We’re going to party like it’s 1939
My old boss at CLAL, Rabbi Irwin Kula (I know, where haven’t I worked? There’s a fine line between an extensive c.v. and an inability to hold a job) has written an interesting take on Inglourious Basterds for the Huffington Post. He calls it the one Holocaust story “we have been afraid to tell about ourselves: the story of what we would really like to do to those Nazis”:
Invited to stare into the Face of Vengeance and admit and own we even enjoyed the killing, maybe we can begin to heal and realize the innocence of suffering can never be redeemed by the exercise of power. For if we could do anything we wanted to anyone to make things right, what would we do that could make things right? The suffering of the Nazis’ millions of victims can never be fully set right – that is the difference between reality and fantasy — and to think anything to the contrary leaves a world in which the only people standing are a branded Nazi and a couple of Basterds.
Thank you, Quentin Tarantino. You have reminded us, whether you intended to or not, that we are never as powerful as our greatest fantasies and never as powerless as our worst nightmares.
Reading Irwin’s piece reminded me of something a friend said when she heard my daughter was to celebrate her bat mitzva on Nov. 9: ”I think that’s so cool that you are doing it on Kristallnacht,” she said. I thought she was kidding, but she wasn’t: She explained how wonderful it is to see 60 Jewish kids singing and dancing on the anniversary of a day the Nazis’ intended to mark as the beginning of the annihilation of the Jews.
Since no act of violence, real or imagined, will bring back the Shoa’s victims, the kind of revenge that speaks to me is in creating Jewish life — Fackenheim’s 614th commandment. A vibrant, pulsing Jewish community, whether in Tel Aviv or the Upper West Side, is my kind of revenge. Carving swastikas into the heads of cartoon Nazis, not so much.
JustASC is written by Andrew Silow-Carroll, Editor-in-Chief of the 