Ruth Wisse, in “How Not to Remember and How Not to Forget” in the January COMMENTARY, writes about her experience in a Jewish day school in the years after World War II, with teachers who were Holocaust survivors:
Nearly all I remember of my formal schooling are the answers I occasionally got wrong. But much else of consequence seeped through these teachers’ lessons: their willingness to be among children after having sometimes lost their own; their respect for the Jewish subjects they taught despite the price they had paid for having been born Jews; the range of their knowledge, which seemed inseparable from their experience.
I am especially thankful that they never alluded to that experience, since I have always thought it wrong to teach young children about the destruction of the Jews of
Given her own upbringing, she thinks the Holocaust should be memorialized not as part of a generalized warning against “man’s inhumanity to man,” nor simply as a horrific period of victimization of Jews, but rather as part of a larger story told from a Jewish perspective, functioning like a Passover text:
Jews, it might say, lived in Europe for over two millennia in such and such places, conducting themselves in such and such ways and achieving such and such things. In the late 19th century, a period of emerging nation-states, they too began the recovery of their national homeland, then under the rule of the Ottoman empire and later of
But before they could secure their place of refuge, catastrophe overtook them in such and such a fashion and subjected them to such and such horrors; at the lowest point in European civilization, Jews were almost wiped off the continent. During the war, they responded in such and such ways. After it, they emerged with even greater national resolve.
This is the way I myself experienced life as a Jew, and the way I would have preferred it to be known by others.
The exhibits to such a story would also explain how the war against the Jews in Europe escalated into a war eventually brought by the Third Reich against the rest of the world:
One key element in such an exhibit would be the wartime alliance struck between Adolph Hitler and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, marking the point at which modern European anti-Semitism effected its entry into the Middle East. The last part of the exhibit would then move forward to today, illustrating how anti-liberal and anti-Jewish ideologies and movements continued to function, throughout the contemporary Arab and Muslim world.
She criticizes the approach of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which she characterizes as a “dark telling” that misses the story of great rabbis and Israeli soldiers in a world-historical saga:
[The Museum’s] representation of the Jewish catastrophe is like a Passover Haggadah stuck in the section on slavery, recounting in great detail how many infant Jewish boys were drowned in the Nile, how many slaves were killed while building the cities of Pithom and Rameses, what cruelties were practiced against Jewish women, and so forth.
Her essay, which covers far more than the excerpts above, is essential reading — a remarkable combination of personal history, political reflection, and literary accomplishment.
In her profile published on the occasion of her receipt of the National Humanities Medal at the White House last November, she traced her passion for teaching to the new Jewish immigrants who were her grade school teachers in
“I had brilliant teachers at my Jewish day school. These young men had no better opportunities. They were displaced intellectuals and went into primary education to our extraordinary benefit. They were engaged with life. At an early age I saw the calling of literature and teaching as inseparable from civil responsibility.”
Her new essay is still another of her extraordinary contributions to the civilization she first learned about as a grade-school student, from survivors of the European attempt to wipe it out, teachers who emphasized life rather than death.