July 16, 2010
At the Spanish Synagogue in Prague today, extinction-porn tourists gathered round an unexpected attraction: schoolboys from Israel. “Look – LIVE Jews!!”
As if a sabre-tooth tiger had appeared, or a Pterodactyl, or a Comanche princess.
Cameras clicking in their faces. Children pointed.
Muttering spread throughout the exhibit (because it’s not a shul anymore, it’s a museum with exhibits testifying to the successful eradication of something sort of like a species, apparently): Jews are here!
Noses pressed to the glass, the extinction porn vibrantly lit with energy-saving LED bulbs, the tourists shivvered to a stop at the sound of Hebrew.
Is that their language? Look! They look just like the pictures…except they’re not wearing those stripes!
Requests for the Israeli schoolboys to “dance like the Fiddler,” “speak Yiddish,” and pose in front of the desecrated Torah were unsuccessful.
What is the next step? Hiring costumed “Jews” for holiday-maker photo opportunities?
These fake Jews will do all the things tourists ask of the rest of us, without the added inconvenience of actually being Jewish.
As in: Don’t feel guilty around them, they’re not real live Jews. Go ahead, say hello!
I went to the sad spectacle of Prague’s Jewish ghetto today – I wish I hadn’t even visited. To attend with respect was to be complicit in a disturbing parody: as if instead of lives lost, entertainment was gained.
There seemed an underlying uncertainty about whether we spectators were to actually mourn or tastefully celebrate the successful genocide.
In communities where contemporary anti-semitic and ne0-Nazi threats and violence are too widely tolerated for Jews to live here safely, the only Jews that these governments take the trouble to keep around are the dead ones. An article in today’s Der Spiegel reports the recent bombing/fire attacks on the synagogue in Worms, men beaten in Berlin for speaking Hebrew, and an attack every 10 days on a Jewish cemetery, building or memorial. Sounds troublesome – why protect and provide safety for living Jews, when there’s money to be made from a lively Dead Jew tourist industry?
Come one, come all, see the dead Jews! No live ones here to offend or annoy – no sir! Young Czech boys pointing at yellow stars and laughing. Adults giggling at the awkward scribbles made by about-to-be-gassed children.
This summer, more than a few Czechs and Germans have confided in quiet corners that they have never before met and talked with a “live” Jew before. A dead Jew, they point out, awkwardly, is nothing new, and perhaps mutter about their grandparents being a bit confused, or their village, or their visit to a camp, and how it was all a terrible misunderstanding. The next request is usually, “Speak yiddish! Speak yiddish!” followed commonly by some criticism of Israel’s foreign and domestic policies, and a second request to say something in Yiddish.
Of course, it seems self-evident to point out that it’s a little too late, now, for them to be so delighted by the prospect of speaking Yiddish to a real live Jew.
Jews in Central Europe are like cherries in winter, or a nice bottle of Prosecco in a Stockholm sauna: a special treat on rare occasions when imported from afar.
I’ve been in small towns for the most part, full of people without the cosmopolitan polish of urban correctness – these are raw conversations with people being honest, and vulnerable. And I try to be patient and tolerant, because my other options aren’t really options.
But it’s their raw honesty that’s frightening – and it’s frightening to hear it from these people in this place, because these are the people surrounded by blood ditches and ash piles and mass graves and these things nonetheless come out of their mouths.
Again tonight in rural Czech Republic, walls covered in swastikas. It’s not a joke, what’s happening: signs in Turkish stores in Berlin once again saying “no Jews or dogs” – I was at the Jewish museum here yesterday when a man pointed at the sign – from 1933 – and laughed, in agreement…his wife nudged him in the ribs, and his laughter quieted to a dull rumble.
(And people back in the US say all sorts of homilies about swastikas being everywhere, and racism is everywhere, and genocide occurs all over the world so why am I making a big deal about this particular situation: I say that if you are in a place where 5,000 not-yet-entirely decomposed bodies lie a few feet away in a unmarked grave and 10,000 others are recently discarded ashes poured over the adjacent hillsides and 60 years later the unprosecuted murderers and their descendants are still painting swastikas in jubilation and warning, then I’d be looking at you right now – but I don’t see you.
(So slap a kippot on your head and come feel it out for yourself, or shut the f&ck up.)
In Bavaria, there’s no tangible evidence that the Germans lost the war – certainly the Nazis were more or less victorious in their goal to eradicate European Jewry – there are only a handful here in Prague. The sight of a live Jew is enough to stop traffic.
I remember going to Dallas for the first time as a teenage girl and seeing signs for REAL LIVE GIRLS and immediately becoming frightened: were there so many dead girls in Dallas that simply being a live girl received advertising and neon displays? As torture porn has gained in popularity, it’s now clear that there’s a huge attraction to dead women, too: they look picturesque, and they fully comply.
Like the Lithuanian government’s purging of “actual, live Jews” from positions of authority within the Jewish community, these trends in the ghettos are tangible, and horrifying. The Prague ghetto is a ghost town, an exhibit more than a memorial, a must-see stop on the entertainment trail.
In a city where only a handful of Jews survive and there are no graves for the millions murdered throughout the countryside, the only people left to sell kippot (skullcaps) and menorahs and dreidels for the tourists are the local Czechs, who set up stalls to sell Judaica along the roadsides. Women stopping at the roadside shacks to buy little plastic torah pointer necklaces, where the finger wedges itself in between their breasts, rather than the scrolls of the Torah.
What is extinction excitement? It’s on the faces of the visitors whose eyes turned greedily towards the Israeli boys, as if they were the newest animatronic spectacle. The adult Israelis got grimaces and scowls and criticism of Israel’s foreign policy, but the tourists took snapshots of the boys in kippot and tzitztit standing in front of the Terezin children’s drawings.
Snap snap click click.
Outside, the tour guides had just finished making the tourists laugh at new stories about the Prague Golem – a legendary creature created by Rabbis in a desperate attempt to prevent the Prague mobs from bashing in the heads of the Jewish children.
According to the story I heard today, the Golem met an SS officer during the “occupation” and fell in love.
How romantic, the tour guide called out to the grinning crowds, a Jewish monster falling in love with his executioner!
Then he goosed one of the girls, Ja wohl!
She giggled, and the group moved on towards the subsequent desecrated synagogue.
Prague was – for centuries until not that long ago – one of the most thriving and populous Jewish communities in the world.
And now, when a man walked down the street by the Alte-Neu Synagogue asking are you Jewish? are you Jewish? are you Jewish? to all the men wearing little blue paper kippot, every single one shook his head no.
It was like we were at Disneyland, and instead of mouse ears, they’d all just put on skullcaps until the next ride gets underway.