r
THE JEWISH
NEWS
Com
Incorporating The Detroit Jewish Chronicle
mencing with the issue of July 20. 1951
Member Amer:can Association of English-Jewish Newspapers. Michigan Press Association. National Editorial Association
Published every Friday by The Jewish News Publishing Co., 17515 W. Nine Mile, Suite 865. Southfield, Mich.
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PHILIP SLOMOVITZ
Editor and Publisher
ALAN HITSKY
News Editor
CARMI M. SLOMOVITZ
Business Manager
HEIDI PRESS
Assistant News Editor
DREW LIEBERWITZ
Advertising Manager
Sabbath Scriptural Selections
This Sabbath, the 13th day of lyar, 5738, the following scriptural selections will be read in our synagogues:
Pentateuchal portion, Leuiticus 21:1-24:23. Prophetical portion, Ezekiel 44:15-31.
Thursday, Lag b'Omer
Candle lighting, Friday, May 19, 8:31 p.m.
VOL. LX.X111, No. 11
Page Four
Friday, May 19, 1978
NOW . . . for the Documentary
Tens of millions of viewers have been moved
by the NBC television Holocaust series into a
realization of the horrors that were marked by
mass murders and genocidal actions by a na-
tion, which until then, had a role among the
most enlightened in the world. A chapter of
forgotten historical facts was re-opened and the
viewers, horrified, became witnesses to the
most dastardly act in which the Nazi hordes
were revealed in their bestial and savage in-
humanities.
Only a handful of anti-Semites who have inh-
erited the Nazi venom jeered at the sight of
human suffering. or this nation the revela-
tions served not only as reminders but also as
declarations never to permit anything like it to
recur.
In this respect it was an admission of guilt,
because the nations of the world, including the
United States, had failed to act to prevent the
wholesale massacres. The Christians who don-
ned the Yellow Star as an expression of solidar-
ity with the Jewish people in condemnation of
the horrors of the past had, thereby, aligned
themselves with the pledge not to be silent
again when symptoms of hatred become appar-
ent.
Having performed a sacred duty of reminding
mankind of the horrors that were perpetrated
by Adolf Hitler and his gangsters, another re-
sponsibility evolves upon people with a con-
science. All of the facts regarding the Holocaust
must be shown, those relating to the Jewish as
well as non-Jewish sufferings. For that purpose
a documentary of what had occurred retains its
significance as a major obligation to be shared
with the entire world.
Broadcast rights to the NBC Holocaust series
have been attained by West German television
stations. They plari to show it without commer-
cials. But some Germans have already asserted
that much more powerful exposes of the crimes
were-shown within Germany, and the leader of
West Berlin Jewry, Heinz Galinski, expressed
concern whether people will turn on their tele-
vision sets to view such programs, since not one
can be forced to view what he refuses to see.
Perhaps this is a commentary on the evil that
has survived in many quarters.
It must be recorded that many historians are
distressed both by the resort to fiction in intro-
ducing the facts about the crimes as well as the
shortcomings in exposing the Holocaust out-
rages. To fulfill the duty of exposing all of the
crimes to public view it is urgent that the
documentaries about the Holocaust be shown
and that nothing be deleted.
The shortcomings in the NBC Holocaust pre-
sentations were many. So little was shown to
reveal the most brutal of all the facts about the
Nazi crimes — that a million children were
among the Six Million who were slaughtered or
incinerated! How could this be ignored? When
this fact was told in all its brutal aspects by
eyewitnesses at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in
Jerusalem, journalists who had experienced the
horrors of wars and massacres were so horrified
that several fainted in the courtroom's jour-
nalists' section. There was little to emphasize
this most outrageous element in Nazism, the
heartlessness in the mass murders of Jewish
children by savages who spoke of kindness to
their dogs.
There were many heroes whose courage re-
mains unknown unless there is to be the
supplementary documentary of the Holocaust.
Example: Dr. Janusz Korczak refused to aban-
don the orphans in the home he directed and
went to the ovens with them. He rejected an
offer of service as a physician made by the
Nazis. Perhaps the Korczak story deserves a
major place in the resistance to Nazism. It
should not be forgotten.
There is the story of the non-Jew Raoul Wal-
lenberg, the Swedish emissary who was respon-
sible for the rescue of some 60,000 Hungarian
Jews from the Nazi crematoria. He may still be
alive in a Russian prison, and the Russian act of
arresting him on unfounded suspicions after the
collapse of Nazism is unexplainable. The Raoul
Wallenberg role is inerasable from history. Let
it not be forgotten!
Many have criticized the failure to portray
the sufferings And death of the number of Chris-
tians equal to the Six Million Jews and the mass
murder of Gypsies. Even if only the mass mur-
der of the Czech population of Lidice had been
included in the NBC Holocaust accounts, the
series would have gained greater status.
What had been shown served a great purpose.
What is lacking confronts the responsible
American leadership to portray all the facts in
documentaries, no matter how lengthy they
may be. If there is a sense of guilt, let exonera-
tion come in the form of complete revelation of a
horror that puts to shame all of mankind.
Mankind has not been absolved by an NBC
television program. The guilt demands repeti-
tive protlamation. Perhaps there is a measure
of Jewish guilt over the silence that existed in
some quarters, silence that may have stemmed
from fear among American Jews. Let there be
proper correction of shortcomings; let the
Jewish community take the lead in an assur-
ance of presentation of facts that are inerasable
in the history of the world.
Teaching the Holocaust
The first impact of the NBC Holocaust tele-
vised series was to shock the uninformed, to
arouse many who had forgotten to a sense of
guilt, to encourage publication and distribution
of hundreds of thousands of copies of leaflets and
brochures describing the tragedy.
The latter are easily disposable. It is not even
certain that enough people read it. How else is
the Holocaust to be taught, so that the
memories of the past should not be erased?
Educators know that only by assuring proper
and sufficient coverage of the events in
textbooks will there be the possibility of attain-
ing the aim of registering the Holocaust story
indelibly in history.
This is the goal: for the Holocaust to be taught
properly it must be extensively recorded in
textbooks. This applies to the Jewish as well as
the public school texts.
Let it not be ignored, if the Holocaust is to be
remembered, never to be erased from memory:
that it must be a part of every reputable
textbook. Else it will be criminally ignored.
it 111; 1
110,1 1 11 1 i' swum ;I1111146'
.mm.4
iii
New JPS Volume
`Defenses in Imagination,'
Dr. Alter on Jewish Writers
Dr. Robert Alter, professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at
the University of California at Berkeley, provides thorough analyses
of modern Jewish writers in "Defenses of the Imagination: Jewish
Writers and Modern Historical Crisis" (Jewish Publication Society of
America). It is an enriching supplement to his earlier work "After the
Tradition" which introduced his basic studies on this immense sub-
ject.
As the author explains in his preface to his new volume:
"These essays present an argument which is the complementary
opposite of the one proposed in 'After the Tradition,' my previous book
on modern Jewish writing. That earlier collection of essays, as its
punning title was meant to suggest, was an attempt to explore the
ambiguous relationship — often more supposed than real — between
Jewish writers and the variegated background of Jewish historical
experience. In the present volume, by contrast, I am much more
centrally concerned with Jewish writers as a symptomatic, if ex-
treme, instance of the predicaments of 20th Century literature, and so
I repeatedly direct attention not so much to the writers' sense of their
cultural past as to their feeling for their imaginative medium and how
it bears on the urgencies of the historical moment."
There is a wealth of analytical commentaries on the major writings
of the time in the essays in "Defenses of the Imagination."
With some emphasis on writings related to the Holocaust, Dr. Alter
opens up vast vistas in his definitive essays on Walter Benjamin, the
martyred writer; Gershom Scholem, and others.
There are essays on Charles Reznikoff, Uri Zvi Greenberg and Leah
Goldberg.
Thus the leaders in Israeli letters as well as German and American
writers are under scrutiny here.
Immensely interesting and revealing in the character and attitudes
of the writers is the chapter on "Eliot, Lawrence and the Jews: Two
Versions of Europe." Exposing the anti-Semitism of the two men
under discussion, Dr. Alter states:
"Whenever traces of anti-Semitism appear in writers of major im-
portance, I suspect that most readers are inclined either to dismiss the
whole matter as an inconvenient but incidental prejudice of the au-
thor, or, alternately, to respond in mere indignation and, by so doing,
to assume that hostility toward Jews is everywhere the same, without
significant differences in nuance, motive, or general orientation.
"However, what a writer has to say about Jews, carefully consi-
dered, can sometimes provide a key to underlying aims and even
methods in his 'work, and an insight into his relation to the larger
culture around him. To suggest something of the range of the
phenomenon, I would like to consider symtomatic works by two En-
glish moderns at opposite poles — T.S. Eliot, the Christian conserva-
tive militantly defending an ostensibly older idea of European cul-
ture, and D.H. Lawrence, the evangelical pagan attacking some of the
basic values of Christian Europe."
Equally revealing are the comments on writers who are motivated
by Yiddishisms and Hebraisms they had imbibed in their homes
while not being Jewishly backgrounded. Two such are Bernard
Malamud and Saul Bellow whose works are commented on in the
essay "Jewish Humor and the Domestication of Myth."
A.Y. Agnon, Ossip Mandelstam, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and others
of prominence are included for discussion in this volume.
Dr. Alter's collective works define writers and their works so
thoroughly that the Alter essays also serve to reach a fuller under-
standing of the inspirations resulting from the eras of their creativity.