Judaism

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Impact of online confusion? Many, many young Americans just don't get the Holocaust

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Impact of online confusion? Many, many young Americans just don't get the Holocaust

It was the kind of open-ended question researchers ask when they want survey participants to have every possible chance to give a good answer.

Thus, a recent 50-state study of Millennials and younger "Generation Z" Americans included this: "During the Holocaust, Jews and many others were sent to concentration camps, death camps and ghettos. Can you name any concentration camps, death camps or ghettos you have heard of?"

Only 44% could remember hearing about Auschwitz and only 6% remembered Dachau, the first concentration camp. Only 1% mentioned Buchenwald, where Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel was a prisoner when the American Third Army arrived.

Another question: "How was the Holocaust carried out?" While 30% knew that there were concentration camps, only 13% remembered poison-gas chambers.

"That was truly shocking. I have always thought of Auschwitz as a symbol of evil for just about everyone. … It has always been the ultimate example of what hate can lead to if we don't find a way to stop it," said Gideon Taylor, president of the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.

It was a sobering "wake-up call," he added, to learn that half of the young Americans in this survey "couldn't name a single concentration camp. … It seems that we no longer have common Holocaust symbols in our culture, at least not among our younger generations."

Popular culture is crucial. It has, after all, been nearly 30 years since the release of Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List," so that landmark movie isn't a cultural reference point for many young people. And it's been 20 years since the original "X-Men" movie, which opens at the gates of Auschwitz, and almost a decade since "X-Men: First Class," which offered a variation on that concentration-camp imagery.

Old movies and school Holocaust-education materials, said Taylor, are clearly being buried in information from social media and Internet search engines.

"The world has changed so much in terms of how information is transmitted," he said, reached by telephone. "Obviously the Internet has transformed how young people take in stories and information. … Twenty years ago, we could assume that most students were being exposed to books by Elie Wiesel" in history classes or "movies like 'Schindler's List' or 'Sophie's Choice.' We cannot assume this anymore."


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What's a hot take on Israel worth? Depends on one's media celebrity status (Hello Seth Rogen)

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How do you tell the difference between a Jewish pessimist and a Jewish optimist?

Easy. The pessimist says, “Things just can’t get any worse. The optimist says, “Sure they can.”

Well, they certainly have — as far as the fraught connection between Israel and liberal American Jews goes.

The latest stressor is a predictably nasty media exchange over high-profile liberal commentator Peter Beinart’s recent declaration that he no longer backs a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

A single bi-national, or perhaps a confederated, state, said Beinart, is the best remaining equitable option. This, he concluded, is because of Israel’s deeply entrenched West Bank settlement project. Further undermining the two-state option, he said, is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s threat to annex much of the occupied West Bank that Palestinians want to include in their own independent state.

Beinart detailed his thoughts in this New York Times oped and, in much greater detail, in this Jewish Currents essay.

For liberal Jews — who have long argued that two independent states coexisting side by side, one Jewish-run and one Palestinian, is the best and only realistic option — Beinart’s abandonment of full Jewish nationhood was nothing less than Zionist heresy.

Naturally, given today’s insatiable 24/7 media universe — in which all who dare venture are but a tweet away from “woke” fame or “cancel culture” renunciation — the verbal warfare started immediately.

Beinart’s, you may be wondering, is but one voice in a cacophony of voices claiming to know what’s best for Israel-Palestine, so why the fuss? Moreover, he lives in the United States, not Israel, so to what degree does his opinion even matter?

The answer, of course, is his American media prominence. His frequent talking-head appearances, (he’s a CNN regular) and voluminous writings have won him a place in the liberal Zionist media firmament, where he’s long been a harsh critic of Netanyahu and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. That’s not Hollywood famous, but it’s a start.


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Journalism cancels its moral voice: What does this mean for Catholic news? For religion news?

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I have always been fascinated with the concept that journalism functions as a moral watchdog on our society. As someone who spent most of his career at two New York tabloids (15 years at the New York Post, two others at the rival Daily News), reportage and story selection revolved heavily around morality.

A lot of it mirrored traditional religious morality.

Editors and reporters never used that language to describe their work, of course.

They still reported both sides of the story and gave people who were the subject of said story the chance to rebuke accusations. Whether it was a news account about an unfaithful politician (former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer and former Congressman Anthony Weiner spring to mind), a Wall Street executive who embezzled money or a regular guy who shot and killed a convenient store clerk over a few dollars, if you broke one of the Ten Commandments then you had a very good chance of being splashed all over page one.

ProPublica, one of my favorite investigative news sites, has a mission statement that sums up this philosophy very well:

To expose abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust by government, business, and other institutions, using the moral force of investigative journalism to spur reform through the sustained spotlighting of wrongdoing.

Where does this morality come from? It is rooted primarily in Judeo-Christian values, something that helped form American society during what is now called The Great Awakening.

News coverage — be it about politics, culture or religion — is largely made up of crimes (in the legal sense) or lapses in judgement (in a moral one). But the news media has changed in the Internet age, primarily because of social media. Facebook, Twitter and TikTok, to name just three, allows users — everyday people — to pump out content. That content can take many forms — from benign observations to what’s called hot takes — for all to read and see.

Truth, fact checking and context are not important. What matters are likes and followers. What we have now is something some have called “The Great Awokening” and it appears to have forever transformed our political discourse and the journalism that tries to report on it.

Mainstream news organizations, in their quest for clicks amid hope of figuring out a new business model, now mirror the content we all see on social media platforms.


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About Rodney Howard-Browne and what happens to Easter, Passover and the hajj during a plague

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When President Donald Trump first talked about churches being “packed” on Easter Sunday, many listeners must have wondered if he meant July 12 instead of April 12.

A lot has changed since Trump’s pronouncement and, for the most part, churches are not packed except for notable exceptions, such as the arrest of a Florida megachurch pastor on Monday for holding services this past Sunday.

Some of you may have heard that the Rev. Rodney Howard-Browne ignored the social-distancing warnings and preached to a packed church this past Sunday. TMZ and other outlets reported on that story.

This is the clear and present danger ... people continuing to congregate -- squeezing into close quarters like sardines -- and that's exactly what happened Sunday at a Florida Church.

The River Church in Tampa was packed to the gills with worshipers who clearly were looking for hope. Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne, who presides over the megachurch and has been reportedly defiant over social distancing, has claimed he'll cure coronavirus just the way he did with Zika.

He has vowed he will never close his church ... despite every doctor and scientist saying social distancing is the only thing that will prevent the disease from spreading even more.

On Monday, Florida police arrested Howard-Browne and charged him with two misdemeanors. CNN’s Daniel Burke had the best lede about it all:

(CNN) Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne said he wouldn't close his doors of his Tampa, Florida, megachurch until the End Times begin. The police weren't willing to wait that long.

News of this was all over Facebook and Twitter by Monday night. For those of you who are afraid of the Constitutional implications of all this, don’t worry. The CNN story points out that the police have been trying to work with this pastor for days, but getting nowhere. Now, the Christian Post says that Howard-Browne (which I am shortening to RHB) made family groups stand six feet apart from each other, but as I watched the video (atop this page), it was hard to tell. Take a look.

But then again, I’ve a history with RHB. I interviewed him back in 1994 for this article when he first hit the American religious scene (he’s from South Africa), introducing the “holy laughter” phenomenon and calling himself “the Holy Ghost bartender.” I was not impressed.


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Looking ahead: What Super Tuesday means for American Jews, Israel and Bernie Sanders

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One of my wife’s cousins, a guy who has spent his life on a kibbutz in northern Israel, telephoned last week to ask what I thought of Sen. Bernie Sanders and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.

I have strong reservations about both men, I responded.

But that’s beside the point, which is: What could I tell him about the two Jews vying for the Democratic presidential nomination (following Super Tuesday it’s now down to one, with Bloomberg having wiped out). Being Israeli, what he really meant was, what did this mean for the Jewish state?

I’ve had permutations of that conversation — on the telephone, via Facebook and in person — with a number of Jews, both American and Israeli, of varying political persuasions. Both the American Jewish press and Israeli news media binged on the Sanders-Bloomberg intra-tribal political slugfest, and I gorged on that as well.

My takeaways?

Sanders scares the #@*% out of most Israeli Jews and more than a few American Jews. But the latter will likely vote for him anyway should he grab the nomination.

Why? Because priority No. 1 is defeating President Donald Trump in November. (More on this below.)

In this regard, the situation is akin to when many traditional Christians, for whom blocking abortion was the deciding issue, held their collective nose and voted for Trump because they could not abide voting for pro-choice Hillary Clinton. How ironic is that? (And no, I’m not saying Sanders is as bad to my mind as is Trump. Not even close.)

Bloomberg, on the other hand, scared no one, except for Bernie Bros.


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Mainstream journalists should pay attention if American Judaism gets into serious trouble  

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How many articles have we read about the inexorable demographic slide of U.S. “mainline” Protestantism, difficulties lately hitting “evangelicals,” declining Mass attendance for Catholics and the growth of religiously unaffiliated people (“Nones”) who forsake all religious ties that bind?

There’s been far less media attention to the state of Judaism, the nation’s second-largest religion though Islam is moving up. It faces far worse prospects, according to premier chronicler Jack Wertheimer, a historian and former provost at Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS).

Reporters — if American Judaism is in serious trouble, that’s a big story by any definition.

This dire, developing story is a good example of the way scholarship that deserves media coverage can be mostly hidden for an extended period yet remain pertinent and newsworthy. Wertheimer’s “The New American Judaism” (Princeton), published two years ago, only caught The Guy’s eye when boss tmatt noted a review in the current edition of the Orthodox Union magazine Jewish Action. (The Guy has not yet read the book but that lengthy review provides ample substance and quotes.)

Wertheimer sees a “recession” — if not a great depression.

More than 2 million people of Jewish parentage “no longer identify as Jews.” Many others do not see themselves as part of the Jewish religion and define themselves only in cultural or ethnic terms. Rising intermarriage means fewer Jews tomorrow. Birth rates among the non-Orthodox are so low one wonders “who will populate Jewish religious institutions in the future.”

If the religion atrophies,  can non-religious communal life thrive?


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Yet more synagogue and church shootings and a farewell (kind of) to arms from Julia

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It is that time of year again when I’m listening to Lutheran Public Radio’s Christmas music, lighting candles for Hanukkah (wanted to teach the kiddo what that is all about) and reflecting on the end of the year. This year is different in that my nearly five-year stint with GetReligion comes to an end with this post.

You may have already seen Tmatt’s writing on the changes afoot and while much is still up in the air, funding is tight, so I will be moving on.

I’ll miss the breaking news, of which there’s been plenty over this weekend, all of it sad, unfortunately. Not only were people stabbed at an innocent Hanukkah celebration Saturday night at a rabbi’s house just outside of New York but two people were killed Sunday at a Fort Worth church by a gunman who killed two churchgoers before security shot him dead. Our own Bobby Ross wrote this about the Texas carnage.

One weird factoid concerned the first attacker’s weapon. He was using a sword (or very long knife) instead of a gun. What was up about that? And why have recent attacks against Jews been carried out by blacks? This Jerusalem Post editorial explains why black anti-Semitism is the new boogyman that no one wants to name.

About the shootings in Texas, what if the attack had taken place in a zip code where people -– in this case the security team at the church — aren’t as likely to carry guns? Would there be a lot more dead? And why that church?

I’ve been asking such questions for four years and 10 months now. I was teaching journalism in Fairbanks and the snow was still deep on the ground in February 2015 when Tmatt asked if I’d join the team on March 1. I’d never blogged professionally before, so it was a steep learning curve figuring out the intricacies of Squarespace, how to attract readers and how to operate while four time zones behind the other writers. I am grateful that Tmatt burnished off a lot of the rough pieces in my copy, especially when I was frequently up past midnight doing posts. One gets the late-breaking news when posting from Alaska.

Now I am merely three zones behind most of the GetReligion team, with whom it’s been a pleasure to work with and compare notes and observations of America and the world’s wild and crazy religion scene. Reporting is often such a lonely occupation, so I have really enjoyed the camaraderie.

My daughter and I now live in the Seattle area and one of my assignments was to monitor religion coverage west of the Rockies which, unfortunately, is as sparse as ever.


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Refugees from ultra-Orthodox Judaism get a sympathetic profile in the Washington Post

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The world is always fascinated when someone leaves a closed religious group for the outside world.

Think Amish teenagers fleeing the faith; family members leave the Westboro Baptist Church; women fleeing arranged marriages from Somalia to Pakistan and the peeling off of ultra-Orthodox Jews.

What’s up with the latter?

Turns out there’s a form of Orthodox Judaism extant in Israel that Americans barely encounter on our shores. Those are Jews whose lives are controlled from cradle to grave by strict Torah observance. But what if you want to leave?

The Washington Post tells you what comes next.

JERUSALEM — Ruth Borovski, doing a bit of homework, sat in a library and Googled “phosphate” on her smartphone.

That could not have happened 19 months earlier, when Borovski was a 27-year-old living within one of Israel’s cloistered ultra-Orthodox Jewish sects. Then, she had never heard of phosphate. Or of smartphones.

She says she had never seen a library. Now it’s hard to get her out of one…

Borovski’s race into the wider world started in 2018 when, trapped in an arranged marriage, she dialed the hotline of a -Jerusalem-based nonprofit called Hillel and said she wanted to leave her family and her community. With Hillel’s help, she became one of a growing number of Yotzim, or “Leavers,” who have bolted from closed religious communities into a secular world they are ill-equipped to navigate.

One assumes there were no children from this marriage, as the article mentions none.


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Here come The Holidays! Yes, the mall is crucial, but there may be other LA events worth noting

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Did you know that this coming Monday is the start of Nativity Lent in Eastern Christianity?

That’s a major period of fasting and penitence in ancient forms of Christian faith and it continues until Dec. 25th — the start of the 12 days of Christmas. In Western Christian churches, Nativity Lent is called Advent and it starts on Dec. 1.

I know. I know. There is more to Christmas than religion. Ditto for Hanukkah. Economics and public revelry is part of the picture. I get that.

The question, when you look at a story such as this one in The Los Angeles Times — “Things to do: 7 L.A., O.C. places to get you into the holiday groove” — if many newspaper editors have decided that the materialistic and commercial celebrations are the REAL holidays and that all of that strange “religious” stuff is now an unimportant wing that has been tacked onto The Mall.

I mean, go to the Los Angeles Times website and do a search for “Christmas.” Then sort through a few screens worth of what you find. I mean, I am scared to click on this link: “Christmas like a Kardashian and 17 other things to do this holiday season.” How about you?

But back to the holiday mood feature. Here’s the lede:

With Thanksgiving approaching, it’s time to charge into the holiday season. Fashion brands and local shopping centers want to get you in the mood as they celebrate with tree-lighting ceremonies and other festivities. 

So what goes on during these rites? Here’s a few samples:

The annual Rodeo Drive holiday lighting celebration on Thursday will kick off what Beverly Hills is calling its Bold holiday events. The night will feature a live performance from Broadway star and “Glee” alum Matthew Morrison, who will sing holiday tunes along with offering a preview of his upcoming 2020 album of classic Disney covers.

This next one even mentions “Christmas,” sort of.


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