For the last decade or so, an ideological tremor has been unsettling American Jewish life. Since Oct. 7, it has become an earthquake. It concerns the relationship between liberalism and Zionism....
The dark meaning the Israeli state has drawn from the Shoah, and then institutionalized in a machinery of repression. Anyone calling attention to the spectacle of Washington’s blind commitment to Israel is accused of antisemitism, ignoring the Shoah.
Some continue to minimize massacres of Israeli civilians - this only fuels militant Zionism. What could lessen its power, drain it of some of that fuel? True solidarity. Humanism that unites people across ethnic and religious lines.
The Jewish community is now with a profound moral challenge. Even as we mourns our dead in Israel, we must acknowledge and protest the genocide Israel is currently perpetrating in their memory in no uncertain terms.
In the face of impunity, there is a sacred role for the storyteller. We can tell stories which invite people to confront painful truths. To combat the lies of impunity, you are doing the task of the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes.
The exhibition “Rendering Witness: Holocaust-Era Art as Testimony” demonstrates the power of art. The artists may have been silenced in the homicide of the Nazi 's final solution, but their clandestine art work survives as an outspoken memory.
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