Commercial Genocide

"Yeah, well, I'm not Jewish, but my wife is so we go through the usual motions, Christmas or Kwanza - a few chuckles - no, really, like for summer camp, would we send the little brat to some Christian fundamentalist hoe-down so he could learn how to molest his peers, or to a Jewish camp, like Treblinka - pause - that's a death camp people, a death camp, jeez, go and educate yourselves!"

Some laughs, some groans. A girl I was sitting with shook her head, faced the floor and muttered, "too much, that was too much." Holocaust jokes at comedy clubs: is it really "too much," or simply a comfort with atrocity?

On August 29th, the New York Times magazine ran a shocking bit on an exhibition of anti-Semitic art set to grace the London art scene later this month. So who is the sick curator, rousing centuries of anti-Semitism that should stay in the graves with those it helped bury. Call the JDL, the ADL, Hadassah! Blasphemy, audacity, catastrophe! What can we do to hold off the imminent holocaust? What is the name of this Nazi?

Why Simon Cohen is his name, an Orthodox Jew with an eccentric penchant for anti-Semitica. The exhibit, though, is not all fun and games. Cohen hopes to educate the masses with a bit of shock-therapy, likening modern anti-Semitic cartoons, such as the memorable image of Sharon eating a Palestinian baby in 2003, to the Nazi propaganda of the past. His goal is to demonstrate how today's hate can be traced to its once genocidal roots. Nonetheless, an inevitable schism of ideology would occur if the exhibit were to be discussed in a random group of twenty Jews. One side would be mortally offended and the other would be fine with the jarring images and their purpose. A few might even find them funny. One of these few is David Duetsch, who, along with Joshua Newman, authored The Big Book of Jewish Conspiracies, a comical proposition that Jews are responsible for every cataclysm that ever occurred on planet Earth.

Although often criticized for the edgy content of his humor, David only relishes in this criticism. "Our purpose with the book was to show the absurdity of these anti-Semitic conspiracy theories by emulating that absurdity." To the surprise of David, there has been much less hostility from offended individuals than he expected the book would spawn. "The older generation still remembers the feeling of not belonging, perhaps even of hatred, while these experiences are almost foreign to the younger generation. In general, it's perfectly legitimate to have a humorous response to a serious matter. It is healthier to laugh then to cry. The truth is, when someone spray-paints anti-Semitic slogans on a synagogue wall, the last thing they want is a Jew to walk by and correct their spelling of Auschwitz. Such heinous acts are done to feel powerful, living happily is the best revenge. Learning to throw these things back at the people who create them is a fairly good weapon."

The borders for the role of anti-Semitism in the media seem to be pushed farther each year. In the 2004 comedy, Harold and Kumar go to White Castle, a movie that brims with tasty bits of racy humor, the hilarious Jewish roommate duo, Goldstein and Rosenberg, describe a scene of cinematic nudity as, "you know the Holocaust, it was the exact opposite." Such a union of superficial observation and mass genocide is fantastic; it is the battlefield between those who find it offensive and those who will violently chortle. In another popular show, Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm, an infamous episode deals with the tricky situation of an older Jewish employee who is completely incompetent, but the numbers inked on his arm evoke a nasty guilt in the conscience of the employer who seeks to fire him. It turns out that he was not a survivor, but a forgetful man, and simply wrote a phone number down in pen; nonetheless, a hilarious/offensive take on the Holocaust.

A nation that has suffered continual persecution and only through miraculous events still exists today, can justify a level of paranoia and easy susceptibility to offense. When the Passion of the Christ was released, I remember hearing from an older ex-Israeli-army-general between segments of the Shabbat morning Torah portion that the film would ignite the pogroms of the past and the blood of Jews would soon run in rivers down the streets of Europe. The blood was never spilled - actually, the only individuals I know that were harmed were church ladies who suffered from heart attacks during the film's more gruesome moments of violence. Was my army friend crazy? I don't think so. I think his prophecy was merely an expression of tragic environmental influence.

There is a strict dichotomy running through America's scale of "offense morality," which balances the urge to be offensive with the appeal to be a liberal wimp/PC. While some groups find the slightest hint of ideology outside the "acceptable" norms of PC to be sacrilegious, some go out of their way to strike that sensitive nerve. I believe a balance must be sought, for the limitations surrounding PC can often be villainous (they tried to ban Elvis from Ed Sullivan). To be a mentch (or menchet, wink-wink) though, one must take the subjective views of others into account. David Duetsch puts it beautifully: "I respect their right to be offended while they should respect my right to be offensive."