"The tenacious 88-year-old had wielded the antique pistol during World War II, when she fought with a band of Jewish partisans in Nazi-occupied Poland...."
Iveniaki was sure enough to kiss grandma on the cheek, pack his bags and follow an unlikely trail being blazed by thousands of young Israelis who are moving to Germany.... The wave of newcomers from Israel is accelerating the rebirth of Jewish culture in the country that nearly extinguished it....
“I generally feel way safer in Berlin than I felt in Paris,” said Raphael Podselver, a 25-year-old French Jew who moved to Berlin to work for an IT start-up.
ADDED: This made me think of a passage from David Rakoff's
"Half Empty":
A few years back, my first book was translated into German and I was flown over for a tour. I don’t kid myself: the primary reason for their interest in me was precisely because I am Jewish, our extirpated culture being somewhat fetishized in Germany today. I was a phantom talisman, like an ivory-billed woodpecker willingly visiting the strip mall that used to be his swampy habitat, or the walking illustration of that rueful old joke about the suburbs being the place where they chopped down all the trees and then named the streets after them. I spent a week as a Professional Jew...
The Germanized Yiddish I spoke to make myself understood to hotel clerks and taxi drivers was met with what can only be described as delight, and a kind of wistful nostalgia for a time no one really remembered anymore, which invariably led to the time none of them seemed capable of forgetting. Every conversation I had began precisely the same way: “How does it feel for you to be here?”
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As long as they criticize Israel in any conversation with the locals they will be fine. Well, fine-ish.
This all went so well for them last time.
Germany: we hate Jews less than the rest of Europe.
Better keep their passports up-to-date.
One wonders if the Germans now understand better than the rest of the world does that the Big Lie that Hitler's Nazi cult used to capture their grandparent's minds was such a silly 100% lie.
The Germans are probably interested in what light real Jews can shed on that experience of the power of a mind control which caused 50,000,000 deaths and another 50,000,000 wandering refugees nearly starving to death in a totally destroyed European continent.
I've long thought that it was historical accident as much as anything else that Hitler was German -- after all, consider how many Jews didn't emigrate when they had the chance because it was inconceivable to them that Germany wouldn't be safe. There was plenty of antisemitism in France, and far more in Eastern Europe.
(Though there was a book that I read and summarized a while back which said that the antisemitism in Germany was connected up with issues of national pride and post-WWI humiliation.)
Anyway, the little factoid that I can offer here is this: the Jewish population in Germany is actually increasing these days, or, rather, has increased following the end of the Cold War. Germany, like many other countries, I think, grants citizenship to anyone with a German ethnic background. Though I don't know how easy it is to prove your Germanness or how "pure" the ancestry has to be, Russian Jews of German ancestry (Volga Germans) were able to use this to immigrate ("back") to Germany. So there's that.
Norman Davies wrote that the figure of approximately 6 million Jewish deaths in WWII will probably stand. Of that, approximately 3 million Polish Jews, 2 million Ukrainian, and 1 million all other nationalities.
("Polish" and "Ukrainian" being rather loose descriptions, given the history of these areas over the last 3-400 years.)
The Big Lie we are faced with every day now is a 20 year multi-billion dollar propaganda campaign that beneficial CO2 trace gas is a world destroying pollutant requiring an emergency shut down of USA's industrial civilization.
Like the story that under Eugenics Science the Jews are pollutants, as an easy excuse for theft and murder programs that will make Nazi Germany look merciful. These Envirnmental Cult guys want at least 6 billion people exterminated immediately.
The Germans have benefited from their experience with this type of mind control crap to quickly see through the giant con and total hoax. They like Australians, are now demanding the truth from "science" this time.
The Germans need the comedy. Once, Robin Williams, on a tour there, was asked by a German interviewer why Germans don't have much of a reputation in the field of comedy. Williams said, "You killed all the funny people."
@Jane
My Grandmother was of the same view. She was raised to be a proud German. Her father had served in WW I. Jews were at the center of German culture in the 1920s. It was places like Poland, Lithuania and France that treated Jews badly. She even confessed that she and her friends looked down on the "Easter" (Polish, Russion, Ukranian, etc.) Jews - because she was a German!
Amazing how fast that all changed. Fortunately she got out, but a lot of her family did not.
"the first thing she did was produce a gun."
gun rights for Jews in Germany would be a good thing :)
Thank you Althouse. I enjoyed the Rakoff quote. If this is typical of his writing style, I'll have to look into his work.
Sadly Germany was at one time one of the better places for Jews to live, at least compared to Eastern Europe. That the Holocaust would be perpetrated by the Germans was a cruel twist for those who lived there for centuries and assimilated into German culture.
I can believe that now Germany is a much friendlier place for Jews than a lot of countries, like France. For most Germans, there's still a lot of guilt over what was done, even several generations removed. The French sort of papered over their collaboration with the Nazis, and the very large Muslim population is not particularly friendly to Jews either.
"Thank you Althouse. I enjoyed the Rakoff quote. If this is typical of his writing style, I'll have to look into his work."
Yes, it is, and I highly recommend the audiobook version. He makes it even funnier, and I just enjoy the sound of his voice. The humor is there in the voice itself. He died young, so it's always a little sad to listen to him.
Rakoff is a hoot; and he reads his own books on Audible. That is a gem our wonderful Professor mentioned here once.
It isn't the ethnic Germans who will be killing Jews in Germany this time around, it will be ethnic Turks and other Muslims.
Take grandma's gun and keep it ready!
An "antique gun" is one manufactured before 1900 and the advent of smokeless powder.
Do not use with modern ammunition!
The Germans will tolerate them until the economy sours.
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