The United States Museum of Holocaust Kitsch

David Rieff

 

The historian Tony Judt once recalled that during a visit to Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, he saw “bored schoolchildren on an obligatory outing [playing] hide-and-seek among the stones.” He argued, “When we ransack the past for political profit — selecting the bits that can serve our purposes and recruiting history to teach opportunistic moral lessons — we get bad morality and bad history.” To which one should add: We also get kitsch. 

How Herzl sold out the Armenians

 Rachel Elboim-Dror

The Armenian question has occupied the Zionist movement since a mass killing of Armenians was carried out by the Turks in the mid 1890s – prior even to the First Zionist Congress. [Theodor] Herzl’s strategy was based on the idea of an exchange: The Jews would pay off the Ottoman Empire’s huge debt, in return for the acquisition of Palestine and the establishment of a Jewish state there, with the major powers’ consent. Herzl had been working hard to persuade Sultan Abdul Hamid II to accept the proposal, but to no avail.

Kerry Comes to Turkey With Rebuke of Its Leader Over Zionism Remark

Michael R. Gordon

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry chastised Turkey’s prime minister on Friday, March 1 for recently calling Zionism a “crime against humanity,” a comment that could frustrate Mr. Kerry’s desire to see an improvement in estranged Turkish-Israeli relations.
When Mr. Kerry set off on Sunday on a nine-nation trip, his plan was to use his visit in Turkey to consult on trade, the crisis in Syria and other Middle East issues.
But on Wednesday, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told a United Nations forum in Vienna that the international community should consider Islamophobia a crime against humanity “like Zionism or anti-Semitism or fascism.”