Jewish world is all abuzz by a pretty awful article one
Anna Breslaw wrote in Tablet magazine.
My father’s parents were Holocaust survivors, and in grade school I received the de rigueur exposure to the horror—visiting geriatric men and women with numbers tattooed on their arms, completing assigned reading like The Diary of Anne Frank and Night. But the more information I received, the less sympathy the survivors elicited from me. Each time we clapped for the old Hungarian lady who spoke about Dachau, each time Elie Wiesel threw another anonymous anecdote of betrayal onto a page, I eyed it askance, thinking What did you do that you’re not talking about? I had the gut instinct that these were villains masquerading as victims who, solely by virtue of surviving (very likely by any means necessary), felt that they had earned the right to be heroes, their basic, animal self-interest dressed up with glorified phrases like “triumph of the human spirit.”
I wondered if anyone had alerted Hitler that in the event that the final solution didn’t pan out, only the handful of Jews who actually fulfilled the stereotype of the Judenscheisse (because every group has a few) would remain to carry on the Jewish race—conniving, indestructible, taking and taking. My grandparents were not excluded from this suspicion. The same year, during a family dinner conversation about Terri Schiavo, my father made the serious request that should he fall into a vegetative state, he would like for us to keep him on life support indefinitely. Today he and I are estranged for a number of other reasons that are all somehow the same reason.
This is an awful, awful story. But (as sort of implied even here by the italicized parts) this woman's main motivator for her hate seems to be that she hates her family and absorbed Jew-hate through this family hate. She seems to have issues she needs to work out with a therapist.
Back in 2010 she wrote about dressing as
Anne Frank for Halloween
I happen to have an Anne Frank face, not to mention the following qualities:
• Female
• Jewish
• Young(ish)
• Oversharer
• Uncomfortable in small quarters
• Attracted to ambivalent men
So for Halloween 2009, I cut a Star of David out of a yellow cereal box, wrote “Juden” on it, taped it to a blazer and carried a Moleskine notebook around ven though my mom didn’t want me to.
She was born the same year as me (
per her tumblr) and so was 22 at the time and had apparently already graduated from college, so this "even though my mom didn't want me to" was more than petty childhood/teenage defiance.
But she seems to have an undue focus on family issues even where the Jews don't come up. Take this piece in
The New York Times:
This aversion seems to run in our genes. My extended family consists almost entirely of fatherless, brotherless and husbandless women. We’re skinny and bright, with a capacity for imagination that lends itself to paranoia and social anxiety. We all possess an encyclopedic knowledge of cinema from the classic to the terrible. Acquiring this knowledge is easier than it sounds. All you have to do is possess a terror of actual male interaction.
Under the banner of
People you might not want to have casual sex With, she ends it with "That divorced friend of your father’s." While the rest may not have been personally experienced, I wouldn't be surprised if this was one she experienced (and was sparked by her daddy issues).
In short, get thee to a therapist, Anna.
