THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

gap between my father’s world and mine and my children’s. My father was fortysevenwhen I was born, undoubtedly older than usual but not rare. But his biologicalage was less significant than the cultural, mental, intangible divide between ourworlds. Nowadays, youth can last forever. We can carry on wearing blue jeans,sneakers, and listening to rock music, stretching our teenage years well into middleage. On the other side, maturity begins much younger, with earlier puberty and sexualbehavior, with earlier consumption and materialism; children in their early teenageyears do things that no one imagined just a few years ago. In our times, theintergenerational gap between me and my father would not be daunting. But at thetime it was an unfathomable difference because Dad was born three world ordersbefore me. He was born in the first decade of the twentieth century and, as a child,lived in a world based on the structures, traditions, and orders of the nineteenthcentury. That century really lasted until 1914, when my father was just a first-grader.Between the end of the Great War and the start of World War II, he was a teenagerand a young man, the son of a well-to-do Jewish family in the Weimar Republic untilit crumbled with Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. My father stayed in Germany until thelast possible moment, emigrating to Israel at the very last second. He watched withhis own eyes, helplessly, the destruction of his beloved Europe, his Jewish Europe inparticular. He witnessed the Return to Zion when he was one of the 120 electedrepresentatives of the First Knesset, the Israeli parliament. He died just a few yearsbefore the third millennium. He could be described as a man who was born into aworld that followed the laws of the nineteenth century; he lived through the two worldorders of the twentieth century, the one before the Nazis and the one of theiraftermath—three world orders all together.By contrast, I was born after the state of Israel was founded. My coming of ageoccurred between two wars—the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War—and mostof my life has been and still is lived in the nightmarish present of an imperial Israel, theIsrael of the seventh day.In the legendary decade of the 1960s, many genies were let out of their bottles,and it is still unclear if they can be returned. In those years cracks formed thatbecame chasms between us and our parents, between us and ourselves and betweenus and many of our peers in the world. In the sixties, Israel started to sever itselffrom the legacy of its founders, the old-time members of Mapai, the Israeli Laborers’Party. A new cadre of professionals and politicians began their ascent to power and