Continuing on the idea of Jewish food, Padma Lakshmi's "Taste the Nation" had a Jewish food episode circling around Chanukah. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised she focused more on kosher style as opposed to actual kosher food.
She goes to the Lower East Side, for some reason, and pretty much remains there, despite the fact that the Lower East Side isn't really the New York center of Jews anymore.
There, she samples the typical fare of lox, cream cheese, and bagels, which seems rather limited. There were latkes, obviously, considering the theme.
I thought it a shame she didn't head out to Brooklyn to experience the food there. For one thing, Boro Park, Crown Heights, Williamsburg, Flatbush, and Downtown boast a dizzying array of "Jewish food," along with a booming populace to go with it. OK, gefilte fish is not something we should proudly share, but what about a hearty cholent? Kneidlach? Rugelach? Delkalach?
Then the conversation veered away from food. Lakshmi went to visit Ruth, who she sorrowfully describes as a Holocaust survivor.
I sat up straighter, interested to hear her story. Lakshmi's voiceover explains that Ruth came to the US in 1939, at the age of 11. That left me confused, as the Holocaust hadn't really revved up yet.
It turns out that Ruth's family fled Europe following Kristallnacht, and for 10 months she was separated from her parents while they worked to get the paperwork to leave.
Ruth explained how traumatizing that experience was for her, and I don't doubt it. But then Lakshmi prodded her (in an obviously staged way) why telling her story was so important, and Ruth compared her situation to the separation of children and parents at the southern border.
So now we have made the connection from "Holocaust survivor" to "contemporary hot button issue."
Umm . . .
Yes, Ruth and her family were driven out of Europe by the Nazi regime, but in my opinion, but that doesn't make them Holocaust survivors. It makes them very, very lucky that they were not interned in death camps or hiding from SS soldiers in the woods. Ruth was 11 in 1939; chances are, if she would have been deported, she would not have lived. So I'll give her a "refugee" title, but I'm not cool with "survivor."
I was reading Yaniv Iczkovits' book review of Dara Horn's book, "People Love Dead Jews," and my peeve was right there:
We look for universal lessons in lieu of attending to the actual persecution of Jews.
There is little to no relation of the current policy by the US border to, say, GENOCIDE. I don't exactly appreciate that sort of comparison, Lakshmi. Eating a bagel doesn't make you an honorary Jew of sufficient status to make such a claim.
4 comments:
There is definitely a worrying trend that sees the Holocaust used by non-Jews primarily to draw universal (and sometimes anti-Zionist) lessons, not to attend to the actual destruction of European Jewry. There is a place for universal lessons, but -- well, no one is saying that black slavery in the anti-bellum South only has meaning if we draw lessons about other atrocities.
I got given People Love Dead Jews for Chanukah. I'd say that I'm looking forward to reading it, but that's not entirely true as I think it will be hard to read in places; more like I feel I will gain a lot from reading.
Good point. Blacks would not like it if slavery was used to bolster other causes besides their own.
Before you even mentioned that book, I thought of Dara Horn's thesis as you described Lakshmi's strange tour of "Jewish food" on the LES. If she had gone to Brooklyn, you see, she would have had to confront actual living religious Jews, doing Actual Jewish Things.
Right! There, she would have met actual practicing Jews who could also be actual survivors. But as Horn observes, humanity prefers to focus on the sanitized version of the Holocaust from Anne Frank as opposed to Zalman Gradowski's experience in an actual death camp.
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