Raz segal: Anger, Apologies, and a Future Beyond Jewish Exceptionalism
Yom Kippur 5785
Oct 12, 2024
My name is Raz Segal. I am a member of Kol Tzedek. I’m a scholar of Jewish history, the Holocaust, and modern mass violence. I’m a Jew, an American, and I grew up in Israel. I have lived in Philadelphia for the past eight years. And I am grateful for the opportunity to share a Dvar Torah this Yom Kippur.
----
This past summer, I had a massive flight with my parents. I was in Warsaw with my partner and our daughter, while my partner was conducting research for her book project. My parents came to visit us from Israel. We were at the dining table in our apartment. I don’t quite remember how it began, just that we stumbled into an exchange about the arrest in Israel of renowned Palestinian professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a scholar who has written several books on Israeli state violence and has, until very recently, worked and taught for decades at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Nadera has expressed many times, well before October 7th, her strong opposition to a Jewish supremacist regime, based on a settler colonial project that envisions the removal and erasure of Palestinians from their homeland, a violent project ongoing, in various ways, for decades since 1948, what Palestinians call an ongoing Nakba. Since October 7th, Nadrea has talked publicly about her view of the current stage of this process — the Israeli genocidal assault on Gaza.
In mid-April, following months of intimidation, harassment, and threats, including by the leaders of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Nadera was arrested and abused by the Israeli police— an event that shocked many in the academic world, in Israel and elsewhere. Not my parents, though, who suggested that it is unlikely, in their view, that Nadera was abused during her arrest and that she is probably lying. Without noticing the contradiction, they also insinuated that she probably deserved what happened to her.
Many Israeli Jews and many supporters of Israel around the world resort to this combination of denial and justification of violence—denying, for instance, the 1948 Nakba while calling, after October 7th (and also before), for a “second Nakba.” This sentiment, especially in Israel, angers me in a particularly intense way, as it stems, in my mind, from the same kind of motivation of Holocaust denial: the silencing and erasure of the voices of victims and survivors. As my parents waved away Nadera’s terrible experiences, these connections raced in my head—and I blew up.
It was bad. Very bad. I shouted, and I said some things that I should not have said. My parents seemed surprised, though this was not, of course, the first time we had clashed in such circumstances. It all lasted for just a couple minutes, and it was not long before they left to return to their hotel room. I then sat next to my daughter in her room and apologized: I had promised her before my parents’ visit that this, exactly this, would not happen.
Two months have passed now, and I have yet to apologize to my parents.
I imagine that some of you here in this room and online can tell such a story as well. It is clear that Israel’s assault on Gaza this past year has given rise to an unprecedented rupture in the Jewish world, bringing decades-long friendships to abrupt and painful endings and tearing at the fabric of families and communities.
This is, of course, not the first crisis in the Jewish world, but this time differs in one significant aspect from this long history of Jews vehemently, at times violently, disagreeing with each other. This time it is the late modern dogma of nationalism, of the nation state, that is now, paradoxically, driving us apart, arguably like never before.
What I have come to understand is that it was nationalism that was at the root of the destruction of Jews and Jewish communities in World War II. After the war, the victors — especially the western victors, the people who made our world — who were themselves nationalists, had a strong incentive to blur this reality by imagining the Nazis and their violence as a unique evil, unlike anything else. But the Holocaust was, terribly, very much NOT a unique evil in the sense that it was very much rooted in the contexts in which it happened, specifically nationalism and the nation-state system, a political framework that continues to structure the world to this day. And insofar as Jews have embraced nationalism --- and the Israeli nation state as it was founded in 1948 --- it has led us to a catastrophic place.
This move, to render the Holocaust unique in order to blur the place of nationalism in Nazism and Nazi violence, also fits a common view in the west about Jews as unique, a people at the core of the Judeo-Christian civilization that the Nazis wanted to destroy and create instead a Nazi world. We should remember that Mordechai Kaplan and Reconstructionism whole-heartedly reject this view of Jews as a unique people.
Some Holocaust survivors also challenged this idea of uniqueness in their accounts. Let me give you one example from my current research. Miriam Shavit was born in the town of Drama in northern Greece in 1919. In her testimony for Yad Vashem (the central Israeli Holocaust commemoration and education institute) in 1987, in Hebrew, she remembered clearly the Bulgarian occupation of her town in April 1941. Bulgaria occupied the entire region, western Thrace, as part of its alliance with Nazi Germany in the attack and destruction of neighboring Yugoslavia and Greece in spring 1941. Bulgaria’s leaders saw western Thrace as an integral part of the ethno-national “Greater Bulgaria” that they envisioned. Miriam remembered that the Bulgarian occupiers quickly demonstrated what “Greater Bulgaria” meant for anyone they identified as beyond the boundaries of the Bulgarian nation. They immediately arrested and imprisoned large numbers of Greeks on the pretext that they were partisans; today they would be called terrorists. “The jail was full,” she recalled. The new rulers also created an atmosphere of terror: “on the gate to the police station, they hung a person’s head,” she explained. The situation deteriorated sharply in September 1941, in the context of a Greek uprising in the area against Bulgarian oppression and violence. In response, the Bulgarian occupiers announced a curfew, and “Bulgarian soldiers were shooting outside.” “They then entered houses and took away young people ... they were looking for Greeks, of course, but caught some Jews as well. ... they killed 10,000 people ... all the streets were full of blood.” The Jews whom Miriam mentioned were actually identified by the Bulgarian occupiers as Greeks, according to language. Miriam noted 10,000 victims most likely as a way to stress the magnitude of the crime; in reality, the Bulgarian soldiers killed around 5,000 people in the massacre.
Miriam, however, stressed even more the magnitude of the event by describing it as “our black Yom Kippur.” Yom Kippur coincided with the massacre that month, but almost all the victims, as Miriam reported, were not Jews. I have encountered this sort of language in other testimonies of Jewish survivors, their use of words referencing Jewish history to describe nationalist state violence against non-Jews, including the use of terms like “pogrom” and “churban,” the Hebrew- and Yiddish-language word still used in Jewish ultra-Orthodox religious communities to describe the Holocaust. I suggest that this use of language in Miriam’s account—and in other accounts as well—underline how Jews understood state violence against their non-Jewish neighbors as a very real attack also against themselves--“our black Yom Kippur”—that is, against their multiethnic and multi-religious societies, their hometowns of which Jews were an integral part.
Miriam’s testimony points us to the acute dangers of nationalism and nationalist violence, any nationalism. Miriam was not the only survivor who expressed herself in this way. Take my grandfather’s story, for instance. Israel Melamed was born in Bulgaria in 1912. Before the war, he was a socialist Zionist, a member of Ha’Shomer Hatzair movement. He lived in Bulgaria when Bulgarian authorities massacred Greeks in western Thrace in September 1941, which Miriam Shavit witnessed; a year and a half later, in March 1943, Bulgarian authorities would go on to arrest, rob, and deport more than 4,200 Jews from western Thrace to Nazi hands, who murdered them in Treblinka (Miriam had by then fled from the region); his Bulgaria also imprisoned him in a forced labor camp during the war. And, after the war, when the wartime authoritarian government was replaced with a communist government, my grandfather was forced to leave the state—even as he thought for a while to stay in his homeland, which he had hoped might become a socialist state. But the leaders of communist Bulgaria were no less nationalistic than the prewar and wartime authoritarian leaders of the state—all of whom did not consider Jews part of their “Greater Bulgaria.” The national communists then found common cause with Zionists—the former wanted Jews out of Bulgaria, the latter wanted them in British-mandate Palestine and, after 1948, in Israel. This is the reason that David Ben-Gurion, who became Israel’s first prime minister, visited Bulgaria in October 1944, right after the Soviet occupation of the state a month earlier.
And so, my grandfather, together with my grandmother and their one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, my mother, arrived in Israel in 1949 as survivors and refugees.
My grandfather wanted to be a theater person, but he was an accountant, which led him to a bizarre job offer in a bank in Ramla, the Palestinian city where Yitzhak Rabin – Israel’s future Oslo prime minister – had overseen its complete “ethnic cleansing” in the 1948 Nakba. A person from the bank took my grandfather around the city, stopping in front of a house on one of the streets. He opened the door, and they walked in. “You could live here,” he said to my grandfather, “if you take the job.” Many of the possessions of the Palestinians who had lived in the house were there. Shocked, my grandfather turned down the job. He realized, I think, that he was not only a survivor, a refugee, and an immigrant—he had also become a settler.
The idea of the Holocaust and Jews as unique, then, is a form of Holocaust memory that is not only nationalist memory but also settler memory--as such, one of its effects is the erasure of Palestinians to legitimize Jewish settlement, as my grandfather and other Holocaust survivors discovered. After all, Israeli forces had expelled more than 750,000 Palestinians in the 1948 Nakba, and their homes were ripe for Jewish refugees to resettle. Holocaust memory as national and settler memory thus blurs the possibility that Jews and Palestinians can live together in a state that recognizes the humanity, the belonging, and the dignity of all of the people living in it equally.
But Holocaust memory as nationalist and settler memory also blurs the fact that Jews had lived for hundreds of years across Europe (and elsewhere) as integral parts of their societies. I am not suggesting here a nostalgic image, nor am I saying that Jews were always and everywhere safe in Europe before World War II. But very few non-Jews in Europe were actually always and everywhere safe in this history; the point, in any case, is that Jews had lived in places that they considered in various ways, also at times in relation to their neighbors, as home.
Recall Miriam Shavit’s description of the Drama massacre against her non-Jewish neighbors as “our Black Yom Kippur.” Recall my grandfather who had thought to stay in Bulgaria, in his homeland, despite his wartime experiences, with the hope that Bulgaria would become a socialist state. But nationalists had other plans --- for him, for Miriam, for everyone, everywhere, also for us.
Indeed, here we are, in 2024. Ours is not, then, a post-Holocaust world; rather, our world is still rooted in the political structures and systems of the world in which the Holocaust happened --- namely, colonialism and nationalism. We did not need October 7th and Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza to know this. We lived before October 7th in a world with around 100 million forcibly displaced people—100 million souls, bodies, worlds, plans, ideas, 100 million people ousted, rejected by the idea of the “homogenous” nation state. In the 1930s and 1940s, Jews were these people, fleeing Nazism, authoritarianism, and fascism, fleeing everywhere, anywhere, and in any way, and encountering closed borders, harsh immigration restrictions, racism, and wild racist accusations. Our world is not a world of “Never Again,” but a world of “Again and Again.”
But the idea that the Holocaust and Jews are unique—it was too alluring. We wanted to believe that the Nazis were uniquely evil—not, say, humans rooted in specific contexts like, say, nationalism—and that Jews, then, were uniquely moral—not, well, also humans, also rooted in specific contexts and capable of doing what all humans can do and have done.
I am grateful for Rabbi Ari Lev who referred me to the rabbinic text of Hilchot Teshuva in the Mishneh Torah, in the first two paragraphs of chapter 5, which speak to this issue by refuting the idea that god “decrees whether [people] will be righteous or wicked. … [Rather], each person is fit to be righteous like Moses, our teacher, or wicked, like Jeroboam or wise or foolish, merciful or cruel, miserly or generous, or [acquire] any other character traits.”
Citing a rabbinic text here is not meant, of course, to suggest any Jewish exceptionalism; indeed, the text refers to all people, not just Jews. We are all capable of greatness and we are all capable of unspeakable evil. This is part of our human nature. And this includes Germans and Jews and everyone else. To imagine the Holocaust and Jews as unique, by contrast, serves western civilization and its supremacy, to the exclusion of the vast majority of the 100 million forcibly displaced people in our world.
That we live in a Holocaust world — a world structured, like the world that led to the Holocaust, on the basis of colonialism and nationalism – this is a terrible realization, but it should also open our eyes, beyond the tears, and open our minds, our hearts, because it does not have to continue being this way. And it cannot: the promise of security for Jews in a Jewish nation-state, built on the insecurity and oppression of Palestinians, has not materialized. Quite the contrary. What would a truly post-Holocaust Israel/Palestine look like? What would a state not organized around national identities look like? What would it mean to Jews elsewhere, here? These are heavy questions, particularly considering all the violence there, past and present, and all the fears, past and present, the anxieties, the hatred, the anger.
The anger, where I started, with my parents. I am still very angry at them. And as I mentioned, I have not yet managed to bring myself to apologize to them. But I know that it is crucial that I do so, for if I cannot engage with them without blowing up, without deepening further the unprecedented rupture in the Jewish world, what hope is there for a post-Holocaust Israel/Palestine? If such a state somehow emerges, my parents, and many like them, will be part of the process. How will that happen, what will justice and accountability look like, how will they feel that they belong, and many, many questions—addressing them will require, among other things, apologies, in the deep sense of the word, indeed in the Yom Kippur sense of the word, heavy with responsibility; apologies not in order to acknowledge the past fleetingly while changing nothing, but as we envision a new year ahead of us, apologies as truly political acts, pregnant with interactions and potentials for a different world, for everyone.
Gmar Hatimah Tova
Oct 12, 2024
My name is Raz Segal. I am a member of Kol Tzedek. I’m a scholar of Jewish history, the Holocaust, and modern mass violence. I’m a Jew, an American, and I grew up in Israel. I have lived in Philadelphia for the past eight years. And I am grateful for the opportunity to share a Dvar Torah this Yom Kippur.
----
This past summer, I had a massive flight with my parents. I was in Warsaw with my partner and our daughter, while my partner was conducting research for her book project. My parents came to visit us from Israel. We were at the dining table in our apartment. I don’t quite remember how it began, just that we stumbled into an exchange about the arrest in Israel of renowned Palestinian professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a scholar who has written several books on Israeli state violence and has, until very recently, worked and taught for decades at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Nadera has expressed many times, well before October 7th, her strong opposition to a Jewish supremacist regime, based on a settler colonial project that envisions the removal and erasure of Palestinians from their homeland, a violent project ongoing, in various ways, for decades since 1948, what Palestinians call an ongoing Nakba. Since October 7th, Nadrea has talked publicly about her view of the current stage of this process — the Israeli genocidal assault on Gaza.
In mid-April, following months of intimidation, harassment, and threats, including by the leaders of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Nadera was arrested and abused by the Israeli police— an event that shocked many in the academic world, in Israel and elsewhere. Not my parents, though, who suggested that it is unlikely, in their view, that Nadera was abused during her arrest and that she is probably lying. Without noticing the contradiction, they also insinuated that she probably deserved what happened to her.
Many Israeli Jews and many supporters of Israel around the world resort to this combination of denial and justification of violence—denying, for instance, the 1948 Nakba while calling, after October 7th (and also before), for a “second Nakba.” This sentiment, especially in Israel, angers me in a particularly intense way, as it stems, in my mind, from the same kind of motivation of Holocaust denial: the silencing and erasure of the voices of victims and survivors. As my parents waved away Nadera’s terrible experiences, these connections raced in my head—and I blew up.
It was bad. Very bad. I shouted, and I said some things that I should not have said. My parents seemed surprised, though this was not, of course, the first time we had clashed in such circumstances. It all lasted for just a couple minutes, and it was not long before they left to return to their hotel room. I then sat next to my daughter in her room and apologized: I had promised her before my parents’ visit that this, exactly this, would not happen.
Two months have passed now, and I have yet to apologize to my parents.
I imagine that some of you here in this room and online can tell such a story as well. It is clear that Israel’s assault on Gaza this past year has given rise to an unprecedented rupture in the Jewish world, bringing decades-long friendships to abrupt and painful endings and tearing at the fabric of families and communities.
This is, of course, not the first crisis in the Jewish world, but this time differs in one significant aspect from this long history of Jews vehemently, at times violently, disagreeing with each other. This time it is the late modern dogma of nationalism, of the nation state, that is now, paradoxically, driving us apart, arguably like never before.
What I have come to understand is that it was nationalism that was at the root of the destruction of Jews and Jewish communities in World War II. After the war, the victors — especially the western victors, the people who made our world — who were themselves nationalists, had a strong incentive to blur this reality by imagining the Nazis and their violence as a unique evil, unlike anything else. But the Holocaust was, terribly, very much NOT a unique evil in the sense that it was very much rooted in the contexts in which it happened, specifically nationalism and the nation-state system, a political framework that continues to structure the world to this day. And insofar as Jews have embraced nationalism --- and the Israeli nation state as it was founded in 1948 --- it has led us to a catastrophic place.
This move, to render the Holocaust unique in order to blur the place of nationalism in Nazism and Nazi violence, also fits a common view in the west about Jews as unique, a people at the core of the Judeo-Christian civilization that the Nazis wanted to destroy and create instead a Nazi world. We should remember that Mordechai Kaplan and Reconstructionism whole-heartedly reject this view of Jews as a unique people.
Some Holocaust survivors also challenged this idea of uniqueness in their accounts. Let me give you one example from my current research. Miriam Shavit was born in the town of Drama in northern Greece in 1919. In her testimony for Yad Vashem (the central Israeli Holocaust commemoration and education institute) in 1987, in Hebrew, she remembered clearly the Bulgarian occupation of her town in April 1941. Bulgaria occupied the entire region, western Thrace, as part of its alliance with Nazi Germany in the attack and destruction of neighboring Yugoslavia and Greece in spring 1941. Bulgaria’s leaders saw western Thrace as an integral part of the ethno-national “Greater Bulgaria” that they envisioned. Miriam remembered that the Bulgarian occupiers quickly demonstrated what “Greater Bulgaria” meant for anyone they identified as beyond the boundaries of the Bulgarian nation. They immediately arrested and imprisoned large numbers of Greeks on the pretext that they were partisans; today they would be called terrorists. “The jail was full,” she recalled. The new rulers also created an atmosphere of terror: “on the gate to the police station, they hung a person’s head,” she explained. The situation deteriorated sharply in September 1941, in the context of a Greek uprising in the area against Bulgarian oppression and violence. In response, the Bulgarian occupiers announced a curfew, and “Bulgarian soldiers were shooting outside.” “They then entered houses and took away young people ... they were looking for Greeks, of course, but caught some Jews as well. ... they killed 10,000 people ... all the streets were full of blood.” The Jews whom Miriam mentioned were actually identified by the Bulgarian occupiers as Greeks, according to language. Miriam noted 10,000 victims most likely as a way to stress the magnitude of the crime; in reality, the Bulgarian soldiers killed around 5,000 people in the massacre.
Miriam, however, stressed even more the magnitude of the event by describing it as “our black Yom Kippur.” Yom Kippur coincided with the massacre that month, but almost all the victims, as Miriam reported, were not Jews. I have encountered this sort of language in other testimonies of Jewish survivors, their use of words referencing Jewish history to describe nationalist state violence against non-Jews, including the use of terms like “pogrom” and “churban,” the Hebrew- and Yiddish-language word still used in Jewish ultra-Orthodox religious communities to describe the Holocaust. I suggest that this use of language in Miriam’s account—and in other accounts as well—underline how Jews understood state violence against their non-Jewish neighbors as a very real attack also against themselves--“our black Yom Kippur”—that is, against their multiethnic and multi-religious societies, their hometowns of which Jews were an integral part.
Miriam’s testimony points us to the acute dangers of nationalism and nationalist violence, any nationalism. Miriam was not the only survivor who expressed herself in this way. Take my grandfather’s story, for instance. Israel Melamed was born in Bulgaria in 1912. Before the war, he was a socialist Zionist, a member of Ha’Shomer Hatzair movement. He lived in Bulgaria when Bulgarian authorities massacred Greeks in western Thrace in September 1941, which Miriam Shavit witnessed; a year and a half later, in March 1943, Bulgarian authorities would go on to arrest, rob, and deport more than 4,200 Jews from western Thrace to Nazi hands, who murdered them in Treblinka (Miriam had by then fled from the region); his Bulgaria also imprisoned him in a forced labor camp during the war. And, after the war, when the wartime authoritarian government was replaced with a communist government, my grandfather was forced to leave the state—even as he thought for a while to stay in his homeland, which he had hoped might become a socialist state. But the leaders of communist Bulgaria were no less nationalistic than the prewar and wartime authoritarian leaders of the state—all of whom did not consider Jews part of their “Greater Bulgaria.” The national communists then found common cause with Zionists—the former wanted Jews out of Bulgaria, the latter wanted them in British-mandate Palestine and, after 1948, in Israel. This is the reason that David Ben-Gurion, who became Israel’s first prime minister, visited Bulgaria in October 1944, right after the Soviet occupation of the state a month earlier.
And so, my grandfather, together with my grandmother and their one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, my mother, arrived in Israel in 1949 as survivors and refugees.
My grandfather wanted to be a theater person, but he was an accountant, which led him to a bizarre job offer in a bank in Ramla, the Palestinian city where Yitzhak Rabin – Israel’s future Oslo prime minister – had overseen its complete “ethnic cleansing” in the 1948 Nakba. A person from the bank took my grandfather around the city, stopping in front of a house on one of the streets. He opened the door, and they walked in. “You could live here,” he said to my grandfather, “if you take the job.” Many of the possessions of the Palestinians who had lived in the house were there. Shocked, my grandfather turned down the job. He realized, I think, that he was not only a survivor, a refugee, and an immigrant—he had also become a settler.
The idea of the Holocaust and Jews as unique, then, is a form of Holocaust memory that is not only nationalist memory but also settler memory--as such, one of its effects is the erasure of Palestinians to legitimize Jewish settlement, as my grandfather and other Holocaust survivors discovered. After all, Israeli forces had expelled more than 750,000 Palestinians in the 1948 Nakba, and their homes were ripe for Jewish refugees to resettle. Holocaust memory as national and settler memory thus blurs the possibility that Jews and Palestinians can live together in a state that recognizes the humanity, the belonging, and the dignity of all of the people living in it equally.
But Holocaust memory as nationalist and settler memory also blurs the fact that Jews had lived for hundreds of years across Europe (and elsewhere) as integral parts of their societies. I am not suggesting here a nostalgic image, nor am I saying that Jews were always and everywhere safe in Europe before World War II. But very few non-Jews in Europe were actually always and everywhere safe in this history; the point, in any case, is that Jews had lived in places that they considered in various ways, also at times in relation to their neighbors, as home.
Recall Miriam Shavit’s description of the Drama massacre against her non-Jewish neighbors as “our Black Yom Kippur.” Recall my grandfather who had thought to stay in Bulgaria, in his homeland, despite his wartime experiences, with the hope that Bulgaria would become a socialist state. But nationalists had other plans --- for him, for Miriam, for everyone, everywhere, also for us.
Indeed, here we are, in 2024. Ours is not, then, a post-Holocaust world; rather, our world is still rooted in the political structures and systems of the world in which the Holocaust happened --- namely, colonialism and nationalism. We did not need October 7th and Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza to know this. We lived before October 7th in a world with around 100 million forcibly displaced people—100 million souls, bodies, worlds, plans, ideas, 100 million people ousted, rejected by the idea of the “homogenous” nation state. In the 1930s and 1940s, Jews were these people, fleeing Nazism, authoritarianism, and fascism, fleeing everywhere, anywhere, and in any way, and encountering closed borders, harsh immigration restrictions, racism, and wild racist accusations. Our world is not a world of “Never Again,” but a world of “Again and Again.”
But the idea that the Holocaust and Jews are unique—it was too alluring. We wanted to believe that the Nazis were uniquely evil—not, say, humans rooted in specific contexts like, say, nationalism—and that Jews, then, were uniquely moral—not, well, also humans, also rooted in specific contexts and capable of doing what all humans can do and have done.
I am grateful for Rabbi Ari Lev who referred me to the rabbinic text of Hilchot Teshuva in the Mishneh Torah, in the first two paragraphs of chapter 5, which speak to this issue by refuting the idea that god “decrees whether [people] will be righteous or wicked. … [Rather], each person is fit to be righteous like Moses, our teacher, or wicked, like Jeroboam or wise or foolish, merciful or cruel, miserly or generous, or [acquire] any other character traits.”
Citing a rabbinic text here is not meant, of course, to suggest any Jewish exceptionalism; indeed, the text refers to all people, not just Jews. We are all capable of greatness and we are all capable of unspeakable evil. This is part of our human nature. And this includes Germans and Jews and everyone else. To imagine the Holocaust and Jews as unique, by contrast, serves western civilization and its supremacy, to the exclusion of the vast majority of the 100 million forcibly displaced people in our world.
That we live in a Holocaust world — a world structured, like the world that led to the Holocaust, on the basis of colonialism and nationalism – this is a terrible realization, but it should also open our eyes, beyond the tears, and open our minds, our hearts, because it does not have to continue being this way. And it cannot: the promise of security for Jews in a Jewish nation-state, built on the insecurity and oppression of Palestinians, has not materialized. Quite the contrary. What would a truly post-Holocaust Israel/Palestine look like? What would a state not organized around national identities look like? What would it mean to Jews elsewhere, here? These are heavy questions, particularly considering all the violence there, past and present, and all the fears, past and present, the anxieties, the hatred, the anger.
The anger, where I started, with my parents. I am still very angry at them. And as I mentioned, I have not yet managed to bring myself to apologize to them. But I know that it is crucial that I do so, for if I cannot engage with them without blowing up, without deepening further the unprecedented rupture in the Jewish world, what hope is there for a post-Holocaust Israel/Palestine? If such a state somehow emerges, my parents, and many like them, will be part of the process. How will that happen, what will justice and accountability look like, how will they feel that they belong, and many, many questions—addressing them will require, among other things, apologies, in the deep sense of the word, indeed in the Yom Kippur sense of the word, heavy with responsibility; apologies not in order to acknowledge the past fleetingly while changing nothing, but as we envision a new year ahead of us, apologies as truly political acts, pregnant with interactions and potentials for a different world, for everyone.
Gmar Hatimah Tova