“Is It Creepy To Remember Someone Else’s Tragedy?”
May 21st, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
My review of The Memory Thief is in this week’s Jewish Press. Here’s the lede:
There is perhaps a paradox afoot in conventional American Jewish views on Holocaust memory. For the most part, our society ridicules people who allow a movie or an article in a newspaper to completely change their lives, yet we expect our programs on the Holocaust to solicit exactly these responses in people who are either willfully or involuntarily ignorant of World War II. Thus, we demand that people let go of themselves and their preconceived notions enough to internalize the horrifying reality of the Holocaust, but we also ask them to display restraint so that they do not go mad. You are a monster if it does not affect you, we effectively say, but if you let it get to you too much, there is something wrong with you.