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Nov. 20, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: How to make every second of your life come first
Caroline B. Glick: Whither American Jewry
Nov. 19, 2009
Binyamin L. Jolkovsky: Please Listen to this Godcast (5 minutes)
Jonathan Tobin: ADL Crosses the Line with Report Bashing Obama Critics
Nov. 18, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: What Judaism has to say about the secret of the Mona Lisa's smile
JWisdom.com: The (Jewish) Dating Game with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (8 minutes)
Nov. 17, 2009
Steven Emerson: How Does the 4th Amendment Impact Terror Finance Investigations?
JWisdom.com: If Frank Sinatra married Edith Piaf with Rabbi Y.Y. Rubinstein (2 minutes) Life lessons from what would be regarded as the most inappropriate lyrics ever sung
Nov. 16, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : When borrowing is stealing
JWisdom.com: Deconstructing faith with Rabbi Warren Goldstein (9 minutes)
Nov. 13, 2009
JWisdom.com Sarah's subjective reality with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 6 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick: Obama's failure, Netanyahu's opportunity
Nov. 12, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet By Marialisa Calta : A sweet sweet potato treat
JWisdom.com Does God get tired? with Rabbi Harvey Belovski ( 5 minutes)
Nov. 11, 2009
Rabbi Avi Shafran: Jews and money: When anti-Semitism isn't
JWisdom.com Marriages are not made in Heaven with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (VERY fast 15 minutes)
Nov. 10, 2009
Michael Doyle: Author of book exposing CAIR ordered to remove supporting documents from Web
JWisdom.com If the creation so loudly shouts the existence of the Creator, why aren't more people believers? with Rabbi Naftali Brawer (9 minutes)
Nov. 9, 2009
Mark Steyn: Shooter exposes hole in U.S. terror strategy
JWisdom.com It's never too late to have a happy childhood with Sarah Chana Radcliffe (5 minutes)
Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review March 7, 2005 / 26 Adar I, 5765

This memory must never fade

By Leonard Pitts, Jr.


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Dear Ariana Schanzer:


I hope you won't mind being called out like this. It's just that I saw your picture in The Miami Herald and it made me want to talk to you. In the photo, you're smiling a giddy smile, dancing cheek to cheek with this equally delighted older man who looks to be about 60 but who is, the caption tells us, actually 90 years old. Which makes your grandfather, Samuel Schanzer, exactly 80 years older than you.


It would have been a touching image under any circumstances, but the thing that made it stand out for me is that it was taken at a reunion of Holocaust survivors. It occurred to me, Ariana, that you are a blessing your grandfather would have found too absurdly wonderful to hope for back when he was young and the world was burning down around him. You are a miracle he would not have known how to dream.


I'm certain he understands how lucky he is. I'm hoping that you, even at your tender age, understand, too. And that you will cherish the gift of these years you have with him.


Not just because he is your grandfather, but also because it is important that his story survives him and is passed to generations not yet born.


I'm concerned about what has become of the Holocaust in recent years, Ariana. It's not just the people who deny it ever happened that I refer to, though heaven knows that bunch is scary enough. To the degree anyone can erode the hard edge of historical certainty, to the degree the Holocaust can be made a "controversy," they spit on ashes and bones and make themselves thieves of legacy.


Still, I think the clearer and more present danger isn't those who deny the Holocaust but, rather, those who trivialize it, who make it a thing undeserving of our reverence. I'm thinking of the people who opened a disco a few years ago near — or possibly in — one of the outbuildings of Auschwitz. And of a painting that made headlines in 2002 because it depicts a man standing among a bunch of death camp Jews holding up a can of Diet Coke. And of a cartoon a student magazine ran last year. It showed a bearded man sitting on the edge of an open kitchen stove. The caption read, " Knock a Jew In The Oven! Three Throws For a Dollar." The headline said, " Holocaust Remembrance Week."


And I'm thinking of the people who say they don't care about the Holocaust because it happened to other people in other places at another time.


We have these delusions about history, Ariana. We tend to regard it as a closed book. We like to insulate ourselves from its atrocities and injustices, to say that, yes, those were awful things, but they were done by unenlightened people in an unenlightened era, so they have nothing to do with us, here, now. Slavery, lynchings, the mass murder of people whose only offense is difference ... these things could never happen again, we say.


But Ariana, that's foolish. Did you know that there is slavery right now, this minute, in Mali? Did you know a man was lynched in Texas seven years ago because he was black? And mass murder has never left us. In just the last few years, we have seen it in Rwanda, in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Sudan — people still killing for the offense of difference.


So we owe it to your grandfather — and mine — to stand in the gap for them, to tell their stories when they no longer can. And to shatter the self-satisfied smugness that allows some of us to believe the past is finished business. As a writer named William Faulkner once pointed out, the past isn't even past.


Remember that when people try to make the Holocaust abstract, Ariana. Remember, when they try to make it absurd. Remember the warmth of your grandfather's cheek against yours, remember how small your hand was in his.


Remember, and pass it on.

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