While most Jewish holidays touch upon some aspect of anti-Semitic action throughout history, not many of them reflect the modern Jewish existence. Few festivals are more often juxtaposed with the Jewish experience today than the March celebration of Purim.
Recounted by the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Esther, Purim commemorates the saving of the Jews from Haman, an official of the Persian Empire who planned to kill all his Jewish subjects. A key component of the holiday is its emphasis on celebrating the Jews who foiled Haman’s plans—Mordecai and Esther—rather than focusing on the suffering which occured at the hand of Haman’s villainy.
But for many in the Jewish community (myself included), Purim has become a reminder of how many recent retellings of the Jewish experience in popular culture—particularly those involving the Holocaust—disregard our agency in an attempt to vilify Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany.
Holocaust survivor testimonies were initially collected and picked apart by nations who looked to present only the worst of Germany’s Holocaust practices, in order to prove their guilt to war crime tribunals.
Even today, these stories continue to be taken out of their contexts as storytellers handpick details from survivors’ experiences to abide by the conventions of the stereotypical Holocaust story—big bad Hitler and the poor, sad Jews.
Unsurprisingly, these conventions often involve gratuitous violence, seen in films of all genres, from intentionally flicks like Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List to blockbuster action movies like Matthew Vaugn’s X-Men: First Class.
While this violent imagery provides context to the brutality of World War II, it does so at the expense of making Holocaust survivors the objects of their stories with action taken against them, rather than as the subjects, with action taken by them.
An audience listening to a Holocaust story should feel hatred and disgust for those who perpetrated this violence. However, we should acknowledge that the technique used to rouse these feelings—blatant victimization and borderline pornographic imagery of torture and death—also patronize the Jewish community by presenting their testimonies as representations of the cruelty of fascism, rather than of their own tenacity.
Even when hand-picked details are pushed aside in favour of a survivor’s life story, inaccurate representations of the Jewish experience post-World War II prevail.
Testimonies are often changed or cut short to suit the Hollywood narrative that a good Holocaust story must end happily. They also often refuse to confront audiences with the reality that anti-Semitism did not end with the fall of Nazi Germany (see documentaries like James Moll’s The Last Days, which often portray being saved from concentration camps as the end of Jewish suffering).
The understanding that every Holocaust story must end with a perfect resolution—often involving the rescue and refuge through the sacrifice of an allied force—suggests to someone outside of the community that Jews do not face, and have not faced, discrimination following their escape from the Nazis.
This theory is clearly opposed through the global rise of attacks on identifiable Jews and Jewish places of worship. Perfection after devastation is a distorted view of how prejudice functions. It perpetuates the idea that bigotry is only relevant if it presents in its most extreme form.
It should come as no surprise that Esther and Mordecai’s experience was rendered a holiday in the Jewish tradition, meant to be remembered and celebrated as representative of Jewish history.
It is this constant retelling and the passing on of resilience stories which have maintained our community throughout its 3,000-year existence. It is also what will aid in the fight against all forms of discrimination, as it remains commonplace.
Photo by Leila El Shennawy.
