![The debates are longer than average TV episodes. My calculations (based on times listed [here]) put the total debate time (not counting tonight’s [Jan. 26]) at north of 1,900 minutes. That’s about 32 hour long TV episodes, 64 half hour eipsodes (I’m being generous and counting commercial breaks as part of episode length). That means the current round of GOP debates have outlasted such TV shows as
Firefly
Freaks And Geeks
My So-Called Life
Police Squad!
Wonderfalls
Eerie, Indiana
Arrested Development
The real question, after considering all of this: What are the chances that we can keep this amazing cast of characters together and keep this new reality show on television long after the GOP convention?](http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lyijd0k5X11qzy2emo1_500.jpg)
![I’m sure you’ve noticed that, with the ascendancy of Newt Gingrich over the past few weeks, people have started to bring to light his many foibles and flaws, just as they did with the other non-Mitt Romney GOP candidates. And there’s a lot about Gingrich for people not to like. That said, when a blogger for The Atlantic found a photo from 2009 in which Gingrich and his wife are standing in front of the main entrance to Auschwitz and said there was “something distinctly off” about it, I thought it was a cheap shot. From my experience, there are no happy tourists at concentration camps. And I don’t need to think Gingrich and his wife were happy tourists at Auschwitz in order to be prevented from voting for him.
In 2006, when I was in Germany for an academic conference on human rights, I visited the site of the Buchenwald concentration camp, where my grandfather was imprisoned for some time in the early 1940s. Although there isn’t much there, I took a lot of pictures. I wanted to show them to others, to people who wouldn’t have the opportunity to travel there, in order to explain more fully and more clearly what I had seen. Accompanying the pictures, I wrote the following letter to my family:
I have had some time to think about my experiences today and thought I would put them down before the day was over and I went to sleep.
I think that the most general thing I can say is that Buchenwald is the most terrible place I have ever been in my life. It is about a ten minute bus ride from the city center of Weimar, from the statue of Goethe and Schiller. The bus drops everyone off in front of the complex of buildings that housed the SS. They look new and are painted yellow. They now house a bookstore, information center, and education center for youth. This is on the top of a hill; the whole camp is on a hill, overlooking a beautiful valley. From these buildings, it is a short downhill walk to the main gatehouse.
The motto on the gate, like the ones on all of the gates of all of the camps, can only be read from the inside. Of course, all of the other gates said, “Arbeit macht frei”: “Work makes you free.” This one says, “Jedem das seine “: “To each what he deserves.”
Inside the gatehouse, there is very little to see. Down the hill, where the barracks used to be, there are only stones and scattered ruins. It is essentially just a desolate hillside. On my way down to the gatehouse from the information center, I had the distinct sense of not wanting to go in, of maybe staying outside. And when I went in, I didn’t go anywhere for a little while; I just stood inside the main gate looking down at the emptiness. There is a feeling that I can’t really explain, like I had to talk myself into seeing the place at each step.
Despite the general emptiness and desolation, there are a few buildings left standing inside the camp. The only building that has been left in its original condition is the crematorium. The other buildings that are still standing are a prisoner infirmary barrack (which is reconstructed and locked), the canteen (also not open), the prisoner depot/storehouse (now a museum, but originally where prisoners’ belongings were stored along with material for running the camp), and the decontamination center (which is now a museum of prisoner art). The crematorium is literally a building out of a nightmare and walking inside might be one of the more difficult things I’ve done. I didn’t take any pictures in the crematorium; I just said Kaddish and left after I finished it.
It was cold today and it rained. I can’t imagine seeing the camp on a sunny day and, in fact, my image is that the sun likely doesn’t shine on this place. The hardest thing to reconcile, I think, is that the sun does shine here and it did while prisoners were starved, beaten, experiment upon, shot, and cremated. The prisoners looked down the hill, into the valley, and on beautiful days it must have seemed so much more cruelly absurd.
Having been to Buchenwald, it all seems so much harder to believe than it was when I was listening to survivors’ stories, learning about it in school, or going to a museum. But it becomes almost unthinkable to travel here, a few miles from the Goethe and Schiller houses, and to try to imagine how people could build a place like this one, let alone how they could live in its shadow. They went to the neighborhood bakeries, they read great literature, they played with their children, they walked in the local parks. It is unimaginable to me, especially when I think that these were regular people and not devils. We want them to be monsters because only monsters should be capable of this; but that is one of the principle lessons, I suppose: regular people perpetrated these monstrous crimes and so it is regular people — us, all of us — about whom we must think. This is why we must have the language of human rights, that great legacy of the Holocaust, and it is why we must continually encourage ourselves to think of others as being like us: by expanding our sense of inclusivity and limiting our sense of exclusivity, we prevent ourselves from creating a distance between Us and Them, where others are some undesirable sort that is unworthy of the rights we hold for ourselves.
“Never Again” means more than preventing something like this from happening in the future, which is obviously vitally important. It means working harder to care about others, to make the suffering of others more real and immediate for us.
Even as it assaults the senses, even as it shocks and horrifies us, Buchenwald should strengthen everyone’s commitment to a better world, in which human rights play a more important role than they do even today. That is where I wind up tonight.
Coming back to this letter after a few years, my thoughts remain essentially unchanged. I took photos and I wrote these words because I wanted to find some way to capture that I had been there. For me, this was something personal; I was living proof that the genocidal project undertaken at this place had failed. But I think the same is true of other visitors, at least to an extent. So long as people continue to visit these places, these crimes will be remembered and future crimes like this one will be recognized and, I hope, fought against. More people should visit these sites and reflect on what they see there but because the trips can be quite difficult — both logistically and emotionally — I’m glad to have the opportunity to share my experience.[1]
[1] An edited version of this blog post appears as the fifth in a monthly series of columns on the problem of justice in contemporary politics and pop culture that I will be writing for the Daily Nebraskan this academic year.](http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxp33cq90d1qzy2emo1_500.jpg)
Running Chicken is powered by tumblr with a template originally designed by manasto jones.
Israel First?
I debated with myself about whether or not to wade into the shark-infested waters of the on-going “Israel Firster” debate that’s been raging online for more than a month now. For those who haven’t been following it on the blogs and on Twitter, Spencer Ackerman provided a helpful recap a couple of days ago. Since I teach a class on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, since I’ve been following along as bloggers launch one blistering ad hominem attack after another, and since I’ve written before about the way that casual anti-Semitism has crept into progressive discourse of late, I thought I might briefly weigh in.
Every year, after I’ve wrap up all of the grading for my Israel/Palestine class, I look through the course evaluations. And every year, it’s the same story: I get blasted by half of the class for being a rabid Zionist and I get blasted by the other half of the class for hating Israel. On the one hand, this sort of thing makes me sad because it means decidedly lower scores on my evaluations than I’d like and because it means that some students have spent an entire semester being angry rather than learning. On the other hand, it’s a good sign since it means that I’m presenting the information in a way that makes it impossible for students to accurately decide my own position on which side is right and which side is wrong.
Except that my position is, I think, pretty clear: As a human rights scholar, I try to make clear that both sides are sometimes right and sometimes wrong.
I criticize the Palestinians for rocket attacks, suicide bombings, prisoner abuse, and whatever happens to be in the news or in the readings I’ve assigned. And I criticize the Israeli government for violating the human rights of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, for systemic discrimination against Arab citizens of Israel, and whatever happens to be in the news or in the readings I’ve assigned.
And, of course, I discuss the American position of support for Israel, which is the subject behind the arguments about whether or not it’s appropriate to call someone an “Israel Firster.” Having said that, though, I should note that I’m a little bit baffled by the entire concept of the “Israel Firster,” which is allegedly someone whose primary loyalty is to Israel and who thus routinely attempts to make a case for the strategic relationship between the America and Israel (which non-“Firsters” see as overwhelmingly detrimental to U.S. interests these days).
I’m puzzled because I don’t imagine that anyone is really criticizing anyone else for actually believing that Israel is always in the right or for believing that the U.S. government puts (or ought to put) Israel’s interests ahead of America’s. In other words, someone might tweet that “[Eli] Lake supports #Israel line 100% of the time, always Israel first over U.S.,” but what the tweeter probably means to say is that Lake holds a position on some particular issue that the tweeter finds incomprehensibly wrong. It’s possible, of course, that Lake or someone else holds the above positions but those positions just seem to me to be impossible to defend. So, my puzzlement really stems from my belief that the “Israel Firster” charge is wrong-headed; if Lake really held the position that Israel should be supported by America to America’s detriment, Lake’s argument would probably be pretty easy to take down. But rather than making an argument against Lake’s position on a particular issue, someone simply attacks Lake.
In doing so, of course, the attacker resorts to an unpleasant term or trope. The “Israel Firster” charge has a historical connection to anti-Semitic white supremacists and it’s a shame — but not a real surprise — to see it being used by the progressive Left to vilify opponents on the Right. I’ve actually written about this sort of thing before and I think it bears repeating now:
There is no doubt in my mind that I’m seeing more casual anti-Semitism, especially amongst American and European progressives under the age of thirty. This is a group that, by and large, will condemn racism, sexism, classism, ableism, homophobia, Islamophobia — and so on — but fails to offer any challenge to the casually anti-Semitic trope that, for example, the Jews control America’s foreign policy. It’s also a group that actively condemns the Israeli government for its treatment of Palestinians (in some of the most vitriolic language) while ignoring or even excusing abuses by Hamas — for example — against Palestinians.
In making use of this sort of casual anti-Semitism, members of the progressive Left really do themselves a disservice because they open themselves up to all sort of allegations that then move the conversation away from the one they really want to have in the first place. In other words, with everyone talking about whether or not “Israel Firster” is anti-Semitic, fewer people are actually talking about any particular policy or action of the Israeli or American government. If someone on the Left wants to criticize the Israeli or American government for some course of action, (s)he ought to do so and if someone on the Right wants to offer a defense, (s)he ought to do so. And then we can have a conversation about who made a good or a bad argument. But as soon as we stop making arguments and start issuing ad hominem attacks, then we’ve stopped talking about the right or wrong course of action and just started talking about ourselves.
At bottom, there has got to be a way to discuss the bad policies of the Israeli government without being labeled an anti-Semite and there have got to be ways to support Israel without being smeared as some sort of monster, moron, or stooge.
And, while it’s amazing to me that this even needs to be written down, it’s got to be possible to have these debates without resorting to language that people have found and continue to find offensive and harmful.