The Holocaust Didn’t Really Change Anything

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.

Source: http://www.danielgreenfield.org/feeds/6056044450859160434/comments/default