An Israeli Official Called My Family a “Second Holocaust” — and I Felt Relieved
July 22, 2019
In a recent meeting, the Israeli Minister of Education, Rafi Peretz, called my family part of “a second Holocaust.” According to three sources present, the new Netanyahu appointee told the Cabinet, in response to a presentation on demographic trends among American Jews, that the rate of intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews in the United States was the moral equivalent of our people’s greatest trauma in recent memory.
When I read his comment, I braced myself for a wave of indignation. Instead, I felt relief.
One comment on “An Israeli Official Called My Family a “Second Holocaust” — and I Felt Relieved”
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You wrote “I felt for my Israeli peers, but we increasingly did not understand each other any more than a random grouping of twenty-somethings from opposite sides of the planet might, despite our shared Jewishness.”
It doesn’t sound like you tried hard enough to understand the other side. Making friends with someone from another country is no easy task. After several years of learning Hebrew, I’ve finally made friends with someone from “the other side” (an Israeli) and it’s changed my perspective on the middle east a lot.
Also… this article conflates Israel with Israel’s Government. A nation’s political leader is not necessarily a great representative of its people. For example: Trump is America’s president. ’nuff said.
I’m not a supporter of the occupation either. But you can’t just say “that’s bad” — criticizing is easy, thinking is harder. If you’re just going to add small portions of that to this article, you need to have a bit more nuance than all the thousands of other articles out there literally saying the same thing, otherwise it’s just another one of *those*.
This is obviously very personal. People who talk about “the silent holocaust” are scum, as if the freedom to fall in love with who you want is a burden on the continuation of the Jewish people (Israel is a modern nation. People have freedoms there). But you’re mixing too many different things here, and it feels like an emotional rejection of Israel as a whole because of one side of it that you didn’t like (for very valid reasons).