Can't wait for the uniqueness of the holocaust to be a topic of importance in a political campaign in america in 2024. That's how it should be. That's normal

It's true, the Holocaust isn't unique, it holds the largest impact because it is the most recent one, at least for jews, given time other genocides will overshadow it, and it should be taught in the same vein as other historic atrocities.

There was the Effacer le tableau.

The Hutu massacres of the first Congo war.

The Rwandan Genocide.

The Bosnian Genocide.

The Isaaq Genocide.

The Anfal campaign.

The Gukurahundi.

The Cambodian Genocide.

The East Timor Genocide.

The Ikiza.

The Bangladesh Genocide, which may have a repeat very soon.

The Holodomor.

The Great Leap Forward.

The Armenian Genocide.

I can go on.

To limit education to but one atrocity, when all of these happened in the same century is an attempt to reframe or even hide these atrocities, for instance I have seen many socialists defend both the Holodomor and the Armenian Genocide, it does those being educated a disservice by treating the Holocaust as unique while surrounded by a myriad of other heinous genocides.

I will say context is important, and I don't know the context here, but yeah he's right to acknowledge the many other genocides that exist.

I mean the context in the screenshot provided is obviously correct and vindicates what Walz is saying. Someone screenshotted that as proof Walz was wrong because they could not read the words in it, just that it somehow disagrees with them.

He fucking says, right there, "to exclude other acts of genocide severely limited students' ability to synthesize the lessons of the Holocaust and ability to apply them elsewhere," that's the quote that this thread's OP and Twitter OP both looked at and got enraged by without reading! Guess what? If you teach people the Holocaust was completely unique and unprecedented and unrelated to any other patterns of behavior, the take-home lesson is that it might as well have been done by space aliens and there's no reason to be concerned with what humans are doing!

and by divorcing the Holocaust from all other genocides, it also allows people to not have a framework of other mass atrocities, which surprisingly enough seems to make them believe that the holocaust could have actually NOT happened, considering how they don't have a framework about how often atrocities happen.

the follow-up here is that when walz taught his class of sophomore high school students about the holocaust, he had them extensively study other genocides and the social conditions that preceded them. the class wrapped up with a group project trying to predict where the next genocide was most likely to take place

(this was in 1993)

and where did they collectively conclude the next genocide was most likely to happen?

Rwanda.

if, like me, you can't remember the date of the Rwandan genocide off the top of your head, it kicked off in April 1994.

So ... when Tim Walz says that studying the Holocaust as part of a pattern is vitally important, he is not talking out of his ass.

As a person of Jewish descent I think it's really, really important that people understand that the holocaust was not the only genocide in history, nor the "worst", that the major way in which it was exceptional was the degree to which it was systematized, documented and centrally planned, that it wasn't the only genocide happening at the time, that there are multiple genocides occurring across the world right now, and that treating the shoah as a freak one-time disaster has a number of terrible downstream political effects, both as described above and in its underpinning of Israeli exceptionalism

Can't wait for the uniqueness of the holocaust to be a topic of importance in a political campaign in america in 2024. That's how it should be. That's normal

It's true, the Holocaust isn't unique, it holds the largest impact because it is the most recent one, at least for jews, given time other genocides will overshadow it, and it should be taught in the same vein as other historic atrocities.

There was the Effacer le tableau.

The Hutu massacres of the first Congo war.

The Rwandan Genocide.

The Bosnian Genocide.

The Isaaq Genocide.

The Anfal campaign.

The Gukurahundi.

The Cambodian Genocide.

The East Timor Genocide.

The Ikiza.

The Bangladesh Genocide, which may have a repeat very soon.

The Holodomor.

The Great Leap Forward.

The Armenian Genocide.

I can go on.

To limit education to but one atrocity, when all of these happened in the same century is an attempt to reframe or even hide these atrocities, for instance I have seen many socialists defend both the Holodomor and the Armenian Genocide, it does those being educated a disservice by treating the Holocaust as unique while surrounded by a myriad of other heinous genocides.

I will say context is important, and I don't know the context here, but yeah he's right to acknowledge the many other genocides that exist.

I mean the context in the screenshot provided is obviously correct and vindicates what Walz is saying. Someone screenshotted that as proof Walz was wrong because they could not read the words in it, just that it somehow disagrees with them.

He fucking says, right there, "to exclude other acts of genocide severely limited students' ability to synthesize the lessons of the Holocaust and ability to apply them elsewhere," that's the quote that this thread's OP and Twitter OP both looked at and got enraged by without reading! Guess what? If you teach people the Holocaust was completely unique and unprecedented and unrelated to any other patterns of behavior, the take-home lesson is that it might as well have been done by space aliens and there's no reason to be concerned with what humans are doing!

and by divorcing the Holocaust from all other genocides, it also allows people to not have a framework of other mass atrocities, which surprisingly enough seems to make them believe that the holocaust could have actually NOT happened, considering how they don't have a framework about how often atrocities happen.

the follow-up here is that when walz taught his class of sophomore high school students about the holocaust, he had them extensively study other genocides and the social conditions that preceded them. the class wrapped up with a group project trying to predict where the next genocide was most likely to take place

(this was in 1993)

and where did they collectively conclude the next genocide was most likely to happen?

Rwanda.

if, like me, you can't remember the date of the Rwandan genocide off the top of your head, it kicked off in April 1994.

So ... when Tim Walz says that studying the Holocaust as part of a pattern is vitally important, he is not talking out of his ass.

Mohammed El-Kurd's Instagram

from his section of this article:

So I’m a historian who works particularly on the relationship between trauma, national memory, and childhood.  The focus of my research is not the Holocaust, but it’s a subject upon which I’ve taught, mused, written, and examined.  A few years ago, I was a TA in a class on the Holocaust (cross listed in the History Department and the Department of Judaic Studies) at a US University (a pretty prestigious one). Most of the course focused on the realities of the Holocaust:  what happened?  how?  why? Now because of my areas of expertise/interest, I was invited to give a lecture to the entire class as opposed to teaching my particular subset of students each week.  The subject of the lecture?  The Holocaust in US education and children’s/YA literature. 

The thing that I found most distressing about this lecture?  The fact that only about nine state in the US require that students learn about the Holocaust in classrooms.  Among those only a few require it as a part of history or social studies classes, the rest require it as part of language arts.  And, the way that students actually learn about this subject is determined at the discretion of the school district, which means that, as long as students meet the general requirements of standardized tests, they don’t have to learn particular details.  So, let that sink in.  Even more distressing?  The states that “require” students to learn about the Holocaust, have only done so since (at the earliest) the 1980s, and far more likely the 1990s and 2000s.  This means that there is an entire generation whose knowledge of the Holocaust comes from popular media and triumphant narratives about US involvement in WWII:  these narratives are hugely false, and what I call the “Punching Hitler” story after the iconic image of Captain America socking Hitler in the jaw.  In the US the general shared narrative about WWII is that the US went over the Europe, lost a lot of boys, but killed Hitler, won the war, and saved the Jews.  o__O  That’s…not what happened.  

In a class of 200 students, only about 10 percent knew anything about how the Holocaust happened.  They didn’t know about the groups that were targeted, the way that anti-semitism and opportunistic nationalist politics helped make it happen, they didn’t know about complicity or bystandardism.  They knew nothing.  They didn’t know that US officials were aware of what was happening and refused to get involved in the war.  They didn’t understand that there was concurrent anti-semitism and racism in the US.  They were taught none of these things.  And that is actually terrifying, not only because it means that these kids have no idea about the past, but because they can’t see the giant flashing warning signs in our current socio-political world.  

“Let us put it generally: if a regime is immoral, its citizens are free from all obligations to it.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago.

[Pictured: Captain Pia Klemp sitting in a chair beside her controls.

@VivianAngrisani on Twitter wrote on 6/8/2019: “Pia Klemp, a German biologist & boat captain faces 20 yrs in prison for rescuing 1,000+ migrants at risk of drowning whilst crossing the Mediterranean. Seeking asylum is a human right. Only 1 in 100 sea captains are female. This woman is a humanitarian, not a criminal. #FreePia”

@Galactic_Rabbit quote-tweeted on 6/10/2019 and wrote: “Thinking about all those videos of people honored in their old age for hiding/protecting Jewish people.”]

To all the people commenting that she’s an accessory to “illegal immigration,” note that seeking asylum is a human right. Countries which refuse asylum are in violation of the Geneva Convention. They get away with this and propagandize complacency towards the victims by using bureaucracy to complicate immigration proceedings. During times of genocide, this is tantamount to hearing a would-be murder victim knocking on your door and locking the deadbolt.

People who risk dying getting smuggled across borders do so out of sheer desperation because the situation they’re leaving is worse. Finally, you are missing the entire point: violation of the law is warranted when the laws violate human rights and criminalize existence. Laws which call immigrants “illegal” are tools of a systemic negligence designed to condemn those who need legal protection the most.

Oh and here’s the petition to #FreePia.

Hiding Jewish people or smuggling them out of Germany was illegal too.

as of 10 february 2023, the petition is still just short of its goal of 500k signatures.

honestly i was obsessed with LC for this (before my time as @teamlynda)

Happy Met Gala Monday!

calling what is happening to trans people in the south an attempt at genocide: correct and ok. it's going to get worse if we don't fight back now

comparing it to the holocaust: not ok and also i'm fucking blocking you.

no genocide is the same. not every genocide mirrors the holocaust. using the deaths of jews, lgbt people, disabled people, and poc during the holocaust as your "gotcha" card every time our rights are in danger today proves you know nothing about the history you're talking about.

also, if you are truly so hard pressed to bring up nazi germany into the discussion of trans rights being targeted in america, talk about what happened to gay and trans people under the regime. talk about how they destroyed our institutions. talk about how they burned our books. talk about the eerily familiar language they used to describe us (see "seduction of youth" and "recruitment")

but as a trans jew, i am telling you that if you're looking at a current social issue and thinking "hmm who are the nazis and who are the jews in this situation" then you're doing it wrong and you're doing it dangerously.

For that matter, look into how the queerphobia and antisemitism were intertwined. Look into how the reason they hated Magnus Hirschfeld's work so much was because he was not just validating queerness, but a Jewish scientist validating queerness. Look into how this created a feedback loop in the nazi mind that accepting queerness - sorry, ~sexual deviance~ - was enabling the ~Jewish menace~, and that Jews are sexually ~deviant~ and predatory.

Examine this, then use this understanding to beat the importance of solidarity into your head. Realize that when they can associate a negative stereotype with more than one marginalized group, they're going to feedback loop it around all of us, unless they can come up with competing stereotypes to keep us fighting each other and doing their work.

Btw - a huge part of the reason the word "genocide" exists is so that we CAN describe targeted attempts to eliminate a population without trying to make 1:1 comparisons to the holocaust (or any other specific genocide, for that matter); so that we can learn from historical incidents WITHOUT erasing the unique distinguishing factors, and in doing so failing to learn from those distinctions on top of disrespecting the victims and survivors.

ALSO FOR FUCK’S SAKE: talk about how the german nazis learned a lot of their shit studying american racists. 

america isn’t IMPORTING nazis. genocidal fascism is not FOREIGN CONCEPT. it’s homegrown. it’s locally sourced. it’s from here. it’s by us. it’s as american as apple pie.

you wanna talk about the holocaust so fuckin bad, you acknowledge america’s long, long, long history of murdering jews, blacks, browns, queers, and cripples right in your backyard.

#SO FED UP WITH THIS#'this is just like germany--'#it's like here. it's like now. this is how we fucking DO. (via@roach-works)

Here’s the opposite story, though. With apologies because I don’t have the book in front of me, so I may get some details wrong, but I read this “Irena’s Children“ by Tilar J. Mazzeo.

Irena lived in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation, and dedicated her life to rescuing Jewish children from the Ghetto, and her story is complicated in a lot of ways but - well, this story isn’t actually about Irena, per se.

It’s about a bus driver.

It’s about a day when she’s traveling across town by bus with a very young Jewish child, and partway to their destination the child looks up and asks a question - in Yiddish. and the whole bus goes quiet, because everyone knows what that means. And Irena thinks, okay, we’re going to die here today.

And she’s running through her options - all of them bad - and suddenly the bus stops, and the bus driver announces that there’s been a mechanical failure and the bus needs to return to the depot immediately. Everyone off, please.

And she stands and goes to get off the bus and the driver says - not you two. Sit down. So she sits down as everyone else leaves, because, well, what else is she going to do? the options are all still bad, at this point.

and when the bus is empty the bus driver says,

“Where do you need to go?”

And then he drives them as close to their destination as he can, and lets them off, and drives away. And Irena lives, and the kid lives, and they never cross paths again.

So a janitor got three people killed, and a bus driver saved two lives - not to mention all the other lives indirectly saved because Irena was able to continue her work.

I think about that almost every day now, to be honest.

We can’t all be Irena. I couldn’t be Irena. She was in a unique place with very specific skills and connections that let her do what she did. I am just one mentally ill librarian. I can’t be her. But - I can be the bus driver. Or I could be the janitor. Because it doesn’t matter what your job is. It doesn’t matter who you are. In a world like this, every single one of us has the opportunity to do massive harm or massive good. We can save lives or end them.

And that’s scary. but it’s also very comforting? at least for me. Because at the end of the day it means this: no matter of how small and helpless and unimportant you feel, you’re never powerless in the face of great evil.

You can choose to be the bus driver.

I have another story from the Holocaust.  

Two, actually.

One is long, and one is brief.

The first story is about my grandfather.

He was a slave in a Krups munitions factory in a Nazi concentration camp in Częstochowa, Poland.

He was also a smuggler.  If I did not have multiple corroborating witnesses to the sheer ludicrious balls that he had, I would dismiss the stories as exaggeration.  But he was a food smuggler–he would buy some kind of sugar from the Polish day workers coming into the factory, make candy out of them, sell the candy back to the workers at a profit, and buy food with the proceeds–which he then proceeded to share with the other slaves, free of charge.  Without him, they would have starved to death, but an extra hundred calories a day made a difference enough to keep them alive.

But that’s not the story.

The story is what happened in Spring of 1945.

My grandfather could hear the guns of the Russian Army off in the distance, and he and the other captives in the camp figured that they would be liberated any day now.  

And then a truck packed full with preteen Jewish children who had just been captured comes into the work camp instead of the extermination camp up the road.  Because the Nazis were so fixated on their hatred of Jews that they diverted war resources to hunting us down even as they were losing.  

So it’s pandemonium.  They’re unloading the truck of the kids, the guards are yelling at the driver, the kids are milling about not knowing what’s going on…

And my grandfather sees one boy who looked a little older, a little more mature, and figured that this one he can save.  It’s just a few days until the Russians arrive, after all.

So he tells the boy to come with him.

And the rest… got loaded back onto the truck and off they went to the gas chambers.

But it wasn’t a couple of days.

It was six weeks.

Stalin personally ordered the Army to slow their advance and told the Polish Resistance to rise up, and that the Russians would support them with food and weapons.  

So they rose up… and were slaughtered.  Because they got nothing from the Russians.  Stalin knew that anyone who would be resisting the Nazis would be resisting him next, and it was an elegant way to weaken Poland before he took it.

Meanwhile, my grandfather is hiding a fourteen year old boy in a NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMP.

The risks they took to hide him… they would hold him up over empty shoes sewn to long pants at the evening roll call so that he would look taller.  They smuggled food to him…  If they had been caught… I have nightmares of what would have been done to them.

Finally, one night, they are all locked in their barracks as the Nazis evacuated the camp and the Russians were coming in, with the Nazis using the camp for cover for their escape.

And in the chaos… 

My grandfather lost track of the boy.

Twenty-two years later, he tells this story to my father when my father is 12, and has demanded to know something, be told something concrete.

So he doesn’t know what happened to the boy.  Did he live?  Did he die?  Did he find his mother and sisters?

He doesn’t know.

Six months later, my grandmother is planning my father’s bar mitzvah.  Not as a religious obligation, but as a 200 foot tall flaming middle finger to the Third Reich.  You are gone, and WE ARE STILL HERE.

So she plugs into what my father called the “Camp Network”–the trombonist in the band was on a death march with an uncle, the florist was in a work camp with a friend, etc.  And she’s asking, “I need a photographer, who is good?”

“You want Joe Brown, up in Queens,” she’s told.

So she invites him down to talk terms at their house in Brooklyn, which is quite a haul in NYC.  

And the first question one Holocaust survivor asks another is, “Where were you?”  Because maybe you know someone, maybe you can tell what happened.

“I was in Częstochowa,” he says.

“You were in Częstochowa?  My husband Teddy was in Częstochowa!”

“I didn’t know a Teddy Baum.”

“Oh, everyone knew Teddy.”

“I didn’t know a Teddy Baum!”

“When he gets home, you’ll see.  Everyone there knew Teddy.”  Because he was smuggling in the food that kept them all alive.

So the thing is, you live in the US for 20 years, you forget that your name was not “Teddy Baum” but “Tuvyas Bumps.”

And when my grandfather got home from work…

…sitting there at his kitchen table…

…was the boy he had saved.

…

(I’m not crying…)

That’s the first story.

The second story is that of my grandfather’s brother.

It is short.

He collaborated with the Nazis to save his own skin.  He let my grandfather’s first wife and son starve to death in the ghetto and informed on people who tried to escape or resist.  My grandfather said that “Good people went up the chimney and he stayed behind.”

Two brothers. 

One saved over a hundred lives.

The other betrayed his own flesh and blood to save his own skin.  

Your choices define you.

Whoever destroys a single life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed the whole world, and whoever saves a single life is considered by Scripture to have saved the whole world.– Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5

I, I was going to add some stuff, I had it all typed out, about how we never see shoplifting, right, about how we always help those less fortunate than ourselves.

I deleted it. It was trite, and general, and not anything like the stories in this post. So I went and found this image instead.

When Trump slapped his immigration ban down and sowed chaos, these lawyers raced to the airport in New York, I think it was JFK, and they began rescuing people trapped on the wrong side of the world.

One person at a time.

The top image is from Chanukah 1931, photographed by Akiva & Rachel Posner in Germany.

The bottom image is from Chanukah 2022, Akiva & Rachel Posners grandson, Yehudah lighting the same menorah at the home of the President of Germany.

Written on the back of the photo: “Chanukah, 5692. ‘Judea dies’, thus says the banner. ‘Judea will live forever’, thus respond the lights”.

we observe Chanukah in celebration of being Jewish and in defiance of all those throughout history who have tried to snuff out our flame. we remember the holocaust so that we may identify the forces of antisemitism and white supremacy in our midst and so that we may teach future generations to say, “never again!”

i really like my functional analysis prof but he keeps talking about the holocaust cuz like all the theorems were learning about were proved by dudes who either died in the holocaust or had to flee to escape it and its really putting a downer on the whole class

@raginrayguns said:

the internet isnt giving me anything when i google banach fleas, what is it?

@raginrayguns said:

wild!

it probably saved his life! insane! also, he got to save lives, so thats cool. never heard of weigl before

doing math while making a living off his body fluids. Just like Yudcowsky. I've wondered if a mathematician could make it as a sperm donor, as their only income source... maybe if they traveled enough, cause one clinic only wants a limited amount from one person i think

I think America has unusually lax regulations about sperm donation, and other countries restrict donation more heavily. I don’t know whether you’d have to hide your subsistence globetrotting to be eligible worldwide. But here it depends on the clinic and some are or have historically been “lol whatever” and sired 300 local kids off one guy (apocryphal hazy recollection).

– Linda Kinstler, “Who Will Remember the Horrors of Ukraine?” The New York Times, June 13, 2022

Yom HaShoah

Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) begins this year on sundown on April 27th, 2022 and ends sundown, April 28th.

The ADL's Audito of Antisemitic Incidents for 2021 released just yesterday, reporting hate crimes in the United States at an all-time high since they began recording in 1979. (A 34% increase from 2020.) Jews make up less than 3% of the United States population (0.2% globally) and remain the biggest target of religion-based hate crimes in the US both in raw numbers and per capita.

Now is a good time to check in on your Jewish friends and support your Jewish communities. If you are able, I highly encourage supporting a charity that helps Shoah survivors (most of whom still live alone and in poverty) or putting money directly into the hands of Jews in need or local Jewish organizations.

It's also a good time to analyze the way we talk about the Holocaust. This article about The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas highlights common problematic tropes to look out for in other works. If you can I HIGHLY encourage getting a copy of People Love Dead Jews by Dara Horn. It's a collection of well-written essays tackling the world's fascination with dead Jews, how Jewish history is exploited to comfort the living, becoming dehumanizing even when done with the best of intentions. It's sharp, insightful, powerful, poignant, and deeply disturbing. For Jewish readers, this helped me put to words things I always felt uncomfortable about but could never articulate why; it's very cathartic in many ways. For others, this is a great window into how it often feels being Jewish in a world that hates Jews, showcasing nuances of modern-day antisemitism I've never seen tackled elsewhere. I cannot recommend it enough; I consider it a must-read.