The lesson of the past 15 months is that the greatest calamity to have befallen a people – to have befallen the Jews – remains unknown or disbelieved, no matter how often we recount it
January 27, 2025 09:20
It’s no coincidence that the best two films in this year’s crop of Oscar and Bafta hopefuls – The Brutalist and A Real Pain – are the least sexed-up and the most Jewish; the latter overtly Jewish, in that its narrative occasion is a visit to a Nazi concentration camp in Poland, the former more subtly and pervasively so, as a case study in creative genius both hobbled and quickened by the experience of the Holocaust.
Both will annoy you in some measure. It is impossible, now, to allude to the camps without what is bound to look like opportunism. Does the fact of his having been in a concentration camp endear us to the hero of The Brutalist and make it easier for us to enter into his Messianic artistic credo? And do we the more willingly share the shlemiel anxieties and twitches of the cousins in A Real Pain because they are third-generation descendents of survivors? Does the very word Holocaust open our hearts?
To be truthful, I neither know nor care. A wind of desperation seems to have been blowing through the film industry this year. Because of all the subjects that studios will have been fearful of addressing post the October massacre, the cupboard feels bare. I don’t doubt that feature films will turn their attention to all that in the future, but for now it’s reel-to-reel women taking their clothes off. The elephant in the bedroom is the Jew.
I don’t expect everybody to agree that the only real subject of art since 1945 has been the genocide – I mean the actual genocide of the Jews, not the politically manufactured genocides of which Jews are now routinely accused – and the only testing philosophical question, “How did that ever happen?” But if we thought we’d had enough – and I often told myself I had – the return of Jew-hate to the streets and campuses of Western cities is a harsh reminder that we need to restart the conversation. Not from wherever it was we left off, but from the beginning. That repeated mantra – “never again” – appears a fatuous hope in the face of the widespread callous ignorance as to what it was the first time round.
It has been said often enough that Holocaust denial takes many forms, from the brute mathematics of those who jotted down the dimensions of Auschwitz to prove that it was no bigger than Butlin’s, and probably more fun, to historians who claim to have found evidence that Jews had done it to themselves to justify invading Palestine. Of all forms of denialism, the worst minimises the slaughter by arguing that Jews were always just Nazis in waiting anyway, thereby forfeiting in advance the world’s pity, first by showing none themselves, and then by claiming what we might call “Shoah exemption”.
I have yet to meet a Jew in real life – as opposed to on a panel or at a literary festival – who believes that what was done to his grandparents in Bergen-Belsen gives him the right to murder children in Gaza, but this passes as psychology in some quarters, especially where Jews of a certain over-educated sort get together and squirm whenever Jews without degrees and from the wrong side of the tracks make a dog’s dinner of defending Israel.
There has always been a reluctance to embrace Zionism among professorial Jews, as much for social reasons as political ones. It is part of the parochialism you are eager to put behind you when you leave Hendon for Oxford, and one of the reasons you march alongside people who don’t know where Hendon is.
I am not a marcher myself. I don’t care for their mood-music. But I have occasionally forgotten to be cautious – or tactful, if you prefer – and allowed myself to stray too close to what’s left of a march late on a Shabbes afternoon. “How dare you?” I have muttered under my breath at the straggling churchy people wrapped in Palestinian scarves who don’t want to go home. “How dare you, as members of a society or practitioners of a faith that made Jews pariahs for two thousand years, sit in judgment yet again in a matter of which, frankly, given what you chant, you know nothing?”
Towards those who have an unborrowed grievance I feel differently. It wasn’t centuries of Arab contempt for Jews that led ineluctably to the camps. But I would like them to know more of what it is they accuse Jews of exploiting, if only to understand the nature of Jewish apprehension. It appears at times as though Israel’s neighbours view the Holocaust as just another of the ways Jews have stolen a march on them, one more Jewish advantage, akin to controlling the media and running Hollywood. Call it Holocaust Covetousness.
My brothers, I want to say to them, believe me, you wouldn’t want it. Go and see A Real Pain if you doubt my words. Played in a low key, it is not a film about the horrors of the Holocaust or any advantage Jews have tried to wrest from it. Without fanfare or self-pity, it tells of the slow-burn of depletion and depression that endures all these years later.
One way or another, the lesson of the last 15 months is that the greatest calamity to have befallen a people – to have befallen the Jews, anyway – remains unknown or disbelieved, no matter how often we recount it or how many schlock Holocaust novels people read. The Chartered Accountant of Auschwitz might while away a tedious hour, but it hasn’t brought knowledge or enlightenment.
The true story cannot be told often enough – not only as history of terrible events we are duty bound to commemorate, but as an honest reckoning with the aftermath. And we Jews have to stop being apologetic about repeating it.
