I was 11 or 12 years old when my school took us to the neighborhood holocaust museum (what, yours doesn’t have one?)
The rabbis warned us that the museum curators might not have the same sensibilities that we enlightened religious people did, and therefore we might encounter some pictures of naked women in concentration camps.
And if we do, we should avert our gaze.
The exposure to gratuitous violence and death, on the other hand, was not the least bit of a concern.
Attending the Yad Vashem holocaust museum is an annual activity for many Orthodox Jews, the perfect way to spend Tisha B’av instead of sitting home and trying to be sad by yourself.
Stimulated by negativity. Titillated by trauma.
I indulged in this ritual several times during my teens, supplemented by graphic holocaust documentaries screened locally on the years I couldn’t make it.
My father was obsessed with antisemitism. I’m not sure if this was his own trauma response to visiting the camps as a teen – the holocaust had ended only 15 years before he was born. Or if it was instilled in him by Noah Weinberg, who couldn’t shut up about Hitler and how inspiringly evil he was.
My father’s bedroom office was lined with shelves of books about the holocaust. They were high up and out of reach, so of course I gained access to them. I couldn’t look away.
My father soon developed a new obsession – the threat of radical Islam. He founded a non-profit and churned out documentary after documentary about local and regional threats – Palestinian, Iranian, ISIS, college campuses.
The goal was to spread “awareness”. The solutions were for other people to find.
He exported fear, and he found a willing voice in the American right and in Jews, who can’t get enough of regurgitating tales of antisemitism on the high seas.
To watch these films was to be exposed to graphic violence set to haunting music, footage from bus bombings, terror attacks, and other acts of brutality. Sometimes the footage was blurred and we were just informed about what we were seeing.
I watched many of these films as a teen, at a time when my parents wanted me to look away when there was a kissing scene in a movie.
I was banned from playing computer games that involved shooting, but welcomed to watch news footage of shooting attacks.
It is fitting , that in this period of my life, I was addicted, or at least dependent, on pornography.
Porn and violence both appeal to the primal part of our brain, the one that transcend logic.
Prostitution is the oldest profession.
Antisemitism is the oldest obsession. For Jews and non-Jews alike.
My father meanwhile, was producing violence porn.
My traumatic exposure to these visuals was disseminated under the guise of “prevention”, “awareness”, and “remembrance”.
Would the average terrorist not welcome the footage of their acts being broadcasted to more people? Would they not be appreciative of the fear of their actions being spread, free of charge, by their victims?
Yuval Noach Harari speaks about the negative impact that magnifying terrorism has – taking acts that are almost trivial in the scheme of deaths and violence that are already occurring within a given country and sensationalizing them, creating an outsized impact.
Terrorists and Nazis commit the acts. They are the perpetrators.
And then come the people who, horrified, share their message as broadly as they can. They are the perpetuators.
My life would have been infinitely better off if I had a lot less exposure to the shit my people went through.
The average Jew experiences infinitely more freedom and tolerance than any of their ancestors did for hundreds of years.
And instead of celebrating this, and moving on, we drag ourselves back into the mud.
Actively identifying as victims beyond the cross-generational trauma that is already flowing through our DNA.
Leave me out of it.
I resent the perpetrators.
And I resent the perpetuators.
