Seize your Heritage, Not your Tragedy
The men pictured here are not Germans, but Hungarians of the Arrow Cross Party, yet they shared the same goal. Our goal should be to show that we've moved beyond them. After 72 years it's time we the Jewish people acknowledged the rest of our heritage, and not just the Holocaust. This morning I saw a Facebook post from my best friend from my Israeli Army service, and it was a rant about how the media there in Israel focuses obsessively on the personality of Adolf Hitler and on the sheer madness that allowed him to pull the wool over the eyes of the German people. He disputed that, claiming that in truth the German people had been intrinsically anti-Jewish irrespective of Hitler. To me it was a surreal experience to discover that today is Holocaust Memorial Day (as it is observed in Israel), but it completely slipped my attention. As a person that went to a Jewish middle school and lived in two different households that were Jewish (though vastly different in ou...