The emails from publicists start in November, if they are good at their job. “With Holocaust Memorial Day coming up…” they say, before describing a film, a book, a piece of music, some memoirs, a television programme, a museum exhibition. The emails gather pace as the weeks fly by. By mid-January, it’s hard not to roll your eyes when yet another missive arrives. Why, I wonder, can’t some of these wonderful Jewish projects be published or put on in the middle of summer? Why do they all have to arrive together, jostling for space in the pages of the JC?
I have to admit, I added to this problem myself last year, as the third week of January was the week chosen by my own publishers for my Young Adult book What We’re Scared Of. “We think it’s a good idea to coincide with Holocaust Memorial Day,” they said. In vain, I argued that the glut of Jewish stuff coming out on that day would make life harder, not easier. And I did manage to get quite a bit of publicity. But interest in Jewish matters — even contemporary antisemitism, even a book which links the horrors of the past with the horrors of the present day, with a synagogue attack not unlike the one which took place in Texas this week — was pretty much contained to January. None of my usual invitations to summer literary festivals arrived.
Last week, the formidable Holocaust survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch said that TikTok was not the way to introduce the next generation to the subject. “Educating children about the Holocaust and Jewish history is so important, but don’t tell me I need to go on TikTok and do it in a 30-second video because that’s how long young people’s attention span is — that’s ridiculous. They should learn to sit down for an hour and develop an attention span,” she wrote in the Radio Times.
Well, yes. They should. But also, no. Tiktok is a powerful tool for grabbing someone’s attention in a busy world and it’s one that works all year round. Another survivor, Lily Ebert, and her great-grandson Dov Forman, have shown us how the TikTok model of Shoah awareness works — heart-warming clips, throughout the year, featuring Lily. But they didn’t just make videos. The serious work of telling her story, working with a historian to put those 30-second nuggets into their devastating context, led to a book, Lily’s Promise, which came out last September and became an immediate bestseller. That’s the power of TikTok.
Books, talks, films, even TikTok clips, all can be powerful ways of telling people something about the millions who died, the people who killed them, where and how. And every speech, every book, every work of art, might be the catalyst that starts someone off on a journey of discovery that could lead to — at the very least — a refusal to vote for an antisemitic politician. Some people hear a survivor speak and are inspired to spend their lives fighting hatred. It is all worthwhile and important. But it is not enough. The focus needs to widen. Yes, it’s essential and important to educate young and old about the Holocaust, but there also needs to be a much wider understanding of Jewish history in places other than Europe, in times that are not the 1930s and Forties.
One of my jobs at the JC is to compile the extracts from the archive that run next to the leader column every week. It’s something that I find endlessly fascinating — combing through old copies of the paper looking for stories which shed some light on Jewish life in the past.
I try and mix the micro — the shopkeeper fined for selling explosive trick cigarettes, the details of a grand society wedding — with the macro, the reports of pogroms and prejudice, which certainly aren’t contained to the Nazi years. The history of Zionism and the state of Israel is there, too. It’s an education - partly because my own education contained absolutely nothing about Jews at all. The reformation of the Church of England? Yes. The expulsion of the Jews from England? No.
I’m doing my best to fill in the gaps in my own knowledge. But what about the younger generation? I’d love to see a Jewish History month, in the same way that schools mark Black History Month. A time to learn about Jewish history beyond the Holocaust, to have a wider understanding of who Jews are, where we come from, what lies are told about us and why.
In the meantime, Holocaust Memorial Day gives us many ways to commemorate an indelible stain on history. And for the rest of the year, there’s always TikTok.
