I'm a little uncomfortable posting this, but I noticed a comment to this post over at Sha! that sort of gave me a push. Andu writes:
. . . while the lefty nutjobs don't bother me much, the self loathing Jews are quire worrisome. I never realized how disconnected from Israel some Jews felt, and I'd forgotten such self-hatred still existed.
Oh, but it does. And in some of the most unlikely places.
A friend of my mother's teaches at UCSC (University of California at Santa Cruz), where she's been valiantly trying to organize lectures to counteract the wave of antisemitic and Israel bashing events on campus. It appears to be a thankless task. She's hopefully going to be publishing a detailed article on this shortly, and I'll link to it when it comes out. But I wanted to focus in on one speaker in particular, recently sponsored by the UCSC Women's Studies Department.
Hedy Epstein is an 80 year old Holocaust survivor. She was born in Freiberg (as was my own great-grandfather), and her family had lived in Germany for many generations. In 1939, Hedy went to England on a children's transport. According to her own account, "Hedy's parents had tried for many years to leave Germany as a family, but were unsuccessful, due to emigration restrictions in various countries around the world". So at the age of fourteen, she was sent away on a train with hundreds of other Jewish children -- the only way their parents knew to save them.
She never saw her family again. It appears that her parents both died in Auschwitz.
Today, Hedy is on the lecture circuit. She talks about the Holocaust and her own experiences and her work as a research analyst at the Nuremberg trials. And, as a proud member of the International Solidarity Movement, she talks about the injustice of the "occuption" of "Palestine," and of the persecution of palestinians by Israel. And of Israel's persecution of her, as well.
You can read some of Hedy's views on this subject here and here and here. Yes, she actually does make the mandatory comparisons between Israel and her own Nazi tormentors. She claims that it was her personal experience of injustice that led her down this path. She claims that she's fighting for peace and justice for all. She claims this, but of course the organization she works for and the agenda that she promotes advocate no such thing. Instead, they advocate the destruction of the one state in the world that, had it existed in 1939, would gladly and at any cost have welcomed her and her family.
So what is there to say about this? I've known many Holocaust survivors in my life. Most, if not all of them understandably have deep emotional scars that manifest in various obvious and not-so-obvious ways. Who am I to judge them? That's something I simply can't do.
But I can point out that people like Hedy Epstein continue to be victimized by their horrific experiences in a classic way. They find it more comfortable to identify with their persecutors than with their fellow victims. There seems to be a sort of empowerment that follows from declaring the Jews to be the oppressors for a change and someone else, anyone else, to be the victims. Regardless of the facts, the evidence, regardless of logic or reason. This is not the response of a rational, reasoning person.
Fortunately, such people are few and far between. But they're all too easy to exploit, and Hedy Epstein has made herself available for the worst sort of exploitation by people who only want to finish the work her parents' murderers began.
How incredibly sad.
