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1. back in November, i did a thread about Yom haShoah/Holocaust Memorial Day and the question of when it should be observed, but i didn't really say anything about *how* it's observed, and since today is 27 Nisan, aka Official Yom haShoah, here's a thread about that https://twitter.com/nonstandardrep/status/1194773178805104641
2. i want to say up front that i haven't been to a ton of Yom haShoah commemorative events — in large part because the handful that i've been to have been so extremely off-putting — so it's very possible that i have a biassed view of what's out there. in fact, i hope i do!
3. because the events i've been to...have not been great, friends. the one i went to last year was, in fact, so off-putting that i want to talk about it specifically, altho i don't want to name specific people/institutions because i want to focus on trends/ideas and not people
4. the evening centered around an interview with a survivor of the Holocaust, and i felt deeply uncomfortable watching it, not because the survivor was recounting horrors but because the interviewer . . . didn't seem interested in what the survivor was saying?
5. from my position in the audience, it felt like the interviewer had a very clear set of points that the survivor was expected to hit, and when the survivor instead went off on tangents, lost the narrative thread, or just had messy/complicated opinions/memories/perspectives...
6. ...that didn't fit into the cookie cutter Insert Generic And Interchangeable Survivor Testimony Here template that the interviewer had in mind, the interviewer seemed to get really impatient and dismissive, asking leading/railroading questions that seemed designed to force...
7. ...the survivor into certain pre-conceived narrative beats regardless of whether those beats actually matched the survivor's story/memory
again, i hope most Yom haShoah survivor interviews aren't like this! but i've seen a few like it, and they all feel super slimy to me
again, i hope most Yom haShoah survivor interviews aren't like this! but i've seen a few like it, and they all feel super slimy to me
8. because it seems very clear that the people doing these interviews aren't interested hearing from these survivors as unique individuals whose stories may surprise and challenge our own preconceived notions of what the past wast like, they're only interested in...
9. ...using these survivors as props in a rote retelling of a Holocaust story they've already decided they know
and in my (again — i want to emphasize this! — limited) experience, that has tended to be a story where the Holocaust is a Unique and Inexplicable Evil
and in my (again — i want to emphasize this! — limited) experience, that has tended to be a story where the Holocaust is a Unique and Inexplicable Evil
10. which is to say that this is a framing that paints the Holocaust as something that can't really be *explained* as arising from specific historical conditions and trends; instead it's just something that *happened*, and we can tell stories about *how* it happened, but...
11. ...the *why* remains forever elusive, either locked away in some mysterious ~evil in the depths of human hearts~ or just ~floating out there somewhere beyond our ken~. either way, we have to be on guard against it happening again, where being on guard primarily means...
12. ...tracking antisemitism (because the Holocaust was a Uniquely Jewish Tragedy and no one else is going to look out for us) and being Militarily Strong (so that we can fight back successfully, because the first real warning sign we have will be something like Kristallnacht)
13. (this is a generalized picture, so not every event is gonna hit all these points, but the event i was at last year was basically this to a T; it included a Very Impassioned Speech about how The Holocaust is why we need to have a Militaristic State of Israel backed by the USA)
14. there is, obviously, a lot to unpack here
i want to start in what may seem like kind of a strange place. i want to start with a gentle reminder that the Nazis didn't only target Jewish people
i want to start in what may seem like kind of a strange place. i want to start with a gentle reminder that the Nazis didn't only target Jewish people
15. there are obviously differences between the specific groups targeted here and the methodologies deployed, but queer people, Roma, disabled people, communists, Serbs, Poles, Soviet civilians and many others were all murdered by Nazis just for existing
16. if you add up all the numbers from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum ( https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution), you get a number just north of 17,000,000. this is *obviously* not to say that 6,000,000 dead Jewish people isn't a horrifying tragedy, nor is it to say that, proportionately,...
17. ...that didn't have a bigger impact on Jewish history than the Holocaust had on, say, queer history — as i said, i think it's fair game to talk about the differences between those groups where those differences exist. but in focusing on the 6,000,000 Jewish dead,...
18. ...it sometimes feels like Yom haShoah events wind up implying that the other 11,000,000 dead don't exist, or at least don't really matter
and you might say, well, Yom haShoah is specifically a Jewish holiday, so of course it's gonna talk abt the Jewish victims specifically
and you might say, well, Yom haShoah is specifically a Jewish holiday, so of course it's gonna talk abt the Jewish victims specifically
19. and, well, fine. except...
it's not like no Jewish people were queer or disabled or communists or—? then or now? you can't cleanly separate out Judaism from all other forms of human diversity like that, that's just not how it works
it's not like no Jewish people were queer or disabled or communists or—? then or now? you can't cleanly separate out Judaism from all other forms of human diversity like that, that's just not how it works
20. when Allied forces liberated the concentration camps, they re-imprisoned those convicted under Paragraph 175. (yes really! US troops re-imprisoned Nazi prisoners just for being gay! that is a thing that happened: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/gay-prisoners-germany-wwii/) do you think none of them were Jewish?
21. (this obviously complicates the easy, false story of "Germany bad, US good, Jewish people and the US have been friends forever since the end of WWII", as should the (oft erased) history of Nazis taking inspiration from US eugenicists, but that's a whole other can of worms)
22. but more than that, how many rabbis who used the book-burning photo from the destruction of the Institut fĂĽr Sexualwissenschaft last night insist on deadnaming their trans congregants? how many who talked about the importance of strong communities run inaccessible shuls?
23. i think if we *only* remember the Jewish suffering of the Holocaust insofar as it is Jewish suffering specifically and set aside the other categories (which are not mutually exclusive with Judaism! people can be more than one thing!) that the Nazis targeted,...
24. ...we run the risk of narrowing our ability to imagine what a contemporary Jewish community can look like, and we also risk taking entirely the wrong lessons from the Holocaust itself (see all the people who somehow get "we need to do ethnonationalism!" from it!)
25. like, the US is running concentration camps. if Yom haShoah is a day where we, as Jewish people, go "once, bad things happened to our ancestors, so we need to bunker up as a community and look out for ourselves and only ourselves", it's a pointless nothing failure of a day
26. so what would could observance of it actually look like?
i think a good start would be stepping back and looking more specifically at *how* fascism happens. it's not a mysterious inexplicable evil. it's a specific ideology that appeals to specific people for specific reasons
i think a good start would be stepping back and looking more specifically at *how* fascism happens. it's not a mysterious inexplicable evil. it's a specific ideology that appeals to specific people for specific reasons
27. the Holocaust didn't come from nowhere, and it didn't start overnight. look at the roots, and look at the context that gave rise to things that later became unstoppable. where were the turning points? where could people have chosen to act differently?
28. and, importantly, what are the general features of the contexts that fascism flourishes in? how can we, as groups of caring people, recognize that context when we see it building around us, and how can we disrupt it, in its early stages, when it's weak?
29. we're well past that in the contemporary US, alas. so now that we're here, what do we do? how do we build solidarity with others opposed to fascism in all its forms, even as we come from very different walks of life? how do we find our place in the antifascist struggle?
30. (that, incidentally, is another reason i think it's important to expand our memory. fascism hasn't targeted just one group historically; it isn't targeting just one group today. but we are vulnerable when we are fractured; we must understand our struggles as interrelated)
31. this wouldn't be an easy kind of day! it would reveal a lot of hard, deeply unpleasant truths about the US and Europe and the future we face, truths that are a lot harder than "Nazis were bad, the US beat them, let's light some memory candles"
32. but those truths don't stop being true if we don't face them. and that, ultimately, is the task we are faced with. we live in the heart of a murderous regime. what are we going to do to stop it now, and how will we reshape the world to prevent another from arising ever again?
33. again, i haven't been to a ton of Yom haShoah events. maybe the handful i've seen were just exceptionally bad and most of them are more like this. i hope so! because we need a shedding of illusions. we need people to face the world as it is. we need collective action
34. memory, in the present moment, is not enough
it's Yom haShoah. what are we going to do to empty the concentration camps our government has built?
~end of thread~
it's Yom haShoah. what are we going to do to empty the concentration camps our government has built?
~end of thread~
