Holocaust Remembrance Day

++Memorial services are being held at Auschwitz and at other sites of the extermination camps. I found yesterday my Holocaust Library in my storage unit. The best histories were written last decade as more historical evidence emerged that showed the European-wide attempt to eradicate the Jews was much wider than originally thought. And the post-Holocaust theologies are not only provocative but grim.In recent years, the Holocaust has inspired Waspy writers like Peter Matthiessen and Martin Amis who were riveted to this essential story of evil. The attempt at interpreting the Holocaust will last many more generations of books. 

++Samantha Powers' claim to fame was to broaden the study of genocide to bring it up to date through Bosnia and Rwanda and advocating humanitarian intervention. And that expansiveness has its own problems as we have seen in the aftermath of Libya and the current debate over Syria. 

++I heard Alan Dershowitz speak only a month ago and he lamented FDR not bombing the death camps. In fact Jews fleeing Europe ended up in the Dominican Republic or Cuba because their entrance to the United States was banned.

++As historians now admit the average German supported and knew about Hitler's policies, even taking holidays near the death camps. Claude Lenzer made the awful--for the events--movie, the riveting Shoah, which not only documented the fate of the victims but interviewed the executioners. I still remember him finding the railroad engineer who drove the locomotive to the siding of the death camps where his passengers were sent to their fates. It was a brave movie that deserves imitators for all the other genocides in this century. The executioners are still around,even if their victims are not.

++James Carroll, a Catholic and a son of an American officer,tried to capture how his faith got militarized, In his film he shows the Jewish community just outside the Vatican and interviewed survivors how the Pope by simply walking to their ghetto could have saved Rome's Jews. Of course, he didn't. Instead he signed a Concordat with Hitler. Carroll backtracked to the first Pogroms which were the preliminary stages of the Crusades and how the river valleys around the Rhine were depopulated as the Crusaders marched to the Holy Land.

++So on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, where does this get us. To the rise again in Europe of anti-semiticism and the perceived dangers by the Jewish communities of attacks. This is really the appropriate subject of any address by Bibi to Congress.

++Just yesterday there were marches in Dresden, a stronghold of anti-immigrant, neo-Nazi sentiment. Angela Merkel has countered the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim demonstrations but the latest have been against the Americanization of Europe, which is encouraged --naturally--by the Jewish population.

++In England, the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Jewish grocery raised alarms among that country's Jewish population, which sent out a bulletin about their concerns. The British government announced that security forces would be monitoring Jewish communities for any disturbances.

++The European Jewish community thought Holocaust Remembrance Day was an occasion to raise the prospect of the EU adopting legislation making anti-semiticism and Holocaust denial a hate crime.

++According to the World Zionist Organization poll published in Ynet, 55% of Diaspora Jews do not feel safe in their own countries. They registered 1,000 types of anti-semitic incidents--which range from personal attacks to physical damage to schools and synagogues--in 2014. There was a 400% increase in attacks during July and August, which happened to coincide with Israel's attack on Gaza. The WZO found that France was perceived as the most dangerous place for the Jewish population and this was discovered before the Charlie Hebdo attacks. In the past week, Israeli officials in France have been swamped by requests for the papers to emigrate to Israel.

++Anti-semiticism has again found fertile ground in the extreme right parties of Europe from France to Hungary,Belgium,Holland and Czechoslovakia as well as Greece where the neo-Nazi Dawn party came in third. 

++Maybe this is an unfortunate blip in the state of anti-semiticism but I recall the Jewish World Telegram then operating out of Geneva and New York failing to report then tales of the death camps because they thought the stories told be refugees too fantastic and that reporting them would scare off the Americans whom Roosevelt was preparing for war.

++I remember this today because the Democratic Underground had the only film clip of Anne Frank standing on her balcony. Watch it. What a lovely looking child.