THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

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with the moral parity among the children of Abraham our father, Esau our uncle, andJacob, our father and thief of his brother’s birthright. “The voice is of Jacob and thehands are of Esau,” we like to quote, as if to say that the voice of prayer andrighteousness is ours, but the hairy hands fit for hunting and killing are not, as they areof the “non-Jews,” those who are as evil as Esau. Therefore we must turn to theMidrash or comparative interpretation, which contrasts the qualities of the voice withthose of the hands.The voice is the voice of Jacob: There is no beneficial prayer that doesnot have something of Jacob’s seed; and the hands are the hands ofEsau: There is no war that wins that does not have something ofEsau’s seed. 8In other words, the meaning of Jewish war ethics is critical: The more we fight andwin, the more our hands become like Esau’s and our voice less like Jacob’s. So itwas in the ancient Talmudic times and much more so today. What is that moral voicethat is disappearing? It is Jacob’s inner voice on his way to his last confrontation withhis brother Esau. “And Jacob was very afraid and he was distressed.” 9 The versetells us of human anxiety, so familiar to us, of the soldier on his way to battle. But theMidrash searches further, as it often does, for something beyond and between thewords afraid and distressed to expand the meaning: “Afraid lest he is killed anddistressed lest he kills the others.” The Jacobean fighter, the historic Jew, bearsresponsibility not just to himself and his fears; his responsibility extends to the lives ofhis enemies and rivals. Do we still feel this responsibility?Again we have a paradox. We fight to break the vicious cycle, which was ourportion since Esau, Pharaoh, Goliath, Adrian, Vespasian, Khmelnytsky, Hitler, and therest of the supervillains. But the more we fight them, the more we feel heavy handed,like them, like Esau. We have forgotten the obligations that our earlier generationstook upon themselves. We treat “them” as if we have never vowed in Hillel theElder’s brilliant summation of the Torah: Do not do onto others what is hateful to you.We hated it, and we are doing it, sometimes much too joyously. Is it any wonder noone wants to be our friend anymore when we practice expropriations, injustice in themilitary courts, abuse, roadblocks, food shortages, and, worst of all, contempt forArab life.We were so adamant in demanding that the Shoah never happen again that we did
not notice what was happening under our noses. The Bible and later sourcescommand us dozens of times to treat the non-Jews among us with sensitivity. TheMidrash compares mistreatment of the resident to the taboo on eating pork: “Andyou shall not harass the resident stranger nor pressure him as you were strangers inthe land of Egypt. Do not harass him, in words, and do not pressure him, in money . .. And you have pig in your mouth and still speak words against me?” 10 This meansthat the commandment to treat the minorities among us fairly and sensitively is asimportant as the ban on eating pork.Is it possible that we can be “Jewish” only when we don’t have liberty andindependence? So far, it is an undeniable fact that from the moment we had a state“like all the other nations,” we wanted to be gentiles like them. While they in turn arealready willing to be a bit more Jewish than they were.Father, where are you? I want to start from the beginning. Differently.
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THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER; WE MUSTRISE
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THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER; WE MUST RISE
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In loving memory of my late parents
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Notes 243Index 247
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none of this could have happened.An
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word “former” is attached to yo
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This is how I explain the fierce pu
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eternal renewal of the world. But n
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CHAPTER 1
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I WAS BORN IN JANUARY 1955 IN GERMA
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When I finished writing my first bo
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I had heard her say that more than
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of my late father. We traveled far
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CHAPTER 2THE HOLOCAUST, EVER-PRESEN
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youngest son, Noam, did not join th
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Bank; New Age and Buddhist experime
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CHAPTER 3
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WHERE TO BEGIN? HOW DO YOU START CL
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ight, and Eban, if the 1967 boundar
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CHAPTER 4
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MY NEIGHBOR RAMI’S PARENTS CAME F
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When he woke up, he continued the c
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power. The local leadership of Ben
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How could it be that everything “
Page 54 and 55: As the Zionist movement aspired to
Page 56 and 57: everything changed dramatically and
Page 58 and 59: “Masada will not fall again” be
Page 60 and 61: So, three traumatized communities c
Page 62 and 63: CHAPTER 5
Page 64 and 65: WHAT COLOR WAS THE HOLOCAUST? PROBA
Page 66 and 67: seemed to side with me and my frien
Page 68 and 69: into ploughshares and wait patientl
Page 70 and 71: When my initial courtship of Yael c
Page 72 and 73: only during the long incubation per
Page 74 and 75: liked to compare the Palestinian Na
Page 76 and 77: Fanon is an expert witness worth li
Page 78 and 79: prevention.” How targeted could i
Page 80 and 81: themselves to speak words that shou
Page 82 and 83: followed the war? If not, how did h
Page 84 and 85: war, therefore they should not know
Page 86 and 87: CHAPTER 6LESSONS FROM THE HOLOCAUST
Page 88 and 89: “nationhood,” including its int
Page 90 and 91: in anger over the Dreyfus Affair, b
Page 92 and 93: 1943, upon hearing of the Warsaw gh
Page 94 and 95: is compared to the Shoah, dwarfed b
Page 96 and 97: ad fortune, to express anger, to re
Page 98 and 99: e the cause of constant political f
Page 100 and 101: use the refugee problem to denounce
Page 102 and 103: Almost everywhere the Shoah serves
Page 108 and 109: THE HIGH POINT OF MY SEVENTH GRADE
Page 110 and 111: at least, before the Warsaw ghetto
Page 112 and 113: than a million Jews who had walked
Page 114 and 115: ebels and the disciples of the yout
Page 116 and 117: exterminated. A group of Jewish you
Page 118 and 119: grenade. Natan Rapoport, the sculpt
Page 120 and 121: we will not respond. We will sacrif
Page 122 and 123: against Us.” It is self-evident,
Page 124 and 125: of now we got lost. We need to retu
Page 128 and 129: BECAUSE OF ADOLF EICHMANN, I CAN’
Page 130 and 131: discussion about garbage technology
Page 132 and 133: gap between my father’s world and
Page 134 and 135: independent Jewish Commonwealth, th
Page 136 and 137: Eichmann harmony at the right pitch
Page 138 and 139: the victors at Nuremberg presented,
Page 140 and 141: the highest order. Without people l
Page 142 and 143: The landlady did not lie, and never
Page 144 and 145: of whom only one was a non-Jew, a g
Page 146 and 147: The Grunwald trial had become the K
Page 148 and 149: Canaanite left, and the yearling of
Page 150 and 151: to shape a new Israeli generation t
Page 152 and 153: trial . . . he would use expression
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light to humanity. But they continu
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suspended daily, and not just to ev
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minister who came from “there,”
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CHAPTER 9
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“WHO REMEMBERS THE ARMENIAN HOLOC
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. . . an ideologue with firm belief
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Today we are armed to the teeth, be
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and Romanians. We would have shut o
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It turned out that the Dalai Lama,
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War II, an estimated half a million
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An empire without colonies launched
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So familiar and yet so far removed
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was the first governor of southwest
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mention other states, the Jewish wo
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square and deserted the universal h
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peoples’ holocausts. In a world i
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we raise our guests and force-feed
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CHAPTER 10
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JUDAISM IS A CIVILIZATION THAT IS T
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the Jewish Pantheon, namely in the
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dogma are the most dangerously viol
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His words express no condolences an
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most meaningful clash to take place
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Korah’s racism lacks the mechanis
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aka HaRambam. All of them belong to
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lecture, a professor stood up.“I
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The revolution that did not happen
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the deceitful war in Lebanon, for t
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and not in Le Monde, in French? His
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a new prayer book, a Siddur, in whi
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CHAPTER 11MAKE GOD SMILE AGAIN
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Does it really matter who is guilty
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Divine intervention did not come to
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enemy-brethren? My Shoah question i
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wept, and kept watch; but when the
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acceptance of those who were discri
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and impatient beliefs win over many
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Chinese tyranny.The sum total point
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—Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Sigmund
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and outlooks. It was not just a dif
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CHAPTER 12
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HOW MANY TIMES SHOULD A MAN DIE? H
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Israelis made a motion. So I starte
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innovation that included my sister
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heard this melody at any other home
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nations that do not know you and on
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I never made secret of my opinion t
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admissible. I am sorry, but this do
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prime minister with Germany’s pre
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only synagogue where the cantor Mei
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3. An official press release by Net
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6. Yehuda Elkana, “In Defense of
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INDEXAbraham, 107, 158, 178, 184, 2
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British Mandate of Palestine, 99-10
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faith, 206-9, 211, 213, 240Finkielk
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198, 203-16, 226, 231-3, 239; color
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Jonas, Hans, 205-6Jordan, 67, 82-3,
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Namibia, 161-5, 174Napoleon III, 52
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Rwanda, 86, 144, 151-2, 155, 158, 1
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Ukraine, 29, 32, 36, 74United Natio
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THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

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