After a speech, historian and Israel critic Norman Finkelstein is asked a question by a young Jewish woman in the audience. The entirety of her apparent objection to Finkelsteins remarks is to the effect that his use of the term Nazi to apply to some Jews is offensive to many people because there are in the audience both Germans and Jews who do not want to be reminded that the Holocaust happened. The precise implication of her objection that some Jews as well as some Germans are bothered by being referred to as Nazis is troubling because they are German or Jewish. Does that mean that they are insulted? And if so, is the insult offensive because it is incorrect? I think she really is saying that it is offensive to be reminded of the Holocaust. Perhaps in an unceremonious way. Of course this is a form of the broader underlying assumption that people have the right not only to not be insulted but also to not be traumatized. Finkelstein forthrightly replies by stating that his entire family was killed in the camps. That is not much of an argument either, as he surely knows, but his avowal involved talking about it rather than agreeing that one should not. This principle emerged recently on some campuses when people argued for trigger warnings on the basis of the right to be protected from traumatic representations. I think, considering his writing on tragedy, Walter Kaufmann would probably have agreed that Antigone and King Lear are traumatizing to most attentive and sensitive viewers, so these plays should just be dropped from the theatrical canon. How can we begin to think about any of the problems that we face if we refuse to be bothered? And in the extreme, this will apply not just to real traumas but to being bothered in the quotidian sense. Dont bother me with your problems; the world we live in now is every man for himself. To your children, say: Go off into your corner and grow up by yourself. And what is it for a Jewish person to get terribly upset when someone mentions the Third Reich? Are we done thinking about it? Do we fully understand what made it possible? If you do, Ill send you my email address; have you published your discovery? I myself have my doubts about the sense or appropriateness of Finkelsteins use of the term but I have not read the text of his lecture to see who or what he applies it to. It clearly is a term that can be true analogically but only so, and also that is most apt to be used in cases where the extreme character of the analogy (the thing mention is not quite of the same intensity) is precisely what gives it emotional force. If I were using the term to describe something contemporary, I would give a precise description of what I mean and how the analogy is true enough to make its use compelling and not frivolous.
Posted on: Fri, 18 Jul 2014 04:38:14 +0000
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