It’s not just the BBC.
It’s also – of course – the Guardian.
Sir Nicholas Winton, who saved hundreds of children from the Nazis, was so modest that he rejected an initial proposal to make a film about him, according to the producer of One Life, the soon-to-be released biographical drama about the British humanitarian.
Iain Canning told the Observer that, about five years before Winton’s death in 2015 aged 106, he and fellow producer Emile Sherman visited him at his Maidenhead home during a break from shooting their film, The King’s Speech.
Over tea, they broached the subject of making a film about the man who helped save 669 children from German-occupied Czechoslovakia, just before the beginning of the second world war, but Winton politely turned them down.
…
[Anthony Hopkins] was inspired to play a man who, alongside others, saved the lives of children who were otherwise destined for the gas chambers and furnaces of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Belsen.
One Life, released on 1 January, tells the story of “Nicky” Winton who, as a young London broker, visited Prague in December 1938 and found families who had fled the rise of the Nazis in Germany and Austria. They were living in desperate conditions with little or no shelter or food, and under threat of Nazi invasion. He immediately responded to their plight and, in a race against time, tried to save as many children as he could before the borders closed.
Why were the children destined for the gas chambers? Why did the families flee the rise of the Nazis? It’s a secret; it must not be mentioned. The Guardian does very well: there’s not a single appearance of the words “Jew” and “Jewish” in the entire article.
Comments
23 responses to “The J word”
It’s “pregnant people” all over again, isn’t it?
Oh, dear. It’s disgraceful.
Quiz Show Host: What country is Yerevan the capital of?
(Hears voice in earpiece).
I’m sorry, forget I asked that question. It might offend some of our Turkish viewers. Nothing bad happened in Turkey in 1915!
Who’s really in charge here? It’s not the World Jewish Media Conspiracy, is it?
What is it in people that makes them so hateful towards Jews? I have been baffled by it my whole life. The Muslims and Christians, especially, have a history of specifically demonizing them. And Christians claim it was because they killed Christ (but they don’t hate the Romans, do they?) even though if they had not, Jesus couldn’t have been raised from the dead and washed away believers’ original sins.
I always wondered if the reason that the betraying disciple was named Judas had something to do with thee etymology of the word “Jew” in European languages. I wrote a post about it once on my old old blog, and someone replied it was a coincidence. But, I wonder still.
To all the Jewish readers who stumble on this post, I am on your side.
This seems to have been a ‘thing’ for a while (though maybe more obvious and blatant recently). In an old episode of This American Life Ira Glass, a Jew, is baffled by a young woman who seems to have trouble actually uttering the ‘J-word’. I’m a Jew, I’m fine with saying that, I’m not wild about the ‘Jewish person’ circumlocution.
But this isn’t about not saying “Jew”; it’s about not saying Jew/Jews/Jewish; it’s about not mentioning Jews at all in an article about the genocide of Jews.
Definitely weird – it is a baffling mystery why some ‘children’ needed to be saved from being murdered and other ‘children’ apparently didn’t. How could Winton have possibly been able to distinguish? Like how some ‘citizens’ or ‘patients’ need access to abortions or birth control….
Mike, at the risk of tooting my own horn, I’ve written a decent piece (what I believe to be my personal best, at least so far) on the roots of anti-Semitism in the West. It may be of interest.
As for the omission of the ethnic marker from this piece, in the very best case it may be that the writer assumed the story was so ubiquitous and obvious that it didn’t bear mentioning. But more likely, given the recent escalation of hostilities, it was at least a semi-deliberate choice.
I think “ethnic marker” is a somewhat belittling label for mentioning Jews when talking about the murder of 6 million Jews.
I am afraid I cannot help but ask why? The word “Jew” or “Jewish” *is* an ethnic marker, and its omission from the Guardian piece was probably deliberate, and by the tone of my comment I thought it was pretty clear that I find that omission was a bad thing. I guess it may be considered ironic that by using “ethnic marker” instead of “the word ‘Jew’” or “the Jewish ethnic marker” the comment was arguably guilty of the same misdemeanor, but a two-sentence comment in a thread whose only subject is the conspicuous lack of these terms may be more easily forgiven than an article in the Guardian.
Also, I think me linking to a piece in which I spend several thousand words explaining (and denouncing) the deranged hatred of said ethnicity should have bought me at least a modicum of the benefit of the doubt that I wasn’t disparaging Jewish people by talking about the article’s author’s choices.
Der Durchwanderer @ 8
Really good essay, relevant and well put. Thanks for sharing it.
DD, sorry, I didn’t mean you were belittling, just that that particular word choice sounded not quite right to me. It was an editor or writer type comment, not a moral or political one. I really didn’t mean you were disparaging Jewish people.
Why does “ethnic marker” sound not quite right to me? I guess because I can’t picture Hitler saying the German equivalent. Too polite for the Nazis. Anachronistic, maybe.
I see you’re way ahead of me. This is what I was groping for:
Your essay is really good.
Love the Doc Martin reference.
I recommend:
Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition. By David Nirenberg. W. W. Norton & Company.
Thanks for that link, Der Durchwanderer, I’ve taken a free subscription to your substack.
Your point fits in in Hector Avalos’ thesis looking at the structure of religion through the lens of economics. Salvation is held as a scarce resource, and I guess the simplest definition of it is as ultimate closeness to the divine. It’s scarce in the sense that it can only be gained through limited channels, which is where religions gain their authority and power, and why they beget hatred and violence rather than love and peace. I recommend his book Fighting Words for a better understanding.
I’ll post the bare link in case my tags don’t work.
https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/fighting-words-the-origins-of-religious-violence-9781591022848?shipto=US&curcode=USD&msclkid=ef5dbfe76f6f19ab5168da7e349dd337&utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=pMax-Used-USA%20(PSDW)&utm_term=4582008568368858&utm_content=Everything%20-%201st%20Party%20Signals
Sackbut, Tim, Mike, thanks for your comments and book recommendations. I have added both to my reading list (though I’ve got about a dozen yet to plough through). And thanks for the sub, Mike; I don’t update often, but I hope I can find some more time to write soon. (Freddie deBoer’s latest posts, the long and hardly-coherent one “defending trans people” and the milquetoast follow-up casting all opposition to the first as either foolish man-hating feminists or transphobic conservatives, are itching for a detailed analysis and response which I may try to take a swing at. Though I’m kind of hoping Eliza Mondegreen or someone of her calibre will pre-empt me there.)
Ophelia, thank you for your comments. I’m afraid you’ve got the better of me with the Doc Martin reference, as I’ve not seen that series, though I may well have to check it out as well. What specifically did my joke inadvertently reference?
Heh, I realized it would probably be totally opaque. The series is quite odd in some ways but set in killer Cornwall coast landscape, so I ended up watching it enough to like it. Doc Martin’s Aunt Ruth is played by Eileen Atkins and she’s brilliant.
Der Durchwanderer #8
Excellent essay. I do have a few comments
Antisemitism started a bit earlier than the Roman occupation of Judea, at least according to this:
https://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=9579
and the following webpage.
Some Jews migrated to cities of the Hellenistic world (i.e.: post Alexander the Great)
Basically the Jews refusal to honor the gods of their neighbors led to those neighbors regarding the Jews with suspicion *at best*. So the earliest pogroms occurred in places like Alexandria (in Egypt, probably many of the other Alexandrias too).
Re: Jews fighting for the country they lived in during WWI
See: the rather tragic figure of Fritz Haber.
Haber was a German Jew who invented the Haber-Bosch method for synthesizing ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen (Bosch figured out how to scale it up to industrial use). This process makes the fertilizer that now keeps much of the world fed.
Ammonia synthesis is also crucial to making explosives. Without it Germany wouldn’t have lasted more than a few months in WWI. Haber was a very nationalistic German and also was crucial in developing poison gas for warfare in WWI. Of course being Jewish he was without honor in Nazi Germany and some of his work was used in killing Jews in the Holocaust.
While I’m at it I will link to the Wikipedia article on Haber
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber
Ophelia#18: I have had the good fortune of seeing Eileen Atkins on stage, with Paul Scofield & Vanessa Redgrave, in a wonderful production of Ibsen’s ‘John Gabriel Borkman’; she was quite extraordinary. She was born into a working-class family, got to the Guildhall School, and after leaving it, worked briefly (according to Wikipedia) as ‘an assistant stage manager at the Oxford Playhouse until Peter Hall fired her for impudence’. Good for her!
Good fortune indeed.
Jim Baerg,
Thank you for your comments. For context, the essay is one of a series of Western history (which I argue, someqhat arbitrarily, begins with the Great Schism of 1053). As such it doesn’t attempt to explain the entire story of antisemitism, but only its expression in Europe and its descendants, with perhaps some close analogies to be found in the Middle East and North Africa only once these areas were rent from Christendom by Muslim armies. But you are quite right that antisemitism was not a Western invention, and indeed Judea had been conquered many times over before the Romans came. If I had it to write again, I would’ve fit more about that in.
(I offhandedly mentioned “Hellenic and Semitic factions of Jewish thought”, but did not explore this in the essay further; the high point of said tension resulted in the Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucid Empire, which observant Jews commemmorate to this day with the celebration of Hannukah.)
And Haber is a tragic figure indeed. As I recall, his wife took her own life, by her own account in protest to his continuing work on chemical weapons. One wonders if they both wouldn’t have been happier taking up botany instead.