People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

At the end of the show, on-screen survivors talk in a loop about how people need to love one another. While listening to this, it occurs to me that I have never read survivor literature in Yiddish—the language spoken by 80 percent of victims—suggesting this idea. In Yiddish, speaking only to other Jews, survivors talk about their murdered families,

In other words, the cause of bloodthirsty antisemitic violence is . . . Jews, living in a place! Sometimes, Jews who live in places even buy land on which to live. To

From the beginning, the regime eliminated anything in the celebrated Jewish “nationality” that didn’t suit its needs. Jews were awesome, provided they weren’t practicing the Jewish religion, studying traditional Jewish texts, using Hebrew, or supporting Zionism.

Either way, then as now, the world really is full of shit. We can pretend the shit is not there, or we can think through how to live with it without making ourselves sick.

In Saudi Arabia, for instance, decades of pan-Arabist and Islamist propaganda have left the public ignorant that Jews even lived in the kingdom at all after the Islamic Conquest, despite recent official efforts to recognize the kingdom’s remarkable Jewish historical sites, including the ruins of entire Jewish cities.

When I asked Jim Fry what motivated his father to take on the rescue mission, his answer did not conjure up anyone resembling the humble peasants of Le Chambon. “I’m sure some of it was a desire to be important and to hang out with famous people,” he said. “There were genuine humanitarian reasons, too, but there was a synergy between those reasons

“Lefkowitz”?) Louis Goldstein declared his name “un-American, uneuphonius, and an economic handicap”—a petition that was rejected by the judge, whose name was also Louis Goldstein. (Those who beat the odds in an unfair system, of course, are the ones most invested in claiming the system is fair; if they didn’t need a workaround, there must not be a

“These are people who are rooted in a clear sense of identity—who they are, what they love, what they hate, what they value—that gives them a footing to assess a situation.”

“Gratitude is what makes you hate someone,” Hannes Stein, a German Jewish journalist with whom I shared my bafflement about the legacy of Varian Fry, told me.