This might be better suited for GD or even IMHO, but I’m bunging it here on the offchance it might turn nasty earlier rather than later.
Question: At what point in history or the family tree do past legitimate grievances become bullshit sentimental point-scoring?
Case in point: One of the (nominal) supervisors at my work is a Jewish woman. She does not keep kosher nor attend the synagogue (except during Passover), she does not dress according to the more orthodox sects. She, for all appearances, is a rather dowdy and homely middle-aged woman who does not stand out as Jewish in any form. I have known her for five years now, and her religious beliefs have always been a background thing, not something that shapes her life really.
At work today, a new bloke (who has proved himself to be a complete fuckwit in other circumstances anyway) addressed her as Hitler. Yes, he is a moron. In a company that is OWNED by a VERY orthodox Jewish fellow, and with many staff throughout who adhere to varying degrees of Jewishness, calling someone ‘Hitler’ is a really dumb idea. It’s stupid and crass. It’s really stupid especially when you are new in a job, and before you’ve had the opportunity to develop those relationships with people that would allow you to get away with making throw-away comments like that.
So the supervisor made an official complaint: she claimed that his comments were ‘anti-semitic’ and by their nature ‘vilified’ her religion and ethnicity (which last time I asked was fully Orstralian, three generations, but anyway…). She claimed to be personally hurt and offended by the reference to Hitler, and judging by her behaviour after the event, I am in no doubt that she was riled up by something alright.
Whether that is an actual hurt or a hurt by familial/ethnic/religious proxy…I guess that is my question here!!
When will the Jewish community let the Holocaust go?
Couldn’t we at least wait for the last concentration camp victims to die off?
Anti-semitism may not have played any role in this incident. The boss may not even truly believe that it did. And it sounds more like the guy was referencing Curb Your Enthusiasm than using a slur. Also, 'Hitler’s been co-opted as a catch-all villain. Even people who don’t know he killed millions of non-Jewish gay people, Gypsies, handicapped people, etc. don’t necessarily equate a Hitler-related insult with anything Jewish.
But really, anti-Semitism is one of those things that’s so easy to joke about around liberal people and Jewish friends- sometimes I almost forget it exists (except when it’s Jewish people bashing other Jewish people, especially orthodox Jews). But then real, honest-to-goodness anti-semitism rears its ugly head and it’s like ‘Oh yeah… there are plenty of idiots out there who think Jews run the world and have horns under their hair. Plenty.’ Then it becomes difficult to accuse some Jewish people of being hypersensitive or paranoid.
I think it’s really pretty rude to call ANYONE Hitler, much less someone Jewish (although he may not have known she was…that’s why it’s a good thing to be careful about saying things about ethnicities & such…because you never know.) I hate jokes like Seinfeld’s “Soup Nazi.” It just seems crass to equate being a little bit of a hardass about something with being a mass murderer.
While the woman in your OP seems to have over-reacted (pretty clearly, IMHO), the Jewish community will “let the Holocaust go” at some point after people who were in the concentration camps have all died, as well as those whose immediate family members went to the concentration camps never to return.
It’s a poor analogy, but look at how long southern pride (ie, The South vs. North in the Civil War) has stuck around, and this is now 150 years after the fact, not to mention that the degree to which the American South was put upon doesn’t come anywhere near to that of European Jews under the Nazis.
The Holocaust was officially a Big Deal, and a few fuckwits screaming bloody murder at a Hitler reference does not in one iota indicate that Jews need to ‘let the Holocaust go’.
I would equate it with seeing a roach and spraying half a can of roach spray on it. From one standpoint, it’s over the top, but for people who feel a certain way about roaches, it’s the equivalent of nuking them from orbit, just to be sure.
Go up to the most mainstream Wonder-bread eating, non-Kwanza celebrating, Friends rerun watching black you know. You tell him “hey Kunta Kinte, when’d yo massa let you out to go to the store?” Then tell them to relax, there hasn’t been slavery in 150 years and would you just let it go already? See how they react.
There are still people alive who were sent to the death camps but miraculously survived.
There are many people alive who lost parents, siblings, extended family, and even children in the Holocaust.
There is a substantial body of work in the psychological community documenting the ways in which the children born to Holocaust survivors have incurred their own disabilities becuase of the overwhelming trauma of the event.
We still have idiots denying it happened.
We still have idiots minimizing the magnitude of the crime.
We even have idiots claiming that the only problem with the Holocaust is that it failed to accomplish its goal.
Your post provided a situation for two separate questions:
Did the offended lady overreact?
When should the Jews “let it go”?
The answer to the first question can be debated.
The anwer to the second question is clearly, “Not yet–and it is too soon to ask.”
(A separate question might tackle the issue of some small number of Jews using the “moral capital” of the Holocaust to rationalize or dismiss their own moral failings, but that clearly has no connection to the OP.)
Except ‘Hitler’ isn’t a racist pejorative against Jews. It’s just a reference to a guy. If anything, I’d imagine that Germans would get sick of hearing Hitler referenced, because the whole point of referencing him is to indicate negative traits about someone.
I do admit that I don’t fully understand the “don’t reference Hitler” mentality. It’s like “he-who-shall-not-be-named.”
I agree with this. Furthermore, I think there is an additional question, “When should anyone ‘let it go’?” The Holocaust is not a Jewish problem or a Jewish issue. It’s merely the most prominent example of things we’ve been doing for a long time and continue to do.
However, I think the question I would have asked were I the OP would have been –
“Is every use of the word Hitler as a slang pejorative anti-Semitic?”
I think the answer is no. And were I to accept the OP’s account as true and complete, I would say the answer in this particular instance is no as well.
You said the woman is middle-aged. While I don’t know Australia’s military history, that means her father could have been the right age to fight in WWII and see some of the horrors associated with it. I don’t know the woman, so I don’t know if she’s being melodramatic or what, but it’s not necessarily an overreaction. She could be non-observant and still have been raised in a very Jewish household where that insult might carry serious weight, for example.
The lady in your story overreacted - calling someone “Hitler” isn’t the same as mocking their ethnicity or religious heritage, since “Hitler” is a catch-all type villian in popular culture these days. “Nazis. I hate Nazis”.
What makes this woman a representative of the entire Jewish community? It is stuff like that which spreads prejudice. See some Black guy being rude or something, and suddenly “why are Blacks so damned rude?”
Who are you to judge whether someone can or cannot claim membership in an ethnic community? You seem to be simultaneously casting aspersions on her pretentions to being Jewish:
AND making her a representative example of that very community:
For future reference, Jewish idenity is not so simple. It can be at one and the same time a religion and an ethnicity, so one can have non-practicing Jews who consider themselves Jewish but not religious. It does not have any necessary conflict with nationality - one can be both Jewish by either religion or ethicity or both and three generations of Australian or whatever, just as presumably one can be both Christian and Australian at the same time.
The obvious answer, according to what I’ve seen of humanity, is “Never and you’re a horrible person for thinking ‘letting it go’ is, or will ever be, an option.”
The realistic answer is “Wait two hundred years or so. Nobody will even know who Hitler was and we’ll all be wearing swastikas as good-luck charms again.” The record seems to be the Armenian Genocide (a few decades from commission to near-total ignorance) but that is a special case: The Turkish government gets extremely angry if anyone mentions the issue around them (largely because the Turkish government committed it). The Holocaust committed by Japan is pretty well forgotten at this point, too, I think because people got all het up about how ‘terrible’ nuclear weapons were compared to firebombing and starving them out with blockades.
Don’t hold your breath. Judaism reveres history more than any other major religion. We were slaves 3000 years ago and we’re still talking about that. And getting six million of your relatives turned into air pollution qualifies as a touchy subject for anyone.
Yeah, i think that, just as some Jewish people do that, some non-Jews (not necessarily the OP, just in general) tend to assume that any Jewish reference to the Holocaust is a martyr’s cry for sympathy and special treatment.
I think that, in many respects, it will really not be possible to treat the Holocaust as a proper historical event until all the victims and their immediate families have passed on. I was involved in a discussion about this on another message board some time ago, and what i said was that, as a historian, i get frustrated by the constant attempt to place Hitler and the Holocaust outside of history, to assume that they constitute a phenomenon that is so unusual that it cannot be explained logically and historically. I think, in fact, that the scariest thing about Hitler and the Holocaust is that they are eminently comprehensible, and that they are different only in degree from many other cases of horrible inhumanity that one could point to in the historical record.
Unfortunately, making that argument sometimes leads to accusations of trivializing the Holocaust, which is quite the opposite of what was intended. I can sort of understand why someone with personal connections to the event might feel that way, but it tends to have the effect of closing off rational discussion.