 Okay, we're back. I'm Jay Fidel, and we're here on ThinkTech, and this is Bigotry in America. And we're talking today about the Holocaust that passed over, which starts actually tomorrow. And the question of the day is, is it being forgotten? And Peter Hoffenberg is with us. He's been here before. He's a professor at the university. He's also Jewish after you have to crank that in. And he is speaking in his individual capacity, not as a representative of the university or anybody else. Right, or any Jewish organization. Yeah. Right. Thank you. All right. First, I want to say why I'm wearing this. I just came back from the legislature at a run because they spent the last couple of hours dealing with the death with dignity, medical aid, and dying bill, which has been in and out of the legislature for like 20 years. And after a Herculean effort this year, well, last year and this year, they passed it to 23 out of 25 senators voted against it. A couple of three of them voted, I mean, 23 out of 25 voted for it. A couple of the ones who voted for it voted with reservations, and they took a long time to express the reservations. But after all of that, 23 out of 25 passed it. And David, he has said that he will sign it upon presentation. So we now effectively, within a few weeks, we will have this law, this new law, this new progressive law, happy to say death with dignity or medical aid and dying. This is a good thing. And I'm fresh from it. I'm very excited. What you have here is a scoop. And that's not what we're here to discuss though, Peter. Right. But I will have reservations about everything I say too. It's a good lead-in, right? You're not running for office, are you? No, from office. There it is. So our topic today is the Holocaust at Passover. Is it being forgotten? And there's two things I'd like to sort of set the stage with. One is Passover starts tomorrow. The first Saturday night is tomorrow night. And we can talk about the story of Passover. I think that's important. People hear that. But also a piece that appeared in this morning New York Times, an op-ed piece by a rabbi in Los Angeles. And he spoke about how the Jewish religion has been essentially forgotten in large part around the world since World War II, since the Holocaust. And you can find synagogues all over the world that are effectively non-functioning. They have become auditoriums. They have become museums. Or they have become synagogues that don't have a minion, which is 10 people to actually pray together. And the ghosts, he called it the ghosts. The ghosts of Judaism around the world in so many cities. It's not just in Europe where the Holocaust took place, but it's in Asia. It's everywhere. These temples used to be so vibrant and everything. And now they're ghosts. It's a very interesting piece if you get a chance to see it in New York Times. So anyway, that sets the stage. And I guess I'm really wondering where we are here in 2018 on Passover. And like you described the story of that. And where Judaism is, and especially where anti-Semitism is in 2018. Is that a multiple compound question? Well, that should take several pass-overs. I think that's Passover plus Hanukkah and every other holiday. So where would you like to begin? It's up entirely. Let's begin with the story of Passover. I think most folks, particularly in the Islamic and Christian worlds, know about the story of Passover. They certainly read the biblical accounts and such about the Jews living in Egypt or what was Egypt. Having been invited and living there under relatively good terms. And it's a somewhat classic story where an immigrant group, in this case Jews, are invited. They live decently. Not first-class citizens, but decently. And then there's a political regime change. And that certainly is relevant today for immigrants who were invited somewhere and lived. And then politics changed. And Jews, as is the wording, now live under a pharaoh who did not really know them. And so very briefly, I think the story for folks is that Moses at the center leads rebellion against what was slavery. Negotiates. You can think Charlton Heston, Yule Brenner as people of generation. I would think of negotiating for freedom. And again, in a not unique situation, the options are between continuing as slaves or essentially leaving. And so, again, I think people would resonate with that today. You stay and have no freedom or you leave. And we wander for 40 years through the desert, which is one of the reasons that some of us Jews do not like to camp, because that was not particularly a good camping experience. We'll probably talk about the other, the second major camping experience, which was also not a particularly good one. After fleeing the pharaoh's troops, a series of plagues, of course. They wander for 40 years and then enter the Promised Land. And so I think if you are living next to a Jewish family or you know Jewish people, you'll see us suffering under matzah, which is unleavened bread because we had to flee before we could leaven the bread, which means all gastroenterologists will be particularly busy this week and next week, and we'll try to recover. We have a ceremonial meal which honors the experience, such as the mortar used to build the bricks built as slaves. It resonates with spring, so you'll have paschal lamb, etc. Of course, the last supper was a seder, so if one follows the life of Jesus. So I think this is one of the holidays, which is probably most well-known among non-Jews. Well, a lot of it is the story, the story winding up in Canaan after 40 years. And Canaan is the modern-day Israel, isn't it? So there's a big Israel factor in this next year in Jerusalem. That's been the mantra for what, 5,000 years. And so this is a story with lots of parts, but very memorable. And it's a story because of the seder, where you get to tell the story in some detail with iconic food and things, iconic pieces on the table that connect up with the meal. So the result is that even if you're a kid, you walk out of that seder knowing a little history and remembering it and reinforcing it every single year of your life. Right. Well, the understanding is to somewhat bridge history in space. I would say it's our transubstantiation. So everyone, Catholics out there, they can understand. Because at some point during the seder, everybody who is attending the seder, reading or listening, is supposed to feel as if they were there. So it's not just the story, but it's actually the retelling of the story and the retelling of the story in essentially the same order. So one could go and read Haggadot, which is the prayer book for the saders in the medieval times. And one would find the story essentially the same as what one would get off of the web today. So it is the story, but it also is the telling of the story in a particular way, and the repeating of the story in a particular way. And the songs, and the litany. The songs, of course. And those are the same prayers, the same songs, the same inquiries year after year through your life and the lives of untold millennia, I mean untold generations in millennia after millennia. So it really does leave an impression. I can't think of any other part really of the Jewish religion or any religion where, you know, you are exposed to such detail about that event and any event like that on a repeated basis. And yes, I agree with you, you're there. The whole experience puts you there. And thus you remember it, and you incorporate it into your worldview. I do, I do, I tell you that. So you can see how very important it became in American history, particularly in African American history. So slavery, telling the stories of slavery, telling the stories of wandering. Black America had its Moses characters. And very importantly for Moses, and again, folks who saw the movie or read the Torah or the Bible as it might be called, will understand that Moses committed sin. And because he committed sin, he was not allowed to go into the promise land. So you can see it resonates in a very tragic way with somebody like MLK Jr., or Malcolm, or Frederick Douglass, who were major figures leading African Americans out of enslavement who didn't, who never, we haven't really reached the promised land, of course, as far as racial equality. But that resonated with the Moses story. So it's Joshua, of course, who leads the people and the tribes into the promised land. But you could say this, this is a condition of humanity, that humanity is always seeking freedom. And so the Passover story remains relevant, sometimes even more relevant than before, with not only the Jews, but really a lot of people in the world who seek freedom, yeah. I think they, they seek freedom and we could have a philosophical discussion the next time. Right. I think freedom is the noble idea. I think probably if we scratch the surface unfortunately, most people prefer order and stability. And that's part of the tension here, right? Because there were also Jews who would not go with Moses. And as Jews wandered the 40 years in the desert, there were those who became nostalgic for Egypt, even though Egypt was enslavement, Egypt was what they knew. Egypt was order. So those of those folks who may not even be interested in religion can see this fundamental human tension between, as you say, freedom, either individual or corporate, but also the drive to have stability and order. So one of the great tensions in those 40 years, and you can see this with immigrants everywhere, right? Do, I'm not going to risk because freedom is uncertainty, freedom is difficult. Rousseau said, freedom is easy to swallow, difficult to digest. And Egypt, or where you came from, is what you knew. Let's remember tragically that there were, it's not a large number of people, but it's, but it's not insignificant number of people who move from Europe to North America and then move back to Europe in the 30s in part. It's a bad time to move back. You can't think of a worse time. You really cannot think of a worse time. And there were a variety of reasons. But among those was the intense American anti-Semitism in the 1930s by the Coughlin and such an intense and economic difficulties. And they had family back in Europe and they knew Europe. It's one thing, you know, European anti-Semitism was known. You knew, you knew how to operate among, until the Nazis rose, of course. But the standard European and expected European anti-Semitism was horrific. But many folks were able to negotiate because it wasn't genocidal anti-Semitism. I mean, the Nazis were genocidal. You can't negotiate with that. But, you know, not being able perhaps to live in a particular area or not being able to be in a particular profession was something that Jews and other minority groups have lived with forever. But having everything stolen, your children murdered, that, of course, was beyond the pale. But also something that most people in the 1930s had no recognition of. So the folks who moved back, you know, moved back with incomplete or no knowledge. It's not a moth going to a flame. It's just that America wasn't the promised land. When they moved back, there were not that many of them. I mean, this was not a grand move. No, it's not. But it's, you know, we always debate about numbers and how representative. But it's not insignificant. And certainly, most of them perish. Yeah. That was one of those really bad mistakes. Right. So compressing, you know, at 5,000 years of history, you know, after they got to Canaan, after Passover, there was the diaspora. And the diaspora in large part was successful. I mean, the Jews flourished in many places in the world. Yes, there was anti-Semitism, but it was in a lot of places it was bad but manageable. In some places, it wasn't so bad and they flourished as part of the local community and culture and all that. But the war and the Nazism really changed that. And the peace in the times, you know, stand for the proposition where there were people, lots of people practicing their religion in so many cities. Now that's not the case. And now furthermore we have, I'm just reading the paper here, we have a resurgence of anti-Semitism. So right after this break, I would like to discuss with you the title question of our show, which is, the Holocaust at Passover, is it, and it refers to, I guess, the Holocaust, is it being forgotten? Are we forgetting the Holocaust? Should we remember? Should we say never again and always remember, or is it okay to forget it? And in fact, whether we say okay or not, is it being forgotten? We'll be right back after this break. Think about it. Hello, I'm Dave Stevens, host of the Cyber Underground. This is where we discuss everything that relates to computers that's just going to scare you out of your mind. So come join us every week here on thinktecawaii.com, 1 p.m. on Friday afternoons. And then you can go see all our episodes on YouTube. Just look up the Cyber Underground on YouTube. All our shows will show up and please follow us. We're always giving you current, relevant information to protect you. Keepin' you safe. Aloha. I'm Jay Fidel, thinktec. Thinktec loves energy. I'm the host of Mina, Marco and Me, which is Mina Morita, former chair of the PUC, former legislator, and Energy Dynamics, a consulting organization in energy. Marco Mangelsdorf is the CEO of Provision Solar in Hilo. Every two weeks, we talk about energy, everything about energy. Come around and watch us. We're on at noon on Mondays every two weeks on Thinktec. Aloha. Okay, we're back with Peter Hoffenberg. You can call him professor. He doesn't speak to the university, but he has a lot of ideas. He's a history professor. Actually, I really care about history a lot. You know, I don't think you can appreciate anything, much less the present, the future, anything without understanding history. And today we're talking about the history of Passover. We're talking about the Holocaust and the connection between the Holocaust and Passover starting tomorrow. And is the Holocaust being forgotten? So, you know, I put that question to you, you know, that Passover is supposed to help us remember the hard times in Egypt. And in remembering maybe, I don't know, there's something bittersweet about it. It brings us together as a community. It makes us understand the human condition maybe a little better. And it makes us, you know, connect with Judaism, I suppose. But what's the role of the Holocaust? And in the Passover Haggadah, there's, and the ones I've seen, always references to the Holocaust, which, you know, happened a long time after Egypt. But why is that? What's the connection between Passover and the Holocaust? It's a superb question and many answers. So as we say, right? Two Jews, three opinions. So let me give you six. Let me start from the middle and develop out. The middle argues that this was a unique event and not unique at the same time. And I think that's part of the tension. And what I mean by that is not that the Holocaust is being forgotten, but the Holocaust is either being normalized. So if we use the word genocide, it's one more genocide. Or the Holocaust is being compared to other things. And inevitably, when we make a comparison, we say one is stronger, weaker, one is more significant or not. So Yehuda Bauer, a dear friend and really the head rabbi of Holocaust studies, doesn't use the word unique. What he says is the Holocaust was unprecedented. And in saying unprecedented, that does not mean that other genocides or other mass murders, it does not mean that the experience of transatlantic slavery is better or worse. These are essentially events that stand on their own. So to answer your question, I don't think the Holocaust is being forgotten. I think it's being used and abused. So for example, people calling the Israelis Nazis are calling Netanyahu Hitler. So that's an abuse. The height of irony. Right. But also it's being in a certain degree normalized. All of history is filled with this. This is one example. And then I certainly do not want to offend in any way any of your listeners. But in the West, it's become a certain degree a Christian moment where I have read materials that equate the death of Jews, the murder of Jews in Auschwitz with the crucifixion. There were post visit surveys at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C. And many of the high school kids came out saying they now understand Jesus better. So what's happening is it's not so much a Jewish event and it's not so much an event which stands on its own. So I wouldn't exactly say forgotten. I would say relativized, normalized. It would be as if you took an event like Atlantic slavery and removed the overwhelming fact that those were black Africans who were enslaved and used it as a discussion of other forms of slavery in which slavery is a widespread issue. And this is just one example rather than recognizing the horrors of 20 million people ripped from the continent of Africa under beyond inhumane conditions. So I don't mean to be overly professorial with you, but it's a really good question because there are curricula, which include the Holocaust. There's a Holocaust Remembrance Day, there's Yom HaShoah, but by the same token. That's a day dedicated to the Holocaust. They're very different. So Holocaust Remembrance Day, for example, is a day where we talk about the relationship between and among genocides. There's usually a mayor or a governor who says it's Holocaust Remembrance Day. And it's a community, a little bit of a community kumbaya moment. Yom HaShoah. Yom HaShoah, Andy, are we speaking about the Jewish community? Wherever you live, no, I mean wherever you live. It's where the community gets together and well-intentioned individuals who are very well-intentioned have good hearts come. I feel badly about it, promised never to let it happen again. And that's a community as in state, a political community, neighborly community. But in the Jewish community is Yom HaShoah. And that's the day where if you're in Israel, everything stops. People get out of their cars. It's like in Europe after the First World War, 11th hour, 11th day, 11th month, still to this day. So if any of your viewers want to catch a bus at 11 a.m., November 11th in London, you're not going to catch that bus. If you want to catch your check in Berlin, you're not going to catch that bus. How interesting. It's a moment of remembrance, but particularly by and among originally veterans and now children and grandchildren. We here also will have a Yom HaShoah service on April 11th. The goal of that is to remember those who both were murdered but also escaped or survived because their memory, the memory of the escapees and the memory of the children of survivors, those are valuable memories. There's a lot of discussion about the last survivor passing away. Like two years ago, the last American veteran of the First World War passed away. But it's not as if their children or their community don't still have control over the memory and control over the stories and narratives. So you ask a very important question. I would say no, it's not being forgotten, but it is being modified and tweaked and used and relativized and sometimes used to hit Jews over the head with. Right, right. So does that answer? I hope it does. Yeah, but I want to go a little further with it. I want every answer should have a couple of questions. Of course, it's the sausage theory. You go from link to link. Right, kosher. This is Tom Munich sausages. So back to the New York Times article and fewer and fewer synagogues and a lot of assimilation, a lot of assimilation. And perhaps here in Hawaii there's a certain amount of Jewish education. That doesn't mean there's a lot of Jewish education everywhere. In fact, I would say there isn't and it's declining. There are other things you want to do in your life and that's just not one of them. At the same time, you have an increase in only reading the Times in anti-Semitism. And recently in the south of France, an 85-year-old woman was attacked in her home and stabbed 11 times because she was Jewish. And that's rampant. The body was burned. Thank you for that. Yeah. Bottom line is we have some pretty gross anti-Semitism going in against the backdrop of the Holocaust didn't take place, the Jews are lying about the Holocaust, they're making it up. And there are people, Peter, you know this, who believe that? Right now, today, people in this country, people in our educational system, they believe it's all made up. So you can say that the people around the Passover Seder, they remember. You can say the community, the common good kind of community, people who care, moderate kind people, they remember. But the larger community and the country and the world, do they remember? Well, I think the two main claims you're making need not be causal. So in other words, you can remember the Holocaust and remain a very learned anti-Semite. They're not mutually exclusive. And I think that's one of the things that the Jewish community has to recognize, that anti-Semitism, noting anti-Semitism, honoring our dead, honoring the Holocaust, is in fact not necessarily going to dilute or reduce anti-Semitism. I mean, it's connected to Israel. An argument is often made that Israeli policies are resulting in anti-Semitism, what's sometimes called the new anti-Semitism. Now, you know, that may or may not be, but that puts the Palestinians and Israel as little chess pieces. And I can promise you, I will give you my mint Mickey Mantle rookie card, that if Israel were to stop doing many of the really illegal and unacceptable things to some Palestinians, there would still be plenty of anti-Semitism. I'm with you. I don't have a Mickey Mantle card, but I'm with you. So people care about the Palestinians, just care about them as human beings. Don't connect it to somehow anti-Semitism. And we have to care about the Holocaust, and we also can't expect that our discussion of the Holocaust will somehow make people hate Jews less. The Germans and the Austrians, for example, experiencing this by outlawing Holocaust denial. It has not removed anti-Semitism. The Nazi party is illegal in Germany. The fascist party is illegal in Italy. Both of them have now been redressed up, and both of those have candidates. I got two more questions. I don't know if we can fit them in. I'll come back. Okay. Unfortunately, this is what Robert Westrick calls the longest hatred. This will continue well after our discussion today. That's it. Gee, let's talk about what we're going to talk about next time. Next time, Peter, I'd like to talk about where this global anti-Semitism came from. Why? You and me are ordinary people, the Jews are ordinary people that try hard to live and have families and do right in the world, and they have a rich heritage of all of that. Why is it that in every age and every generation we suffer this kind of anti-Semitism, even now, even after the horror of World War II, people really still do it? I find that kind of extraordinary flaw in humanity, if you will. We can talk about this next time. I think of those guys emerging out of the Warsaw ghetto, the ones who said, never again, I am not going to tolerate this again, the ones who fought in the war of 1948 vigorously in order to save Judaism and in order to save Israel. Where are they now? Do we have people, I guess we do, do we have people who will fight that fight? Do we have people who believe so strongly that they are a force that will stop anti-Semitism? And I'm not sure if anyone is actually advocating that, but there was member Meyer Kahane. Of course, the JDL, of course. And he felt that you actually went out there and said, never again, with a club or a gun, he said. With a gun. And they committed violent acts in during the crazy times of the late 60s and early 1970s. We could talk about that. I don't advocate the JDIs. And part of anti-Semitism is the difficulty in distinguishing, if we want to make this distinction, between words and actions. And if we want to make those distinctions, so it's easy if you don't make the distinction, because then you can outlaw anything. But I think our tradition, our very valuable American tradition, is really to try to make a distinction between what you say and what you do. But we are struggling with that intellectually. And we're struggling with not only are they separate, but how do we determine when the words will lead a reasonable person to think that an action would result? It's a great challenge. It's a great challenge for the Jewish people. It's a great challenge for anybody who appears at a Seder tomorrow or Saturday. And it's a great challenge for a history professor as well. And when we come back, I also want to talk about Catholicism. I want to talk about the Inquisition. I want to talk about the king and queen. Was it Ferdinand and Isabella in 1892, how they were treated as the most Catholic of all rulers in Europe? And what does that mean vis-à-vis the Inquisition? What a question. Well, to whet your appetite, you may or may not know this, that Benjamin Netanyahu's brother, of course, was the only Israeli killed in Tebi. And that influences him tremendously for a variety of reasons we can talk about. His father was a well-known professor at Cornell who wrote a book about the length of at least three books in the Torah, saying that the Inquisition was essentially the dress rehearsal for the Shoah. Oh, my God. So there's a lot. And this is not necessarily a pick on Netanyahu, but Netanyahu may be the face for anti-Semites. Certainly, Netanyahu is one of the faces who is targeted. And we can talk about Israeli politics and whether some are justified or not. But his own fascinating life history embodies so much and explains a lot of the never-again. His father linking the two, his brother dying. But having said that, he's also a pretty clever politician. So Netanyahu may say never again, but he's on the phone with lots of different people. More than happy. I'm happy to talk about the religious tradition. There's a biological tradition. I think one of the ways for your listeners, if they're interested, to think about this is that anti-Semitism is essentially a form of racism, essentially. So if we look at why people are racist, we can help to begin to understand why people accept that there have also been Jewish institutions. But there again, black churches are targeted in the south as institutions of African American spirituality. So there are some very important parallels. But I think for listeners, thinking about why racism arose, why we can't get rid of it, how we might distinguish between racial words and racial actions also do apply. The irony is in many of these countries, Jews are really a relatively small minority. Well, and we'll connect that with whether humankind is perfectible or imperfectible. If you don't mind, that's my inquiry. That's only two or three minutes to decide that. Of course, that's easy. Of course. Peter Haffenberger, he's been Professor at UH, wonderful to talk to you. Next time again soon. Of course.