Remembrance
Today is Yom Hashoa, Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Through LGF, I found this article by Caroline Glick that describes Europe’s misguided Holocaust fetish.

Sadly, Europe has avoided serious self-examination and instead has turned the Holocaust into a fetish. Holocaust memorials spring up like mushrooms after the rainfall throughout the continent. But what do they signify? A sop to Holocaust-obsessed Jews, they are used to teach Europeans that nationalism is bad.

The article is not long, and worth reading in its entirety. It states much more eloquently than I could my impression of what the Holocaust has become to many Jews. For many American Jews, especially secular Jews, the Holocaust is the main reason they are Jewish. Their primary motives are the transmission of Jewish ethnicity and culture and the transmission of Holocaust remembrance to the next generation.

Rabbi Brad Artson, who is the Dean of the Rabbinic School at the University of Judaism, speaks of two general groups of Jews. He calls them Column A and Column B. Column A believes that God gave the commandments to the Jews as an eternal covenant, and that it is the unique mission of the Jews to do His will. In short Column A are religious Jews (in any denomination). Column B believe that Judaism is about the transmission of collective memory and ethnicity and peoplehood. For Column B, being Jewish involves donating to Holocaust museums, eating bagels, sprinkling your sentences with Yiddish, voting Democrat, and raising kids who do the same. After his/her Bar/Bat Mitzva as an adolescent, a Column B Jew has no further religious expectations.

Rabbi Artson makes the point that Column B fails even by its own goals. The children of Column B Jews are overwhelmingly assimilating, intermarrying, and raising children of their own who are not in any column, as they are not self-identifying as Jews. Judaism works as Column A or not at all.

I actually figured this out relatively early in life. The Holocaust is not a reason to be Jewish. The Holocaust is a powerful reason to assimilate, intermarry, and try to see to it that one’s grandchildren are not identifiably Jewish. Judaism, as a religion, is either a fulfilling way to live and a path to ultimate truths, or it is not, regardless of the Holocaust. If Judaism is valuable as a religion, then it is worth living and dying for. If not, then Jews should find something else to do, and the fact that millions of Jews were murdered doesn’t change that. Many have been martyred for lots of other causes, after all. I am not obligated to live as a Christian or as an Armenian because of the massacres that befell those groups, and if a man who was raised as a Christian decides he can not believe in the teachings of Christianity, the martyrdom of all those who died for Christianity is irrelevant.

So my wife and I do the best we can in Column A, knowing that our children or grandchildren may be around when homicidal Jew-hatred appears again. And we remember what befell my parents and their generation, not because we worship the Holocaust, but because the victims deserve remembrance and because we must remember that it will happen again.

- served up by Doctor Bean @ 10:07 AM