ZACHOR (REMEMBER)

Today is Yom Ha Shoah - Holocaust Rememberance Day. It is a day that of course leaves me with mixed emotions, and many unanswered questions. How to untangle the "lessons" of the Holocaust. How to remember a universal tragedy that the starkest example of the potential of humans for evil, and yet a particular tragedy that was directed with unique fury at the Jewish people, that snuffed out Jewish life through the majority of Europe. I for one find the universalist/particularist debate to be mostly futile. The Holocaust needs to be remembered, understood and even a pale replica of it guarded against by all decent human beings; that does not mean that Jews should cease being vigilant in their own self-defense, or that Jews do not have a unique role as witnesses to speak out against genocide against any group. There is another linkage between the universal and particular aspects of the Holocaust - the Jews are the canary in the coal mine of civilization. A society racked with hatred of the Jews is a society low on moral oxygen, and a scourage to all free men and women. We all must work together to build socieities more like the Golden Age of Islamic Spain, the great city of Amsterdam and the United States, and less like the Inquisition's Spain, Nazi Germany, and the current despotic regimes of the Islamic world.

On the misuses of the Holocaust rhetoric in the conflicts of the Middle East, read here.