This past February, I walked out of rehearsals for Bread and Puppet Theater's Battle of the Terrorists and the Horrorists. Normally this would not be something worth commenting upon in a public statement, as performers leave projects all the time, but because my relationship with Bread and Puppet had been an ongoing one since 2003 and most importantly, because it was a matter of conscience, I feel compelled to comment, especially since it has become the subject of scuttlebutt about the local scene.
But before I explain why I departed, I ought to describe Bread and Puppet's significance to me. To those unfamiliar with the company's history: Bread and Puppet Theater was founded in the early 1960s in New York City by German immigrant Peter Schumann, an artist whose formal training was in dance and sculpture. In the early 1970s he relocated the company to Glover, Vermont, where it stages pageants during the summers, while spending much of the rest of the year performing both in the United States and abroad. Due to the scale of Schumann's theatrical vision and the costs involved in running a theatre company that receives no outside institutional support, the company relies heavily on volunteer performers. Some of these volunteers are veteran company members, while others are fans or local artists who feel some resonance with Schumann's artistic vision, and camaraderie with him and his company.
Since 2003, I had been one of Bread and Puppet's Boston area volunteers. I estimate that I have participated in some 37 individual performances with the company. During this time, I had made a habit of keeping a web log of my experiences at these shows, an activity to which Schumann gave his blessing after he and many others had become aware of it.
Actively reflecting and writing about rehearsing and performing under a maverick theatre director was to have a powerful influence on my development as an artist. From the very first rehearsals, I learned techniques of staging and object manipulation that have added to my toolkit -- more importantly, I saw first hand how to take philosophically complex concepts and translate them into an allegory for the stage (Indeed, I was unable not to see parallels between Martin Heidegger's later work, most specifically, "The Question Concerning Technology" and Schumann's own Oratorio of the Possibilitarians).
As this past February came around, I was preparing to spend another week-long run with Bread & Puppet. This time we would be performing at the Boston Center for the Arts' Cyclorama, a 23,000 square-foot red brick rotunda located in the South End of Boston, originally built in the nineteenth century to display a panoramic painting. I was excited to be in such a space. Since the size of the venue allowed for it, an exhibition of Schumann's two-dimensional art all along the interior walls of the structure was also planned.
On February 5th, 2007, I was contacted by freelance journalist and activist Susie Davidson (Disclosure: Davidson is editor and primary author of I Refused to Die: Stories of Boston-Area Holocaust Survivors and Soldiers who Liberated the Concentration Camps of World War II, an anthology that includes two of my poems, and is a personal friend) as she had received word that a new piece, not mentioned in previous press releases, had been added to the art exhibit, one that was based on Schumann's experience of working with a group of Palestinian artists in the West Bank. To quote Schumann in the revised press release:
Last November I went for nine days to the West Bank to the town of Beit Sahour to conduct a puppet workshop with an on-and-off company of about twenty. We built puppets and masks from garbage retrieved cardboard. And on Palestinian Independence Day, November 15, the Palestinian Branch of the Bread and Puppet Theater performed on Manger Square , Bethlehem a short spectacle titled “Independence” consisting of four stories made from recent local incidents.
This description was vague enough that anyone could interpret it in terms of their own fears or hopes and as the press release began to circulate, members of the local Jewish and Holocaust survivor communities began to show alarm. Davidson had hoped that I could clarify the content of the show and exhibit.
My own experience had been that, except for the slapstick variety, Schumann is opposed to all sorts of violence. It is also my feeling that working with Palestinian artists, and having sympathies with Palestinian non-combatants must not be interpreted as sympathies for those who advocate violence against Israelis or Jews in general. However, I lacked the certainty to assure anyone that the concerns were not justified, and could only caution that one should not jump to a conclusion out of fear. However, I persuaded a number of my interlocutors to attend the opening reception of the exhibit and to ask questions at the symposium that was to follow.
On February 12th, I attended the reception. On entering the Cyclorama, I was greeted with smiles and open arms by many of the friends I have made over the years through Bread and Puppet. However, already aware that I was in the middle of a potential maelstrom, I turned my attention to Peter Schumann as he walked us through the art exhibit, which ranged from political works that directly referred to current events like the Bush Administration's practice of "extraordinary rendition" to a more fanciful adventure of Kaspar, who is something of a Germanic equivalent to the Neapolitan Pulcinella or English Mister Punch.
When Schumann began his narrative of "Independence Paintings: Inspired by Four Stories" he explained that he had gone to the West Bank on invitation from local peace activists, and that he had been reading John Hersey's The Wall, an account of the Warsaw Ghetto. The result was a large piece that juxtaposed scenes from the Warsaw Ghetto (with inmates clearly represented as Jews) and a narrative of how Palestinian non-combatants are affected by Israeli Defense Force's (IDF) counter-terrorist operations. Schumann noted how the West Bank wall and security checkpoints between Israel and the West Bank had led to economic privation and "humiliation" for Palestinians, though he was quick to note that it "was not as bad" as conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto.
As at the symposium (a question and answer session moderated by John Bell, a former Bread and Puppet company member, current member of Great Small Works, one of my favorite puppet theatre troupes, and Emerson College professor) began, I found myself in an alienated state and thought it best to sit back and observe, sensing that while I would have to make a choice, I did not have to at that moment. Susie Davidson spoke up. She noted that the juxtaposition of imagery of the Warsaw Ghetto and a narrative of the West Bank invites a claim that the two are equivalent. Schumann responded by asking her to point out where he makes that claim in his art. He only reiterated that he had just read Hersey's book and that there were economic deprivations that resulted from the West Bank Wall, specifically citing an unemployment rate of over 80%, while never acknowledging that the West Bank Wall had been constructed as a non-lethal means to end suicide bombings in Israel and that it had been largely successful.
(Of course, how much of that unemployment can be blamed on the construction of the wall and not on corruption within the Palestinian Authority, something Schumann did acknowledge, is open to debate.)
The Warsaw Ghetto is an icon in the historical memory of the Holocaust, and though originally conceived before Germany decided upon the "Final Solution," it is impossible to view the ghetto except as a stepping-stone towards the Holocaust, and this is what makes it such a powerful source of imagery. Schumann, an artist who has been refining his own personal pantheon of icons over decades, is certainly aware of the power of images, especially when placed in relationship to one another. The idea that he was merely putting the scenes of IDF counter-terrorism alongside those of the ghetto because he was reading a specific book while visiting a specific place, might be understandable had a much younger, less mature artist made the work, but from an artist of his experience, it seemed a cop-out.
Davidson pressed on, questioning Schumann: if one is comparing the Warsaw Ghetto with the West Bank, where are the slave labor camps, the gas chambers, and the Zyklon-B canisters? Schumann was silent, but much of the audience, who probably saw themselves as supporters of Schumann and Bread and Puppet, were not.
Frank Levine, who was seated next to Davidson, described the ensuing debate in the March 2, 2007 letters section of The Boston Phoenix:
[...]Schumann’s installation was a collage of photos of the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto, with text underneath referring to the wall in Israel, “jackboots,” “people being pulled from their homes,” “the oppressor and occupier,” etc., leading to no other conclusion but that he was equating the policies of the Israeli government with those of the Nazis.
[...]at the symposium, [Susie Davidson] asked Schumann what the basis of his comparison was; she was met with a chorus of “Zionist Nazi,” denunciations of the Israeli government, and insulting, dead-end rounds of clapping. Schumann then incredulously stated he did not mean to equate Israeli and Nazi policy, when it would be an insult to any viewer’s intelligence to conceive that the impression would be anything but.
I was not seated near either Davidson or Levine, and did not hear anyone use the phrase, "Zionist Nazi" as Levine describes, but the account otherwise matches my observations. I did, however, see scrawled in large red marker, the phrase "Zionist Genocide" on a sheet of paper left behind after the fact.
The point is that, even if Schumann intended no such comparison, his audience explicitly interpreted him as making the comparison. Schumann, an artist who has spent decades cultivating his own personal iconography is certainly intelligent enough to realize that a large segment of his audience would interpret the work as a statement of equivalency between the Warsaw Ghetto and the West Bank.
The Warsaw Ghetto was part of a system of ghettos that Germany built and operated in the Nazi puppet-states it established in Poland and the Baltic between 1939 and 1941. According to the Raul Hilberg's seminal study The Destruction of the European Jews (all references are to the 1973 edition), 500,000 to 600,000 Jews died from starvation and disease in the ghettos of forced labor camps of Poland. Translation: about one fifth of Poland's Jewish population died in the ghettos in less than two years. (Hilberg, pp. 173-174.) Nothing of that sort has occurred in the West Bank-- in fact, the Palestinian population on the West Bank has grown since 1967.
Indeed, Schumann went on to interpret the the failure of the April 19-May 16 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising as "the failure to reach out to the Polish resistance." However, to again refer to Hilberg, in preparing for the uprising, 22 battle groups under the command of Modechai Anielewicz received weapons from the Communist People's Guard under the command of General Rola-Zymierski and from the Home Army -- the military wing of the Polish government in exile in London (Hilberg, pp 322-323.) In addition, Polish partisans carried out diversionary attacks outside the ghetto (p. 324). The failure was being outnumbered and outgunned by the Germans, and their Polish and Ukranian allies -- and perhaps in not taking up armed resistance earlier.
Though I am young, the world has witnessed much genocide in my lifetime. We know how to measure genocide in cold statistics without reference to emotionally charged icons. The population of a group targeted for genocide simply does not increase, especially when the alleged murderers have military superiority. IDF entered the West Bank in 1967, and while it would be absurd to state that there have been no injustices committed against Palestinian non-combatants, no genocide has occurred, no genocide is in the making, unless we are to believe that this is the most ineptly-managed genocide in history.
At best, the juxtaposition Schumann presents in "Independence Paintings: Inspired by Four Stories" is what historian Deborah Lipstadt refers to as "soft core Holocaust denial" in that rather than deny that a historical event (like the Holocaust) has occurred, it seeks to rewrite history without concern for actual facts. So Israelis are compared to Nazis and the West Bank is compared to the Warsaw ghetto -- in short, the idea of a phony genocide is promoted. Outrage over a phony genocide diverts from outrage over real genocides like those in Rwanda, Darfur, the former Yugoslavia, and Iraq.
At worst, Schumann's statements on behalf of "Independence Paintings: Inspired by Four Stories" are normal Holocaust denial: that the ghettos were sites of merely massive unemployment and security checkpoints -- and not places in which one fifth of the population died through deliberate starvation , over-crowding, and denial of medical care over a period of less than two years. This sort of denial was implicit in the fact that these ghettos were called "ghettos" as the ghettos of Europe had never before been so deadly. The word "ghetto" was a euphemism.
Listening to these evasions by an artist I admire left me in a daze of cognitive dissonance, where I had to wrestle with conflicting feelings of loyalty and friendship, but also for the value I place on truth and critical analysis. The conclusions above are not ones I could reach at the symposium, but ones I struggled with over the next day and night. So despite these feelings of dissonance, I still greeted my old friends, and I still pictured myself working with them. The next evening, I attended the first night of rehearsals, hoping that perhaps the show would provide the counterpoint to the tension I felt.
This was the description of The Battle of the Terrorists and the Horrorists in the press release that had been sent out in a mass email on January 11, 2007, when I had first committed myself to performing in the show:
THE BATTLE OF THE TERRORISTS AND THE HORRORISTS is a black and white dance and puppet show with a few colored exclamation marks!! As the U.S. sets out to achieve victory over the terrorists, it becomes necessary to make citizens acquainted with the promoters of victory: the horrorists. Under the banner of the two major divinities who rule over our present day existence — the God of Everything and the God of Nothing — the horrorists demonstrate, with the help of a cardboard citizenry, the progressive stages on the way to victory, including Ice Cold Reality, a dumbshow, which describes a week of horror under the feet of the occupier. The march to victory is a giant sailboat that drowns in stormy seas, and war is genocide.
From the press release, it appeared that the show was to be a satire about the Bush Administration's "War on Terror" as seen through the lens of the mythology that Peter Schumann had developed. "Horrorist" is a neologism that I first encountered in Bread and Puppet's How to Turn Distress into Success in 2004 (indeed, the monologue and cards in which the term is introduced are used in both plays.) It is understood as the dialectical antithesis to the terrorist, an opposing faction that enjoys "peace defined as complete military superiority". Clearly, this well describes America in the age of George W. Bush.
In rehearsal, The Battle of the Terrorists and the Horrorists was an alternation between satirical and allegorical tableaux, lazzi, and skits, the most brilliant of which was the "cardboard citizenry," a group of puppet characters whom the puppeteers introduce to the audience, only to abuse without warning, and then assure the audiences that no harm has been done, as the citizens are mere cardboard. This bit of comedy well satirizes the tendency to make distinctions between , victims of terrorism, victims of war crimes and the euphemism of "collateral damage". While I do accept such distinctions as valid for purposes of International Law, there is no reason why these distinctions should not be questioned by either ethicists or satirists.
But in the middle of the rehearsal came the bait-and-switch. Just as I had thought I was in an allegorical satire of contemporary America and that I was marching off to Iraq (or perhaps Iran), we were in the "Ice Cold Reality of Palestine." Schumann had transformed American soldiers (he had had us hum The Star Spangled Banner) into IDF soldiers. The dumb show curtains opened and puppet characters representing Palestinian women were being shown with a wall closing in on them, while large puppet feet trampled them from above. We were directed first to mime throwing rocks at the wall and then to mime tearing the wall down.
The scene disturbed me because I knew that tearing that wall down in reality would result in a return to suicide bombings in Israel, which would necessitate IDF reprisals, and so lead to needless deaths of both Israelis and Palestinians. I hoped that as we went through the scenes we would see something of what the terrorists would do, or a call for peace. But nothing of that sort came. Indeed, even what little nuance Schumann had demonstrated at the symposium, his criticisms of Palestinian society, notably, its sexism and the corruption of its leaders, were completely absent.
By the time I arrived at home, I decided I could not in good conscience remain in the cast, and then began to compose an explanation to a friend involved in the production. It took me a day to find the words, but in summation: If peace is a goal we seek, we cannot acquire it by demonizing the enemy, accusing them of crimes that they have not committed, nor can we insist that no injustice has been done to them. By performing in The Battle of the Terrorists and the Horrorists I would have lent my body to increasing the polarization that I witnessed that Monday night and make dialogue between people of good conscience more difficult. I have no idea if my explanation was passed on to anyone else in the company, and chose not to discuss my decision in detail to more than a few individuals until the production ended.
The response I received, in fact, the only disapproving response, was to suggest that I had succumbed to peer pressure, and that if I truly objected, that I should have worked within the system of Bread and Puppet to change the show, instead of giving up, and that I should have known that Bread and Puppet treats controversial material. Of course: I largely lack the behavioral pattern of "peer pressure" response, Bread and Puppet is not a democracy, and I was apparently on the other side of the "controversy."
Peter Schumann was born in 1934 in Silesia. This much appears in all the biographic accounts of Schumann's life, very little else. While Lower Silesia was at the time firmly within Germany's borders, Upper Silesia was divided between Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. In 1939, Germany's invasion of Poland resulted in the annexation of all of Silesia. The German SS, along with Silesian ethnic German paramilitaries, rounded up Silesian Poles and sent them to forced labor camps in the Reich or deported them to the General Government (the part of Nazi-occupied Poland not formally annexed to the Reich, but placed under the government of General Governor Hans Frank). The Jews of Silesia were deported to the ghettos. Silesian Germans and newly arrived Germans from the west took control of formerly Polish and Jewish-owned properties.
In 1941, once the ghettos had become unmanageable, plans were made to for surviving residents not killed by Mobile Killing Units to be sent to the camps, such as the death camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau and the concentration camps at Groß-Rosen, both of which were located in Silesia. This history is not mentioned in the hagiographies written about Peter Schumann (Notably George Dennison's An Existing Better World: Notes on the Bread & Puppet Theater and Richard T. Simon and Marc Estrin's Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater). Indeed, we only have to look at an interview dated March 1, 2006 given to Real Change News:
I was born in Silesia, which was German. It became Polish in 1945, after the war. It was part of Germany that was given to Poland by the Yalta Conference. Ninety-nine percent of the population of Silesia was made into refugees at the end of the War and we were part of that 99 percent. We were all looking for a new life, so we live as refugees for a few years.
[N.B.: Real Change News removed the article from their website, but it is available on archive.org.]
This quote is an example of historical denial. Never in the interview does he mention that one of the most notorious sites of the Holocaust is located in Silesia or that Germany had invaded Silesia and that the adults in his community had either profited from or committed acts of ethnic cleansing, enslavement, and genocide, or even that he was a child under the Nazi regime. In many cases, surviving Jews were still in displaced persons camps for years. 1945 is the year that the surviving Poles returned to their lands, wanting nothing of the people who had enslaved them.
This is not to dismiss the horrible experience of being a child refugee for the crimes of the adults in one's community, but the context of a little talked about, and incredibly complex aspect of the Post-World War II era has gone missing. The lands that Germany seized, ethnically cleansed, and then settled, were forcibly returned after the defeat of the Reich. In Poland, it is estimated that 6 million Germans fled or were evacuated, while another 3.6 million Germans were deported. It is estimated that as these lands were restored to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Russia, Lithuania, Yugoslavia, and other states in Eastern Europe, as many as 16.5 million Germans either fled or were deported to Germany between 1944 and 1948. Because of poor logistics, it is estimated that as many as two million Germans died in the process. Most Germans who fled from Silesia and other German-held lands in the east, not because of deportations though, but in the face of the Soviet military who were pressing toward Berlin (and had to, as a matter of military necessity.) As to the redrawing of Germany's eastern borders after World War II, there were many reasons, too complex to discuss here.
However, this inability to talk about what really happened is very telling about his attitudes regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict. To quote the same interview:
Palestine is an ice-cold reality under the feet of the occupiers. Palestine is homelessness that results from the gestures of politicians. Palestine is a giant body arrested, crushed, and rises up and lives.
In 1948, the formally British Palestine was partitioned into two states: Israel and Palestine. The Arabs of Palestine, alongside the armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon as well as smaller forces from Sudan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Morocco, invaded Israel. The intent was to destroy any Jewish state. The ultimate aims of the Arab protagonists ranged from a reinstitution of dhimma to, judging by statements by Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Chairman of the Arab Higher Committee, recruiter and organizer of Muslim SS Units on behalf of the Nazis, and suspected war criminal, a second genocide. Ultimately, the invasion failed. The conflict resulted in the creation of about 711,000 Palestinian Arab refugees and 900,000 Jewish refugees. No Arab state has offered to repatriate or compensate the Jewish refugees.
The ice-cold reality is that Schumann's identification with the Palestinian cause is so one-sided that one is forced to consider the hypothesis that it is an emotional stand-in for the Silesia he lost as a child.
It is a failure of those who sympathize with the Palestinian cause when they engage in Holocaust denial of either soft core or "hard core" variety, often by crassly appropriating the very iconography of the Holocaust. Those who survived the genocide and mass murder committed by the Soviet Union and its client states, the People's Republic of China, the Khmer Rouge, Imperial Japan, Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalist movement and other such regimes, do not need to appropriate the symbols of the Holocaust in order to educate the world about these histories, but anti-Zionists like the ones encountered and encouraged at the February 12, 2007 symposium are not interested in truth, healing, or reconciliation. They are interested in equating Jews with Nazis. Why?
To quote Hilberg:
Preventive attack, armed resistance, and revenge are almost completely absent in two thousand years of Jewish ghetto history. Instances of violent opposition, which may be found in one or another history book, are atypical and episdoic. The critical period of the 1930's and 1940's is marked by that same absence of physical opposition.
On the other hand, alleviation attempts are typical and instantaneous responses by the Jewish community. Under the heading of alleviation are included petitions, protection payments, ransom arrangements, anticipatory compliance, relief, rescue, salvage, reconstruction-- in short, all those activities which are designed to avert danger, or, in the event that force has already been used, to diminish its effects.
- Hilberg, p. 14.
While these stratagems had ensured the survival of Jewish communities over millennia despite having overwhelming force arrayed against them, they became completely dysfunctional when, as during the Holocaust, the oppressors' aims ceased to be conversion, segregation, humiliation, exploitation, scapegoating, and deportation, but a "final solution" of annihilation.
What outrages many who call themselves "anti-Zionists" is that Israel represents a Jewish people who no longer behave as "ghetto Jews" when threatened with violence. In the imagination of an "anti-Zionist" a "bad Jew" is a Jew willing and capable of defending both himself or herself and the community, while a "good Jew" is a pacified Jew, who will suffer under the yoke of tyranny or, if so commanded, die. This line of thought, in most cases, is probably only held on a sub-conscious level by "anti-Zionists" and serves as the conceit by which they deny being anti-Semitic; They simply do not grasp the anti-Semitic logic underlying their beliefs -- but this is because they have absorbed the status quo of the Christian-European and Islamic-Arabic worlds: That Jews are supposed to be a humiliated and weak people.
So even when Israel exercises force in proportion to an actual threat, the very act of defense is deemed to be Nazi-like, which is a convenient belief for Schumann to hold given his own Silesian denial. Because of this complex of historical denial, psychological denial, mallicious use of Holocaust iconography, and fanning the flames of conflict, I could do nothing else but part ways with an iconoclastic artist who had greatly influenced me.
29 comments:
I have since learned that I offered a too simplistic account of Silesia during World War II. Apparently I misinterpreted some maps.During the period between the two World Wars, Lower Silesia was squarely inside Germany's borders. Upper Silesia was split between Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Germany, until Germany incorporated all of Silesia within its borders through aggression.
On the other hand discussion of the treatment of Jews and Poles in Silesia after 1939 is about as accurate as space would allow.
I will be correcting the article accordingly once I have a firmer grasp of the history.
Corrections have now been made to this post regarding the Warsaw ghetto uprising, Silesia, and the generally agreed upon number of Palestinian refugees after the 1948 War (I had earlier stated it was 750,000-- most scholars agree on the figure on 711,000.)
In your article you write:
"The failure was being outnumbered and outgunned by the Germans, and their Polish and Ukranian allies -- and perhaps in not taking up armed resistance earlier."
Can you give historic sources confirming participation of any Polish units in fighting Warsaw Ghetto Uprising? As far as I know the Polish Blue Police was removed earlier for being too symphatetic to Jews and only a small unit was used to guard outside the wall.
This can be confirmed on Wikipedia and there is much more detail in Polish sources.
See below from Wikipedia.
"The Germans eventually committed an average daily force of 2,054 soldiers and 36 officers, including 821 Waffen SS Panzergrenadier troops (consisting of five SS reserve and training battalions and one SS cavalry reserve and training battalion) and 363 Polish Navy-Blue Policemen who had been ordered by the Germans to cordon the walls of the Ghetto.[6] The other forces were drawn from SS Ordnungspolizei (Orpo) police regiments (battalions from 22rd and 23rd), SS Sicherheitsdienst (SD) security service, one battalion each from two Wehrmacht railroad combat engineers regiments, a battery of Wehrmacht anti-aircraft artillery (and one field gun), a battalion of Ukrainian Trawniki-Männer from the SS Final Solution training camp Trawniki, Lithuanian and Latvian auxiliary policemen (Askaris), and technical emergency corps as well as Polish fire brigade personnel; a number of Gestapo jailers and executioners from Pawiak, under the command of Franz Bürkl, volunteered to hunt for the Jews. Their support weapons included armoured fighting vehicles, combat gasses, flamethrowers, aircraft, tanks and artillery.
Please modify the statement from your webpage accordingly.
Sincerely
Marek Perkowski
The source I relied upon for my statement was Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews. In the edition upon which I relied, he cites "Polish police" and "Polish fire brigade" amongst the forces under German command during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
These two pieces of information are taken from table 48, page 324 of the 1973 Edition of Hilberg's work.
In addition, the article you cited from wikipedia converges with Hilberg's account of events. Polish collaborators played a significant role in the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, even if that role was smaller than that of the Germans (still perhaps contributing as much as 15% of the manpower if we use the numbers you cite.)
The phrase, "the Germans, and their Polish and Ukranian allies" may certainly be taken out of context, however, I also cited assistance given to the ZOB and ZZW by the Home Army, Polish partisans, and the Communist People's Guard, in terms of weapons and manpower.
I believe that the only contention between us is that I describe the 363 Polish Navy-Blue Policemen, and the Polish Fire Brigade as allies of the Germans. I'm not sure what else to call them but allies. They certainly were not uninvolved bystanders, they did not join forces with the partisans, the ZOB, and ZZW, and they were there in an official capacity to aid the German effort. If they were not allied with the Germans, then how do we describe their role in the assault on the Ghetto?
Based on the data captured by Google Analytics, this article was visited on August 14 by somebody hailing from my home town of Washington, D.C. who typed "the annihilation of america by the puppets of zionism" into their search engine. I'm equal parts amused and disturbed.
I think that qualifies as the strangest search that ever found me
Over the past several days I noticed that this blog post was receiving an unusual amount of traffic from cities and towns across Vermont. This evening I discovered this report, "Art Display Draws Criticism" by WCAX reporter, Jack Thurston, detailing criticism of a scheduled exhibition of Independence Paintings led by Rabbi Joshua Chasan.
...based on reviews of when it showed in Boston, Chasan takes issue with the way Schumann uses images of the holocaust to comment on the contemporary violence between Israel and Palestine.
ian - great piece well researched and it certainly makes a case for what local burlington gallerist and critic ric kasini-kadour has asked for of the south end art hop -to "contextualize" schumann's piece. the art hop is an event happening this weekend that is expected to draw 40,000 visitors. ric publishes a monthly gallery guide, and without the HOP knowing much about schumann's content, they had asked ric to preview it, before however, it was even installed or open to the public. his story would be background material - but during the course of his research he learned about the boston controversy (your blog was probably a primary source), and began discussing with the HOP how they might warn viewers of it's strongly subjective content, and/or better still - distance themselves from the piece without censoring it. there is precedence - last year's juror made what i and others considered insulting, elitist comments about the caliber of burlington's art scene, and the festival did in fact post and distribute a boilerplate "we are not responsible for the juror's comments” statement. apparently, discussions between ric and the hop broke down early this week - so ric contacted rabbi josh (a really wonderful soul and community leader respected by all) and published what i considered to be a rather inflammatory article that was emailed to his 1500 subscribers on wednesday. http://www.artmapburlington.com/articles/september2007_5.htm
one of ric’s points is the connection between schumann and estrin with Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel, which he considers to disseminate holocaust denial, in much the same way you describe a “soft core” side of the phenomenon - as perhaps a sort of radical chic party line devoid of critical thinking (am i correct?) drawing superficial, and ignorant, comparisons.
i’m friends with both ric and the art hop organizers, also a prominent vermont art critic and artist - but it was as a friend that i started looking for common ground between the two sides. ric’s headline had been “Art Hop Exhibition Takes on Palestinian/Israeli Conflict --Wades into Anti-Semitism & Holocaust Denial” and i do wish it had been ‘wades into accusations of ...” after all, ric hadn’t actually seen the piece. He’s also a well respected gay activist, who has presented plenty of solid work that fosters dialog, in his own venue - and i am concerned his criticism may open him to the charge of promoting double standards. so i visited with him all afternoon yesterday, and discovered he really does have a reasonably nuanced and just basis for his concerns. indeed he is calling for neither censorship nor curtailing the festival’s current position of noninterference in artistic content.
there is also a magnificently strong, monumental 7 panel anti-bush piece by artist al salzmen appearing this year http://www.sevendaysvt.com/nc/columns/eyewitness-art/2007/the-maleficent-seven.html
and, in sympathy to the hop’s NOT “contextualizing” schumann, i personally think they realize that salzman’s piece would require the same treatment - which would make them look overly cautious about political content considering the fact that vermont is almost universally anti-bush. salzman forcefully speaks out against injustice in the georg grosz tradition. no one has called for curbs on salzman, indeed the paper i write for made it the cover story this week.
last night i tried to get a very reluctant ric and art hop directors into a face to face conversation (their communication has mostly been email) - by taking direct action, and bringing ric to the flagship venue where i expected my art hop friends - mark the chairman of the board, and carlos festival director, were working. in fact we inadvertently crashed an important party they were throwing as a thank you to high rolling benefactors! well...as you know, i am a rather colorful character and perhaps my naiveté, and polite lack of decorum were an interesting diversion... but hopefully i interjected a note of concern that the schism between upscale pine st of the HOP, and low income north street where ric and other quirky venues reside, not get out of hand. specifically saying such a developing schism is very disappointing and it seems to be on the verge of escalating into something very nasty.
as of this morning, art hop is hunkered down into damage control mode, and ric would be happy to be sued for libel if that’s what it takes to get venues take responsibility for what they present. he joked to me "i'm a jew of course i've got good lawyers." but as i told ric - i really think the Hop’s inability to address his concerns isn’t from malicious intent - it’s because they are running around like crazy putting out 100 smaller fires - as all festival producers must do in their final countdown. there are nearly 100 venues participating and 500 artists presenting work this weekend. they feel like presenting the piece without comment is fine - let it generate conversation, controversy. our art viewing audience is going to make up it's own mind. but given my discussions i'll be telling HOP people and friends, (if anyone cares to hear my opinion) that even though ric hadn't seen the piece, his concerns are very valid - he’s an activist whose real issue is responsibility. He’s not a zionist saying israel right or wrong. if you don't mind i'll be printing out your piece to give a few folks as an example of the veracity of shumann's detractor's concerns.
i do think carlos, festival director would like to go over the whole incident after the event, and i hope the rift will be mended and strengthen our community. in hindsight, it’s great that the power of art is generating meaningful discussions- if people can just talk to each other, rather than past each other.
THANKS IAN for your principled stance visa vis bread and puppet. i bet you didn’t know how well your ripples might might foster further critical thinking even in a place as accustomed to progressive ideals as my own vibrant, brilliant burlington, vermont!
I have already posted a note about the current debacle in Burlington and will likely be providing further updates as the story progresses:
http://ianthal.blogspot.com/2007/09/ independence-paintings-in-burlington.html
Blogspot is acting funny with the "a href" tag again.
After reading Ric Kasini Kadour's analysis of the controversy in Burlington, I did some of my own investigating and wrote another follow up blog:
http://ianthal.blogspot.com/2007/09/independence-paintings-in-burlington_08.html
Peter Schumann is a great artist and great men in their genius are known to digress.
The sad thing here is that ordinary men like yourself, just because you
have internet access and by god, a blog, you think that your opinions are actually worth the virtual space it is encoded on.
This has happened before: little men with no fame, and mediocre writing skills need to attach a divisive political issue with a person of note in order to try and damage their good name.
What do you really think you have
accomplished here besides playing a partisan game that most free thinkers are tired of? Do you really think that Schumann's political critiques label him anti-semitic?
You claim to have 'worked' with Bread and Puppet since 2003. I have food in my freezer that is older than that. Perhaps you simply do not possess the consciousness to interpret great art in dangerous times. Perhaps you feel so cornered
by the fears of your collective lot that nothing matters any longer except your right to digress.
Vermont is one of the most progressive places in North America, and yet you must find the one critique that will divide people.
Shame on you. Mediocrity is not that bad, but some people just can't get accustomed to their own
inadequacies and thus empower themselves with loaded words like a loaded gun pointed towards all those who would disagree with their beliefs.
In response to the anonymous poster:
"[You...] with no fame, and mediocre writing skills need to attach a divisive political issue with a person of note in order to try and damage their good name. "
Actually, it was Peter Schumann who attached himself to a divisive political issue. I didn't twist his arm into juxtaposing images of the Warsaw Ghetto with economic conditions on the West Bank.
"Do you really think that Schumann's political critiques label him anti-semitic? "
In this particular instance, yes. Since I do not want anyone to think I use the word "antisemitism" lightly, I chose to be quite methodical in the presentation of my argument. If you think my assessment is unfair, then I invite you to critique my argument and cite the facts that support your critique, instead of relying on a small repetoire of ad hominem clichés attacks.
The fact is that it was rather upsetting to me to have to conclude that Schumann was promoting antisemitism-- as like you, I do consider him a great artist. However, I examined his words and his choice of images and when I put them into the context of docmented history, I had no choice but make my conclusions.
Go ahead: address my argument. Show me the logical fallacies. Show me where I have fabricated evidence.
"Vermont is one of the most progressive places in North America"
Another cliché. We have far stronger civil rights protections here in Massachusetts-- however, we also have
our share of problems, just as you have in Vermont.
The brilliant- the most brilliant artist of this century- Peter Schumann was a refugee during the Holocaust and in 1988, performed a versiona of Khurbn (in collaboration with composer Charlie Morrow and Japanese novelist Makoto Oda)in 1995.
A book of poems about the Holocaust, written by Jerome Rothenburg, the title translation is "TOTAL DESTRUCTION". I heard Rothenburg read this at the Living Theater in NYC. I have been an audience of Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theater for over 20 years, have seen his Museum, that tells stories of The Holocaust. Schumann is much brighter than me as he declines comment. I can only wonder what your motive is?
Peace, dianna
Dianna,
I think I was quite forthcoming in explaining my motives-- if you have questions as to why I wrote the piece, then please re-read.
What I take issue was that Schumann took events from the Holocaust out of their historical context in a manner that misrepresents the complex situation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and draws wrongful comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany. This trivializes both the Holocaust and the real security concerns with which Israelis are confronted on a daily basis, while also downplaying the resposibility of both Palestinian factions and other Arab states in perpetuating the conflict. He has a body of work which demonizes Israel and Israelis-- and in this instance, uses symbolic representations of the Holocaust to do so.
Had an younger, inexperienced, less well-read artist made the same error, it might be understandable. However, we are talking about an artist experienced and intelligent enough to know better.
Schumann, as you note, was a refugee during the same time period in which the Holocaust occured, but interview after interview makes it clear that his family were refugees from bombings by Allied forces and the desicion at the Yalta conference to punish Germany's aggression by giving Silesia to Poland.
While Schumann does not, to my knowledge, himself use the internet, he has responded (evasively, in my opinion) to these concerns in question and answer sessions and in interviews with journalists. I have cited his responses in the above article as well as in the series "Independence Paintings in Burlington, Vermont":
Part 1 • Part 2 • Part 3 • Part 4
Eve Garrard makes some of the same important points you make in your article:
"2) In 1948, there were around 750,000 Palestinian refugees. The current figures are between 4 and 6 million. Genocides, slow or fast, do not normally result in a huge increase in population.
(3) Spreading lies about whether Jews are murderers on a huge scale is what we might regard as a very old-fashioned, even traditional, form of racism.[-]
Whether through ignorance or malice, some of them are telling flagrant and disgusting lies about Israel, lies which express some very familiar anti-Semitic tropes. But the Union's view is that saying that Israel is the root of all evil just can't be construed as anti-Semitic. And saying that Israel is the most inhuman country in the Middle East, and that it's the cause of all the world's troubles, can't be anti-Semitic either. Saying that Israel's supporters have bought America's government can't be anti-Semitic. Saying that Israel is equivalent to the Nazis can't be anti-Semitic. Saying that Israel is committing genocide can't be anti-Semitic. Saying that Israel should be wiped off the world map can't be anti-Semitic. Really, you begin to wonder what the Union would regard as anti-Semitic.
..the pro-boycotters also say (very very frequently) that the charge of anti-Semitism is offensive, but I imagine that Hickey et al might find being falsely charged with committing genocide even more offensive. Why do pro-boycotters like himself not show any concern about the kind of filth, displayed above, which the pro-boycott case attracts? Why do they not do something to dissociate themselves and their case from this kind of support, something more focused than giving general motherhood-and-apple-pie statements against racism? They might, for example, insist that Israel is not committing genocide, that Jewish nationalism is as legitimate as any other form of nationalism, and that there are many far worse rights-violators in the United Nations today. Is it that the leading pro-boycotters also think that Israel is commiting genocide, that alone among the nations Jewish nationalism is illegitimate, that Israel is the worst rights-violator in the world, and the root of all evil? It would be useful to know. If they don't believe this, they should at least take a hard look at the type of supporters and arguments the pro-boycott movement sucks in. (Eve Garrard)
http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2007/07/the-reasons-the.html
For those of you unfamiliar with the issue that Eve Gerrard is discussing, it is the boycott that was proposed by the University and College Union (UCU) and National Union of Journalists (NUJ) in the UK. The UCU abandoned the boycott after it was determined to violate UK civil rights laws.
The point being that the arguments made by the "anti-Zionists" with whom Schumann cavorts and those behind the proposed UCU and NUJ boycotts were similar in content and similarly hypocritical and contra-factual.
I want to quote your post in my blog. It can?
And you et an account on Twitter?
While I appreciate your asking, the problem is, anonymous, that I sort of like to know with whom I am dealing. As a general rule the bloggers who've quoted me, or linked to me, at least identify themselves (even if they use a pseudonym.)
And you haven't even identified your blog.
"The failure was being outnumbered and outgunned by the Germans, and their Polish and Ukranian allies -- and perhaps in not taking up armed resistance earlier."
There is a difference between being one's ally - the case of Ukrainians joining the Nazis - and being put before a choice of working in the Blue Police or death. The policemen were pre-war policemen who were forced to remain in the police. "Allying" oneself with one's enemy assumes free choice and willingness.
You make a valid point, Sylwia.
I was comparing the actions of the Blue Police to any of the Polish resistance groups that participated during the uprising. The Home Army, the Partisans, and People's Guard all took heroic stands, however futile, to relieve the Jews of the Ghetto.
Of course, it is far more complex than "good" Poles fighting "bad" Poles. My main point was to emphasize that Polish and Jewish resistance groups did work together as best as circumstances allowed (Schumann, of course, claimed in his presentation that this did not happen-- and I do think that this is a grave slander against every Pole who fought the Nazis.) So in the process of drawing attention to the "good" Poles, I may have given short shrift to the moral quandry that the officers of the Blue Police found themselves in.
Maybe you are just starting to figure out that these peace-and-love hippies are not who they appear to be.
The problem I have with these sorts of folks is that they are hypocrites of the first order. They are status-seekers, like any other human, only they compound the crime with hypocrisy.
Status-seeking is the need for humans to say "I'm better that you" whether it is through granite counter-tops or a Mercedes sedan.
But for the politically correct, the modus operandi is "I'm better than you because I care about the planet" or "I'm better than you because I care about peace!" or whatever.
It is just smugness. And far too often, young people, such as yourself, find themselves being sucked into someone else's political movement, without figuring out whether it is antithetical to their own - until it is too late.
Take all the kids here in Ithaca, NY who love the Dali Lama. He is a multi-millionaire with houses on four continents and an outspoken homophobe. But the kids dig that far-out Eastern philosophy, and it is "cool" to have a "Free Tibet" sticker on your backpack (which was made in China). Pretty stupid stuff.
What is fascinating about your blog (which I presume is no longer "approved by Peter Schumann" - why did you need his permission in the first place?) is the outright hatred by the peace and love hippies, who cannot tolerate, for one moment, any form of dissent.
Scratch a hippie, find a fascist.
You are leaning to think for yourself, and that sort of thing scares the pants off the far left. You are no longer marching in lock-step with the commune, and you will be shouted down by the mob.
You might want to take the process a little further and examine whether B&P's little "I hate America" shows really offer any valuable social commentary, or more importantly - and realistic alternatives, other than vague ideas about "Peace".
As you note, issues in the Palestinian territory are not really black and white. But the B&P puppet show is....
To the above Anonymous commentator:
I find it rather ironic that you congratulate me by stating that "You are leaning to think for yourself" on one hand, while on the other your screed was filled with demagoguery. It is of little surprise to me that you chose to post anonymously.
As to your question:
[W]hy did you need [Peter Schumann's] permission [to blog about my experiences performing with Bread & Puppet] in the first place?
Simply put: I did not.
I had blogged about these experiences (not on this site) by my own initiative. Over time, I received a great deal of positive feedback and was encouraged by Schumann and others associated with the group to continue documenting my experiences.
It was nice to have his approval at the time, but when I came to disagree with him, his approval no longer mattered to me. Essentially this means I would have written what I had written no matter what.
My position is that while Schumann is an important theatre artist from whom I learned a great deal about theatre, he has taken a number of political positions on any number of issues: I am sympathetic to some of these positions, and others, like his antisemitism, and his Holocaust-Inversion produce a disagreement of such proportions that I have no intention of associating with him or his company again.
As far as the other topics you bring up, I prefer that if you continue posting to the comments thread that you stay on one of the topics discussed in the above essay as other commentators have.
My main problem is your thesis that juxtaposing Warsaw ghetto pictures with the "narrative of how Palestinian non-combatants are affected by Israeli Defense Force's (IDF) counter-terrorist operations" is "trivializing the Holocaust." History is to be learned from. Here is a Howard Zinn article on learning from vs. "respecting" the Holocaust, he says it much better than I could: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Zinn/RespectingHolocaust.html
I doubt you will actually read this, because your intellectual curiosity seems almost nonexistent, but it would be beneficial to your understanding on the difference between fetishizing a terrible event and learning from that event.
I think it is fascinating and artistically valid to see how the connection could be made between the Holocaust and an oppressive Israeli state. The difference in scale of genocide or oppression hardly justifies the oppression. If you want to talk scale, why don't you talk about the number of Israeli vs. Palestinian casualties? Peter doesn't tend to spare anyone, or anyone's feelings, and his art tends to be extremely powerful. I don't think there is ONE person I've ever met, or read, who can justify the oppression of the Palestinian people convincingly, or why the U.S. should be sending foreign aid to said regime (well, that is a no-brainer, the U.S. is an imperialist regime itself, and has a habit of propping up dictators as long as they support our interests). I welcome you to try and make a case for Zionism. Zionism is nationalistic by definition, and intelligent people reject nationalism and think for themselves. The human rights violations of Israel are numerous, and the crimes of the Holocaust hardly justify any action of the Israel military.
People like Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn get labeled as "Anti-Semitic" for supporting the oppressed Palestinian people. Since they are far more intelligent and far less reactionary than the people who tend to use this term, it bounces off them.
This would seem to me to be same reason for Peter not responding to you--you have not given a substantial critique to respond to.
You drew me in. I have worked with Bread and Puppet for a long time and the criticism seems paranoid and baseless.
Nice try, Anonymous.
Schumann has, on more than on occasion, responded indirectly to my criticisms, often by espousing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories such as the fairy tale of Jewish/Israeli/Zionist control of foreign governments and the media. Indeed, if you read my blog, you will notice that over the years there has been an extended back-and-forth between Schumann and myself in The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research, Seven Days, and The Burlington Free Press. I summarized much of this debate in a recent piece in The Clyde Fitch Report.
Please note that at no point do I "make the case for Zionism." The existence of both a Jewish people and a Jewish state are historical facts. It's very interesting that you have a problem with nationalism for Jews, despite the fact that Zionism provides citizenship rights, education, and economic affluence to non-Jewish minorities; you, like Schumann, (and since you mention him, Chomsky) are fairly unconcerned with the explicitly genocidal nationalism of Hamas or Hezbollah.
Thank you for demonstrating one of my main arguments, that comparisons between the Third Reich and Israel serve to amplify animus against the Jewish people and the Jewish state while providing little analytic insight.
Anyway, I am sorry to hear your admission that you are not very well read. It would sharpen your arguments if you were.
"At best, the juxtaposition Schumann presents in "Independence Paintings: Inspired by Four Stories" is what historian Deborah Lipstadt refers to as "soft core Holocaust denial" in that rather than deny that a historical event (like the Holocaust) has occurred, it seeks to rewrite history without concern for actual facts. So Israelis are compared to Nazis and the West Bank is compared to the Warsaw ghetto -- in short, the idea of a phony genocide is promoted. Outrage over a phony genocide diverts from outrage over real genocides like those in Rwanda, Darfur, the former Yugoslavia, and Iraq."
There are numerous implicit and explicit fallacies in this single paragraph alone. As I explained in my blog post, the juxtaposition of the images to the narration is not "holocaust denial" in the slightest--it is the use of art to cause one to think for themselves about the profound interdependency of human conflicts-- how the oppressed can become the oppressor, and why that might happen. If there is a difference in scale--even if there is a huge difference in scale, does that justify the abuses by the Israeli state? The main reason that Peter would put the emphasis on the Palestinian point of view, is that it is the view of the minority, of the oppressed. The United States repeatedly refuses to cut aid to Israel even as we are going into debt, and Netanyahu refuses to consider a two state solution. The United States media obediently shields their eyes as Palestinians die, and hurls charges of anti-semitism at journalists such as Helen Thomas who dare criticize one of our dear allies. Clearly, Schumann's drive to show the point of view of the oppressed, to afflict the comfortable has worked--you, the comfortable have been afflicted. If only more people in the media were "outraged", then change might occur. The funniest part of this was that you could have just talked this out with Peter over good beer, bread and aoli--Peter is hardly a fascist, and he's a warm person.
The most intellectually dishonest part of this paragraph was the remark about deflecting the attention from "real" genocides. If you've been at Bread and Puppet for any length of time, you should know Schumann and the company's depth of criticism for the horrendous Iraq war--the Aghanistan war-- and any events viewed as absurd and unjust. To claim that one part of a small exhibition aimed at bringing awareness to the situation in Palestine causes neglect of genocide in the world is absurd and willfully disingenuous. I think your problem with Schumann's work is that he presents worldviews that make you uncomfortable. You don't have any major moral or aesthetic critiques, and seem to present an unduly paranoid view of Bread and Puppet.
"It's very interesting that you have a problem with nationalism for Jews, despite the fact that Zionism provides citizenship rights, education, and economic affluence to non-Jewish minorities..."
I don't have a problem with nationalism for Jews, I simply have a problem with the way it's been carried out--the mass displacement of indigenous people, the occupation and oppression of them for over half a century, and the way propaganda has been conveniently used to justify slaughter of civilians because the Israeli army either cannot or will not distinguish between civilian targets and enemy combatants. There have been many war crimes committed during the various conflicts that Israel has engaged in--I'll elaborate on those in a later post. In addition, I have a problem with how Israel has repeatedly refused to enter talks regarding a two-state solution, and how the U.S. has simply gone along with Israel quietly, each of those times. I don't blame the Israelis for wanting a homeland-- I mainly blame the British for making a thoughtless decision that they essentially caused the displacement of about 726,000 palestinian Arabs. If you want measurements in "cold statistics," that's a pretty impressive statistic. That's a larger statistic than the number of civilians killed in the Vietnam war. It's about seven times the death toll of the Bosnian Genocide. It's a significantly larger number than the total death toll of the Iraq war. I simply listed some practical implications of the nationalist ideal... And, like I said, I don't support any nationalist ideal--Not America's, not Iran's-- but the leaders of Israel have had chances to negotiate and implement a two-state solution, and they have turned the Palestinians down repeatedly, which I find sick, since the majority of Israeli civilians AND Palestinian civilians are in favor of this solution.
"At best, the juxtaposition Schumann presents in "Independence Paintings: Inspired by Four Stories" is what historian Deborah Lipstadt refers to as "soft core Holocaust denial" in that rather than deny that a historical event (like the Holocaust) has occurred, it seeks to rewrite history without concern for actual facts. So Israelis are compared to Nazis and the West Bank is compared to the Warsaw ghetto -- in short, the idea of a phony genocide is promoted. Outrage over a phony genocide diverts from outrage over real genocides like those in Rwanda, Darfur, the former Yugoslavia, and Iraq."
At best, your comment represents a strenuous disconnect from reality. Holocaust denial is holocaust denial, and Peter Schumann has never engaged in that. When you get into discussing what artistic expression is appropriate because of what implicit conclusions YOU think are in the work, you enter a very nebulous area. When you use Deborah Libstadt's term, are you aware of how she's watered down such a serious accusation in much the same way: using it to describe Jimmy Carter, for God's sake!? Possibly the only president in recent American history that didn't commit war crimes (though that is debatable). You don't seem to take the word seriously enough to use it in proper context. And what I object to the most is the lack of in depth aesthetic critique of the artwork. You are letting your ideology get in the way of any kind of useful or interesting criticism of the piece. Maybe you come to the conclusion that Peter was making a blatant political statement equivocating the humiliation at the checkpoints and the countless problems caused by that wall to the incomparable suffering of those in the Warsaw ghetto, but you come to that conclusion rather quickly, with little critical thinking. I still don't understand how you got from A)The juxtaposition of the image and the narration to B)Peter is attempting "soft core holocaust denial" In my opinion, it's a leap of faith you take, and without it your whole argument falls apart.
Before I respond to your talking points, Walker, two items have come to my attention: first of all, the matter of that lie you tell in your comment at The Clyde Fitch Report about having sent me messages via facebook, when in fact, you apparently didn't even have a facebook account (until this morning apparently, when you started obsessively bombarding my inbox with no less than ten messages while I was sleeping on top of the three you posted above in that same time period.) Opening a discussion with a blatant lie is simply bad form. Secondly, I notice that you're a teenager and that due to your stage of emotional and cognitive development, you're unable to deal with the uncomfortable situation of discovering that your heroes might not be as morally virtuous as they seem (believe me, it doesn't get any less unpleasant as you enter adulthood.) You display a marked tendency to simply name-drop your heroes without awareness of how well they are regarded in their field. The point is that while it's bad form to argue from authority, it's worse when those authorities are widely regarded to be demagogues as opposed to historians whose work is peer-reviewed (which is why I make use of Lipstadt and Hilberg.)
As with many "anti-Zionists" who talk about displacement of indigenous people; you neglect to note that Jews are also indigenous to the area: there have been Jews living in both modern day Israel and the Palestinian territories for thousands of years. There is also the matter of 900,000 (give our take 50 thousand) Jews who lived in Arab speaking countries, who were also displaced by the Arab-Israeli conflict.
As to a two-state solution (which I have supported since before you were born): Israel has supported one since it agreed to the partition plan at its founding, and has made multiple peace offerings to the Palestinian Authority over the last twenty years. Arafat walked away from the 2000 peace deal offered by Ehud Barak, and Abbas walked away from the 2008 deal offered by Olmert. The occupation,including the check-points and the separation wall, are a consequence of there being no other authority in the West Bank willing and able to halt attacks on Israeli citizens-- much as the blockade of Gaza is to prevent the Hamas regime (whose official policy is the extermination of all Jews) from acquiring more weapons. There is a firm legal basis for the check-points; no government is obligated to maintain an open border.
Point is that while there are certainly reasons to criticize Israeli policies, such criticism must be attuned to the facts and the moral ambiguities of the situation: something that Schumann doesn't do here. Schumann compares Israelis to Nazis and Palestinians with Europe's Jews-- both comparisons, of course, are factually incorrect if you are familiar with history-- and it is clear from the reactions that I observed that such comparisons only serve to create hostility-- not respectful dialogue. By contrast, Israeli playwrights like Motti Lerner and Gilad Evron (just to name two) do create theatre that is critical of Israeli policy but is attuned to facts, nuance, and ambiguity.
So yes, I do say that Schumann is trivializing the Holocaust because he is very deliberately manipulating the images to attack the Jewish people as well as the Jewish state; and this is made especially problematic by his use of barely disguised anti-Semitic rhetoric and his presentation of German victimhood in interviews or how he talks about his childhood as if he never lived in Nazi Germany.
As to your tangential reference to Helen Thomas: She is entitled to her perspective but when she says that Jews should "go back... to Poland, Germany..." it's pretty clear that she's talking about the death camps and the ghettos. Even if she was being arguably hyperbolic, there really isn't any credible argument that that wasn't an anti-Semitic statement.
So, Walker, the whole gist of your attack on me is that I observed that some elements of your hero's world view have less-than-savory origins and less-than-savory repercussions. Despite going on at great length, you've not presented a cogent counter-argument, nor have you stayed on topic.
But really, Walker, thirteen-plus rambling messages over twelve hours? Don't you think that you are a little overly obsessed with me? And if you are going to be that obsessed, shouldn't you take a more careful study of my writings?
Walker Storz attempted to post another three comments.I'm not posting them for the simple matter that they just repeat the content of his previous four comments when they aren't simply quotes from Noam Chomsky.
The simple point that he, and my other detractors, refuse to address is that in the above piece, and in subsequent writings on the topic, every statement that I attribute to Peter Schumann either come from conversations for which I was present or from published interviews which any curious reader can read in their entirety if they choose to seek them out.
If one wants to argue that Schumann's views regarding World War II, Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, Jews, and Israel are not problematic from either a political or historical perspective, then one has to take in account Schumann's own statements, as well as the murals that first drew the equation between the Warsaw Ghetto and the West Bank or Schumann's dealings with activist groups that host anti-Semitic and Holocaust denial materials on their website.
If one cannot attend to the evidence then one cannot claim, as Walker Storz has, to have "picked apart my facile arguments."
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