Zany Misadventures in Identity Politics: Rosh Hashanah Edition

Yiddish new year postcard, circa 1910; reads “the sky has split!” (in the scroll) and in the storm cloud, “good things.” (via the Hidden Treasures project of the Board of Deputies of British Jews; from the collection of Doris Levinson)

We observed a new Hebrew calendar year, Rosh Hashanah, in this last Gregorian week of September 2022, hoping to be inscribed and sealed in the Book of Life for 5783.

While I am only about half an hour into the first episode of the Ken Burns PBS documentary The US and the Holocaust, I do not usually prefer to watch Holocaust movies. Having grown up on a headful of Holocaust curricula from my earliest years in Hebrew School, as important a lesson as it is, I do not enjoy burrowing into the images and narrative of Jews as civilization’s greatest victims. As a people, we have contributed way too much to have to dwell on our victimization or to rub their humiliation into the faces of the Gentile nations, mostly because resentment is an awful tincture that comes with a spite hangover. And it makes too many of us indifferent to stuff like the shooting of Palestinian kids, medics and reporters at the Gaza border, the West Bank and overall territories of the Palestinian Authority.

Yom HaShoah is the holiday during springtime in the Jewish calendar popularly translated from the Hebrew as “Holocaust Remembrance Day.” The literal translation of shoah is catastrophe, a much more accurate word to my taste. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines holocaust initially as “a sacrifice consumed by fire” and in the Oxford…