opinion
Jew-hatred Struts the Stage in Berlin
Melanie Phillips
T he unspeakable performance
by Roger Waters in Berlin last
week crossed a number of
new red lines, even for him.

The former Pink Floyd guitarist has
long been infamous for his venomous attacks on Israel
and antisemitic remarks. Few, though, could ever have
imagined that he would be allowed to stage the obscene
performance he put on at Berlin’s Mercedes-Benz Arena.

As described on the German website Bell Tower,
Waters displayed the names of people supposedly killed
because of their identity. In an odious comparison, Anne
Frank, who was indeed murdered because she was a Jew,
was displayed as equivalent to Shireen Abu Akleh, the
Al Jazeera journalist who was shot dead while covering
clashes between Israeli troops and Palestinian gunmen
in Jenin.

Dressed in a Waffen SS uniform under fascist-style
banners hanging from the roof, Waters pretended to fire
on the audience with a dummy rifle. When he exchanged
this for a keffiyeh in an unsubtle reference to Israel and the
Palestinian Arabs, the giant LED screen flashed up: “F***
bombing people in their homes. F*** the occupation. You
can’t have occupation and human rights.”
In a speech bubble displayed on that screen, a
fragment of dialogue channeled Jewish conspiracy
theory by suggesting that the world was controlled by
a cabal of wealthy individuals who were secretly pulling
all the strings.

Many who visit Berlin speak about the “impressive” or
“moving” Holocaust memorial there. The fact that Waters
could nevertheless stage this obscenity in that very city
shows how thinking has become badly skewed.

There is now an unprecedented amount of Holocaust
memorializing and education in the West. Yet the Shoah
is nevertheless routinely misappropriated, trivialized
and demeaned.

Words like “Nazi,” “fascism” and “holocaust” are now
used to describe a dizzying range of presumed social
ills. Meanwhile, verbal and physical attacks on Jews are
becoming ever more frequent and brazen.

There are several reasons for this frightening trend.

But Holocaust memorializing has itself played an
unwitting part.

The demonization of the Jews is, of course, the never-
ending hatred, as is the corresponding impulse to deny
Jewish suffering. At the core of the form it takes today lies
moral relativism — the replacement of objective truth by
personal opinion, feelings and emotion. Relativism means
no one’s values or status can be higher or lower than
anyone else’s.

There can be no hierarchy of suffering. So Jews can
12 JUNE 1, 2023 | JEWISH EXPONENT
never be allowed to make the justifiable claim that the
Jewish people are unique, or that antisemitism is unique
or that the Nazi genocide of the Jews was unique.

Of course, this so-called equal status merely produces
an inverted hierarchy in which good and bad, truth and
lies, victim and victimizer are reversed.

That’s one reason why, in the minds of progressives for
whom relativism is a kind of faith, Israel is an oppressor
and its Palestinian attackers are its victims.

That’s why such progressives can’t acknowledge that
the fate of Israeli victims of Palestinian terrorism is in a
different moral universe from the fate of the Palestinians.

That’s why CNN chief international anchor Christiane
Amanpour misrepresented the point-blank murder of Lucy
Dee and her daughters by Palestinian terrorists in the
disputed territories of Judea and Samaria as a “shootout”;
and why Amanpour’s belated and lame attempt at an
apology, altering “shootout” to the scarcely less distorted
“shooting,” merely compounded the offense.

It’s why Waters so disgustingly equated Anne Frank with
Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed not because she was a
Palestinian-American but because she had put herself in
harm’s way by standing in the middle of a fire-fight.

And unfortunately, this most immoral equivalence has
now become embedded into much Holocaust education
and memorializing, which equates the genocide of the
Jews with “other genocides.”
In his book “The End of the Holocaust,” Alvin Rosenfeld
observed that the Anne Frank story has been reframed to
articulate the need to overcome racism and homophobia,
prevent mass murder and promote tolerance and kindness.

Jews like Anne Frank, however, were wiped out not
because of a lack of tolerance or kindness or through
prejudice but because of a derangement beyond
comprehension directed at the Jewish people.

In Mosaic in 2016, Edward Rothstein wrote that
Holocaust museums flinched from emphasizing the
uniqueness of Jewish suffering. No such museum, he
observed, could seemingly be complete without invoking
other 20th-century genocides in Rwanda, Darfur
or Cambodia.

If we are all guilty, though, then no one is guilty. More
balefully still, if everyone can be a Nazi so, too, can
the Jews. Holocaust universalism has thus led directly
to the demonization of Israel by people claiming to
be anti-racist.

In Britain, this is one reason why there have been
strenuous objections to the Holocaust memorial and
education center that the government wants to construct
in a small park next to the Houses of Parliament. The
project has been derailed by the late discovery of a
planning law that forbids any such construction in this
park, a law that the government is determined to overturn.

Aside from environmental objections, significant
concerns have long been expressed that the message to
be delivered by this center will relativize and thus devalue
the Holocaust. These objections have been brushed
aside by the government and the project’s backers in the
Jewish community leadership.

However, the government itself has now given the
game away by acknowledging that the main purpose of
this center is not to commemorate the genocide of the
Jews. As Housing Minister Baroness Scott disclosed last
month, its aim is to ensure that the story of what happened
in the Holocaust “resonates with the public.”
And how will it do that? By denying the unique nature
of the Jewish genocide. “The content will also address
genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur,”
she said.

This drew a furious response from one of the leading
opponents of the project, Baroness Deech, who said it
would “demote the Shoah.”
Deech, who is Jewish and whose late father, historian
Josef Fraenkel, fled the Nazis, said: “It would prompt
generalities about hate and intolerance and would drain
the presentation of the Shoah from its antisemitic origins
dating back thousands of years.”
She went on: “They are going to put forward the
message that if you see something bad going on, you
must not be a bystander. If it’s just ‘don’t be a bystander,’ I
don’t see how that helps people understand antisemitism
and the plight of the Jews.”
Deech was backed by Gary Mond, chairman of the
National Jewish Assembly, who said: “The main concern
is that there must be no dilution to the principle that the
Holocaust was totally unique and incomparable.”
But that message will be utterly diluted by this proposed
memorial. The government is being egged on by Jewish
community leaders who refuse to get the point. Instead,
they have bullied objectors to the project and vilified them
as antisemites, although a number of them are Jews.

These leaders are thus weaponizing antisemitism
to drive through a project that will instrumentalize
antisemitism to deliver a message that will betray the
memory of Jews murdered in the Shoah by diminishing
their unique fate.

Universalizing the Holocaust has happened for two
reasons. The non-Jewish world wants to share the
protected moral status of being victims of the greatest
crime in history by claiming other evils are just as bad.

Diaspora Jews, desperate not to be viewed as different,
are terrified of asserting Jewish uniqueness, even over
this. Meanwhile, a depraved antisemite struts the stage in
Berlin. ■
Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster
and author, writes a weekly column for JNS and is a
columnist for The Times of London.




opinion
Karen E. H. Skinazi
When a Breast Cancer Diagnosis
Knocked Me Down, a Network of
Jewish Women Lifted Me Up
Getty Images
O n the way home from
the hospital where I was
given my diagnosis of
grade 2 invasive lobular breast
cancer, I directed my husband,
through my tears, to stop at the
kosher store.

“I don’t want to see anyone
right now,” I said, knowing the
inevitability of running into
someone we knew in the small
Jewish community where we live,
“so can you go in?” He pulled into
the parking lot. “We need challah,”
I reminded him. It was Thursday,
after all. The next evening was
Shabbat. Time doesn’t stand still
for cancer.

My hospital appointment took
place two days after the front page of The New York
Times declared: “When Should Women Get Regular
Mammograms: At 40, U.S. Panel Now Says.” I was
48. Breast cancer has long been the second most
common cancer for women, after skin cancer. It is
also the most lethal after lung cancer. Statistically,
though, most women affected are postmenopausal,
so unless there was a specific reason to test early,
women were screened regularly from the age of 50.

Now, the advice has changed. Breast cancer is rising
in younger women. For women in their 40s, the rate
of increase between 2015 and 2019 doubled from
the previous decade to 2% per year.

Why is this happening? Air pollution? Microplastics?
Chemicals in our food? We don’t know.

In the days following my appointment, there was a
proliferation of articles about the topic. Importantly,
doctors explained that the cancer women are
diagnosed with in their 40s tends to be a more
aggressive type of cancer. Cancers in premenopausal
women grow faster; many breast cancers, like
mine, are hormone sensitive. (Got estrogen? Bad
luck for you.)
When I posted the news about my diagnosis —
on Facebook, because I’m an oversharing type — I
was stunned by the number of friends my age, more
discreet about their lives, who sent me messages
to tell me they had recently gone through the
same thing. Everyone had advice. “If you can do
a lumpectomy, you’re very lucky. It’s not a major
operation, and you’ll preserve your breast.” “Cut it
all off! Immediately! Just get rid of all it and you’ll
never worry again! Do you want to spend the rest
of your life in mammogram scanxiety?” “Ask plastic
surgeons for pictures, and pick the cutest new
boobs out there. You won’t regret it.” “The radiation
burns — that’s something no one ever tells you. Get
yourself some Lubriderm and lidocaine, mix into a
slurry, slap it on a panty liner, and tuck it in your
sports bra.”
I’m not sure why I thought I was immune. Or maybe
I didn’t — maybe I just never gave it much thought.

Even when I found the lump on my breast, I was
dismissive. I went to the doctor, and she asked if
anyone in my family had had breast cancer. “Oh, who
knows? They were all murdered,” I said blithely. Her
eyes bugged. “In the Holocaust,” I added. “Your …
mother? Grandmother? Sisters?” “Oh! No, no history
of breast cancer in my immediate family.”
Add to that, my mother and sister both tested
negative for the BRCA gene mutations, and that’s my
Ashkenazi side. The thing is, though, most women
who test positive for breast cancer have no family
history of it.

But also, I’d done everything right! If you look
through the preventative measures, I took all of
them. I had three kids by 35,
and I breastfed them. I have a
healthy, mostly plant-based diet;
I walk and cycle everywhere. I’m
not a drinker or smoker. I eat so
many blueberries!
Several of the articles that have
been published in recent days
are emphasizing the particular
danger for Black women, with
good reason: They have twice
the mortality rate of white
women. But as I did my research,
I realized that Jewish women
should also be on high alert.

We’ve long known that one in
40 Ashkenazi women has the
BRCA gene mutation, significantly
raising the risk of breast cancer
(50% of women with the gene
mutation will get breast cancer)
as well as ovarian cancer, which
is much harder to detect and far more deadly. So
many of my friends who reached out to me to tell
me of their breast cancer experiences are Jewish;
interestingly, not one has the BRCA mutation.

Are these high numbers indicative or anecdotal?
Are Jewish women generally more susceptible to
breast cancer? This seems to be an important area
of future research.

For me, that research will come too late — as did
the guidance. For now, I have to accept that this
cancer diagnosis is part of my life, that just as I will
pick up challah every Thursday, I will wake every
morning and take my hormone-blocking Tamoxifen.

I will lose sleep every night about which surgery
to have until I have the surgery, and then I will
lose sleep every night about whether it was fully
successful. And there’s plenty more in store for me
that isn’t pretty; so it goes.

But here’s a good thing that’s already come out of
this diagnosis: When the responses to my Facebook
post flooded in, they were not only along the lines of
“Refuah shleimah” and “I’ve just been through this
too,” but also, “Thank you for sharing! I’m going to
book my mammogram right now!” ■
Karen E. H. Skinazi is associate professor of literature
and culture and director of liberal arts at the
University of Bristol in the United Kingdom.

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