Tablet Magazine Refuses To Apologize To Readers For Anti-Holocaust-Survivor Screed

I might have added in the headline -- it was also, implicitly, anti-cancer-survivor, too. The writer has always had, she said, and "unappealing and didactic" hostility to people with too strong a "will to live."

Also, apparently, an unappealing hostility to look up the definition and usage of the word "didactic," as commenters noted two days ago.

So, Tablet's comment on this article is We hear you, and we're happy to have provided some lively debate, and so you're welcome.

I’m used to our pieces eliciting strong emotions. But the reactions to Anna Breslaw’s article have been exceptional. For some readers, her piece explored the consequences of growing up in one specific family touched by an enormous Jewish tragedy, and publishing it asserted the message that young people needn’t express only safely held conventional wisdoms to be involved and engaged with Jewish life.

Which readers were those? Which readers wrote, "Kudos, I've been meaning to say Holocaust and cancer survivors have had it too good for too long but never had the guts"?

But others saw in it a blanket condemnation of all Holocaust survivors—an impression that caused many to wonder why Tablet published it.

Yes. In some languages, "others" means "everyone."

....

What does the intense response to this piece say about what the rules here should be, about what precisely the red lines are in Jewish communal discourse?

The rule should be, "Don't publish people who have more psychotropic medication prescriptions than published articles."

Jeffrey Goldberg says that won't be enough:

Breslaw clearly needs help. Tablet needs to ask itself why it would publish such a horror. It also needs to provide evidence to back-up Breslaw's insinuation that Elie Wiesel has manufactured incidents of betrayal. If Tablet can't do this, then it needs to apologize to Wiesel. While Tablet is at it, it should apologize to those victims of the Nazis who remain alive today -- those "race-conniving, indestructible, taking and taking" Jews of Breslaw's demented imagination.

She does need help. From what I can tell, she is a narcissistic hysteric who is butthurt about her relations with her father and grandparents, and so began spinning some Greater Narrative of Historical Import to explain, essentially, why she doesn't get invited to Pessach any longer. She thought maybe Hitler victimized her (hey, he's important!) not by killing millions of people, but by making her Dad an asshole.

Thus does she trace the history of the twentieth century in the lumps and striations of her doodie.

Thanks to CharlieBrown'sDildo.

posted by Ace at 08:14 PM

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