Keith Gessen Blog - But these bad guys were real, this history was...

Declared winner of the internet (YM, 5 June 2009).

Aug
23rd

Sun

But these bad guys were real, this history was real, and the feelings we have about them and what they did are real and have real-world consequences and implications. Do you really want audiences cheering for a revenge that turns Jews into carboncopies of Nazis, that makes Jews into “sickening” perpetrators? I’m not so sure. An alternative, and morally superior, form of “revenge” for Jews would be to do precisely what Jews have been doing since World War II ended: that is, to preserve and perpetuate the memory of the destruction that was visited upon them, precisely in order to help prevent the recurrence of such mass horrors in the future.

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—Daniel Mendelsohn in Newsweek. Is this the same Daniel Mendelsohn who praised the Holocaust fantasy Everything Is Illuminated to the skies? More to the point, of course there *were* Jewish avengers, or “death squads,” after WWII, whose express mission it was to kill former Nazis. (Some of this is described in Tom Segev’s very good book, The Seventh Million. It’s also described, fictionally, in Avner Mandelman’s story collection, Talking to the Enemy, which I once reviewed here and still think is great.) Mendelsohn no doubt knows about all this. So what’s he talking about?

It’s also worth mentioning that Jewish avengers Eli Roth and B. J. Novak attended my high school. Where we grew up, there weren’t that many Nazis. Well, until you crossed Commonwealth Avenue, at which point all bets were off. Way to kill Nazis, you guys.

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