Never Again? Not About Everything...

By Rebekah Emanuel
Yale University

"Never Again." The phrase is oft-repeated as the proper response to the Holocaust. But what does it mean practically, for us, the new generation of Jews?

One response is to keep alive our collective memories. We should remember our grandparents' near escapes and blank, pained silences; we should go to see "The Pianist"; we should sing nigunim (melodies) from villages which no longer house a single Jew. However, I think that keeping up a collective memory should also mean remembering the times that worked, when we were not persecuted and did not simply assimilate, but lived vitally near other religious and cultural communities and each enhanced our experiences by knowledge of others. Avoiding another Holocaust may require not only knowing what to shun, but also knowing what has worked.

Prof. Menocal

I was surprised not long ago to discover that I knew almost nothing about one such age of golden collaboration. I was sitting in a lecture hall watching as Professor Maria Rosa Menocal, author of "Ornament of the World" (her book on this very topic), flipped up slide after slide of mosques, churches and synagogues from the Spanish Caliphate of the 12th and 13th centuries. Each gorgeous house of worship had adopted architectural and artistic styles from the others, clearly viewing them as fully compatible with their own beliefs, a type of synergy mirrored in the intellectual developments of the time (and at least in part in the thought of our own Maimonides).

Professor Menocal explained that under Muslim rule, Jews in particular had often found a safe haven in Spain when others were persecuting them. Walking out from the dark lecture hall into the bright light I was struck that I had never been aware of the productive collaborations forged in this period of our history.

I heard Professor Menocal speak again, this time to Jews and Muslims (JAM), a dialogue group on the Yale campus. This dialogue group addresses a second practical stipulation of "never again": that of personal experience and understanding linking different religions and cultures. It is much easier to think that all Jews are money-grubbing and dirty or control all our media if one has never met a Jew or looked at what Jewish tradition says about the proper management of money. Those righteous gentiles who acted against the pounding tides of their times in the 1930s and 1940s almost uniformly did so because they recognized a sense of common humanity and acted on it. In our generation, this sense of common humanity and the possibility for violence that accompanies its loss is most dangerous in Jewish-Muslim relations. Perhaps "never again" requires us now to look more closely into what Islam is, and ask others to look more closely into our own traditions.

Personally, I have found this endeavor meaningful. Talking quietly on cushions in a friend's dorm room I've discovered that Shariah law—a very similar legal structure to halakhah—governs my friends' actions and that even such simple things as how you handle books containing holy scriptures and the social etiquette surrounding unmarried men and women are similar. In JAM we started out by talking only about our personal experiences and not about politics and then moved cautiously into more and more difficult questions.

The poet Amiri Baraka came to Yale's campus a handful of weeks ago and questions of when anti-Zionism intersects with anti-Semitism began to shake our campus. Then an editorial ran in our paper suggesting that Jews have a disproportionate control over the news at Yale. My own mind was drawn back to the Holocaust and I began to wonder what it is that makes the events now seem different from those of our grandparent's times. What makes the situation different now is our collective memory, warning us of the dangers, but also assuring us that options other than the facelessness of a conspiracy theory can hold sway. The situation is also different now, because in the wake of these events, JAM got together to talk about how these events affected us and what it was that motivated these feelings. This is what it means to act on the desire to never again experience a Holocaust. Prevention is in remembering and in sharing.

[Posted 3/27/03]