THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

lecture, a professor stood up.“I agree with you in theory,” he said, “but in reality, it would be very difficult. Whatwould I do if my son brings home a gentile woman? I am secular, but it is difficult forme.”I pondered for a moment whether to dodge the subject or inflame the discussion. Idecided to inflame it.“I don’t think that our generation’s choice is linear and one-dimensional, as was thedecision of our parents and elders,” I said. “In the past, such a decision was binary,either a goy or a Jew, a shikse or a yiddene. Your choice today is much more difficultand sophisticated. What do you prefer, that your son marry a gentile woman or aJewish man?”It took the professor a long moment to contemplate the alternative, but then helowered his head and said, “A Jewish homosexual is preferable to a gentile bride.”For me, it is important that the person that my child marries is good, ethical andmoral. I don’t care whether he or she is a Jew or a gentile, homosexual orheterosexual. My standard is goodness and morality, not a person’s origins or sexualpreferences. But many others differ. Their basic instinct was programmed differently.For the blue-collar worker as well as the professor, the hierarchy is obvious: a Jew,whether male or female, straight or gay, is preferable to any gentile whatever he orshe is.Purists will say that racism does not exist among ordinary people. “Am I a racist?”they would demand defensively. “Only yesterday I had hummus in an Arab restaurantin an Arab village.” There are many slogans and technical denials of this type.Nevertheless, I believe that racism is rampant. I have many times been party to suchconversations, which stressed cooperation between Israelis and Arabs as proof ofbrotherly love, but reality continues to defy them. True, we are not like Germany atthe war’s end and at the height of the Final Solution. But we are somewhere veryclose to the first stages of humanistic and cultural Germany’s implosion in the face ofHitler and his henchmen, whose National Socialism shredded everything good andbeautiful in what had been Germany. To my great sorrow and pain, I cannot alwaysdistinguish between the early Social Nationalism and some national theories of hereand now.Germany’s moral immunity has been investigated and described in detail, but very