Peloni: Excellent article!
The real lessons are those we still haven’t learned.
By Daniel Greenfield | Jan 31, 2025
Philosophers, writers and thinkers insisted that the Holocaust was an inflection point in history, but it’s clearer now than ever before that it did not change history, it only accelerated it.
Israel was not, as politicians all too often insist, “born out of the ashes of the Holocaust.” It was born out of the blood, sweat and determination of a relatively small group of Zionists who defied the traditionalists and leftists in their own communities to go and rebuild their own homeland.
Liberal Jews have made “If you will it, it is no dream” into an airy cliche when it was actually meant as a hard wake up call to a European Jewry that had spent too long living in dreams. Even after the Holocaust brought an iron end to many of those dreams, they still linger on.
Nor did the Holocaust secure political support for Israel. How could it when it did not even secure the ability of European Jews to flee to America or even to their homeland in Israel? The politicians and nations who voted at the UN to recognize Israel did so for varying reasons, Truman was facing a difficult election and the USSR wanted to undermine the UK, and the closest the Holocaust entered into it was the hope that a homeland would keep the Jewish refugees who could not return back to Poland lest they be murdered from moving elsewhere.
The Holocaust killed a lot of Jews and produced a rich body of literature, memoirs and historic works, but it did little to alter the trajectory that the Jewish people had already been on.
If the Nazis and their local collaborators had not exterminated the Jews of Eastern Europe with mass graves and death camps, the Communists would have done it with gulags and bans on Judaism. Jewish life under Communism was ultimately as unsustainable as under Nazism.
The religious centers of Jewish life would have inevitably shifted to America and Israel, and the secular ones to America and Western Europe. The Islamic colonization of Western Europe would have put paid to Jewish life in Western Europe even if the Holocaust had not happened. And in America the growing political radicalization is making Jewish secular life unworkable.
The post-Holocaust myth of a new tolerance has been dying by the death of a thousand cuts and the worship of diversity and civil rights peddled by Jewish leftists is a major factor. Even while Abraham Joshua Heschel, in the pivotal ‘spiritual’ moment of Reform Judaism, marched with MLK, Jewish shopkeepers were having their windows smashed by antisemitic black mobs.
If Reform Judaism were to have a future, it would have put up pictures of those smashed windows in its temples instead of the photos of Heschel with MLK now taking their pride of place alongside rainbow colored magen davids and posters about defending illegal alien migrants.
But the Holocaust did not actually change how Western Jews thought about anything.
Liberal Jews became more liberal. Traditionalist Jews became more traditionalist. And the Jews of Israel alternated between winning wars against Jihadist armies and trying to get along with them. If it had been up to European Ashkenazi Jews, Israel would have carved itself up into pieces by now. It’s mostly the doing of the Middle Eastern Sefardi Jews and the Religious Zionists, who combine traditionalism with a commitment to holding the land, that it has not.
Middle Eastern Jews for the most part did not experience the Holocaust. They did not need to. Instead they lived through over a thousand years of Muslim oppression and ethnic cleansing. And they understand what the Holocaust did not seem to have taught much of Western Jewry.
The latest International Holocaust Remembrance Day was marked by articles noting the small number of living Holocaust survivors, examinations of more movies about the Holocaust, the narratives of ‘third generation’ descendants of survivors and other such absurdities all while the world’s largest Jewish population has been fighting for its survival every single day last year.
It’s as if American Jews had spent the 1940s commemorating the Chmelnitsky Massacres while hardly paying attention to what was happening to the Jews in Germany and Poland.
The day was also marked by a pregnant Jewish woman being dragged out of a ‘Holocaust’ event at which the President of Ireland expressed his sympathies for the current mass killers of Jews. Some leaders in the Irish Jewish community condemned her instead of the pro-genocide president. Other ceremonies marking the official UN designated day were equally terrible.
To meaningfully commemorate a tragedy as more than a loss of life, you have to ask what it means. And rather than coming up with any new answers, the various strands of Jewish communities looked at the Holocaust and saw what they had seen all along. They doubled down on what they had been doing before, good or bad, and worked the Holocaust into it.
And so the Holocaust didn’t really change anything.
It took parents from children and children from parents. It wiped out families, villages, traditions and entire ways of life, but it didn’t change the fundamental adaptability of the Jewish people.
But what is true on a communal level isn’t true on an individual level.
I lost over 50 members of my family in the Holocaust (and others to Communist brutality). From a very young age, I understood that the worst was possible and complacency was never an option. I have a young daughter because my father-in-law, while looking at a Jewish cemetery in Eastern Europe decided that he would not allow Jewish history to die in that place.
The Holocaust was not the first mass murder of Jews and, as Oct 7 reminds us, not the last.
What death ought to teach us is how to live. And how to survive in the face of certain death. The greatest challenge for the Jewish people remains complacency in the face of evil. If that is to change, the momentum will not come from leaders or organizations, but from individuals who see the threat. Death, no matter how vast or brutal, alone will not change complacency into awakening. To wake up, we must remember who we are. That is what Zionism at its best did by allowing us to imagine ourselves as more than the fallen state we had been reduced to.
The Holocaust could not change who we are. Only we can change ourselves.
We’ve been through all this before. The Ashkenazim started the Alliyah at the end of the 1800’s and were more or less established in Palestine by the beginning of WW2. After WW2, the British backed out and did their best to create a situation where the Arabs would solve the Jewish problem. When that didn’t work out (war of independence in 1948-9) the Jews in now Israel were able to assist the Mizrachim to migrate (also an Alliyah). There is a lot more to tell about these stories but that is not the subject of the article. The Shoah (Holocaust) stopped the Alliyah from Europe and the British did their best to make sure that none of those who escaped Hitler’s regime actually got to Palestine. That is the world we live in!
Much of this is correct but it has a post 1945 MacCarthyist sneer and fear of “leftism” which ignores that there were two sorts of Socialist Jews – the Zionists and the “Bundists” in shorthand, for those who stayed in the Diaspora and at least voted Socialist.
Besides in a very hard economic context remember that as many as half of the first two aliyot returned or went on to the US including Imber the creator of “HaTikvah”. Do have the consideration for people in hard times as in Tennysons line: “But the sailors made reply,
“We have children we have wives
And the Lord has spared our lives.” People are usually cautious to hang on to the bird in hand rather than pursue the bird in bush – which makes the original pioneers – chalutzim – all the greater even of a bit fanatical given the underdevelopment and even when a degree of success was achieved it was not easy in the 1948 – 51 aliyah of the Shoah survivors and Jews from Arab lands to take in and provide for all. The population doubled in two years and some of the scars still show. Taking in the ex-Soviet Jews was a matter of adding an extra quarter to the population in a country that already had physical infrastructure – roads water power flats, and social infrastructure – schools and clinics and an economy.
For most of the 19th century certainly in Tsarist lands and after 1919 its successors, there was still a struggle for the rights of Man and the Bill of Rights or the British Chartists Charter. None of these were to be taken for granted as in the US and even there votes for women and Miranda rights had to be fought for. Remember too that most Zionism was pushed till Israel could make a visible success of itself as now. In the circumstances of putting together a society in a small underdevelopment, it was socialism that for two generations gave a template of practical togetherness to create a practical society which traditional synagogue religion could not. Finally never forget that the Green Line of the 1949 four armistices – runs where there were kibbutzim and moshavim to hang it on. If we wish to encourage the rising generation of college age young adults to make aliyah then they could finance themselves like the Palmach trained and worked on kibbutzim in alternating fortnights – but as students work a year on a kibbutz or moshav to learn Hebrew and in the vacations to pay the rent between college terms which are cheaper fees than in the US and Europe.
Are Ashkenazi Jews the new favorite prey?
Ashkenazi Jews created the state, saved it in 1948, and brought in almost a million Mizrachim.
If Mizrachim and the National Religious are such great Zionists, where is aliyah and settlement, the two hallmarks of Zionism?
I detest the efforts (they are multiplying online) to smear Ashkenazi Jews by implying that their role in building of the Jewish state was minimal and all of them were so-called “leftist”, both of which are LIES.
Some people cannot live without applying the divide-and-rule technique to everything and everyone, a human being cannot be defined by a label.
We need to be united, now more than ever, rather than divided.
The Jews of Eastern Europe were NOT totally exterminated – the ones who were evacuated to the East of the accursed $U survived – 2 million of them including some Polish Jews.
Moreover, if the accursed you-know-who lost the war instead of defeating Nazi Germany at the cost of 27 million lives (including the Jews who remained in the occupied territories), we wouldn’t be discussing anything now because Jews would no longer exist.
To find out how “eager” the US and Great Britain to save the doomed Jews of Europe read:
The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust David S. Wyman
Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis 1938-1941 David S. Wyman
Most of this is correct but it has a a typically post 1945 “MacCarthyist” (?) anti- “leftist” hobbyhorse.
Before the Shoah there were two sorts of socialist Jews. The Zionist socialists who eventually planted over 240 kibbutzim and created the Histadrut and with it several major Israeli combines even if no longer part of their founding organisation. In 1948 – ’67 the de facto Israeli borders of the Green Line of the 1949 armistices hung on the kvutzot and kibbutzim put down by the socialist inspiration that the new Jewish state would be more humane than just another industrial jungle.
Secondly there were the Jews who like most of their neigbours faced with the new urban industrial life looked to Socialism to redress the balance against the unabashed capitalism of the first waves of industrial development and its robber barons which took for granted and neglected the non- commercial spaces that are all the same needed to run a humane society. If you read the articles of the British “People’s Charter” and the ten points of the Marx Engels Manifesto you might be surprised to learn that the 19th century had to fight for: school for children instead of 12 hours factory labour; votes for each adult man; let alone women; income tax and national co-ordination of communications and banking were all – in some places still are – not to be taken for granted. Admittedly property is still disputed when it is so great it defeats elected authorities but by and large for most of the last two centuries it was socialists who tried to even out the inequalites in a context where across most of Europe – definitely in the Tsarist Empire and its successors – the US Bill of Rights and the French Rights of Man were treated as rebelliously subversive.
That takes us back to why so many did NOT go on aliyah before the Shoah or since. People tend to keep the bird in hand rather than risk the two in the bush. Remember Tennyson’s line, “But the sailors made reply?
We have children , we have wives/
And the Lord has spared our lives.” If life is hard and you are not actually being attacked you tend to stay with what you hold rather than risk starting again from scratch – Till you are pushed or taken by prescient family.
Daniel Greenfield is correct to refer back to the pioneers of the early aliyot who were ideologically committed and a bit fanatical but given the underdevelopment of the time justifiably so. We forget that a large proportion of the early aliyot returned or went on to the US because of the hardships of HaAretz including Imber who wrote Hatikvah. Yerida has happened also in the 50’s and after YK 73. Quite a few of the ex-Soviet olim also went to the US – Brooklyn Beach(?). On balance those Israelis who settle in and make it for themselves and children are in every way justifiably proud and a bit brash – but warm and cuddly even when your Hebrew is still rough hewn.
Let us hope that the project of the current Israeli government to prepare for a large Aliyah succeeds. One way would be to invite the college generation to come to study in Israel – pay for it by working on a kibbutz or Moshav to learn Hebrew and have a base in the country if you do not already have relatives there.
This article by Greenfield is rambling, without any real point, and it ends up in its whole being an attack on the Jews of the real world.
The article by Greenfield, and even though he thinks he is rescuing Jews, is a severe attack on Jews, because since he’s rooted in capitalism he leads only in the direction of another Holocaust.
And it is full of the most basic of errors.
He has taken to labelling Stalinism as “Communism” which is a lie of gigantic proportions.
And much else.