![]() ![]() People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present (Of course, they already are.) My husband’s grandfather once owned a bus company in Poland. I do not want my children to be someone else’s metaphor. And I find myself furious, being lectured by this exhibition about love-as if the murder of millions of people was actually a morality play, a bumper sticker, a metaphor. ![]() ![]() In the years since I walked through Auschwitz at fifteen, I have become a nagging mother. Then as now, Jews were cast in the role of civilization’s nagging mothers, loathed in life, and loved only once they are safely dead. It happened because entire societies abdicated responsibility for their own problems, and instead blamed them on the people who represented-have always represented, since they first introduced the idea of commandedness to the world-the thing they were most afraid of: responsibility. ![]() The Holocaust didn’t happen because of a lack of love. That the Holocaust drives home the importance of love is an idea, like the idea that Holocaust education prevents antisemitism, that seems entirely unobjectionable. Here it is the ultimate message, the final solution. “Love rarely comes up why would it? But it comes up here, in this for-profit exhibition. ![]()
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