LEONARD KJUEGEL
579
view of history being made about the relationship between blacks and
Koreans in Los Angeles or blacks and Cubans in Miami, as the film
The
Liberators
puts forth? How striking that its creators assumed Jews would
embrace the film, would love it for the sentiment behind its creation. As
if the intent of "healing the rift" between blacks and Jews lent one im–
munity from history. Or as if suffering were worthwhile only after it was
nickel-and-dimed into a high school civics lesson. If history gets in the
way, then history can be altered.
The Liberators
is spiritual Krazy Glue,
meant to rebind blacks and Jews to each other. Dance off into the sun,
children.
Together again.
But history as a morality play is either childishly silly or blatantly
obscene. As if the purpose of those fleshed skeletons were an hour of
brotherhood talk at the Apollo. "Don't talk me no brother talk!" cries
the boy in Shirley Clark's
The Cool World.
Smart boy. Reality is simpler
than brother talk. Blacks and Jews during the Second World War each
had enough
tsooris.
They were, after all, blacks and Jews. They didn't
need to serve as the other's savior. To believe that one can react to
those skeletal bodies with a celebration of brotherhood is the most bla–
tant obscenity of all.
Even for the politically correct, fear is a reality reminder. The reac–
tion of a Jew to the Holocaust - even one of those PC
gauleiters
trying
to convince himself and others that the World Trade Center bombing
was a Mossad plot, alone at night with a touch of indigestion forcing
him to sound the hollows of his heart - is going
to
be different from
the reaction of a black. Just as the reaction of a black to the horrors of
the Middle Passage is going to be different from the reaction of a Jew.
Not that we can or should remain oblivious to the other's pain and
suffering. But fifty years after the Holocaust, Jews should realize that it is
one thing to blind ourselves to the fate of others by saying "never
again," quite another to make history trivial by universalizing it. The
Holocaust was no more or less universal than African slavery or the
nightmare committed on Armenians by Turks. But it happened to Jews
because they were Jews.
That is its enduring lesson. Jews may have created
Hollywood (a feat embroidered in the sinister imaginations of black aca–
demic idiots), but the cavalry never made it over the hill in time to res–
cue them.
One of the minor legacies of our insistence on political correctness is
that in the "gorgeous mosaic" of David Dinkins's city, social problems
are personal problems. One offers group suffering on the altar of PC.
