A Pensee on The Holocaust

A Pensee On The Holocaust
(Review on Sue’s Book Review “Dry Tears”)
November 26 2006

***Author’s note: I write this review to provoke discussion about a Holocaust paradigm that views it only as a Jewish monopoly classifying other holocausts as illegitimate and inconsequential and denying other non-Jewish survivors to share the term Holocaust: “your catastrophe is less unique, comparable, comprehensible, and distinctive than ours.”
However, my review is not designed to discourage reading the book, “Dry Tears”, but remind the readers every saga has always two-sides story and the Holocaust story should not be hijacked by the vested interests like the Jewish organizations in America.***

Plato: “you cannot compare any two miserable people and say that one is happier than other,”

First of all, I am pleased to find that Sue Choi reads a book…I mean I thought most of youngsters nowadays would spend most of their times watching TV, playing games, chitchatting in chat-room or driveling on cellular phone day in, day out instead, sometimes, of perusing some books, any books except for the SAT. (Do you still have a history class in your curriculum?)

In her book review in November issue of the Church News Letter, Sue categorized the autobiography of the Holocaust Survivor, “Dry Tears”, an appropriate, excellent and good book for anybody of any age who would like to learn more about the Holocaust.
She also praised the book as it tells “all of the informational facts” about the Holocaust “to let other people re-live the Holocaust”.
Since I have not read “Dry Tears” written by Nechama Tec, I cannot give a detailed review on the book but critique about what Sue wrote about in her review.

The term holocaust derives from the Greek, meaning a completely (holos) burnt (kaustos) sacrificial offering to a god, and it has been used to refer to disasters or catastrophes. (Jews call the Holocaust “Shoah” meaning calamity in Hebrew.)
I assume that Sue understands the Holocaust exclusively as “Shoah”, the systematic Nazi state-sponsored extermination of 6 million Jews excluding millions of other victims as most of Americans accept it as well…that is, “The Holocaust” always or almost always refers to a Jewish genocide of Nazi murder program, “The Final Solution” by the Nazi regime.

Frankly speaking, I am very much skeptical that Sue would know there were about 5 million non-Jewish victims (Gypsies, Jehovah’s witnesses, Slavs, Polish Catholics, disabled peoples, etc) added to the 6 million Jewish Nazi victims in the 11 million rosters at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
I cannot help but sympathizing her for not knowing it, since the Museum operates under the principle: “if you did not die as a Jew…6 million Jews, you died differently,” marginalizing the sufferings of other victims of The Holocaust.

Therefore, I believe Sue’s review on the book, “Dry Tears”, merits to be reviewed again, since the story is related only to “The Jewish Holocaust”, the only historical reference that resonates in the classroom in the US. (Many college professors testify that compared to Civil War, many more college undergraduates are able to place the Nazi holocaust in the right century and to cite the number killed.)

In other words, “The Holocaust” was such heavily Americanized that it became an American memory and as American as an apple pie, even though it had nothing to do with Americans…I mean it occurred in other country thousands miles away across the ocean.
However, “The Holocaust”, curiously for two decades, has not evolved becoming the American consciousness right after the World War Two. (The sad stories of the Holocaust did not spring up in American psyche until 1960s, as the New York Times did not even publish the first story of The Holocaust until 1959.)

Memories, like “Remember Pearl Harbor! Remember 911!”, has no sense of the passage of time; it denies the “pastness” of its objects, and insists on their continuing presence.
And “Remember the Holocaust!” is no exception…after another two decades of silence and the following memorialization through TV drama series about the Holocaust, it culminated in the opening of the Holocaust Memorial Museum and first screening of Spielberg’s Shindler’s List in 1993, institutionalizing the memory permanently in the heart and mind of American people.

Cui bono?

Some argue that the Americanization of the Holocaust allows a foreign trauma becoming a central position in American consciousness in order to cover up the national tragedies like the genocide of Native Indian Americans and 200 years of the African American Slave System…that is, it is much easier, for Americans, to deplore the crimes of others than look at their own holocaust,
Others contend: the American Jewry put the Holocaust on the American agenda when they discovered that Holocaust memory seemed desirable and appropriate to acquire the victim status in the course of establishing the Jewish State of Israel in Palestine.

Aside from the American guilty feeling about their atrocities against the Native and Black people, the Jewish American leaders in postwar years did not look highly on the Holocaust survivors in the first place, saying that “those who have survived are not the fittest…but are largely lowest Jewish elements, who by cunning and animal instincts have been able to escape the terrible fate of the more refined and better elements who succumbed”, according to the Holocaust historian Peter Novick.
Even David Ben-Gurion, the father of the State of Israel, depicted the survivors in negative view: “they were people who would not have survived if they had not been what they were…hard, evil and selfish people.”

In other words, the Holocaust survivors right after the War were not termed in honorific way evoking sympathy, admiration, or even awe.
They were marginalized by the American Jewish elites who feared of recurring anti-Semitism in the US after the war, and the Holocaust victims were generally depicted in news media as DPs (Displaced Persons) in universal terms.
Then, how this European event, Holocaust, sprang up in the center stage of American life? And why the Jews decided to upfront the Holocaust stories in the American culture?

The partial answer on this query is that Jews in America play a major and important role in Hollywood, TV industry, newspaper, magazine, and book (comic book too!) publishing sectors, and they were eager to get help from the ordinary Americans in the establishment of the State of Israel, casting itself a “victim” state.

The idea of victimhood has been a core of Jewish identity that formed by historical persecution and the Holocaust, and it became a sort of cult among Jewish people.
And this Holocaust victimhood became a beneficial ideological weapon to ward off all criticism and to justify the criminal policies of the Israeli government against the Palestinian Arabs.

In essence, what I want to argue here is that we seemed to have an incongruous, disfigured and distorted version of Nazi genocide, “The Holocaust” that serves the ONLY interest of the State of Israel...an ethnocracy of the Jewish State in which both 1.3 million Israeli Arabs inside the Israeli proper and 3.6 million Palestinians in occupied territories have been subjected to another holocaust of ethnic cleansing by, ironically and obscenely, the Judeo-Nazi-The-Holocaust-Victims.

The fact almost unknown to the world is that there are Israeli Arabs (one-fifth of Israeli population) who live as the Israeli Citizens but hold no nationality…they are guests in their own motherland, trespassers in their own hometown, and they are even NOT the second class citizens like blacks, Asians or Muslims in the US but the non-resident visitors destined eventually to go somewhere to live, when Jews find ways to kick them out permanently in order to make room for a Jew living in Brooklyn, New York City. (Even dying is a problem if you are an Arab in Israel, because almost all land, 93%, is owned by the State, there is no new cemetery available for the dead Israeli Arab citizens.)

In Gaza Strip where Israeli Government “disengaged” unilaterally from the military occupation, the Palestinians were corralled into an “open-air” concentration camp sans ovens by the Jews, summoning the “inverted” memories of The Holocaust.
For decades, these people have been terrorized on a daily basis by the Israeli Occupation Forces in roadblocks, incursions, checkpoints, and walled environment, they are subjected to air raids, artillery and tank bombardments, and the economic strangulation tantamount to slow pace of total extermination.

Of course, it is inspiring and amazing, as our Sue reviewed, that the Holocaust is examined through the eyes of survivors and it was a horrible and despicable historical event we all endeavor never to repeat it again.
However, if Jews show paranoia in insisting the uniqueness and distinctiveness of the Holocaust compared to other holocausts, it is a moral travesty that Jewish lives are more precious, beloved, esteemed, and valuable than others.
In other words, the claim of Holocaust uniqueness is equivalent of claiming the Jewish uniqueness, special status, and a distasteful secular version of chosen-ness.

Therefore, it is also despicable and abhorring claim that Jews have every right to protect themselves, however they see fit as in case in dealing with their archetypal enemy, the Palestinian Arabs, employing almost analogous Nazi-tactics that The Holocaust victims had been subjected to.

Unless Jews begin to realize that the sufferings of “The Holocaust” victims are no more painful, sorrowful, and abominable than other holocaust victim’s as they refuse to think of Palestinians as victims, they do keep committing the inhumane crimes against the helpless Palestinian Arabs.

Unless Jews begin to stop thinking that they possess solely a two-thousand-year-old title deed to the Palestinian land ordained by the Great Realtor, in other words, without the abdication of Jewish uniqueness, distinctiveness, and chosenness, they would not be able to listen Other’s voice or to take responsibility for their role in Other’s sorrow, pain, agony, misfortune, and sufferings.

In this perspective, the narratives of “The Holocaust” could not possibly and arbitrarily be monopolized by the Jew-only survivors, but its saga should be analyzed, shared, examined, disseminated, and memorialized by all of us, since we all are victims of holocaust.

PS: I recommend readers a book, “The Other Side of Israel” written by Susan Nathan, who moved from her comfortable home in Tel Aviv to an Arab Town in Israel and lived as an only Jewish woman among the oppressed indigenous Arab population of 25,000 Muslims. I promise that this book would bring you an eyewitness, live, and true story you’d never get from the mainstream media and help you to better understand what I wrote about here.

The Commercialization of Education

The Commercialization of Education
by Daniel Hong

In his 1993 movie "Indecent Proposal," Robert Redford, luring Demi Moore to spend one night with him for $1 million, showed the cultural zeitgeist by stating that "Yes, everything is for sale." Today, this includes college education.

Every year since 1983, U.S. News & World Report publishes "America's Best Colleges," showing merely the tip of iceberg on how much education has been commercialized as the weekly treats higher education as a thing to be measured and weighed. In those hands, college education becomes a commodity like cars or computers that have been rated by consumer magazines so that students and parents can buy accordingly.

In choosing a college, many students and their parents are swayed by the rankings without questioning the methodology behind the report. Here are several questionable formulas in their methodology.


The report assumes that the quality of education can be quantified in numbers. But, how do you translate the quality of discussions between professors and students into numbers?


They use the weighted formulas such as freshmen in top 10 percent of high school class, alumni giving rate (5 percent) and peer assessment score (20 percent). Do all high schools have their class ranking system? Do all students care about the alumni-giving rate? Do all so-called "top academics peers" really know other institutions inside and out well enough to evaluate their quality?


What's the difference between the schools ranked No. 1 and No. 10? Not much in the statistical sense from the report. However, by listing the ranks arbitrarily in hierarchical order, the report creates an illusion of a huge gap to the uninformed readers.


What about such invaluable criteria as access to faculty, social climate, financial resources, quality of academic resources (library, labs and computers), housing and food service quality, sports program, job placement, advance studies in graduate and professional schools, and fostering of students' lifelong intellectual and psychological development?

To acknowledge the shortcoming of the rankings, therefore, the news magazine needs to put a warning sign just like the surgeon general's caveat for cigarettes: "It has been determined that reading these rankings may cause quick and uninformed choices concerning the colleges you think are right for you. It contains misleading data which may not be helpful in identifying the real quality and character of a college in which you are interested."

Just as people still smoke by their choice in spite of the warning label, the report will shine through and be meritorious for some people who choose to believe it. It is the perfect fodder for the pliable with herd instincts who are obsessed with status and prestige, and for those who need a therapeutic session that soothes their egos.

The ranking report indeed is a sad commentary on our society, in which many are infatuated with lists and rankings. It shows we care too much about what is outside and too little about what is inside. Hence, we need to rethink about the real purpose of college education. Students and their parents shouldn't be swayed by the ephemeral rankings but rather listen to what John Dewey said: "Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself."

So, do you want to measure your life according to the indecent proposal filled with spurious formulas provided by the weekly?

Pastor Chang HJ replied

제 생각은 ‘대학교육’에 대한 환상은 이미 깨어진지 오래라는 것입니다. 그 말은 이제 더 이상 대학은 ‘상아탑’으로서의 기능을 갖지 못한다는 것이며 오직 ‘기술교육’의 장소일 뿐이라는 것입니다. 그러므로 보다 비싼 값을 낸 학교가 보다 좋은 기술을 가르치고 보다 좋은 취업의 길을 열어 주는 것이 당연한 수요 공급의 원리라고 생각합니다.

마치 빵을 만들기 위해 밀가루를 얼마나 넣어야하고 계란과 버터의 비율이 얼마이며 오븐의 온도를 얼마에 맞추어야 하는가 하는 것을 배우는 것이나 많은 열매를 맺게 하기 위해 가지치기를 하는 시기와 사용하는 비료와 약치기를 하는 방법을 배우는 것과 다를 것이 없다고 생각 합니다.

이는 어떻게 배심원들의 마음을 움직여 재판에서 이기는가를 배우는 것이나, 어떻게 멈추어 버린 심장을 다시 뛰게 하는가 또는 어떻게 학생들에게 플라톤과 모택동을 이해 시키는 가 하는 방법을 배우는 것과 비교 해 볼 때 이미 대학은 꿈에 그리는 ‘교육’의 장이 아니라 삶의 기술과 방법을 가르치는 곳일 뿐이라는 것입니다.

‘교육이 곧 삶’이라는 말은 교육자들의 자기 과대 평가일 뿐 과연 진정으로 누가 누구를 참 ‘교육’ 시킬 수 있겠습니까?

오늘의 대학 교육은 그저 상업화된 삶의 기술을 가르치는 곳이라 생각 합니다. 마치 어떤 이는 새를 잡기위해 돌을 던지고 그런가 하면 어떤 이는 고무줄이 달린 새총을 사용하고 그보다 더 많은 것을 투자 한 이는 엽총을 사용하는 것 정도의 차이 뿐이라고 생각 합니다.

‘진정한 교육’, ‘삶으로서의 교육’ 그것은 학교에서 가르치는 것이 아니라 세상에서 자신이 자신에게 할 수 있는 것 뿐이라고 생각 합니다.

해서 저는 교육의 상업화에 별 염려하지 않습니다. 물론 기대하지도 않지만 그보다도 하나님은 사람에게 스스로 자신을 ‘교육’시킬 수있는 능력을 주셨다고 믿기 때문입니다.


Yes, Everything is for Sale”
September 2, 2006

Frankly speaking, I was initially amazed, secondly dismayed, and lastly disheartened by your remark on the “commercialization of education” that you are less concerned and worried about the our college education system being run commercialized like the free market system of the supply and demand principle, and you would like to leave the matter in the invisible hand of God.

For the worse proposition, you’d like to take the commercialized education for granted a fait accompli, as you get more in return if you pay or invest more, and you disparaged educator’s buzzword, “education is not preparation for life; education is life itself”, as a tall catchphrase, adding that “a real life” begins at the society where we are becoming the self-made man.

It is true, I admit, that we live in a society that fathoms life in terms of numbers, like polls, statistics, ranks, percentage, dollars, Dow john’s averages, etc., and our education institution manufactures years after years a massive number of robotic technocrats who value a thing only in terms of numbers not in terms of humanity.

When you wander along the bustling street of the Fifth Avenue in the New York City, you’d find that a majority of pedestrians, drivers, deliverymen, and messenger boys on a bike, talks incessantly on a cellular phone with someone invisible on the other end of line…they are inattentive to or not interacting with their physical proximity.

Among the whole enchilada of diverse groups, you don’t have difficulty finding a gaggle of school age youngsters attached to iPod, CD cassettes, Cell-phones, or other gadgets in their own world…It’s a universe of “my space” where gadgets that are made to enhance greater communication only serve to separate us from humanity.

It is no wonder why we do not care about Others, those not in “my space”…we could not fathom how someone lives with one dollar a day at the opposite side of the “my space”, because we live in the world where one dollar does not bring much or many things to us.
As long as they do not infringe on “my space”, they are irrelevant and not being counted as numbers.

When we reflect on the purpose of education, one may say that it trains youngster’s mind in the facts, rules, formulas, numbers, and precepts in curriculum.
Other may say that it stretches the mind of students giving them skills to inquire and discuss ideas and beliefs that they can participate with their neighbors.
The bottom line is how we can balance above-mentioned reflections in its implementation…

And I find that we tilted our system too much toward the former case that weighs more on numbers and formulas: and the latter case is more harder to be implemented, because it is a process, not a formula that can be compressed into a book or reflected with numbers.

In which term do you wish your sons and daughters after the school year being portrayed by your neighbors in the community?
A robotic technocrat with a prestigious diploma who lives only in his space? Or a man of intelligence whose ideas and beliefs encompass for the betterment in the entire world of humanity?

Probably, I gather that you appear to reflect the money-grubbing characteristics on behalf of the ugly Korean immigrant community, in which a majority wishes to see their kids to be a dumb family doctor, an ambulance-chasing lawyer, an ever-squabbling stock, insurance, and mortgage broker, a spurious financier, an egotistic and Hispanic-bashing “deli-CEO”, a swaggering and unconscionable Church elder, etc., whose training had more to do with numbers and less to do with humanities.

Inshallah!!