Admissions against interest

By Bill O’Reilly

www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?23430

Thursday, June 28, 2001

This “Pearl Harbor” movie still bothers me.

The Disney people re-edited the film for Japanese audiences because of “emotional sensitivity issues.” In other words they softened what was already a cupcake of a movie because Disney wanted to do better in the box offices in the Land of the Rising Sun, which is the largest movie-going country after the USA.

So I’m thinking to myself what would have happened if Steven Spielberg had re-cut “Schindler’s List” for German audiences so they wouldn’t be confronted with “emotional issues”? Well, you would have heard a worldwide howl that would have curled Ben Affleck’s hair. Demonstrations would have been ordered up, and outrage would fill the air.

[…]

The Unknown Holiday

• The invisibility of Shavuot in the Jewish community is simply the reflection of a wider American problem.

By Rabbi Daniel Lapin, the president of Toward Tradition, a national coalition of Jews and Christians, and the author, most recently, of Buried Treasure: Secrets for Living from the Lord’s Language.

May 25, 2001 9:10 a.m.

[…] Our communal leaders may express deep concern about Jewish “continuity,” but when they fund Holocaust memorials more lavishly than day schools, we have reason to doubt their sincerity.

So in this vein, let us compare the observance of two revered days on the Jewish calendar: the entirely secular Holocaust Remembrance Day, which fell last month, and the ancient festival of Shavuot, falling this year on May 28 & 29.

In the former case, enthusiastic Jews young and old crowded synagogues, temples, and Jewish Community Centers around the country. Holocaust survivors had their pictures not only in Jewish newspapers, but also in lavish spreads in the major dailies. Community leaders of every denomination warned us not to forget our history. And yet, just a few weeks later, on Shavuot, the day commemorating the giving of the Torah, when the people of Israel became a nation, most Jews will prefer to forget history. Year after year, in spite of its centrality to all of Jewish existence and its three prominent Scriptural references (Leviticus 23, Numbers 28, and Deuteronomy 16), Shavuot is trumped by Holocaust Remembrance Day.[…]

An American Jew in … Not Quite Paris

Kellerman

MightyWords

May 3, 2001

Book writing is a solitary profession. As the sole author of my works, I take the credit, I take the blame. About once a year, usually when my hardcover book is published, I am encouraged to venture out of my cocoon to publicize my work on what is known in the biz as the book tour. I like book tours. They allow me to do some face-to-face interaction with those who buy and read my books. My fans are wonderful — honest and sincere. I get feedback — mostly good, sometimes not so good, but always given with an honorable heart. Why else would they stand in line, sometimes for over an hour, just to have their books inked with my scrawl?

I also like book tours because I like to travel. I’ve enjoyed visiting almost every state in the U.S., and most of the major cities. Once in a while, my husband, the New York Times best-selling author Jonathan Kellerman, and I have done joint book tours, mostly out of the country. Jonathan and I are close and doing the circuit together minimizes our time apart. Three years ago, when we went to the land down under, we also took the kids. It was fabulous.

But even the foreign tours could not have prepared me for my upcoming tour in Germany. First of all, I was going without Jonathan and the kids, for a full ten days. I would miss them terribly. And, there was that picayune fact that I was going to Germany. As a modern Orthodox Jewish woman, I had strong feelings about visiting a country that just sixty years ago, had played judge, jury, and executioner to six million of my people, ten million human beings in total. Though Hitler’s “final solution” never came to pass, damn if he didn’t die trying to implement it. How would I feel about Germany and the Germans? How would they feel about me? Come join me and find out.

By David Newman

The Jerusalem Post | April, 18 2001

cgis.jpost.com/cgi-bin/General/printarticle.cgi?article=/

Editions/2001/04/18/Opinion/Opinion.24802.html

[…]

In Israel, Holocaust education has become, for many, a last resort in creating a sense of identity and attachment for a younger generation which has become increasingly alienated from a country which is continually fighting for its existence and to which this same youth is being asked to fight and, perhaps, make the supreme sacrifice. The use of the Israeli flag as a blatant symbol of nationalism during the March of the Living is, at one and the same time, a moment of pride for the youth of a country which rose from the ashes of the mass extermination, but equally a cynical manipulation of history’s greatest human tragedy to promote nationalism and to cover up for the failures of the education system back home in creating a sense of identity and loyalty to the state in which they reside.

No country can continually resort to the darkest moments in its history as the only common denominator which brings youth of diverse backgrounds to identify with a common cause.

“Never Again” is an important slogan for Israel, but it cannot be the only slogan by which generations of children and young adults will be asked to swear their

allegiance to the state. But however important a message this may be, it can never replace the essential positive aspects of living within a state and contributing to its development and security — messages which the state education system has miserably failed to disseminate beyond the context of persecution and pogroms.

[…]

(The writer is chairman of the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.)

Actors gain painful look into the past

By Yvette Craig

Star-Telegram Staff Writer

Updated: Saturday, Mar. 17, 2001 at 22:25 CST

FORT WORTH — It’s dress rehearsal at Sage & Silo Theater, and actor Kit Hussey is in the uniform of a Nazi SS captain.

Removing the costume’s black hat and lowering his eyes, Hussey asks 80-year-old Lena Factor to describe how Nazi soldiers treated her in the concentration camps.

[…]

“Now, you all can ask anything more. I was there. I was one of the first to go in and the last one to get out.”

[…]

In a thick Polish accent, she tells the players about a moment in Auschwitz that haunts her.

She was shoved into a shower stall with about 200 other women. An echo bounced off the walls as the door was slammed shut. They stood bald and naked, shivering with fear.

She held her breath and waited. Cold water spewed from the shower heads instead of deadly gas. Wails of disbelief, followed by cries of joy filled the chamber.

[…]

Alan Riding New York Times Service

Friday, March 16, 2001

PARIS — The harrowing photographs taken during the liberation of Nazi death camps in early 1945 played a central role in convincing the world of the existence of a Nazi killing machine. Over time, however, many of these same images of skeletal survivors and mounds of bodies came to assume an iconographic quality, speaking generically for the Holocaust but with little emphasis on how, when, where and by whom they were taken.

Now a new exhibition here, “Memoir of the Camps: Photographs of Nazi Concentration Camps and Extermination Camps, 1933-1999,” which runs through March 25, aims to go beyond these images, back to the photographs. Its organizers, Pierre Bonhomme and Clement Cheroux, believe the time is ripe for a more documentary analysis of such photographs, in this case some 300 taken in Nazi camps before, during and after World War II.

If attendance were the only gauge, the show would be deemed a success. Presented by the government’s Patrimoine Photographique at the Hotel de Sully in the Marais district, it is drawing Parisians of all ages, including a good many camp survivors and groups of high school students accompanied by teachers. In a country that has only recently acknowledged its role in the deportation of 76,000 Jews, that itself is significant.

But the exhibition has been sharply attacked by some World War II historians and former deportees. They say that in its effort to clarify, the exhibition has sown confusion by not differentiating between concentration camps set up in Germany soon after Hitler seized power in 1933 and extermination camps established later in Poland that used gas chambers to eliminate Jews. The effect is to blur the distinction between the victims of executions, abuse, disease and famine, and the victims of genocide, specifically Jews and Gypsies.

The loudest criticism has come from Claude Lanzmann, the director of “Shoah,” the 1985 documentary about Hitler’s “final solution.”

“I have spent my life separating concentration camps from extermination camps because the reality is that there is not one image of the camps of Belzec, Sobinor and Chelmno and almost nothing of Treblinka,” he said of those extermination camps in Poland. “The images here do not suffice to write the story of the camps.”

Cheroux responded that his purpose was not to present a history of the camps but a history of the photographs of the camps. “There is enormous power in these images, but we didn’t want people merely to be shocked by them, which is the way they are normally presented, as part of a pedagogy of horror,” he said. “We wanted to treat them as documents that enable us to reflect on what the image is.”

Lanzmann has also challenged this approach. “I already knew all the photos that are on view,” he said in an interview with Le Monde. “The real problem here is, what is the role of photography? What can it testify to? The issue is not documentation, as Cheroux believes, but truth.”

The historical photographs, all familiar to experts and mostly borrowed from museums and collections in Europe, the United States and Israel, are divided in two parts: those taken in concentration and extermination camps from 1933 until the eve of their liberation, and those taken during and after their liberation, between late 1944 and April 1945. A third section of the show is dedicated to contemporary photographs that evoke the camps and their victims.

The first part of the exhibition is presented on two television monitors as slide shows: six minutes of photographs taken by deportees and 14 minutes of images taken by the Nazis. The liberation of the camps is in turn illustrated on the walls of the same gallery with pictures taken both by professional photographers — like Lee Miller, Margaret Bourke-White, Germaine Krull and George Rodger — and Allied soldiers.

Cheroux said that while carrying out research for this project, he was frequently presented with boxes of photographs in which Nazi propaganda images were mixed with those taken by Allied forces and even contemporary artists. Many of the photographs were damaged and often they had no captions, he said. “Behind each image there was the ‘look’ of the person who took it,” he continued. “It was important to know who took it, when, where, perhaps even why.”

The show’s organizers said research had enabled them to clear up some errors. For example, one photograph long thought to show a Nazi officer bulldozing bodies into a mass grave is now believed to show a British soldier burying bodies to forestall the outbreak of disease.

The exhibition also demonstrates how some pictures were edited or touched up after the war to increase their impact as propaganda.

But some experts are also challenging the captions on some photographs in the show. For example, two images on loan from the State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau show a pile of bodies being burned and are said to have been taken by members of the Polish resistance from inside a gas chamber beside Crematorium No. 5 at Birkenau. “No one can affirm that,” said Lanzmann. “No one knows.”

Certainly the most photographed camps were those in Germany, which were built as labor camps for “anti-social elements” and not as extermination camps, even though hundreds of thousands of Jews and non-Jews died in them in the final months of the war. They were widely photographed by the Nazis before 1939 and by the Allies when they were liberated. In contrast, there is almost no photographic record of the extermination camps in Poland, which were liberated by the Soviet Army, often after their gas chambers had been destroyed.

Gilbert Michlin, 74, a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz and several other camps who has just published his memoirs, “Of No Interest to the Nation,” said that it was important for young people to see the exhibition but that he was disturbed by what he called the amalgam between “normal” concentration camps and extermination camps.

“In the ‘normal’ camps, people also died like flies, but you didn’t have industrial extermination of Jews,” said Michlin, who survived because his training as a tool and die maker won him a place in a slave labor “commando” working for Siemens. “This is not clear in the exhibition.”

The contemporary section of the show has also come under fire. Designed to underscore the importance of memory, it includes 35 black-and-white photographs by Michael Kenna of what remains of the Nazi camps. Jeffrey Wolin and Gilles Cohen focus on camp survivors, while Naomi Tereza Salmon presents enlarged color photographs of false teeth, shaving brushes and glasses. Lanzmann criticized Kenna’s aesthetic approach and dismissed Salmon’s work as fetishistic, but other critics have been less harsh.

Cheroux, 30, said he included these works less as art than as documents that illustrate how memory links the present to events more than a half-century ago.

“It’s part of the passage from communicative memory to cultural memory, he said. “As the direct witnesses disappear, memory finds new expression in books and films like ‘Schindler’s List’ and ‘Life Is Beautiful.’ Now it’s being addressed in photographs. At present there is little cultural memory of the camps, but it will gradually take over. It’s inevitable.”

Charles Laurence

National Post

February 17, 2001

NEW YORK — As the fogs of obfuscation begin to lift from the latest mess of his own peculiar making, former president Bill Clinton is looking like the seasoned snake-oil salesman who has just been sold a pup.

[…] Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, called Mr. Clinton in the final hours of his administration, while Rabbi Irving Greenfield, head of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, wrote a missive in support of a pardon on official letterhead.

“This is squandering the moral capital that Israel needs, that was deposited by the blood at Auschwitz,” says Mr. Stein. “That capital is needed in Israel’s ongoing struggle for safety, even survival. To use it for [Marc] Rich is appalling.” The Yiddish word for Jewish feelings, he explained, is shondah (shame).

[…]

By Lawrence Morahan

CNS Senior Staff Writer

February 16, 2001

(CNSNews.com) — By taking sides in controversial political and religious issues, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has departed from its original charter of telling the story of the Holocaust and therefore disqualifies itself from receiving federal funds, a national Jewish organization said.

Toward Tradition, a national coalition of conservative Jews and Christians based in Mercer Island, Wash., criticized the museum, among other things, for showing visitors a film that links Nazism to Christianity and for sponsoring a panel that accused the CIA of genocide.

“Many people who aren’t Jewish feel uncomfortable criticizing an institution that almost represents the Holy Grail of American political discourse right now,” said Yarden Weidenfeld, national director of Toward Tradition, in a phone interview. “But we believe that as a predominantly Jewish organization, we have a special role to play in making the case for why the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum should not be federally funded.”

The group took issue with the museum for celebrating a book that charged Israel with “ethnic cleansing” and for seeking to appoint, as director of its Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, a scholar who compared the election of President Reagan to the rise of Nazism. The scholar, John Roth, eventually withdrew under protest.

The museum, which receives an estimated 2 million visitors annually since it opened in April 1993, was built with private donations on land provided by the U.S. government in downtown Washington, D.C.

Congress mandated the creation of the museum in 1980, and 60 percent of its funding comes through the House Appropriations Committee. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, whose members are appointed by the president, oversees the running of the museum.

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, president of Toward Tradition, said in a statement, “As time goes by, it becomes increasingly hard to see how one might explain to, let us say, a wheat farmer in Iowa why his tax dollars should go to support such a foolish institution. Nor is it as if the United States had anything whatever to do with the Holocaust, a fact that made the museum a questionable object of federal largesse to begin with.”

A museum movie shown to visitors that links Christianity to the rise of Nazism is a “glaring example” of abuse of taxpayer funds, Weidenfeld said.

While the history of Christianity in Europe, especially during medieval times, was marked by anti-Semitism and attacks on Jews, “American taxpayers and American Christians have absolutely nothing to do with that,” Weidenfeld said.

“In the American context, Christianity has served as a very philo-Semetic influence on American non-Jews and the relationship that American Christians have had with the Jews is one of tremendous admiration and love and respect.

“We believe that since this museum is supported by American tax dollars and engages in any type of efforts to link Christianity with Nazism — those two facts together are tremendously problematic and ultimately not showing the proper gratitude and respect that we believe Jews owe American Christians,” he said.

The museum, which is open to the public free of charge, tells the story of 6 million Jews and other minority groups that were exterminated by the Nazis in Europe between 1933 and 1945.

Other commentators criticized the museum for what they called its one-sided portrayal of the issue of homosexuality during the Third Reich.

Nathaniel Lehrman, M.D. has pointed out what he called a “grave historical error” to the museum regarding its documentation of the relationship between homosexuals and the Nazis, but the museum has refused to consider his work.

“The Nazi Party was largely homosexual,” said Lehrman, a Holocaust scholar and commentator. “But the only discussion the Holocaust Museum has had about the relationship between homosexuals and the Nazis is the story of the 5,000 to 10,000 homosexuals who were sent to camps, and who possibly died there. The homosexuals were victims. The notion of homosexuals as perpetrators has been systematically ignored by the museum.”

Toward Tradition said the museum was taking sides in other controversial issues. “There are many Zionist and zealous Jews who were concerned that the museum celebrated a book that charged Israel with ethnic cleansing and accused the CIA of genocide. This over-politicization of the Holocaust is of great concern, but it makes it all the more so when the institution that is promoting this is the recipient of federal tax dollars,” Weidenfeld said.

Toward Tradition also criticized Rabbi Irving Greenberg, chairman of the Holocaust Museum’s Council, for writing to President Clinton on museum stationary in the last days of the administration, urging him to pardon alleged tax cheat Marc Rich.

Permitting Rich to return to the United States without criminal penalty would be “one of the most Godlike actions that anyone could ever do,” Greenberg said.

Tom Cooney, a museum spokesman, said a communication by Rabbi Greenberg was printed on museum stationary “in error” and Greenberg had acknowledged his mistake to the council members.

Addressing other concerns raised by Toward Tradition, Cooney said the documentary shown to museum visitors “did not attempt to blame anything on Christianity.”

Instead, “it was pointing out that at a time when Christianity was prominent, some things happened in the world that weren’t very palatable,” he said.

“It’s a matter of things not being looked at in the right context,” Clooney said. “Two million people go through this institution every year, including decision makers. Everybody is aware of what we’re doing and how we’re doing it, and clearly they don’t have the kind of issues that this particular group does. Quite clearly we’re not engaged in any kind of action other than one that explains to people what happened at a particular moment in time and what led up to that.”