. i knew about antisemitism before i knew how to read chapter books. do i have to elaborate upon the fear i felt seeing a swatstika etched into the toilet paper dispenser in the bathroom at my college town’s grocery store? why i’ve packed a getaway bag in a dead panic multiple times? what waking up to news about the tree of life shooting felt like? then learning one of the victims was literally a holocaust survivor?

“well people only care about the holocaust because the victims were white” great let’s unpack that fucked up little sentence, but first here’s a cool little survey to check out. i found it by googling “holocaust education statistics” and clicking on the first link.

also:

🤔

[jewish-vents]

whenever I see stuff like "I wish Hitler had finished the job" or "six million wasn't enough" as parts of genocide accusations and ways to vilify Jews, I just can't help but think about how none of these people are anti-genocide. they're totally enthusiastic about genocide, so long as the people being murdered are Jews - because we're not people at all, and never have been in their eyes.

.

[eretzyisrael]

by Bari Weiss

There was not a single conversation that I had in the week I spent in Israel where the person did not say a version of the following: There was an October 6 version of me and an October 7 version of me. I am forever changed. I am a different person. 

And that is another sense in which the story of the ancient Roman requires modification. The binary of war and peace, the pastoral and the military, is a retrospective luxury of powerful nations or empires. A small democracy, whose very existence is contested by populous autocracies, does not have the privilege, as Cincinnatus did, of going from the field of battle to the field to till. Israel’s citizen-soldiers are scientists, artists, and farmers, just as they are mothers and fathers, husbands and wives. Israeli citizens, whether they serve or not, are not—as one Hamas leader said of Gazans—someone else’s problem.

“It’s like after you knock your finger with a hammer, you don’t feel anything for a while,” the journalist Gadi Taub said, describing what Israelis have gone through since Hamas’s invasion. “People haven’t begun to understand the extent of this earthquake and how it will change Israel. The tectonic plates have moved, and nothing in the system has yet absorbed or changed to accommodate what happened.”

The public intellectual and Bible scholar Micah Goodman told me in Jerusalem that the country went through a collective near-death experience. Imagine an entire society that, between sunrise and sunset, peered together into the abyss. “For the first time in our lives, we had a moment where we could imagine that the whole thing was over. That the whole thing ended. You know how when individuals have a near-death experience, they’re transformed. Because they learned that life should not be trivialized. As a country, we had a near-death experience, and now we’re transformed because we know that Jewish sovereignty should not be taken for granted. It can’t be trivialized.”

Israel’s founding fathers and mothers, having known a period when Jews didn’t have a state—a period in which six million Jews were murdered—understood the difference between statelessness and sovereignty in their bones. The paradox of their extraordinary achievement is that modern Israelis, who might appreciate the distinction intellectually, could dismiss the dread alternative even when presented with visible evidence of a fragility they consigned to the past. Or at least they could until October 7. On that day, the thought exercise became real.

If Israel, in other words, is currently fighting a second war of independence—an existential war necessary for the survival of the state, as everyone here believes—then the young men and women of this country are more than soldiers. They are latter-day Ben-Gurions. They are a new generation of founders. Indeed, as Gadi Taub told me in Tel Aviv, one of the slogans of this war is lo noflim midor tachach! Which loosely translates to do not fall short of the ’48 generation.