We Will Be Strong in our Weakness!

by tobybee

Exciting times blogreaders! We have a special guest post from Ben, who is a fellow melbourne Jew, an academic and general man-about-town…

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I went last weekend, along with tobybee, to see ‘… and Europe will be stunned’, Yael Bartana’s provocative film trilogy, which meditates on the difficulty of living in the world. Imagining and inventing a Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland, she explores the complexities of finding and making a home amidst others, playing with and discarding both a destructively facile Zionist liberation ideology and the reductive ease of liberal multiculturalism.

Her first film in the trilogy, Mary Koszmary (Nightmares), introduces us to the charismatic leader of the movement: scriptwriter and Polish activist Slawomir Sierakowski. Evoking and twisting Leni Riefenstahl’s fascist aesthetic, he stands in a decayed and almost entirely abandoned stadium. An almost absurd man in an absurd situation, he speaks before only a small number of Polish children and calls for the return of 3 million Jews to their Polish homeland.

Reprising Riefenstahl’s framing of the great leader, Sierakowski pronounces on post-Holocaust Polish lack in a language obliquely referring to the problem of return—whether Jewish or Palestinian—elsewhere:

Today we are fed up looking at our similar faces. On the streets of our great cities, we are on the lookout for strangers and listening intently when they speak. Yes! Today we know that we cannot live alone. We need the other, and there’s no closer other for us than you! Return!

Sierakowski’s call is as much for a Polish renaissance as it is a Jewish one, crying out for self-knowledge through the return of the other. We need you, he seems to be crying, to save and renew Poland. Bartana’s implicit critique, here, evokes Derrida’s explication of the logic of the supplement. The supplement, he suggests, is something enriching that is added. But it is also a sign of absence:

It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void. If it represents and makes an image, it is by the anterior default of a presence. Compensatory [suppléant] and vicarious, the supplement is an adjunct, a subaltern instance which takes-(the)-place [tient-lieu]. As a substitute, it is not simply added to the positivity of a presence, it produces no relief, its place is assigned in the structure by the mark of an emptiness.

The supplement, in other words, is something external, introduced to fill a lacking absence in the original structure itself, but which can never be more than a proxy. The three million Jews of Sierakowski’s dream are not the same three million who lived precariously in Poland in 1939. 70 years have changed us, one can never fully go back.

But Slawomir Sierakowski is not only speaking to the children in front of him, and some who have left do ‘return’. Bartana’s second film, Mur i wieża (Wall and Tower), imagines his cry as it is heard by Jews around the world who, inspired, band together to form the semi-fictional Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland. Evoking the Zionist pioneering aesthetic, this film traces the building, in a single day, of a kibbutz in Warsaw (repeating scenes from the 1939 JNF propaganda film Collective Adventure). But the optimistic spirit is compromised, over a soundtrack of Hatikvah played backwards, almost as soon as it begins. Located opposite the Warsaw Ghetto memorial and presumably on the site of the ghetto itself, the Movement’s uncanny construction includes surrounding barbed wire fences and an immense guard tower, suggesting both the concentration camp of Europe and the wall that runs along and through the West Bank, each looming inescapably over life itself.

This debilitating securitised existence, life behind a wall, is certainly no hopeful utopia. The JRMiP Manifesto is at times ambivalent, questioning its very purpose of existence:

Perhaps this return will not always be distinguished and victorious. We are filled with doubt, lack of confidence, hesitation. We do not plan an invasion. This will be more of a return of ghosts of the neighbours haunting you in your dreams – the neighbours you never expected to see again or those you have never had the chance to meet.

The uncertainty of ghostly existence, hidden away behind a wall and tower, is that of an embodied sense of embattlement, one that can be expunged neither by the ‘Zionist phantasmagoria’ nor by a return to an ambivalent Polish home. It is haunted by the violence of the 1930s and 40s in Europe, and today in Israel/Palestine. And the movement is ultimately forged in the blood of the assassinated Slawomir Sierakowski. Bartana’s third and final film, Zamach (Assassination), is set at his public funeral, as various speakers—from his contemplative widow, to a grotesque Israeli anti-diasporist, to the hopefulness of two children of the movement—speak to an assembled crowd in a large square in Warsaw. The movement comes together before its icon, fragmenting into factions even in the moment of its performative unification.

It is in this third film that Rifke, a Jewish escapee mentioned in Mary Koszmary, returns to bear witness. The ‘ghost of return,’ she has been repressed but not forgotten by Poland. But her return, both symbolic and embodied, is undetermined. What would a return really look like? To this question, Bartana gives us little.

Where does this leave us? Is there nowhere between existing for someone else, and failing at doing so, and a securitised precariousness, living as a permanently embattled minority? Perhaps this is her post-emancipatory point. ‘My recent works,’ Bartana has said, ‘are not just stories about two nations — Poles and Jews. This is a universal presentation of the impossibility of living together.’ As the JRMiP declares:

We direct our appeal not only to Jews. We will welcome all those for whom there is no place in their homelands – the expelled and the persecuted. There will be no discrimination in our movement. We will not dig in your life stories, we will not check your residence cards or verify your refugee status. We shall be strong in our weakness.

There is a noble dignity in such a position. To paraphrase Vinay Lal in a different context, the ontology of the dominated always has room for the dominator; the same cannot be said for the latter. Insisting on a position of weakness is not a simple move. There is a strength in that weakness, a commitment to existing with others even while acknowledging the impossibility of that dream.

What would a truly plural Europe look like? How is its possibility repressed even today, always there to return, to speak against its denial? As racist and Islamophobic movements grow both in our current homes and across that continent, evoking the anti-Semitic tropes of a not yet distant age, this remains an urgent question.

With one religion, we cannot listen.
With one colour, we cannot see.
With one culture, we cannot feel.
without you we cannot even remember.
Join us, and Europe will be stunned!

The films are screening at ACCA until Sunday. And for those more internationally inclined, they’re apparently in Venice until 27 November. So go see them!

‘no archive without outside’

by tobybee

Two archives have recently been launched: to honour 100 years since the fire, the Forward has put online links to translations of their original coverage of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire (via Lilith), and, in memory of 50 years since the trial, Yad Vashem has put on youtube over 200 hundred hours of testimony from the Eichmann Trial.

I spent a little while over the last few days trying to figure out what to share with you here: which parts of these archives do I draw out as particularly… what? what point did i seek to make? to share the saddest (as though we can, or should, rank grief amongst victims), the most poetic (as though burning in fires, or being genocided, is worse when experienced by someone who has a nice turn of phrase), the one that moves me the most (as though their ability to move me is the point). For as Derrida notes, in Archive Fever (if I am reading him correctly), the archive is a form of law: an institution of memory and forgetting. The guardians of the archive (the archons) “have the power to interpret the archive”; they place the archives in a dwelling, and from there we learn. The archive is both destruction, and a limit of destruction. It contains the death drive (hence le mal d’archive, or archive fever), and threatens every desire. Yet it also contains the desire to see, to read. Archives, for Derrida, are both ‘the commencement and the commandment’.

So then, I’m not sure how to read or to watch these archives with respect. What precisely they commence, or command me to do. And what I should do when it is begun and propelled. With the acknowledgement of the layers of law that bring to me what I will see – we see through the institutions of the newspaper and the courts after all. But also with the knowledge that I can do no more than dip into these archives. Maybe that’s what we’re meant to do. Who knows.

But then, the point of these archives is the testimony. It’s not my analysis. or is it? what is testimony without analysis. none of us ever just ‘speak’. So here’s an excerpt from one report, from March 28, 1911, of the story of one victim, Yetta Rosenboym. (Go here to read more.)

Yetta Rosenboym

22 year old Yetta Rosenboym lived with her brother Sam at 308 East Houston Street. She began working at the ‘Triangle’ Co. last Friday and was burned to cinder. Her brother was able to identify her yesterday at the morgue by a scar the ill-fated young woman had on her left leg. That foot managed to remain whole, as it lay in water. The scar remained on her foot since an operation she had there when she was 8 years old.

After examining the foot, which was all that remained of the beautiful Yetta, the coroner determined it was her, and produced the permit for her brother to bury her. The young woman was in this country for three years. She comes from Rovno, in the Volyn region.

And here is one video of Eichmann’s Trial. (Go here to watch more)

holocaust stories

by anzya

A friend recently interviewed author Ghita Schwarz on her book Displaced Persons for the Brooklyn Rail.  It’s a really interesting conversation about writing and reading and telling stories about the Holocaust, and on dealing with trauma and its effects as it’s passed down through generations. Here’s an excerpt:

Rail: What I found to be unique about your book was the way you chose to focus on the subtle aspects of trauma that pervade the characters’ lives after 1945, rather than depicting the more horrific details of their war experience which we’re used to reading in a Holocaust narrative. This is a challenging thing to do. One of your characters, Sima, says herself that “sometimes Americans lost interest if one did not say the words ‘concentration camp.’ As if what gave the experience its importance was the form of torture one had endured, rather than the loss of everything…They preferred violence—‘the gory details’…to grief.”

Schwarz: One of the primary motivating feelings I had when writing the book was this weird feeling of being both turned-off and interested in the gory details myself, and noticing how in so much that’s written about not just the Holocaust but any sort of major historical, horrible human rights event, people really do focus on the machetes cutting off the arms, and the gas chambers, and it has a way of erasing the experience and making it into a horror that ends, rather than something that people go through and live with. When I used to hear stories, my father didn’t focus that much on a horrible thing he saw. He really focused on how he never saw his father again after this one time. So I wanted to equalize it a little bit and make the grief and the loss the focus of the book rather than the actual mini-events.

Read the rest here…

memory and love

by tobybee

It begins with a woman confessing her story to a judge. We don’t know why – this doesn’t seem like a story that requires confessing. But then maybe all stories require a confession to be known. This, after all, is something we have learnt from both Freud and Foucault: that a speech, a confession, a talk, with an interlocutor is how we make meaning, or make truth, of our lives.

But how to make meaning when meaning is so difficult to grasp?

This is a problem that Nicole Krauss grapples with in her books. I recently finished reading her most recent book, Great House, and in so many ways, I think, she nails what it means to live in the unknown. And this is in some ways a peculiarly post-Holocaust generations, early twenty-first century unknown. Her works are works of postmemory (the type of memory described by Marianne Hirsch, wherein the traumas the traumas of the Holocaust—and their working-through—continue across time, space and generations). But it’s also, as Hannah Arendt has pointed out, a part of the general modern human condition (which isn’t to say that it’s an inevitable part of all human nature, but that it’s a part of a particular, and continuing, historical moment or experience of alienation in modernity and nationalism).

But despite its potential generality, Krauss writes of Jews and trauma, memory, longing, replacement. She writes of a man who, from the time the Holocaust ends, works to reconstruct their father’s study, as though by bringing together the items of his study his being could be brought back. It points us to a fetishisation of objects, but also to the poignancy of the impossibility of filling the hole created by losing one’s parents (in a genocide). But I like that it’s a study that he recreates.

When you read (here) Krauss’ explanations of some of the stories in the book (for there are numerous different threads which run through Great House, all united by a desk and its travels), she makes clear that parenthood has made her rethink what it is to be intimately connected to people (Krauss has two young sons). But one of the other things I like about the book is that she never creates a model of a family where everything is perfect. She writes of love that is beyond understanding but that sometimes works. She writes of failed relationships. She ponders whether we can ever know another person, no matter how much time we spend with them. So while her characters are heterosexual, their relationships, for the most part, are not simply straight. She plays with the expectations of heteronormativity.

And then there are the moments in the writing that make me laugh: a woman is describing the poet who she is to inherit the desk from, and she says “He had a big nose, a big Chilean-Jewish nose, and big hands with skinny fingers, and big feet, but there was also something delicate about him, something to do with his long eyelashes or his bones” (p. 10). It’s the ways she nails the search for the semitic in the body that mirrors something I so often do. Looking at the obvious repositories of bodily jewishnesses.

So yes, you should read this book. And if you haven’t read The History of Love – her previous book – you should most definitely do that as well. Nicole Krauss’s writings of memory, love and loss make me swoon.

William Cooper and Jewish-Yorta Yorta/Koori solidarity

by R.S.

Used with permission from Cooper family

I got an email yesterday from a good friend of mine Yorta Yorta man Peter Ferguson. Ferg’s great-grandfather was William Cooper. Ferg is looking for financial assistance to take his family to Israel for the opening of the William Cooper Memorial Garden at Yad Vashem

Uncle William led the first protest in Australia against the treatment of European Jewry by Nazi Germany immediately after Kristallnacht. As secretary of the Australian Aborigines League, Uncle William’s protest was significant in as much as it was the first private non-state, action against fascism in Germany. The protest Uncle William led to the German Consulate was refused admittance.

Perhaps the most significant of all was that Cooper’s Yorta Yorta community at Cumeragunja were experiencing the ‘intimidation, starvation [and] victimisation’ by the then Manager A.J. McQuiggan from the Aborigines Protection Board. McQuiggan was formally of the infamous Kinchela Boys Home where he was known as an ‘indebted drunkard who had regularly punished boys at the home for minor infractions by tying them to the fence and beating them with hosepipes and stockwhips’. On Cumera, Kooris had come to the conclusion that McQuiggan needed to go for his ‘arrogant, offensive and abusive’ behaviour’. Uncle William wrote:

The people are frightened of him at any time, for we have been cowed down so long but the fact that he carries a rifle about with him makes matters worse. We have been decimated by the rifle among other things and fear the result of one being carried now.

The protection board’s ambivalent response to the anger at McQuiggan’s behaviour elicited the following from Uncle William:

I submit that this is not in accordance with the British tradition and would not be done for a fully white community and in itself constitutes a further grievance…we are not an enemy people and we are not in Nazi concentration camps. Why should we then be treated as if we are?

It is incredibly significant that Uncle William would go out of his way to keep an eye out for European Jewry at a time of such deprivation of his own people.

I haven’t been able to help but think of my grandmother who was a child at the time, but who saw, in remote Australia, the kind of violence and deprivation and the trickle effect of eugenics thinking in her own life on Aboriginal people, and was able to enjoy the privileges that a “white Australia” offered. And yet in a different place, had she been in a Nazi occupied Europe, her situation would have been much different.

On the 15th of December Yad Vashem will be opening the William Cooper Memorial Garden in honour of Uncle William’s work, and Peter Ferguson is looking to take his family along for the opening. He is also looking to take with him two great-great-granddaughters of Uncle William and a great-great-great-grandaughter along with him.

Peter is looking for financial assistance to do this, in his own words:

I am writing to ask you for money for us to be able to travel to Israel and play a part in this ceremony. I cannot stress how important this is to my family and what a great source of pride it is for us to see him recognised in this way. The recent opening of the William Cooper Justice Centre in Melbourne saw almost all my brothers and sisters make the journey to Melbourne – with many of their kids in attendance as well – and all off their own bat.

But the cost of this trip is way beyond what we as a family can afford which is why I’m asking for assistance on behalf of my family.

Peter Ferguson can be contacted for further information and cost break downs here:

Mobile: 04—–

Email: peterf@ or umayorta@

It would be great if anyone out there could help out, or otherwise, have some awesome contacts for anyone who could.

Historical info from:

Goodall, H., (1996) Invasion to embassy: land in Aboriginal politics in new South Wales, 1770-1972

Glenn Beck’s lessons in commemoration…

by tobybee

You may recall that Glenn Beck’s rally held in Washington, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, earlier this year took place on the anniversary of King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech (which was given at the exact same place). And he claimed that he didn’t realise it was the same date, but that if it was, well, then good, because he was the heir of the Civil Rights movement. Indeed.

Well, the anniversary of Kristallnacht is on November 9-10, and Glenn Beck decided to memorialise that with an exemplary display of antisemitism. Rich Jews? Check. Jews controlling governments? Check. Jews that are both capitalist and communist? Check. Jews that are seeking to control the whole world, or rather, are actually controlling the whole world, just the rest of the world doesn’t know it yet? Check. Sneaky, shadowy, dangerous, scary Jews? Check.

Welcome to Beck’s world, in which George Soros is a Nazi collaborator, antisemite, and world-dominating puppetmaster:

This was a three-part program, where, over a few nights, Beck traced the ways in which Soros has apparently extended his grasp over the world. To see all of the programs go here (in one bit you learn that Moulin Rouge is one of his family’s favourite films!). And, of course, the smearing, lies and antisemitism hasn’t stopped with the tv shows. For instance, on his radio program on the 12th, following (an extraordinarily weak) condemnation from the ADL, Beck said that people should check to see if Soros has donated any money to the ADL(!) (and check out media matters for a full list of the ridiculous things that Beck has said leading up to and in the aftermath of his program.)

Here’s Michelle Goldberg (from Nov 10) on the program:

Anti-Semitism, like all ideologies, tells a story about the world. It’s a story about almost occult Jewish power, about cabals that manipulate world events for their own gain. In classic anti-Semitic narratives, Jews control both the elites and the masses; they’re responsible for the communist revolution and the speculative excesses of capitalism. Their goal is to undermine society so that they can take over. Through the lens of anti-Semitism, social division, runaway inflation, and moral breakdown all make sense because they all have the same cause. Nazi propaganda called Jews drahtzieher—wire-pullers. They constitute a power above and beyond ordinary government authority. “There is a super-government which is allied to no government, which is free from them all, and yet which has its hand in them all,” Henry Ford wrote in The International Jew.

If you know this history, you’ll understand why Glenn Beck’s two-part “exposé” on George Soros, whom Beck calls “The Puppet Master,” was so shocking, even by Beck’s degraded standards. The program, which aired Tuesday and Wednesday, was a symphony of anti-Semitic dog-whistles. Nothing like it has ever been on American television before.

“There is a crisis collapsing our economy—George Soros,” Beck said on Tuesday’s show. “When the administration and progressives look for a savior to step in and save the day—George Soros… He’s pulled no punches about the end game. It’s one world government, the end of America’s status as the prevailing world power—but why?” Because, Beck suggests, Soros wants to rule us all like a God: “Soros has admitted in the past he doesn’t believe in God, but that’s perhaps because he thinks he is.”

Soros, a billionaire financier and patron of liberal causes, has long been an object of hatred on the right. But Beck went beyond demonizing him; he cast him as the protagonist in an updated Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He described Soros as the most powerful man on earth, the creator of a “shadow government” that manipulates regimes and currencies for its own enrichment. Obama is his “puppet,” Beck says. Soros has even “infiltrated the churches.” He foments social unrest and economic distress so he can bring down governments, all for his own financial gain. “Four times before,” Beck warned. “We’ll be number five.”

It’s true, of course, that Soros has had a hand in bringing down governments—communist, authoritarian governments. Beck seems to be assuming a colossal level of ignorance on the part of his viewers when he informs them, “Along with currencies, Soros also collapses regimes. With his Open Society Fund… Soros has helped fund the Velvet Revolution in the Czech Republic, the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, the Rose Revolution in Georgia. He also helped to engineer coups in Slovakia, Croatia, and Yugoslavia. So what is his target now? Us. America.”

Beck’s implication is that there was something sinister in Soros’ support for anti-communist civil society organizations in the former Soviet Union. Further, he sees such support as evidence that Soros will engineer a communist coup here in the United States. This kind of thinking only makes sense within the conspiratorial mind-set of classic anti-Semitism, in which Jews threaten all governments equally. And as a wealthy Jew with a distinct Eastern European accent, Soros is a perfect target for such theories.

To inoculate himself against charges of anti-Semitism, Beck hurled them at Soros, pointing out that he’s an atheist and a critic of Israel. He accused Soros of helping Nazis steal Jewish property as a teenager and of feeling no remorse about it. In fact, when Soros was 14 in Nazi-occupied Hungary, his father bribed an agriculture official to pretend that the boy was his Christian godson. Soros once had to accompany his protector to inventory a confiscated Jewish estate. Asked by 60 Minutes if he felt guilty about it, he said no, because he wasn’t at fault. The slander that he was a Nazi collaborator has proliferated on the right ever since.

It’s entirely possible that Beck has waded into anti-Semitic waters inadvertently, that he picked up toxic ideas from his right-wing demimonde without realizing their anti-Jewish provenance. Early on Wednesday’s show, Beck cited the “Prime Minister of Malaysia” on Soros’ villainy. As Media Matters pointed out, he was almost certainly talking about former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. Maybe he doesn’t know that Mohamad also said, “We do not want to say that this is a plot by the Jews, but in reality it is a Jew who triggered the currency plunge, and coincidentally Soros is a Jew.”

“There’s a difference between first-degree murder and vehicular homicide, which is intentionality,” says J.J. Goldberg, a columnist and former editor in chief of The Forward, America’s leading Jewish newspaper. Goldberg wasn’t convinced that Beck meant to attack Jews. Nevertheless, he described the show as “as close as I’ve heard on mainstream television to fascism.”

It’s pretty amazing, to me at least, that such a program could be made and aired (why didn’t someone within the operation – there must have been a few people working on this! – stop it at any point? How did no-one realise what they were doing?). I have no sense of what broader ideas or lessons can be drawn from this – Beck generally spouts some pretty radical sentiments that, I don’t think, are as widely shared as he would like to be believe they are. But this is definitely disturbing. At the very least, I suppose, he reminded us of what Nazi-era antisemitism looks like (he even got the aesthetic of the videos right, I reckon – in particular in this promo video). So good job Glenn! But fuck, that fact that this was made and aired is kinda scary.

Sosnowitz memories

by tobybee

I’ve just finished marking some essays for a university history subject called “Genocide and Holocaust Studies”. Reading these essays – particularly this year, when I didn’t tutor the subject, but just got work doing the marking, so I have no idea who any of the students/writers are – is an amazing experience in reading the abstraction of genocide. Students say things like ‘the ways in which the Nazis stereotyped the Jews was disappointing’; or, ‘the Rwandan genocide was the fastest genocide in history.’

It reinforces for me that the university essay is no place for the representation of genocide. Actually, that’s overstating it, because some of the students write beautifully poignant and meaningful essays. But in general, and particularly when I’m sitting there trying to get through them in the time that is allotted, with music playing in the background to help me along, it feels somehow disrespectful.

In one of the last essays I read, the student said something like, ‘On 9 March 1941, 1000 Jews from Sosnowitz were transported to Auschwitz, and gassed on arrival.’ For that student, the name Sosnowitz is probably meaningless; transported just symbolises a really bad train trip; and gassing is incomprehensible. For me, Sosnowitz is the name of the town that my grandmother came from, and that ‘transport’ is the train that probably took some of my family to their death. Still for me, it’s an abstraction. But an overwhelming one.

I had to take a deep breath before I could continue reading.

‘Dancing Under the Gallows’

by tobybee

There’s a new doco coming out called Alice Dancing Under the Gallows. Here’s the preview for it (hat-tip to Michelle A.)

Movies like this point us somewhat to the interplay between individual stories and broader stories: the ways in which trauma is productive of both individual subjectivities and group identities. In that vein, to accompany the exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Melbourne, “Theresienstadt: Drawn from the Inside”, I had a piece in the September edition of the Jewish Museum Journal. Here it is:

Women of Terezin: Towards a More Nuanced Understanding

In the Jewish collective memory the concentration camp and ghetto at Theresienstadt (or Terezin) was a ‘model camp’. Musicians were brought in and encouraged to play; prominent Jews were brought there in order to ensure their partial protection; the Red Cross came to the camp so that the Nazis could demonstrate their ‘care’ for Jews (which we also remember to be a tragic falsehood). What about those aspects of Theresienstadt that have not entered into our collective memory?

For example, that in 1944 there was a poetry competition in the camp, and of the 37,000 people who were incarcerated at that time, 3000 submitted poems. And that in the barracks the women would talk about food and warm baths incessantly, remembering things they had eaten, and conjuring up ideas for what they would cook once the horrors were over. As Susan Cernyak-Spatz tells us, ‘[t]he funny thing was that many of us were of an age group that had never been to cookery classes, but we had the wildest imagination about what we would cook. I don’t think I ever became so good a cook as I was with my mouth.’

‘let’s just commemorate’

by tobybee

Last Sunday night I participated in a discussion at the Bund about how they commemorate the Holocaust. This commemoration takes place on April 19th every year, at a ceremony that is called the Geto akademye: April 19th is the date on the secular calendar when the Nazis entered the Warsaw Ghetto to begin the final Aktion, or deportation of prisoners. As is well known, they were met with armed resistance from some of the Jews. And so this is the date that the Bund worldwide has taken as its day of commemoration.

A problem arose in the aftermath of the commemoration this year. Regular readers of this blog might remember that we posted Dave Slucki’s speech which he gave at the akademye this year (if you didn’t read it then, go read it now!). And I said then, and I still maintain, that this was one of the most perfect speeches I can think of for a Holocaust commemoration at this particular historical moment. Unsurprisingly however, it caused a few ripples, as others in the Bund community later said that they were offended by what he had said.

So, in response, the Bund convened the meeting which took place on Sunday evening. About 35 people gathered together in the Bund’s halls, to listen to speakers and voice their opinions about what April 19th should entail. And, I have to say, it was one of the most interesting discussions about Holocaust commemoration that I have heard for some time. Interesting, however, not in the best sense of the term, unfortunately…

I was asked to speak as someone who is outside the Bund community but who has spoken at a previous April 19th ceremony, and as someone whose academic work is concerned with considerations of Holocaust memory. What was most fascinating for me, I think, was the way in which the discussion turned oh-so-very quickly into an emotional plea. Which isn’t to devalue emotions, but to try to point at the way in which, in this particular space, emotions were held up as something purer than what was perceived as academic thought (which reared its head when I suggested that any historian of memory would say that to remember is inherently political).

So one speaker argued that the Bund should ‘stay true to remembering’, calling for a space in which people could ‘just commemorate’. The ceremony was equated to the experience of ‘standing at [a family members’] grave’. There was a discourse of purity of commemoration at work, such that someone else in the audience was driven to ask ‘when you all say remember, and commemorate, what do you actually mean?’ And the answer? One person said that on all other days they remember, of course, but on this day, what makes it different, is that it is a holy day; that it is about standing at the cemetery and reciting a set of poems, and songs, lighting candles. That this day, this commemoration, is about a set of rituals which are known, and which bring comfort; that it’s not a day to make (what was perceived as) extraneous meaning out of the Holocaust. The perception that April 19th is in some way holy permeated the room. Speaker after speaker said that that ceremony is their Yom Kippur, their Rosh Hashana. Indeed, Dave was accused of having ‘shattered the holiness of the ceremony’.

So what was it that was so shattering?

I think, from my reading, that it was that he raised a different set of questions about the Holocaust. In his speech he raised the question of what it means to honour the memories of those who died and those who survived. And I think, in essence, that is the central question that all makers of Holocaust memories and commemorations are trying to answer. But the answers he posed were, truly, shattering. I think there is a kernel of truth in that. For instance. In the speech he called the Israeli occupation of the West Bank illegal. And this is, I would think, a truth. In international law, yes, the Occupation is illegal. That he said so on that night, and in that space, was for some disrespectful. This was a word that people kept returning to: that the speech was disrespectful and didn’t respect the sanctity of the event. For Dave, however, I think, it was a question of ethics. April 19th this year fell on Yom Ha’atzmaut. While the akademye was taking place, across town a large group of the Melbourne Jewish community was celebrating the anniversary of Israel’s independence. To not mention that, in light of the type of questions Dave was raising about the Holocaust and what it can mean for us today, was in an important sense unethical.

But the hegemonic position of the Bund community seemed to be that the ceremony was not political: that to raise explicitly political questions was to be disruptive and to show dishonour. That to make people uncomfortable was to disrespect the event (and by event here I mean both the Holocaust and April 19th).

We know of course that this is not true: that everything is political: that the mere choice to remember, to include particular stories and exclude others, to use particular structures and motifs of commemoration, is political. That to be rebellious, to consider different ways of thinking and speaking, is an important way in which the Holocaust can be commemorated (after all, it’s a commemoration which falls on the anniversary of the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: how better to honour the memories of those who rose up than to echo their rising?). And this was a point which was definitely made by a few people present at the meeting on Sunday night. So I don’t mean to suggest that it was Dave against the Bund – certainly not. But what I took from the meeting was that for all the work which theorists of memory and commemoration generally, and of the Holocaust in particular (and in general), have done, there is still a sense which pervades the Melbourne Jewish community, that the Holocaust is sacred, that remembering it needs to be done in a ‘pure’ fashion, and that such purity can exist. Indeed, as one person commented, ‘it’s not academic. It’s emotional. It’s historical. It’s simple.’

If I was reminded of anything on Sunday night, it was that when it comes to Jewish communities remembering the Holocaust, it’s never simple.

“We Australian Jews certainly don’t want you here!” (Dunera Boys pt.2)

by R.S.

Fritz Schonbach, With Prescience, depicting the Dunera Boys as museum displays. Jewish Museum of Australia, 2007

With Julia Gillard and the Australian Labor Party dogwhistling their way to the next election over asylum seekers, and with this month marking 70 years since HMT Dunera left Britain, I think it is worth writing my second installment to my review of the 80s flick/tv show Dunera Boys. You can read Part 1 here.

The Australian Jewish News reported recently that, ‘Peter Felder, son of Dunera boy Henry Felder, is organising this year’s reunion, the first major gathering since a 50th-anniversary event in 1990. “So far, we’ve had 12 Dunera boys indicating they will attend,” he told The AJN.’ I think this is great news, and really nice that someone has taken it upon themselves to organise an important event such as this.

As the Dunera Boys pass on (the history nerd in me can’t help but think) they each take their own little archive with them – to be a fly on the wall at this event would be an amazing thing.

I feel like the Dunera Boys have taken on a kind of symbolic place in Australia’s history of refugees, particularly in the minds of Jews. However, I think some people have forgotten the gritty, at least initial, response to European refugees by the “established” Jewish community and particularly the Jewish establishment’s response to refugees, including that of the Dunera Boys.

The “old-established” Jewish community in 1940 – mostly older families of English and German origin – held a relatively secure place in Australian society. The Jewish community located their Jewishness, for the most part, in religion, and saw themselves, as the adage goes, ‘more Australian than the Australians’. Despite fears about the outbreak of anti-Semitism, their “Britishness” passed them as “white”.

This was not always the case, Australian nationalism oscillated so much that it is often hard to tell who was considered “white” at any given time, by any given group. All of this, revolves around the White Australia Policy (which you can get a wiki-crashcourse in here), which didn’t officially end until 1972, but which always appears in the form of white-noise any time a politician mentions the word “immigration”. Certainly Australia’s representative to the Evian Conference (established to work out what to do about refugees from Nazism) told the delegates in 1938:

It will no doubt be appreciated also that as we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one by encouraging any scheme of large-scale foreign migration…I hope that the conference will find a solution of this tragic world problem.

Instructions issued to refugees by the Australian Jewish Welfare Society are a good example of what the Anglo-Jewish community expected of European refugees:

Above all, do not speak German in the streets and in the trams. Modulate your voices. Do not make yourself conspicuous anywhere by walking with a group of persons all of whom are loudly speaking in a foreign language… Remember that the welfare of the old-established Jewish community in Australia as well as of every migrant depends on your personal behaviour…Jews collectively are judged as individuals. You personally have a grave responsibility.[1][My emphasis.]

Considering the lack of institutional anti-Semitism, , the ‘normalcy’[2] of the Jewish experience in Australian history and society, the degree to which the wider community espoused it’s “Britishness”/”whiteness” and Australia’s all consuming preoccupation with “assimilation”, it is not surprising, as Blackeney has put it, that ‘the Australian Jews shared the general xenophobia of Australians’.[3]

Blakeney has written that various policies adopted by the AJWS were ‘bound to create tensions between the Welfare Society and the refugees’.[5] Bartrop has argued that assimilation ‘in the first third of the twentieth century developed owing to a misconception that anti-Semitism would breakout the minute Jews were seen to be anything other than loyal Australians true to the British empire’.[6] Rubinstein has noted that it should be remembered that, ‘only twenty years before the refugee intake began in earnest many Australian Jews had opposed their German co-religionists on the battlefield and conceivably…it was difficult to accept with warmth and enthusiasm people whom they, as loyal British subjects, had once regarded with enmity’.[7] Rutland reminds us that such a response was not unique to Australia. The Jewish community in America responded in a similar way when Jews were fleeing Tsarist Russia, while the assimilated German and Austrian Jews also rejected social contact with Jews who fled Polish oppression before and after World War 1.[8]

However reasonable someone might find these explanations, I’m not sure it changes the fact that for Australia, let alone the British/German Jewish community, refugees were seen as an inconvenience before they were seen as people with a story in which they had little agency.

The Jewish establishment felt at the time they they knew how to best fight anti-Semitism and for the rights of Jews and Jewish refugees in Australia, effectively to the exclusion of ‘continental’ voices. They considered those whose ‘expertise’ in fighting anti-Semitism was ‘limited to conditions in European lands’.[4]

In response, people who were either refugees or Jews of Eastern European origin responded by establishing the Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism.[9] This was a largely left wing, communist oriented organisation that had, from what little I understand, fairly broad support for a fairly long time. You can listen to an awesome podcast here with Norman Rothfield, once a former organiser for the ensemble.

It is around this time, with refugee arrivals trickling in, that the nature of the Australian Jewish community began to change dramatically and would never be same again. The tensions that ensued can be seen in the experience of some of the Dunera Boys.

Around the time the internees first arrived, they received a visit from General Secretary of the Australian Jewish Welfare Society, who was considered the representative of the Jewish establishment. Benzion Patkin described the General Secretary’s speech to the internees,

We bring you greetings from the Jewish community of Sydney … we realize your plight and misfortune … however as enemy aliens, and to safeguard the security of England in its hour of peril, you were brought out to Australia, a friendly democratic country. If you will behave in accordance with all regulations, begin to learn English, we shall be proud of you. You will be given some work to do and you will be provided with all the necessities. We brought with you some amenities and will send some more later.[10]

The amenities included toothbrushes, prayer books, chewing gum and “special items for women” (there were no women in the camp).

Erwin Lamb describes his impression of this news. The General Secretary,

in the presence of the Australian guards and the Australian officers, told us very plainly: “We Australian Jews certainly don’t want you here!” We, the internees definitely did not expect to hear such statements from a Jew, a Jewish high official of a Jewish institution.[11]

He goes on to describe how a Jewish Chaplin, I presume from the Army, came to visit during Hanukah, and noticing the wooden menorah, made by some internees ‘he remarked “one day this Menorah will be placed in the Museum in Melbourne” to which we replied that we were more interested to be in Melbourne ourselves than to have the Menorah in Melbourne’.[12] [See title sketch]

Hans Hammerstein describes how

It was about this time that an official of the Australian Jewish Welfare Society visited the camp for the first time. Our impression was that we, the internees, were like wandering beggers in his eyes. I approached him with a question whether he could assist us obtaining immigration certificates to Eretz Israel. He replied (over the shoulder and in a manner that anyone, like me, who heard him say it, will never forget) “I am not interested in Palestine in any way”, and left. The fact was – we had no “status”. It was not clear who or what we were, or who might “protect” us.[13]

The attitudes of the Jewish community establishment changed quite dramatically quite quickly as the war progressed, and Patkin describes this in a number of instances. Certainly at the time I think the “established” community recognised the real threats Nazis posed, and were not deluded (as far as you could be, so far away) about the ramifications for Jews in Europe.

However, Jews in Australia were extremely quick to defend not just their own social capital but the social capital of what was considered to be “white” in Australia, and to be “white” meant protecting Australia from any possible “problem” – in this instance it was European Jewry.

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Since I can’t stand blogs that don’t reference properly, but hate referencing/bibliography myself, this simple one will have to do. Leave comment if you need further details. 
[1] Rutland, Edge of the Diaspora, 1997

[2] Rubinstein, The Jews in Australia: A thematic history 1788-1945, 1991

[3] Blakeney, Australia and the Jewish Refugee 1933-1938, 1985

[5] Blakeney, 1985

[6] Bartrop, Australia and the Holocaust 1933-1945, 1994

[7] Rubinstein, 1991

[8] Rutland, 1997

[4] Blakeney, 1985

[9] Blakeney, 1985

[10]Bartrop, Eisen, The Dunera affair : a documentary resource book, 1990

[11] Bartrop, 1990

[12] Bartrop, 1990

[13] Bartrop, 1990