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Silent danger
Being Jewish in a perilous time
BY DANA KLETTER

IT’S A TROUBLING time to be a Jew. I know there have been times far more dangerous than these, but at moments I feel like I’m living in a perilous miasmic state. There was the day I came out of the Park Street T station to join fellow anti-war protesters on Boston Common only to be greeted by a man holding a sign that said STOP THE WAR above a Star of David connected to a swastika with an equal sign. Or the day I was driving down Prospect Street, awfully late for work, when someone in a brand-spanking-new Range Rover swung out in front of my car, giving me a terrifyingly close look at the homemade NO WAR FOR ZIONIST IMPERIALISM sign in the SUV’s back window. Then he tossed his ponytailed head, passed the car ahead of me on the right, and roared on into the depths of Cambridgeport.

But it’s been while working with a volunteer group that helps plan an annual Holocaust commemorative program that I have had my most uneasy moments as a Jew. I have avoided these commemorative things all my life, not because I see them as superfluous or morbid — I actually see them as serving an important ecumenical cathartic purpose. But I grew up in a house with two people who survived Auschwitz, and that’s the real reason I evade memorials. The memory of my family’s enslavement and torture absorbed us all. My profoundly damaged mother and grandmother were never at peace. Their terror and anger and irreconcilable sorrow pervaded everything. But despite a persistent struggle to keep the Holocaust out of my life, it is present every day. Once you know, you can never un-know.

When I moved to Boston in 2001 and got a job in a Jewish school, I began to learn what it was like to inhabit the cycle of observances and holy days. It became a kind of antidote for me, learning to live a Jewish life rather than a Jewish death. I broke my own rule about memorial events last year when I sang a song at the Cambridge Peace Commission’s Holocaust Commemoration. I worried about having an embarrassing emotional meltdown, but nothing happened. I sang my song. I sat down. And when the rabbi I work for asked if I would represent our community in the planning of this year’s commemoration, I said I would.

But in the meetings to plan the Holocaust commemorative ceremony, which will take place at Cambridge’s Temple Beth Shalom in April, I have been struck by how careful we all are. We, a mixed group of Christians, Jews, civil servants, and activists, must not say "Israel" or "Zionism," because these words have become incendiary, evidence of how the Jews exploit their misfortune. "The ruthless exploitation of the Holocaust," as they say in the Guardian, the Nation, and CounterPunch — once the mainstays of my news reading — is something we must be on the lookout for. No one mentions that this same cliché also appears in the White Power publications of Stormfront and the National Alliance.

We walk a fine line, self-consciously monitoring ourselves and each other in case someone appears to feel too keenly like a victim, or the proceedings become too infused with Jewishness and thus inexplicable or alienating or, worst of all, exclusive (that old complaint that dogs us into a new century). So we are expansive in our inclusiveness. We give away great and incommensurate portions to all victims of persecution, because we don’t want to be accused of arrogance or self-indulgence or competitive suffering. Six candles sit on the altar. Perhaps once they each represented a lost million. Now they are meted out to others who suffered under the Nazis’ brutal regime. A single candle is left to light for the Jews.

But this is a Holocaust commemoration. "Holocaust" means "burnt offering," and that is what the Jews were in the Nazi death camps, from the gas to the ovens to the smoke up the chimney. If Americans should have a national day of mourning for our crimes against the enslaved African — and I do think we should — I would not expect to use that day also to commemorate the indentured servitude of the Irish or the exploitation of immigrant coal miners. It would be a day to meditate on the systematic destruction of a free people and their thousand-year-old culture. Yet as we work to commemorate the dire consequences of intolerance and prejudice for the Jewish people, we are hampered by a fear of being too obvious about it.

There is a theory that what makes Jews — a various and miscellaneous group distinguished neither by racial features nor national boundaries — Jewish, is the power and pattern of collective liturgical memory. With no centralized authority, no Vatican, no Mecca, and no emphasis on an afterlife, memory has served as our sacred site. In the theater of memory, the Jewish narrative begins with the story of Abraham and culminates in the future hope of redemption. Events along the way, both good and bad, have been assimilated into the story, codified, the great historian Yosef Yerushalmi says, so that they may be a part of the continuum, the movement toward redemption.

In this context the Holocaust might have become another part of the story, except that it changed everything. How much further off redemption seems when there is no prescription for assimilating this catastrophe. Complicating this is the fact that the Holocaust seems to be the one sphere where our memories are being appropriated from us, as if we cannot be trusted to wield these powerful images. We are warned against the temptation to view our tradition through the distorting lens of the Holocaust, as if that were really the problem with genocide. But that’s not the problem. "The problem with Auschwitz," Imre Kertész says, "is that it happened. And now it will never not happen."

Those signs I saw on Boston Common and on the Range Rover speeding down Prospect Street articulate a blatant anti-Jewishness I’ve rarely seen before. The most disturbing sign that it’s a precarious time to be a Jew, however, is my own self-censorship. My careful utterances at the Holocaust-commemoration planning meetings tell me all I need to know about how endangered I really feel.

Dana Kletter is a musician and writer who lives in Cambridge.


Issue Date: March 26 - April 1, 2004
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