“The Maghrebi culture of hatred drew sustenance from the Nazi legacy.  On November 28, 2002, in a Beaumarchais de Meaux secondary school, a young Jew was beaten up by a North African Arab schoolmate, apparently inspired by a history lesson about the mass murder of the Jews.  At the Turgot School in Paris, nearly a month later, a Jewish student heard her Maghrebi classmate (who had just insulted her during a lesson) brazenly tell the teacher: “Hitler should have finished his work and exterminated you.”  On January 15, 2003, a terrified Jewish student at the Arago School in Paris was surrounded by some thirty young Maghrébins shouting “sale Jude” (dirty Jew), using the German word for Jew!  On May 22, 2003, a Jewish public school teacher in the eighteenth arrondissement of Paris found, on the table of a Muslim student, graffiti describing her as a sale Juive (dirty Jewess) with the macabre racist message: “We will burn you all, you arseholes!”  In another incident, a plastic arts teacher of Jewish origin in a fifth-year class of Maghrebi students was first subjected to an obscene torrent of abuse (“Fuck the Jews!” “Fuck Israel” “Hitler was right, they should all be gassed!,” and so on), and then, at the end oft he lesson, pelted with paper pellets, erasers, pens, and anything else her students could lay their hands on, as she crouched behind her desk for protection.

“Such violence seems, if anything, to be fed by history lessons about the Holocaust.  A third-year student from Algeria in a Lyon suburb told his French teacher, “We like history at the moment because we’re doing Hitler and he killed off many Jews.  So we like him.”

Wistrich, Robert S.  A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad.  Pages 295-296.  New York: Random House, 2010.

Fifth grade’s rough!

When I was in junior high school (8th grade), I sat in class as sundry mates pelted a male substitute teacher — generally among the most financially pressured, least rewarded, and most beleaguered of well educated and qualified good souls — with spitballs, aiming for a boil behind his ears.

We heard he had committed suicide the following week.

That age group, roughly in the same park as that from which Wistrich reports in the above passage, also picks up, explores, and starts to validate its communal and individual identity.

By 9th grade, I suppose, the star struck, musically talented, mathematically inclined, and drug prone or troubled know themselves and their emerging themes at least a little bit.  Who knows what they will keep or discard or how they will make those decisions about themselves in the earliest stages of their own narrative?

Although one might expect much in the way of juvenile behavior and expression to recede with maturation, this knowing that kids say the darndest things, one knows too how well the same give voice to themes permeating their experience of home, media, playground, and street.

Wistrich’s research and political analysis throughout: compelling, factual, straight, and sympathetic, and that not only to Jews but those so egregiously saddled with what the reasoning may interpret primarily as an adverse, indoctrinated, unproductive, politically reprehensible, and poisonous habit of mind.

On the page following the above excerpt, the author notes, “But the victim status of Jews as a result of the Holocaust is doubly infuriating to a significant number of French Muslims, especially those who have been exposed to Salafist and radical preachers.  They are as little inclined to listen empathetically to the story of Jewish persecution in Europe as they are interested in visiting churches and synagogues or hearing about the Crusades” (p. 197).

Perhaps expressions of malignant political narcissism coincide with the depth and spread of emotional damage — damaged self-concept, reduced self-assurance — within populations.

I once told my students at the University of Maryland, “You may look out on the world, but the world cannot look in except by what you do and what you say” (“and I’m here to help you say what you have to say”).

Back than, that was a day-one gift-wrapped incentive for reviewing and studying basic composition; today, the other facet serves: a good listener will hear the heart and intuit its character and integrity, its fears and its strengths, by way of how each voice expresses itself in relation to myriad others.

* * *

The back-of-the-book index accompanying Wistrich’s magnum opus exceeds 60 pages, so I am approaching the middle of a book, about 300 pages in, where most books have reached their conclusions.

Even gifted as a Jew with a rainy Easter Sunday — and happy and busy with family may that be for my Christian friends — I don’t think I’m going to zip through it today, although I could go 14 hours with it, reading like I haven’t since I was myself 14 years old.