Eric Recommends: ‘My Holocaust’
Tuesday, October 9th, 2007
“My Holocaust,” by Tova Reich, is a relentlessly savage satire about the modern-day religion of Victimism, where everybody wants in on the martyr action in order to feel special about themselves.
Its central character is Maurice Messer, an old Jew who survived the Holocaust (by hiding in the woods, though he tells everyone he was a resistance fighter) and now runs the lavish U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., with his son Norman. Norman is what they call a “second generation survivor,” even though he didn’t actually survive anything himself, having been born long after the war. Survivorship can be inherited, you see. They spend ridiculous amounts of government money wining and dining potential donors, taking personalized tours of Holocaust sites in Europe and forever claiming everything they do is for “the six million.” You can’t cut their budget or insist they stop flying first class everywhere — it’s for the six million! Many Jews, Reich suggests, worship at the altar of the Holocaust, using it to define themselves and their religion above everything else.
But that’s not all! Reich also has stinging barbs for all the gentiles who try to latch onto the Holocaust for their own needs,
Continue reading…