What have we really learned from the Holocaust? Was it of the suffering of European Jews? Or was it an evil that challenged moral complacency in the 20th century and reverberates even today? Is it a franchise for the state of Israel, Yad Vashem, or the Wiesenthal Center — or does anyone living have a right to invoke it for art or politics or ethics?
In the last week two news articles appeared which raised these questions.
One concerned a video that has gone viral, called “Dancing Auschwitz,” produced by Melbourne artist Jane Korman. The other was the posting, in Hebrew, of the message “Liberate all Ghettos” on a wall of the former Warsaw Ghetto by Israeli conscientious objector Yonatan Shapira, an Air Force pilot who created the 2003 “Pilot’s Letter” signed by 27 pilots who publicly refused to fly missions over the Palestinian territories.
Korman’s video, which features Korman’s father, an 89 year old survivor, and other family members dancing to Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” was warmly received in the local Melbourne Jewish press and the Orthodox Jewish world.
Shapira’s graffiti, on the other hand, was immediately slammed on the Jewish Telegraph Agency website, Yad Vashem, and YNet News. Noah Flug, chairman of the Center of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Jerusalem, called on Polish police to launch a criminal investigation and said, “Yonatan Shapira and his ilk disrespect the Holocaust and its heritage. His actions harm the commemoration of the Holocaust and hurt the feelings of the survivors and the memory of the victims, including his family members who were murdered by the Nazis.”
Flug’s representative message on Shapira’s political act — and his silence on Korman’s video — make it clear that as long as the Holocaust is invoked in a way that does not stray from Jewish territory, it’s OK. But as soon as the messages of the Holocaust begin to be applied universally, they are condemned.
I have watched Korman’s video a half dozen times, and each time I find myself crying. Tears for both the absolute evil and the resilience and hope of the human race. It is edgy, but Korman’s message is precisely about these themes. While I did not have an emotional response to Shapira’s message, it was equally daring and timely, and — with the message in Hebrew — a challenge to Jews to internalize the universal message of the Shoah.
I applaud both Korman and Shapira.
In one of the segments of Korman’s video, we are reminded of the absolute universality of the Holocaust. “Lo tir tzakh” (“Thou shalt not kill”) appears in front of the dancing family. In Shapiro’s graffiti, the universal again appears in the message: “Free all ghettos.”
The real messages of the Holocaust, whether in art or politics, will continue to resonate with anyone on earth who has endured persecution. Survival and liberation belong to us all.
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