Sep 23, 2022·edited Sep 23, 2022Liked by Christine Greenwald
Thanks for sharing about the Burns Holocaust series, Christine. As an almost 70-something (😅), I watched the full series this week. I don’t watch much about the holocaust anymore because it is so heartbreaking, and this series is no exception, but it delves directly into US attitudes and participation. I was both heartened by US organizations and politicians (FDR) who tried to aid the Jews of Europe, and horrified by the widespread antisemitism and overall xenophobia in the US. As the series so aptly points out, White Christians have always held these attitudes, as Black, Brown, and Jewish people have always known. But we White folks are just beginning to awaken to the centuries of horrors we have perpetrated. I liked your allusion to Critical Race Theory. Instead of running from it and passing laws against teaching it, White people need to face it squarely and dive deeply into the heritage of racism and ethnocentrism built into our culture and our laws and change them. As you said so well: “…we should be honest with ourselves about our moral failings in the past because it is only through honesty and repentance that we stand a chance to change our ways.”
As someone from one of the countries occupied by Germany during the war, let me just say the occupying forces would have had a much harder time getting the jews who lived here if the people had been less anti-semitic. How much is still a thing people argue about, but it's clear many lives could have been saved by the occupied people. People were more often willing to break the occupiers' laws for each other, but not so much for the ones considered outsiders. Very few jews were saved from the holocaust here.
Thanks for sharing about the Burns Holocaust series, Christine. As an almost 70-something (😅), I watched the full series this week. I don’t watch much about the holocaust anymore because it is so heartbreaking, and this series is no exception, but it delves directly into US attitudes and participation. I was both heartened by US organizations and politicians (FDR) who tried to aid the Jews of Europe, and horrified by the widespread antisemitism and overall xenophobia in the US. As the series so aptly points out, White Christians have always held these attitudes, as Black, Brown, and Jewish people have always known. But we White folks are just beginning to awaken to the centuries of horrors we have perpetrated. I liked your allusion to Critical Race Theory. Instead of running from it and passing laws against teaching it, White people need to face it squarely and dive deeply into the heritage of racism and ethnocentrism built into our culture and our laws and change them. As you said so well: “…we should be honest with ourselves about our moral failings in the past because it is only through honesty and repentance that we stand a chance to change our ways.”
As someone from one of the countries occupied by Germany during the war, let me just say the occupying forces would have had a much harder time getting the jews who lived here if the people had been less anti-semitic. How much is still a thing people argue about, but it's clear many lives could have been saved by the occupied people. People were more often willing to break the occupiers' laws for each other, but not so much for the ones considered outsiders. Very few jews were saved from the holocaust here.