On Memory and Misremembering - 4/14/2024

Today marks the 190th day of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. To date, close to 34,000 Gazans have been murdered, over 76,000 have been injured and over one million have been displaced. The pogroms in the West Bank continue to swell, with Settlers continuing to set fire to homes and cars, or outright murdering Palestinians in cold blood. More global powers are weighing into the violence. Despite a growing shift in the narrative in the US, our politicians are doubling down on their support for this genocide. I find myself feeling an ever growing sense of dread and despair and fear at what the next days, weeks and months will bring.

While the news cycle has been deeply troubling for many reasons, one thing that has really horrified me over the past weeks is the continued repression of Palestinian solidarity work in Germany. Over two weeks ago, German banks froze the account of a Jewish anti-Zionist organization. On Thursday, a University in Cologne rescinded a job offer from Nancy Fraser, a Jewish American philosopher who has spoken out about Gaza. On Friday, Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah, a British-Palestinian surgeon who spent weeks in Gaza was refused entry into a conference that was later violently shut down by hundreds of German police. 

Despite having this national narrative of accountability and ownership to commemorating their genocidal actions in the past, they are contributing to a genocide presently in their repression of dissenting voices.  

An essay from Jewish Currents entitled “Bad Memory” published in July 2023 captured this dynamic better than I could. They wrote: Germany’s commitment to memory is undeniably impressive; no other global power has worked nearly as hard to apprehend its past. Yet, while the world praises its culture of contrition, some Germans - in particular Jews, Arabs, and other minorities - have been sounding the alarm that this approach to memory has largely been a narcissistic enterprise, with strange and disturbing consequences.” The article goes on to discuss the term “Theater of memory” which they describe as “a coinage meant to describe the role of German Jews in a narrative that is less about making amends to victims of genocide than about redeeming perpetrators and their descendants.” The authors are pointing to the fact that the German commitment to doing right by the Jewish community is nothing more than a bastardization of memory, an intentional construction meant to redeem Germany’s honor. 

Memory and all that that word means has been at the heart of so much in the lead up to and aftermath of October 7th with none of the actions and atrocities happening in isolation. The way that history has been used and weaponized feels important to interrogate especially as narrative and media has the power to shape how we all view and respond to the ongoing genocide.

Of course, memory is a core tenant in Judaism - it is not a thing we do individually, but something we are commanded to do communally. We re-read the Torah every year in its totality to remember our core story. We have rituals that mandate how and when you remember the dead. One of the 10 commandments is to remember the shabbat and keep it holy.  And of course, we talk about the duty to remember of all of the harm that has been done to Jews. Many of our holidays come from the explicit commandment to “remember.” The rabbis go so far as to say that “Anyone for who forgets one thing from his studies - it is as if he is liable for the loss of his life.” This line comes from the book of Pirkei Avot - which is THE book on Jewish ethical wisdom. We are told over and over again the process of remembering is how we preserve life. In forgetting, we lose the people who came before us, we let them die a second time. Jews go so far as to leave stones on grave sites because of the understanding that that rock will be there forever, just as our memories should. 

Not only are we commanded to remember, we are specifically instructed not to bear false witness, that is to say, we are not to misremember or use a false narrative to our benefit. The law specifically states: וְלֹֽא־תַעֲנֶ֥ה בְרֵֽעֲךָ֖ עֵ֥ד שָֽׁוְא - this translates to You shall not bear false witness against your neighbors. Now the use of the shaveh or neighbor is really important. While many Jewish laws only concern acts between Jews, this one is very specific about the fact it pertains to all people, not just Jews.

  

By including this law as one of the ten commandments, truth telling and accuracy become a cornerstone of Jewish law. So what happens when people purposefully misremember the past? Does memory and the act of commemoration count when the memory is so thoroughly contorted, when it is bent so out of shape that it no longer calls back to the original event?

In the case of Germany, it feels very clear that this new narrative on antisemitism has nothing to do with Jewish safety and strays so far from the original intent of retaining the Holocaust as a cultural memory. As the authors at Jewish Currents write later on in the same article: By becoming the consummate protectors, Germans have so thoroughly absorbed the moral lessons bestowed by Jewish martyrdom that they have no more need for the Jew exception as a symbol; by logic of this strange supersessionism, Germans have become the new Jews. The authors are hypothesizing here that German remembrance of the Holocaust and their supposed protection of the Jewish people has become a cover for them to enact their political agenda. They use the narrative of Jewish protection to gesture towards a reinvention and a revival of Germany identity. 

Jewish safety is actually immaterial to Germany. Their concern is all about optics - optically seeming like they are the defenders against antisemitism. Ultimately though, Germany’s actions, and those of other defenders of Jews (like the ADL or the American Jewish Council), are a vehicle for supremacy with an anti-racist veneer. In this way, these entities are weaponizing Holocaust imagery in direct contrast with agendas of safety. They are intentionally misremembering the past and bearing false witness. 

When you look at the larger Zionist mission, so much of it relies on misremembering, on bearing false witness. For example, Zionists like to remember the Balfour Declaration - the 1917 British edict that created land for Jewish people in modern day Palestine - as a triumphant moment for the Jewish people. They forget that Balfour was a racist and xenophobe who just wanted Jews out of England. Similarly, Zionists love to spread the lie that Jews dominated the land of Palestine pre-1948. The Israeli government and military bear false witness when they say conduct themselves with morality and concern for civilian life.

Years from now, I fear that Zionists, and those who do not care to understand the current genocide and its accompanying news cycle, will intentionally misremember the actions of past 6 months. They will contort real truths and bear false witness to the suffering that they created, or were agnostic too. It is up to us to bear witness, to speak out and make sure that we zakhor - that we remember, that we challenge narratives of oppression. These lies are genocidal and the very least that we can do is to preserve events as they are, to speak out against them as Jews and as allies in the Palestine solidarity movement regardless of our religion (or lack thereof). If we forget, the rabbis would say that we would be responsible for all of this death a second time.