Posted on 02/02/2025 3:58:30 AM PST by texas booster
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at frontpagemag.com ...
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.
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.
Leave it to Mr Greenfield to teach me things that should be obvious, but often need repeating.
Ping out to the Daniel Greenfield Ping! list.
As always, please FReepmail me if you want on or off the esteemed Daniel Greenfield ping list.
Daniel Greenfield's website: The Sultan Knish blog
Two books worth looking at are The Crimes of Stalin and another is Bloodlands.
Isa 66:8
Who hath heard such a thing? who hath seen such things? Shall the earth be made to bring forth in one day? or shall a nation be born at once? for as soon as Zion travailed, she brought forth her children.
The author doesn’t know the bible.
God allowed the holocaust to fulfill prophecy.
The next one to be fulfilled comes any day now... we just don’t know which one.
I think that he knows the Bible very well. Just not your understanding of it.
It has been true since Isaac, that the Jews are uniquely unable to discern who are their friends and who are enemies.
Stalin killed more Jews than Hitler. I don’t think he singled them out. It’s just that Stalin killed many times over as many people as Hitler. Stalin was no friend of Jews.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Stallin = Socialist Internationalism
Hitler = National Socialism
Both Socialists, but different kinds of Socialism
Both killed millions of their own people.
ping
“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.”
GUlags and exile to Birobidzhan was where Stalin was going to send them.
Interesting...
It doesn’t matter WHAT you call it- leftism, nazism, communism, the democrat party- hatred of Jews is older than the Roman Empire.
And it isn’t political.
>>> I think that he knows the Bible very well.
Based on what??? he never even mentions the bible in the article, let alone how the holocaust relates to biblical prophecy. Israel would NOT have even been considered to be reinstated as a sovereign state by the UN had it not been for the holocaust.
His OMISSION of biblical connections in the article makes my point obvious.
The Truth Arab Cultures and Liberal 'Elites' Hate To Hear...
I work with a young Jewish kid who has Democrat in his DNA.
After October 7 I said “You and your wife should buy a gun’’.
He said “We don’t believe in guns!’’
I said “Your enemies do’’.
He didn’t have anything to say to that.
Daniel Greenfield is not esteemed in any books I’ll be
reading. Israel is the only country in the history of
the world to be over-run, scattered across the globe,
abandoned their homeland only to be restored as a people
and a nation. And as predicted by Biblical prophecy - no?
Excellent reposte. Reminds me of the saying “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you”.
“Mein Kampf’’ is a very popular book in the Arab Middle East.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.