A few days after publishing what I and others consider the most egregious piece of anti-Semitic filth in years, the editor of Tablet, Alana Newhouse, has published something or other intended to respond to its critics. It’s not an apology, exactly, even though the words “deeply sorry” appear. It’s more a…I can hardly believe I’m writing these words…tribute to Tablet. Her response is self-referential, self-aggrandizing, and ultimately self-infatuated.
She writes that she is “used to our pieces eliciting strong emotions. But the reactions to Anna Breslaw’s article have been exceptional.” Yes, exceptional, in the sense that most of us who read it were appalled and disgusted in a nearly unprecedented way. And then, in the cowardly fashion of media organizations caught in the midst of a disaster of their own making, she attempts the ludicrous claim that there are two sides to the response.
“For some readers, her piece explored the consequences of growing up in one specific family touched by an enormous Jewish tragedy, and publishing it asserted the message that young people needn’t express only safely held conventional wisdoms to be involved and engaged with Jewish life,” she writes.
Judging not only from the other discussions of the piece in the media besides mine and from the hundreds of comments on her own site, those “some readers” number maybe in the single digits, while everybody else reared in horror. So there is no controversy. What there is is a nearly universal condemnation.
She then goes on to characterize the response as follows: “Others saw in it a blanket condemnation of all Holocaust survivors—an impression that caused many to wonder why Tablet published it. Quite a few expressed extreme hurt.” Actually, no one expressed hurt; people expressed outrage, which is something entirely different. And not because the article was a “blanket condemnation of all Holocaust survivors.” The piece was an anti-Semitic outrage because it suggested that in the act of surviving the Holocaust, survivors had fulfilled the worst stereotypes of the Jews—Nazi stereotypes—as grasping, greedy, and selfish. That is not a condemnation. It is a slander. It is a libel. One might even go so far as to call it a blood libel.
Newhouse then praises herself for her deliberative delay in responding to the explosion of outrage by saying she thought it necessary to spend some time thinking about how Tablet came to publish the article, with some staffers saying it was good and other staffers saying it was blah blah blah. And then she commits herself and Tablet to a more thorough examination of…Tablet. Her staff decided they must commit themselves with even deeper seriousness to answer some deep questions:
What—if any—is the communal responsibility to the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors? Do we have a duty to hear them out, even when their thoughts are—as Breslaw described her own—“unappealing and didactic,” or worse? And what of other writers looking to explore other painful questions about their Jewish identities? What does the intense response to this piece say about what the rules here should be, about what precisely the red lines are in Jewish communal discourse. What we all did agree on is that it is our duty to more vigilantly and responsibly engage with all of these questions, and with our readers’ legitimate concerns.
How nice. So having published something that could have appeared in Der Sturmer, Newhouse now strokes her chin and wonders how she and her team might “responsibly engage” with questions of Jewish identity.
Anything Tablet has to say on “questions of Jewish identity” from now on will fail to take root, as it will wither and die in the black shadow of Anna Breslaw’s foul article—and in the appalling self-justifications of its editor.
On the contrary, although I found the Breslaw piece offensive and not very interesting, Tablet has now earned a place on my bookmarks bar. I'd rather a publication that goes off the deep end once in a while yet regularly explores topics ignored by so many of the "mainstream" Jewish publications. I like Tikkun but since I want a variety of opinions I make time for Tablet, Jewcy & Commentary, even Fox News & Townhall on the secular side. Why do you find a robust discussion of how 21st century Jews deal with the Holocaust and its survivors to be threatening? Kudos to Tablet for its commitment to the marketplace of ideas, even on the most sensitive of topics.
She stated that every single Jew who survived the holocaust was living up to Hitler's view of Jews — "conniving, indestructible, taking and taking." Would it be OK to say such things against any other minority just to start some "debate"? I didn't think so. n n"Why do you find a robust discussion of how 21st century Jews deal with the Holocaust and its survivors to be threatening?" n nThat is a laughable description of her article. It had nothing to do with her dealing with the Holocaust nor was it intended to do so. It wasn't titled "A look inside how the deranged mind of a child deals with the Holocaust."
I don't find much difference between Tablet and Tikkun. Both publish shallow, left wing, anti-relgiious drivel, masquerading as daring breakthrough stuff. Both gaze profoundly at their own navels. n nThe only difference is that Tablet occassionally publishes a piece by a politcally conservative writer, who is then roundly attacked in the comments in the same manner of the least thoughtful critics at Contentions — no analysis, just name calling about being neoncon tools of the racist Likud and the racist GOP. n nTablet is worth exactly what they charge me to read it (nothing), or perhaps a bit less.
I found the article disgusting. Still, I would not go as far as the Norman and saying that she is essentially no better than Der Sturmer. That is just emotional hyperbole.
In the end, I’d rather be shocked and outraged once in a while than treated the same narrow range of articles over and over again. That isn’t intellectual vitality. And vitality is often misunderstood as vulgarity.
The Norman? I assume you mean The John.
Agree. I thought the Breslaw piece was poorly written but to call it Der Sturmer as Podhoretz did is claptrap. This notion that every Jewish publication has to be like the N.J. Jewish News with talk of Purim Festivals, bar mitzvahs, and paens to Shmuley Boteach and assorted other gonifs and worse is absurd.
"This notion…"? Who's suggesting that because no publication should be like Tablet, every publication has to be like N.J. Jewish News? What's absurd and infantile is your suggestion that that's what Podhoretz or anyone who condemns Tablet wants.
At about 4:00 PM ET, I took the link to Newhouse's post on the Tablet site. In the right hand column, there was a link to the Breslaw article, which I wanted to see for myself. I clicked on the link a got a message that the Tablet website is offline. I tried going to the Tablet homepage and got the same message. One of the reasons given is that "the site may be experiencing excessive load."
Tablet is simply not worth the time. The editor's statement confirms the suspicion of why the op-ed nwas published in the first place. Therefore, we can only expect more of the same, plus,her judgement portends other falacious , non-credible reporting.
I had never heard of Tablet prior to this incident. I went there once, and will not return. They published a shock piece, had their 5 minutes of fame, and now it's over. It appears that the left wing intellectual Jewish self-destructive instinct is alive and well. Maybe they should just convert to Islam and get it over with; the way they're headed, they are playing right into their hands anyway.
I tend to agree with most commenters here who think Norman overstates the case agains Brewlaw and Tablet. Her opinions are troubling, but they are her opinions and probably are not unique among her generation. That she felt at liberty to state her horror toward the survivors in her own family in such a public way, almost in passing, while writing on a completely unrelated topic, tells me something important. This needs to be explored, not swept under a rug as Norman would have us do by crying "foul anti-Semite!"
"Her opinions are troubling, but they are her opinions and probably are not unique among her generation. " n nHow is this a defense of Brewlaw's garbage? Can that not be said for anyone's opinion on anything, no matter how divorced from fact or how immoral? n nBut I think you have been too harsh against Norman. After all, you may think his opinions are troubling, but they are his opinions and probably are not unique among his generation.
Check out the great article on the internet I just read. A black intellectual attributes the "Dependency Syndrome" among African Americans – evidenced by drug dependency, family break-up and the entire crisis of the inner cities – to the kind of Africans brought over to America during the slave trade. n nHe writes that "slavish attitudes," "lack of initiative" and other "modes of submission" were qualities over-represented by the blacks captured by the traders, and that therefore today's African American communities are hobbled by those characteristics. n nIt may be insulting and outrageous, but people should read it – right?
Did he add that their behavior justifies the worst stereotypes of the slave owners?
The most dangerous enemies of The Jewish People are the Jews themselves. nRemember Torquemada! As I commented elsewhere we need to revive the zealot movement. n
Um, right, we should murder Jews (and their editors) who won't keep their neuroses to themselves and their therapists. n nLook, "Europa, Europa" was a very good movie, based on a true story, about an amoral Jewish boy who eluded detection in German-occupied Poland and Russia by posing (and sometimes enjoying life) as an elite Aryan. He ended up immigrating to Israel. He didn't murder anyone, however, and neither, truth be told, did Anna Breslaw. n
…and neither did Julius Streicher.
Yes, and George Soros palmed himself off as an elite Aryan in Hungary, helped dispose of Jewish property and ended up in the USA.
And we're all suffering from that still.
C'mon, this isn't the time or place for pussyfooting around. Breslaw wrote, "I wondered if anyone had alerted Hitler that in the event that the final solution didn’t pan out, only the handful of Jews who actually fulfilled the stereotype of the Judenscheisse (because every group has a few) would remain to carry on the Jewish race—conniving, indestructible, taking and taking." (The boldface translates as something like "sh*t Jews.")
How many agree with David above that by publishing Breslaw's piece Tablet was going for "intellectual vitality," only to be misunderstood by those who don't appreciate such as serving up mere "vulgarity"? Or that Tablet may have published a "poorly written" piece, but it distinguished itself from local Jewish newspapers with their "talk of Purim Festivals, bar mitzvahs, and paens to Shmuley Boteach," who James above considers a "gonif" or worse? "Kudos to Tablet for its commitment to the marketplace of ideas, even on the most sensitive of topics."? n nThose who do roll that way are Tablet's "base," and it is welcome to such a readership. n n(BTW, David, the OP was authored by Commentary's current publisher, John Podhoretz, not its former one, Norman Podhoretz.)
If any of those attempting here to defend Tablet or the author have gone deeper than charging the critics with censorship, hysteria or hyperbole, I must have missed it. The article is a wretched piece of work whether judged on its writing, its analysis, factual basis (or lack thereof), or morality. Self-indulgence and shock value were the only reasons for publishing this drivel.
The Anna Breslaw article itself, IMHO, was not so much anti-Jewish as anti-human. How dare those awful, old, smelly, ugly people with numbers tattooed on their arms intrude in my pleasant consideration of my virtues as I look in the mirror, kind of stuff. The only "reporting" going on was the unintentionally honest revelation of the thoughts of an almost complete narcissist. While the victims of horror in her particular life were Jewish, an Italian or a Pole might have written the same. What it most affirmatively did NOT actually explore was the intellectual and emotional burden of being a descendant of holocaust survivors. It was simply a rejection of that burden and along with it any human feeling toward those who had suffered unspeakably. Sitting in the therapist's chair we might want to ask Ms. Breslaw if accepting the reality of the suffering of her forbears scared her and made her worried that the same thing might happen to her. We can't find that out by reading the article and it is a very important question. It is also a very logical question. If the article had explored those questions it might be something more than an artifact of holocaust study– an example of a young woman who has almost completely dissociated herself from her own history without even really acknowledging that fact and certainly without giving us any intellectually satisfying answers as to why. Her answers are that she finds her relatives and their suffering tiresome. She chooses not to be one of them and to join with the people who also find them tiresome. What she does not choose to tell us, one senses because she does not know, is how she can believe that, as a Jew, she will really be allowed to be one of the anti-Jews in light of the fact that that strategy has never really worked in the long run. And yes, Ms. Anna, many Jews tried to escape Nazi attention that way.
Had Anna Breslaw's grandparents not scratched and clawed to survive – that in itself a ridiculous statement which denies the heroism and courage of so many Jewish victims, she wouldn't be here to worry about her heritage as perhaps compared to the – one can only conclude in her opinion – more noble Nazis. If she has so much angst that she herself now spiritually and emotionally scratches and claws to survive, and she thinks that Jewish victims in the Nazi camps should have gone quietly to their Zyclon B deaths, then perhaps Breslaw has a death wish, in which case, I'm all for allowing her her wish.
In the other Contentions about Breslaw's piece, I wrote that Breslauw comes from insular societies — New York and Germany — that have made æsthetics of the morbid, so maybe your suggestion that Breslaw has a death wish isn't so far-fetched.
So now we're comparing her to a bullwhip-toting professional pornographer and Gauleiter of Nuremburg who devoted 25 years and millions of words and pictures to depicting Jews as sexually degenerate race defilers, to a degree that even some of his fellow Nazis were too squeamish to endorse?
…Who, btw, was convicted and executed for having openly and repeatedly advocated mass extermination with knowledge that it was under way?
Spare me. Yeah, and I'll bet the mob is assembling right now with tallises over their heads to surround her house with pitchforks and burning torches. And make her watch while they cook her pet parakeet and feed it to her cats, and paint laws from the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch on her kitchen ceiling so she'll lose her security deposit. How could you have missed all that? Quick, go warn someone.
Please note – the above is called 'sarcasm' and should not be mistaken for actual threats of harm nor with advocacy of unlawful action, neither of which are intended by my preceding post.
Individuals on this and the preceding comment thread who advocate reviving the zealot movement or fulfilling her alleged death wish clearly want her to die or be killed, and even you feel obliged to issue a disclaimer. If her sentiments represent a physical threat, why not theirs?
“Aesthetics of the morbid”….I'm trying to get my head around that. Poe's “The Raven” first springs to mind, but I have a feeling this is much more sinister, especially when you add “insular societies.” A Google project for me. Thanks for the reply.BrooklynroadsPhotoWrite416 505 0109905 731 7252—
I thought it seemed pretty clear that this was a round about way of expressing her pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli views. Scheisse Jews that are taking and taking, and using the past horrors in their lives to justify their current bad behavior – just seemed like shorthand to deplore the use of the Holocaust as a justification for Jews to find a homeland in Israel.
Taking and taking; bad behavior; justification for returning to Israel….is this Breslaw's voice or yours?
"What—if any—is the communal responsibility to the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors? Do we have a duty to hear them out, even when their thoughts are—as Breslaw described her own—“unappealing and didactic,” or worse?" n nif there's a contest anywhere for "phrase that most completely encapsulates the self-congratulatory false equivalency of the leftist academy," I would like to nominate this one. n n
Tablet started out as a "big tent" Jewish mag – something for everyone. But once the camel got his nose under there, the rest of his body followed and the whole place started to stink.
As long as we define "who's a Jew" genetically, the plague will continue and spread. There must be an easy way out of Jewishness, an exit door, so that women like Anna Breslaw could simply walk out and never trouble us again. As it is, we imprison these restless children. They are not one of us, and because we refuse to let them go, they turn on us with a vengeance. Yet, the rabbis insist that our mitochondria are our masters. n nSo what to do? Simple enough, just not easy. In fact, we must shake off the past, including Rabbinic Judaism above all. We must admit that Rabbinic Judaism is a religious practice and outlook that was hatched in the Exile and meant to sustain us in the Exile. Who among us (aside from delusional fundamentalist Jews) believes we are still in Exile.? n nAnd not only that: We now have our state and our holy city, Jerusalem, the two things we've been praying for since the Romans sent us packing. What we need in the modern age is not an endless system of do's and don't, a way of life that essentially boils down to "how many ways to bake the kosher blackbird." We need a future that focuses on developing the expertise and temperament to govern and defend a modern Jewish nation-state. n nIs it any wonder, then, that so many Jewish leftists focus their rage on "freeing occupied Jerusalem?" They want us out of there, so they can wash their hated Jewish identity off their backs. Their problem isn't "self-loathing." They simply don't want to be Jews. n nWe need to let them go. If we don't, they will go on spreading lies and slanders about Jews and Israel. It's their way of saying "Not me, you." What else is Ms. Breslaw's article, if not this? n nThese Evil Sons and Daughters aren't in it for the privilege of expressing themselves. They bludgeon us, in order to make us lose our grip on them. But they don't stop there. They slice us up a bit in the process, for causing them so much aggravation, for thwarting their most cherished wish—to be whatever they feel like being, whenever they feel like being "it." That fits no definition of "being Jewish" with which I'm familiar. n nAs for Tablet, I've "unsubscribed." So far, it hasn't worked. Apparently, the want to irritate and disgust me a while longer—these Evil Sons and Daughters!
blackparrot, if Jewish history shows anything, it shows that any "Judaism" that is not centered around Torah is doomed to failure, and will be unable to sustain itself. If you want some examples, all you have to do is look at the Sadducees, the Karaits, or the early Christians. Closer to our day, you can look at the inability of secular Zionism, and particularly Labor Zionism, to survive more than a few generations past independence. How are the Bundists and Arbeiter Ring doing these days? What are the intermarriage rates among Reform Judaism (those of whom were born Jewish, discounting those with unconverted non-Jewish mothers) and the defection rates among the anything goes Conservative movement? n nWhat is delusional is to think that Torah (which means the Oral as well as Written Torah, and which you call Rabbinic Judaism) is a creature of exile, or that it 'essentially boils down to "how many ways to bake the kosher blackbird." ' It is exactly that estrangement from Torah that produces the kind of articles like Ms. Breslaw's, and magazines like Tablet. [con'td]
[part 2 of reply to blackparrot] L'havdil, your prescription would do for Klal Yisroel what substituting Toni Morrisson for Homer, Shakespeare and the other "Dead European White Men" canon of literature has done for American education — produce masses of ignorant people unable to think critically, lacking any moral guidance beyond what demagogues and their friends tell them, and what feels good to them. n nIt's been tried, blackparrot, and it hasn't worked. Do we lose people from Rabbinic Judaism? Of course we do, and a look at Tanakh will tell you that's nothing new either. It ain't a popularity contest, achi.