{"id":700,"date":"2015-11-11T16:35:49","date_gmt":"2015-11-12T00:35:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/?p=700"},"modified":"2015-11-11T16:40:42","modified_gmt":"2015-11-12T00:40:42","slug":"peter-beinarts-holocaust-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/?p=700","title":{"rendered":"Peter Beinart’s Holocaust Problem"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Last night I watched a long video of Peter Beinart’s November 4, 2015 appearance at Beth Chayim Chadashim<\/a>\u00a0with Rabbi Sharon Brous<\/a> of IKAR<\/a>. \u00a0Beinart is correct that he did not attempt to justify terrorism against Israel when he said that he believed that some of Israel’s policies have contributed to the terrorism problem (“Israel is reaping what it has sowed.<\/a>“) \u00a0But he did say something at the very end of his talk that I found disturbing.<\/p>\n

At the end of the program (at 1:21:30), in answering the final question, Beinart went on a riff about what he perceives as the misplaced priorities of the American Jewish community:<\/p>\n

The American Jewish community has spent . . . and this may be a controversial thing to say, but I think we have spent too much money on Holocaust memorials and not enough on Jewish education. \u00a0I think it says something very troubling about a\u00a0community where you can go into city after city and they have built these Holocaust memorials which are gleaming and very impressive. And then you go to the Jewish day school and it is crumbling. I mean there’s no gym, there’s no science lab. \u00a0What does it say about a community that’s more interested in memorializing its dead than providing for its future?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, two things. \u00a0First, Beinart is factually wrong. \u00a0If you look at Los Angeles, for example, it is true that in the past 25 years we have built both the Museum of Tolerance<\/a> and the new building for Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust<\/a>. \u00a0At the same time, our community\u00a0has also built a number of new Jewish day schools, including Milken Community Schools<\/a>,\u00a0deToledo High School<\/a>, Brawerman Elementary School,<\/a>\u00a0and greatly expanded others, such as Sinai Akiba Academy<\/a>, Shalhevet<\/a>, and Yavneh Hebrew Academy<\/a>. \u00a0You’ll find state of the art science labs and excellent gyms\u00a0at all of these schools, and many others in and around Los Angeles. \u00a0These Jewish schools have also been building up their endowments, thanks to a program sponsored by the Bureau of Jewish Education<\/a>, Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education (PEJE)<\/a> and the Avi Chai Foundation<\/a>. \u00a0So Jewish education is not “crumbling” in Los Angeles. \u00a0And I doubt it is crumbling in any other Jewish community that has invested in a Holocaust museum.<\/p>\n

But second, Beinart is setting up a false dichotomy. \u00a0Indeed, when you look at the major donor lists, you find that the same families are supporting both Jewish schools and Holocaust museums. \u00a0Why? \u00a0Because our Jewish schools and our Holocaust museums serve different functions that are not mutually exclusive. \u00a0In fact, they complement each other. \u00a0Jewish schools naturally serve just the Jewish community, and in particular a subset that wants its children to learn Hebrew and religious observance. Our museums serve a much larger community, and one that is largely non-Jewish. Certainly, one great aspect of our Holocaust museums is that they are places where Jews can memorialize the victims, and teach our young the terrible history of our recent past. \u00a0But these museums also, indeed primarily, serve to teach non-Jews about our history. \u00a0Those of us who contribute to both Jewish education and Holocaust museums know that while it is important to continue Jewish traditions, it is equally important to educate non-Jews about our history and the terrible consequences of anti-Semitism.<\/p>\n

What would it say of our community if we only built Jewish schools, teaching, as Bienart suggests, the holidays of Purim and Simchat Torah, but neglected our role as interpreters of the Holocaust? \u00a0One of the things that makes us human is our sense of history. Our schools are designed to transmit the history of our species, and so we learn about the great civilizations, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, etc. \u00a0We learn about great conflicts, the Peloponnesian Wars, the Battle of Hastings, the Thirty Years War, the Napoleonic Wars and the American Revolution and Civil War. \u00a0And, from now on and for the next thousands of years, we will teach our children about World War II, the distinguishing feature\u00a0of which will be the Holocaust, the greatest mass-murder\u00a0in the history of mankind.<\/p>\n

We have the privilege of living with the last generation of survivors, who are first-hand witnesses to the history that will be taught for millennia. \u00a0Our Holocaust museums are designed to collect and marshall the evidence while we still can, to package and deliver it to people in an effective manner. \u00a0Our Holocaust museum serve also as places for the inter-generational transmission of history. \u00a0There are few\u00a0other places where you will regularly find a 90-year-old teaching a class of 8th graders, as happens every day in our Holocaust museums.\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

So why does someone like Peter Beinart make such a grave error when speaking about Holocaust museums? \u00a0My theory is that it comes down to his genealogy<\/a>. Beinart’s parents were from South Africa,\u00a0so his heritage is\u00a0a mixture of early Russian and Lithuanian immigrants from the pogroms\u00a0as well as one grandmother from Egypt. He probably doesn’t feel that his family was very affected by the Holocaust. \u00a0I’ve seen this very often also in the United States. \u00a0There are many American Jews for whom it comes as a shock to learn that the defining moments of Jewish history over the past 100 or even 1,000 years were the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel — and they missed them both! \u00a0(They thought that it was growing up in Brooklyn, listening to Bob Dylan<\/a> and Barbra Streisand<\/a>, and rooting for the Dodgers<\/a>.) These folks like to build different types of museums, like the National Museum of American Jewish History<\/a> in Philadelphia, which was completely\u00a0empty when I visited last March. (Really, I did not see one other person inside, although the nearby\u00a0Barnes Foundation museum<\/a>\u00a0had been full of people when I visited there an hour earlier.) \u00a0But their story just doesn’t resonate — not with Jews and not with non-Jews. \u00a0Meanwhile our Holocaust museums are booming. \u00a0(For example, LAMOTH<\/a>‘s attendance\u00a0increased 25% each of the past two years and is set to increase another 7% this year.)<\/p>\n

The good news is that views like Beinart’s will die out as the generations move forward. \u00a0Before too long, every Jewish family will be descended or connected to a Holocaust survivor family. \u00a0That’s just how genealogy works. \u00a0But in the meantime, those of who really understand the importance of the Holocaust to Jewish continuity will continue to pour our support into our museums as well as our Jewish schools.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last night I watched a long video of Peter Beinart’s November 4, 2015 appearance at Beth Chayim Chadashim\u00a0with Rabbi Sharon Brous of IKAR. \u00a0Beinart is correct that he did not attempt to justify terrorism against Israel when he said that … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=700"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/700\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":710,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/700\/revisions\/710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}