Sunday, May 2, 2010
And, in the week forward...
In LA's American Judaism class, we spoke quite a bit about the idea of the sanctity of the Holocaust, who "owns" it as an experience to be referenced and made representative, and the way in which the Holocaust has become a near-universal referent for other persecutions, oppressions and experiences of murder on a massive scale. The use of the Holocaust as an important metaphor to indicate the depth, breadth and extent of genocide and killing campaigns has become familiar. If we press the question of universal and particular experience (and the way that Judaism can be both) onto the Jewish experience in WWII, we beg a whole set of questions. Chief among them (or, high on the list) is how we use German Jews as representative of the Holocaust when their experience in it was so unique. How does re-telling the history of the Holocaust through the experience of Jews living in Nazi Germany change your perceptions and understanding of the event as a whole?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
On Sara's behalf:
ReplyDeleteThe readings of the German-Jewish experience prior to the Holocaust have deepened my understanding of the complexity of German-Jewish life and how it stood very much in opposition to the experience of Jews outside Germany. While I previously understood that the German-Jews who were so wholly integrated into the intellectual culture of Germany must have felt greatly betrayed by their country when the Nazis came to power, I now have a keener sense of just how quickly they were taken by surprise particularly by the mass extermination. The distinction that Dr. Hochman explained vis-a-vis the Eastern European Jews who experienced the Nazis as invading their homes and exiling them to work and death camps, in contrast to the horror of German-Jews whose experience revolved more around the internal betrayal of the culture and neighbors they so esteemed. One can grasp how such murders were unthinkable in such an advanced society and why the Jewish members of society could not foresee nor believe that such atrocities could or would be committed in their homeland.