WALL STREET JOURNAL
by Matti Friedman
August 9, 2015

The idea that a collective memory of the Holocaust renders Jewish judgment defective is somehow acceptable these days.

Ah, Israel/Palestine, where thinking Westerners go to play! How many people with an advanced degree in the humanities can resist fiddling with competing national narratives of victimhood? The stakes—peace, no less—give the whole thing a frisson of importance lacking in so many other parts of intellectual life. How fortunate the world is to have the Holy Land, without which everyone might have to grapple with the baffling nature of the entire planet or the dreary failures of their own societies…The “bonding, primal element” of the Jewish psyche, we learn, is the Holocaust. Israelis are in thrall to weapons because of the Holocaust; they are obtuse to the suffering of others because of the Holocaust; and in general they are sort of crazy because of the Holocaust. Actually, half of the Jewish population in Israel has roots in the Islamic world. Their families were displaced by Muslims, not Nazis. Israelis think many of their neighbors are out to destroy Israel not because of the Holocaust, but because many of their neighbors say they are out to destroy Israel…READ MORE