Friday, May 16, 2025

At Home with the Holocaust by Lucas F. W. Wilson. Book Review.


 

At Home with the Holocaust
A scholarly exploration of children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors

 

On March 11, 2025, Rutgers University Press released At Home with the Holocaust: Postmemory, Domestic Space, and Second-Generation Holocaust Narratives by Lucas F. W. Wilson, PhD. At Home is 188 pages long, inclusive of an index, end notes, and a bibliography. The book's goal is to analyze how children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors are traumatized by their parents' and grandparents' experiences. The book focuses on how homes – that is, houses and geographic locations – can transmit trauma from one generation to the next.

 

In an online biography, author Wilson says, "I am the Justice, Equity, and Transformation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Calgary." On a University of Calgary page, Wilson follows his name with "Pronouns: he/him/his." In an interview, Wilson says, "My work has largely centered on the Holocaust, but given the rise in anti-queer and anti-trans violence, public policy, and legislation, I redirected my attention on a main catalyst of homophobia and transphobia today: white Christian nationalism …  Both the Holocaust and conversion therapy are inextricably connected to Christianity … The Christian scriptures and Christian theology laid the seedbed for the Holocaust … Christianity has so easily lent itself to such hatred." Christians have "genocidal intentions" toward GLBT people, Jews, and "Indigenous folks in North America."

 

Wilson, though young, is an exceptionally successful scholar, enjoying a degree of financial support and accolades that most scholars can only dream of. "I have received several fellowships and awards for my work." An incomplete list of his honors: The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi's Dissertation Fellowship; a European Holocaust Research Infrastructure Fellowship; The Rabbi Ferdinand Isserman Memorial Fellowship from the American Jewish Archives; a Regent Scholarship, two Edwin L. Stockton, Jr., Graduate Scholarships from Sigma Tau Delta International English Honor Society, an Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellowship, and a Zaglembier Society Scholarship awarded by The Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies.

 

At Home with the Holocaust has received high praise. Scholar and author Victoria Aarons says that the book "makes a vital contribution to the research on second and third-generation Holocaust descendants and the complex ways in which traumatic memory is passed along intergenerationally." Alan L. Berger, the Raddock Family Eminent Scholar Chair in Holocaust Studies at Florida Atlantic University, says that At Home "breaks new ground."

 

I can see how At Home with the Holocaust meets the needs of a reader happily immersed and unquestioningly invested in academic trends in writing styles, thought processes, ideology, and ethics. I am not that reader. This book exemplifies serious problems in contemporary academia, as I will detail in the review, below. First, a word on why I care about this topic.

 

As soon as I saw the Rutgers University Press ad for this new book, I was eager to read it. I have been swimming in the water of post-World-War-Two trauma for my entire life. I'm a baby boomer, a drop in the post-World-War-II demographic surge. I didn't give it much thought in my childhood, but I was surrounded by post-war trauma.

 

On August 14, 1945, Life magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt captured "V-J Day in Times Square." A sailor is kissing a young woman wearing a medical uniform – white dress, white stockings, white shoes. The photo expertly captures the ecstatic jubilation of the end of worldwide horror and atrocity.

Tuesday, May 6, 2025

Everything Is Illuminated Not by Ivan Katchanovski

 I just stumbled across this article. I have not fact checked it. I found it on the "Wayback Machine" so apparently it is otherwise unavailable. I'm no expert in WW II in Ukraine so I can't comment on the article's accuracy. 

THE PRAGUE POST

NOT Everything is Illuminated

 

October 07, 2004

 

Everything Is Illuminated distorts history by omitting crucial facts, including an important link to the Czech Republic

 

By Ivan Katchanovski

 

As the recent controversy about The Passion of the Christ and the election of a movie star as governor of California show, movies are not only entertainment but also sources of negative and positive stereotypes. An upcoming Hollywood film, much of which was filmed in Prague this summer, promotes such negative stereotypes. Furthermore, the book on which it was based, Everything Is Illuminated, distorts history by omitting crucial facts.

Monday, April 28, 2025

Jewish Men Attack Lone Woman in NYC.

 


My only comments: this happened. It needs to be addressed. People are people and people from any ethnic group can do good or bad things. Mob behavior -- and that mob can be people of any ethnicity -- often gets very dark. 

Thursday, April 17, 2025

The Shroud of Turin. Is Seeing Believing?

 


The Shroud of Turin
 Is seeing believing?

 

A storm had been brewing for days. You could bite the air it was so thick. Sleep was impossible. Sweat was constant. Black, muscular clouds, bruised, crazed, ready to blow, beat down on us as if we were the head of a drum. My toes were sunk in the sand on the bank of the Wanaque River.

 

It came from the west, right over the river, emerging from thick and twisting thunderheads. It wasn't more substantial than air; it was the embodiment of air; it was animate sky; more air than air, more sky than sky. White and black, gleaming as a sunstruck cloud, sharp as a slicing wind. Swinging from left to right, seeking and gobbling its dragonfly prey. And that fast it was lost to my eyes downriver.

 

That was a swallow-tailed kite!

 

This Florida bird did not belong in New Jersey! Its exotic home was a thousand miles south, casting its shadow on earthbound alligators and colorful flowers.

 

Birders keep something called a "life list." We record every bird we've ever seen. For the past fifty years, alone in my room, no witnesses, I cannot bring myself to check the box opposite the words "swallow-tailed kite." I am stopped by the barrier between perceiving and accepting. 

 

The part of my brain that instantaneously assembles disparate details into a coherent whole and reports, "This is a chair; this is a table;" told me "This is a swallow-tailed kite." But bird-watching requires firing up the part of the brain that disassembles details and analyzes each. That part of my brain that would have consciously ticked off each detail – the snow white breast, the dipped-in-ink wings, a storm that may have tossed the bird off course – that part of my brain was not in gear. I was too awed by the whole to inspect the parts.

 

And it's more than that. Now that I'm an adult and I've lived away more years than I lived there, I can recognize that my hometown was special. We never locked the door; we were surrounded by neighbors we knew and woods full of deer and berries and spooky stories. But when I was a kid, my hometown felt like prison. Even as we kids enjoyed the woods, the sleepovers, the close, warm kitchens full of kielbasa and lasagna and paella, we yearned for anywhere else where everything, we were certain, was better. Such an elegant bird simply did not belong in the turbulent sky over the humble Wanaque River.  

 

In the 1986 horror film The Fly, a mad scientist tries to explain to his girlfriend that, thanks to an experiment gone wrong, he is turning into a fly. She says, "I don't get it."

 

He replies, "You get it. You just can't handle it."

 

A swallow-tailed kite in my factory-pocked hometown? I got it. I just couldn't handle it.

 

Over seventy years earlier, a world-class French scientist occupied that same rickety bridge between perceiving and accepting. Anatomist Yves Delage wrote of his "obsession" with a "disconcerting contradiction between" a mind-blowing artifact and the "impossibility to find a natural explanation" for that artifact.

 

Moi aussi, Yves. Like you, that's how I have long felt about the Shroud of Turin.

Saturday, April 12, 2025

Snow White 2025 Review

 


Snow White 2025
 
Is it Woke or Disneyfication that hobbles the movie?

 

Ever have one of those days when no matter how hard you try to be rational, pleasant, and productive, the universe seems to hate you? You walk out the door and a pigeon poops on  your head? You cross the street and a cab splashes you? You show up for work and everyone blames you for every snafu? Relax. At least you are not the 2025 film Snow White.

 

Snow White is a musical fantasy produced by Walt Disney Pictures. Marc Webb directs. Erin Cressida Wilson wrote the screenplay. Her best-known work is Secretary, an explicit exploration of a sadomasochistic relationship between a submissive secretary and her dominant boss. The songs "Heigh ho," and "Whistle While You Work," from the 1937 Snow White, but with new lyrics, re-appear. The song "Someday My Prince Will Come" is cut. Lyrics to new songs in the film are by EGOT-winners Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. Snow White is 109 minutes long. It opened in the U.S. on March 21, 2025.

 

Some scenes in Snow White put a smile on my face and made me laugh out loud. I'd rate the film three out of five stars. What handicaps Snow White is not so much Woke, as it is the Disneyfication of the source material. More on that, below, after a bit of background.