For the life of me I can't quite grasp why the story Herman Rosenblat's wrote is "heartbreaking". Especially given the fact that he was a death camp survivor. This IS important to take into consideration. I don't [or won't] pretend I will ever fully understand why human beings react as they do after experiencing something bursting at the seams with existential horrors day after day. It is something most of us in our most brutal nightmares will ever be able to comprehend.

But who could possibly take seriously anyone who would read the story, find out it was fabricated, and think, "well, that settles it for me, the Holocaust never happened!!"

And then what, millions more will agree?

I'm not a Holocaust survivor. No one I have ever known and loved was. So I would be a fool to suggest that my point of view is one that will [or should] ever be considered "impartially" by those who have. I do not even pretend to fully understand my own reaction here.

But the bristling self-righteous condemnatory fusillades that have been dumped on this man strike me as the sort of apoplectic reaction one would expect if it turned out Rosenblat was actually a Nazi commandant at the camp instead.

This manner of reaction strikes me as projecting outrage in one direction because you can't do anything to stop all the horrors coming at you in so many other directions. Not the horrors of the past...not the horrors of the present. And certainly not the horrors you know will go on long after you are gone.

george walton

Noam, I find points one and two to be valid but I am sorry, point three is weak. I don't know a single person who does not believe the holocaust was not an undeniable fact, I find it fairly ludicrous that the American people, whom you refer to as not being superinformed will somehow in someway be superinformed about this one story. I have never heard of the book, nor do I watch Oprah, and my only source of information has been TNR.

As to the antisemitic elements in the Middle east exploiting this, so what? They have zero credibility with anyone who has an education. The holocaust denial industry has as much credibility as the people who deny the US landed on the moon.

As to the book, the guy has gotten himself caught up in a lie and really can not extricate himself from it.  If his writing style is compelling, the true story of how his elderly brothers did their all to help him survive would have made just as compelling a love story (brotherly love) as there could be, so that is a pity that story will not be told.

First, a preample of sorts....

I remember the year after I was discharged from the Army, I attended a local community college. I was enrolled in a psychology class and one day the instructer [I still remember her name---Vannetta Burkhardt] had us all sitting in a circle, discussing different things we either would or would not do. Could we rob someone? abandon someone? murder someone?

"No" "No" and "no" came the expected responses. When she got to me, however, I told the class that, two years previously, I would have said "no" as well. And that was because I was a devoutly religious conservative then. But in the interim I had spent about ten months as a soldier in and around Song Be, South Vietnam. I saw things and did things there that not only thumped God out of my life, but had me questioning the very foundations of my own sense of self. So, sitting in the classrom back then I assured them they really had no idea what a circumstantial landslide would or could prompt them to do.

But I also learned in turn I had a few things to unearth and discover myself about reacting to "circumstantial landslides".

Back then I thought the year I spent in Vietnam was about the shittiest experience a person could go through. But Ms.Burkhardt had us sitting around facing each other again a couple of weeks later and I was now hearing students who were far more hesitant about saying "no". "Maybe" or "possibly" or "I suppose I could", were interspersed among the "I still don't think I woulds" as well.

What caused this change? It certainly wasn't anything I had said to them. Instead, Ms. Burkhardt had assigned us a book to read. It was Victor Fankl's, "Man's Search For Meaning".

In the first half of the book, Frankl related his own personal day to day experiences in the concentration camps. And from this I learned two searing lessons about what it means to live through a Hell on earth. The first was that what I had gone through in Vietnam was a crack in the sidewalk compared to the grand canyons Frankl and so many others had to endure in the camps. And the second lesson was this: if the embodied Hell was horrific enough all bets are off on just what a human being is capable of doing if his or her humanity is scraped right down to the bone.

Frankl wrote about just how unimaginably vast the existential gap was between the lives some of the prisoners had lead before the war and the dog eat dog survival mode many had devolved into after weeks or months of being treated like Michael Vick treated dogs, of being led aound like dogs on the shortest possible leash.

Noam writes:

I say "heartbreaking" not because I think Rosenblat has perpetrated some evil against all Holocaust survivors (though he certainly hasn't helped their cause), but because a guy who suffered inhuman treatment and emerged more or less intact appears to have trampled all over his hard-earned dignity. I think Rosenblat is much more of a tragic figure than a contemptible one. Though, like you, I don't pretend to understand why he did it. (Or even that I'm 100% confident I wouldn't have done it in his situation. I'd like to think that, but who knows...)

George responds:

Again, I have no way of knowing what was swirling around inside Rosenblat's head before he wrote the book. I don't know what prompted him to write it. Maybe it was just something his mind had concocted to help him deal with what he had gone through. Maybe he thought the story would inspire hope in others....a yearning to believe that in the blackest of nights we are still able to cast even the most flickering of lights on a better world tomorrow. Or maybe he just did it for the recognition, publicity or the money. Again, I don't know. I do know however that he is nearly 80 years old now and he was, in fact, one of those battered souls that Frankl tried to somehow explain to a world where so many had little or no understanding of what it meant to survive in a Nazi pestilence that dehumanizing.

Noam writes:

The people I find contempible arer the non-survivors who stand to profit from the fabricated story, who never bothered to vet it appropriately because, on some level, they didn't want to know if it was true, who egged on this at best fragile (and possibly damaged) guy, and who then, on top of it all, tried to cover their tracks by invoking the horrors *other people* suffered during the Holocaust (that would be Salomon). That's where the outrage comes in.

George responds:

Here I could not possibly agree with you more.

On the other hand, there have already been any number of books written, movies made, plays performed etc. about the Holocaust from any one of a thousand of different vantage points. Enormous profits have been made over the years. And some who took the money to the bank were without a doubt mercenary, unscrupulous, undeserving and venal.

But what we are forced to do here of course is to situate what we believe the motivation and intention behind Herman and Roma Rosenblat's choices were....and the extent to which we believe they either exaggerated or lied about their experience....inside this turbulant, problematic moral continuum that no one is in position to vouchsafe for with anything even approaching an absolute certainty.

I just can't reconcile the gap between what this man is alleged to have done and the intensity of the oppobrium that has been leveled against him because of it.

Noam writes:

Yes, obviously, one embellished or fabricated story does not in itself undercut the millions of true stories out there. But there's clearly a point at which *enough* fabricated stories begin to cast doubt on the larger mass of truth. Particularly if the fabricated stories, by virtue of their more compelling narratives, reach a much wider audience (which is obviously the case here). I'd prefer not to find out where that point is.

George responds:

This is one of those profoundly murky determinations whereby, in my view, the estimation, evaluation and judgment of "the facts" can easily become entangled in such deeply felt emotional and psychological reactions that no amount of untangling is likely to change many minds. Again, it is the degree of Rosenblat's alleged profanity and the degree of his alleged blameworthiness that strikes me as far out of balance.

But I will be the first to suggest this is not something that can be definitively laid out on an existential timeline as though, if we compute the sum of all the variables involved, we arrive at something analogous to a mathematical equation whereby the assessment of the variables accrues to an unambiguous Right determination.

Noam writes:

Also, even if any fair-minded, well-informed observer could look at the occasional fabricated story, weigh it along side the enormous body of true stories, and write it off as an aberration, that's not how these battles play out for the broader public, which is not exactly super-informed. The way these things often play out is that a handful of high-profile cases harden into conventional wisdom for those who don't know much about the subject. (Again, we haven't approached critical mass yet, but why tempt fate?) Worse, these episodes are often exploited pretty effectively by sophisticated segments of the Holocaust-denial industry, particularly in Europe and the Middle East.

George responds:

What I would object to here is the presumption that anyone is privy to the manner in which enormous historical events like this play out before "the broader public". Especially when, as you rightly suggest, this public is often woefully uninformed about something no intelligent and caring human being should ever be uninformed about. But even here, in trying to align the speculations, conjectures and narratives of those who do take the time to educate themselves about the highest and lowest points of human history, there will always be conflicted interpretations that we are incapable of resolving. And this is because the very nature of human value judgments are without a nature at all. And it is within this linguistic oxymoron that we can begin to explore just how ambiguous the relationship often is between words and worlds.

I just do not see the straight lines between words and worlds that some are inflicting on Rosenblat today. Instead, I see them more as bent and broken...as constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed over and over again.

george walton

I don't want to get involved in the above dispute. I find that all posters so far have made valid points. This includes George which is saying a lot.

In any case, here is the latest news on this lamentable fraud:

"Publication of disputed Holocaust memoir canceled"

"NEW YORK (AP) — The publisher of a disputed Holocaust memoir is canceling publication of the book. Berkley Books issued a statement Saturday saying it is canceling publication of "Angel at the Fence" after receiving new information from the agent of author Herman Rosenblat.

The statement did not elaborate.

Rosenblat's book is based on his well-publicized story — embraced by Oprah Winfrey among others — of how he met his future wife, Roma Radzicki, on opposite sides of a barbed-wire fence at a Nazi concentration camp. Scholars have questioned whether such an encounter could have happened.

Berkley says it will demand that Rosenblat and his agent return all money that they have received for the work."

www.google.com/.../ALeqM5gqrb4uMpbj8D7T-XHwX0ylu0Q-0AD95BC9D00

George you tend to write too fucking much.

We don't need your life story in order to understand your views.

Your first post made  a valid point but good god how you go on!

jacksondyer writes:

George you tend to write too fucking much.

We don't need your life story in order to understand your views.

Your first post made a valid point but good god how you go on!

George responds:

Isn't that just another way of saying you read too fucking much?

And if you are so blind as to not see the crucial...the utterly vital...relationship between the life you live and the manner in which you respond to or judge the lives of others, I would most certainly suggest you skip books like Victor Frankl's, "Man's Search For Meaning".

You see, Frankl's contribution to a world where Holocausts no longer exist, revolves around logotheraphy, a psychological narrative of human relationships that is deeply, deeply marbled in the existential parameters of actual human interaction. It is merely another rung higher up on psychotherapuetic ladder folks like Sgmund Freud and Alfred Adler have been building now for decades and decades.

And, unless Tom Cruise and Scientology succeed in debunking it, it's not likely anything more relevant will ever come along to replace it. Unless, of course, people like Dick Cheney have already succeeded in laying the foundation for a Fourth...

WelI, I could elaborate, but in order to spare you the time, I reccomend you start reading the encyclopedia britannica----from A to, say, Z? It's not as comprehensive as my own point of view, of course, but it'll do until you find yours.

george walton

"And if you are so blind as to not see the crucial...the utterly vital...relationship between the life you live and the manner in which you respond to or judge the lives of others, I would most certainly suggest you skip books like Victor Frankl's, "Man's Search For Meaning"."

Thanks, I have already done so.

I am not searching for meaning.  I am already steeped in meaning. Aren't you?

iam, nothing personal, but you really do need to be more concise, your first posting was great, one of your finest and one of the finest but I don't like overly long posts and simply skip them. A couple rule of thumbs, keep your response shorter than the post you are commenting on, stick to the point (as you did in the first). and you don't need to quote entire passages, one line should suffice. I like when talkback is more a conversation and not a monologue. If your post is too long it is simply too time consuming to go over all of the points.

Jackson writes:

I am not searching for meaning. I am already steeped in meaning. Aren't you?

George responds:

What I strive for is to delimit the meaning of words we use to express religious, moral and political values. I try to suggest, in turn, that the meaning we give to value judgments is steeped in historical, cultural and experiential perspectives. Finally, I strive to explore how human ethics, in being derived from ever shifting contingency, chance and change, can be no more than relatively true or false.

For example, it is a fact that Isreal is now engaged in a second day of attacks in the Gaza Strip. Who disputes the meaning those words? Not many. But if we shift the emphasis from the attack itself to judging it morally, there are no words that can be strung together to express the most rational assessment. Let alone the most laudable or praiseworthy.

george walton

Blackton writes:

iam, nothing personal, but you really do need to be more concise, your first posting was great, one of your finest and one of the finest but I don't like overly long posts and simply skip them. A couple rule of thumbs, keep your response shorter than the post you are commenting on, stick to the point (as you did in the first). and you don't need to quote entire passages, one line should suffice. I like when talkback is more a conversation and not a monologue. If your post is too long it is simply too time consuming to go over all of the points.

George responds:

That reminds me of the scene from Amadeus where the King reacts to Mozart's music:

Mozart: So then, you liked it? You really liked it, sire?

The king: Well, of course I did ! It's very good ! Of course, now and then, just now and then. . . . . .it seemed a touch. . . .

Mozart: What do you mean, sire?

The king:  Well, I mean, occasionally, it seems to have. . . . How shall one say. . . ? How shall one say, direktor?

The direkor: Too many notes, Majesty?

The king:   Exactly. Very well put. -Too many notes.

Mozart: l don't understand . There are just as many notes as I required, neither more nor less.

The king: My dear fellow, there are in fact. . . . . .only so many notes the ear can hear in an evening . I think I' m right in saying that, aren't I, court composer?

Salieri: Yes. On the whole, yes, Majesty.

Mozart: This is absurd!

The king: Young man, don't take it too hard . Your work is ingenious. It's quality work. And there are simply too many notes. Just cut a few and it'll be perfect.

Mozart: Which few did you have in mind?

George responds:  "What I strive for is to delimit the meaning of words we use to express religious, moral and political values. I try to suggest, in turn, that the meaning we give to value judgments is steeped in historical, cultural and experiential perspectives."

You didn't invent the wheel, George.

Striving to "delimit the meaning of words" is at least as old as the Vienna school of positivism and probably as old as Maimonides. It may even go back to ancient Athens.

Try reading Plato's Theatetus and you'll see what I mean.

Usually when people talk about the "search for meaning" they don't mean the kind of exercise you mentioned above. They mean the search for LOGOS which is itself a theological quest.

For someone interested in the meaning of words and phrases in an "historical and cultural context" you should know that.

Blackton, you can't win with George. You ask him to be "more concise” and he writes you a long chapter full of chatter telling you why he can't be more concise.

I guess he likes monologues and is begging poster to scroll past his comments.

I have been out of circulation for a few days. I'm just checking in mid trip. This story reminds me of a time, about 5 years ago, when I took a group of colleagues to the Museum of Tolerance in LA. One of the highlights of the group tour was an end of the day session with 2 survivors. The first speaker was a woman who was very moving. The second speaker was man who seemed to embellish his stories - as we often do - with tales of his beating up guards etc. The museum tour guide seemed very uncomfortable and the audience seemed to sense that this old guy was making stuff up and unlike the long list of questions that were asked of the first speaker, with the second guy, folks just got quiet. No one doubted that he was a survivor but there was a palpable sense of disbelief about his over the top ass kicking stories. No one called him on it or tried to embarrass him but I sensed that very few really believed that he beat up so many guards etc.

As I left that session, I asked the Museum docent what she knew about this guy and she said that she knew nothing of him. This was the first time that she has heard his story and she wondered if the Museum would ask her back.

Weird, this post reminded me of this guy. Of course, the old guy could have been telling the truth for all we knew...

What is the Holocaust?

I've been hearing about it and reading about it and watching films and videos about it for much of my 57 years and I'll be damned if I know.

Let me put the Holocaust aside for a moment before I attempt to answer my own question, and relate a few of my observations over the years:

Human beings are, in large part, assholes. At the drop of a hat we'll rip off and kill our own kind to suit our materialistic or psychological or other purposes. We routinely support "leaders" who will do that to others en masse, i.e., commit genocide. Often, however, we're much more subtle about it--no need to be so obtuse, so gauche, as when we commit genocide. To commit genocide is to get much of humanity's panties in a bunch (i.e., the panties of those who are not at the moment committing genocide themselves), and those thus offended might actually--well, once in a great while, anyway--do something to make us stop. Nobody wants that.

Which brings me to "the" Holocaust. I don't need the Holocaust to prove to me to what depths my fellow sentient beings are capable of exploring. Which begs the question: how fucking ignorant is a human being who needs the Holocaust to tell him or her how bad we are? Aren't they paying attention?

What I fear most about the Holocaust is that it gives some of us subconscious permission to look the other way, as perverse as this is, when atrocities happen IN OUR TIME and IN FRONT OF OUR OWN EYES. Oh well, they say, I know all about man's inhumanity to man: I can quote chapter and verse about Treblinka or Warsaw. Pass the butter and don't bother me with your chatter about Rwanda or Darfur (much less Philippine child prostitutes or Chevron's noble work in Nigeria and Ecuador).

The Nazis were the Id on steroids. You can tell me, prove to me even, that you don't take steroids, but I know and you know you still have an Id. Holocaust deniers would have us believe the Holocaust is a myth. One myth I take great truth from is the myth of The Fall in Genesis. All the Holocaust veracity on the planet won't put our Humpty Dumpty souls back together again.

when I was living in really poor parts of Asia the amount of times that small children literally held onto my legs begging and to move you have to shake them off, really, in the end that is what I did, giving them money was useless since they were slaves to people who put them out to do that, after a time I simply could not take it anymore and moved. As to what to do, I try to support those who try to make a difference, but sometimes it is hard to know what is right. For example, do I continue to teach people basic English who trek through Oaxaca on the way to the US? To a lot of people I am aiding and abetting criminals. Lately though it has become a trickle since the economy in the states has collapsed.

iam, don't you think it a bit of hubris to compare yourself to Mozart? Anyway, that dialogue was made up for a movie so you are comparing yourself to a made up Mozart.

jackson writes:

You didn't invent the wheel, George

Striving to "delimit the meaning of words" is at least as old as the Vienna school of positivism and probably as old as Maimonides. It may even go back to ancient Athens.

Try reading Plato's Theatetus and you'll see what I mean.

Usually when people talk about the "search for meaning" they don't mean the kind of exercise you mentioned above. They mean the search for LOGOS which is itself a theological quest.

George responds:

I didn't need to invent the wheel. It was already here when I was born.

And logical positivists were just one in a long string of "ists" that tried to intertwine empiricism and rationalism....knowledge and experience. And who has ever come closer than Immanuel Kant, right? But even Kant was assute enough to commingle observation, perception and cognition with God. How else could he make that existential leap [ethically] to a "categorical imperative"?

No matter how you combine induction and deduction, you can never derive a premise that, when coupled with another, allows you to express a syllogism that differentiates good from bad behavior. A transcendental vantage point is always needed.

As for Plato, he was able to transcend the world we actually live in [morally, politically and philosophically] by embracing a "formal logic". And formal logic is just another way to make the world go away when we get down to the nitty gritty reality of evaluating and judging human behavior. Why else do you suppose his beloved Republic has never seen the light of day? It's still in the cave with his other shadowy illusions.

Which is why I eschew LOGOS in grappling with "the meaning" of something like Herman Rosenblat's angel at the fence. Sure, there are facts we can try to extrude from the historical record. But even if we had access to every single fact there is to be known about his relationship with Roma it wouldn't get us even a single step closer to being able to  judge it esentially. Only God can do that. And I don't believe in God. Especially one who gazed down at the Holocaust week after month after year....and never put an end to it. That is why Harold Kushner wrote his book about a God he concluded could not be both omniscient and omnipotent.

george walton

jackson writes:

Blackton, you can't win with George. You ask him to be "more concise” and he writes you a long chapter full of chatter telling you why he can't be more concise.

I guess he likes monologues and is begging poster to scroll past his comments.

George responds:

You keep missing the point about what it means to be missing the point with respect to moral juggernauts this story is rapidly turning into at TNR. And that point will always be missing sans God.

You simply misconstrue the point I keep making about it by making me the point instead. We have been over and over and over this at The Spine, right?

george walton

jaunty writes:

This [Rosenblat] story reminds me of a time, about 5 years ago, when I took a group of colleagues to the Museum of Tolerance in LA.

George responds:

Museum of Tolerance? That struck me rather ambivalently so I went to their website.

They describe their mission thusly:

"The Museum of Tolerance provides a unique and provocative experience that challenges visitors to become witnesses to history, confront the dynamic of intolerance that is still embedded in society today.Through powerful interactive exhibits, arts and lectures, special events and customized educational programs for youths and adults, the Museum engages visitors' hearts and minds in a journey of discovery to inspire change."

George:

What is the dynamic [historical, cultural, religious, psychological, political, moral] between tolerance and intolerance?

Isn't it profoundly problematic? On the one hand, we speak of the practical necessity of being tolerant of other people's points of view. On the other hand, we recognize that sooner or later we must decide when another's beliefs and behaviors cross the line and become intolerant of our own. Even perhaps an existential threat to our very way of life.

This inherent tension between narratives must be confronted over and over again as we weave in and out of the overlapping and conflicting labyrinths our communities can become.

What makes this all the more equivocal is when conflicting religious chronologies predicate human belief and behavior on the salvation of our very souls. Heaven and Hell is literally said to be at stake here for least tolerant. Add to this the reality of political economy [wealth and power] and tolerance becomes all the more precarious still.

This is why nations like America, Canada, France, Israel, Britain, Germany, Australia etc., in commiting their collective communities to democracy and the rule of law, are so vital to the future of the human race. These republican polities strive to keep intolerant religious and/or secular ideological narratives as separate from the legislative, exectutive and judicial functions of government as possible.

george walton

blackton writes:

iam, don't you think it a bit of hubris to compare yourself to Mozart? Anyway, that dialogue was made up for a movie so you are comparing yourself to a made up Mozart.

george responds

Who is to say when another's point of view is merely the bombast of a braggert? Especially when you have no way of knowing the motivation or intention behind the post?

I recall reading once that Mozart considered a compositon to be superlative only to the extent he was able to bridge the gap between what he wanted to convey emotionally, psychologically, and aesthetically and what he actually achieved upon hearing the music played. That is what motivates me with respect to language.

At the same time I often copy, paste and email my posts in TNR to all of my contacts in the world of philosophy. I do this when I am particularly pleased with the content, inflection and syntax of an argument or when I self-consciously attempt to build a bridge between epistemology, logic, linguistics etc. and materialism, phenomenology, Marxism and existential themes.

Alas, many exchange words out in the world without the foggiest idea of how this relationship evolved over time.

As for the cinematic narrative that is imposed on Mozart, he hasn't complained about it, right? Besides, I have always been far more fascinated with Antonio Salieri's reaction to the music Mozart composed. It is the reaction of a man who loves passionately something he lacks the inherent or nurtured gift to do himself.

The cruelist of fates, in my view.

Yet a fate far more people can relate to. Perhaps that is why F Murray Abraham rather than Tom Hulce was chosen for the academy award.

george walton

Last week, TNR published an article by Gabriel Sherman, whose original reporting revealed that a new

George W., I'm with Blackton and Jackson Dyer about your posts.  I like most all of them, but I think they're a bit off-topic and sometimes repetitive.  As soon as you start mentioning the true meaning of words or some variant thereof, I inevitably gloss over or skip the rest of your post.  I certainly don't find it necessary to re-read your extensive copy and pastes of other comments.

I also noticed your comparing yourself to Mozart, a composer whom it appears we both admire.  No, your posts aren't as good as his music.  You mention you repeat many of your TNR posts on a philosophy forum, I think your posts are really more suited to that forum.

I'm piling on because I generally value your input while at the same time skipping most of your comments.  Normally, I read all the other comments verbatim for the blog posts I do read, often following through with their links.  There are only three talkbackers I skip wholesale - a very occasional poster whose semi-literate comments are devoid of grammar or syntax, a right-wing news aggregator, and someone who exudes all the bitterness of an angry white male living in his mom's basement.  I don't want to have to lump you in with them.

George W., now to respond to the meat of one of your comments - on the related threads a commenter quotes a Romanian dissident who went through the Holocaust and Ceaucescu's prisons - suffering corrupts, suffering with publicity corrupts absolutely.  Unfortunately, yes.  In Survival in Auschwitz Primo Levi says that the best people died quickly, only the most rascally survived.  Tadeusz Borowski's et. al We Were in Auschwitz described survivors' shenanigans.  Alas, both writers ultiimately did themselves in.  In terms or Rosenblat's fabrication, you raise an interesting point that perhaps he's still in survivor mode.

Jaunty, a while ago my mom was a floor guide at the Holocaust Museum in DC.  It was known among the staff that many of the repeat visitors' survival tales kept getting more embellished, like fish stories.  Though they assumed the tales sprung from an imperfect memory, and the survivors weren't commercializing them.

Blackton, I'm with Scheiber about the uninformed American public.  Do not underestimate their ignorance.  My 14-year old niece is reasonably smart, goes to good schools.  My sister and brother-in-law are fairly well-read and informed.  Yet, my niece had barely heard of the Holocaust.  My sister has tried to clue her in a bit.

satyendra,

I think that you hit the nail on the head. Raconteurs, especially those of us of the male species, fall prey to this embellishment tendency. I think that was what was going on with that old guy from the LA museum. As I noted, it was abundantly clear that he was a survivor so that was never in doubt; what disquieted the audience and my group was his embellishments and everyone just seemed to get quiet.

Funny this should come up: yesterday, my family along with close friends had a large group reservation to go the the Museum of Tolerance in LA. Unfortunately, on Saturday, my oldest came down with chicken pox, my youngest started showing the early symptoms of neck ache etc, and my nieces, who have not yet had the pox, are totally freaked. So I called the Museum, told them my tale of holiday woe, and they have allowed us to transfer our reservation for Spring Break, which we have done.

This would have been the first time that my boys had seen the Museum, though when I took my older son to DC last Spring, we did go to the Holocaust Museum in DC. That was a moving and memorable experience. My older boy has started asking us  - he is 16 - about a program called "Birthright". Have any of you heard of it? I have checked it out and it seems almost too good to be true. My wife is Jewish and my boys are being raised as Jews, so I am not entirely up on this program but it appears to be a wonderful opportunity. This spring, he is going to with a group from his school to China and he wants to go to Israel in the fall. If any of you have had experience with Birthright, I would love to hear your impressions.

satendra writes:

George W., I'm with Blackton and Jackson Dyer about your posts. I like most all of them, but I think they're a bit off-topic and sometimes repetitive. As soon as you start mentioning the true meaning of words or some variant thereof, I inevitably gloss over or skip the rest of your post. I certainly don't find it necessary to re-read your extensive copy and pastes of other comments.

George responds:

I see your point and I respect it. And I do not deny that in some respects I am guilty as charged.

But, again, while the comments I post here are genuinely derived from my reaction to the posts of others at TNR, the arc of my rebuttals goes beyond that. My forte in cyberspace is philosophy in general and "ordinary language philosophy" in particular.

So, yes, I often copy and paste my posts here and email them to my [virtual] friends at various philosophy sites.

But to understand my motivation for doing this you would have to understand the manner in which many philosophers refuse to ground their tautologies in the substantive interactions of flesh and bone human beings; and, in turn, the manner in many which political pundits are hopelessly benighted regarding the relevancy of philosophical tools like epistemology, logic, phenomenology, naturalism, materialism, scientism and [atheistic/theistic] existentialism.

You simply cannot speak intelligently abour human relationships [in my opinion] unless you are willing to begin your explorations in both approaches.

And it bothers me not at all when folks "pile on" in order to nudge me in a direction they feel is more germane here. One thing I am not lacking in is confidence in my own mastery of the relationship between words and worlds.

george walton

satyendra writes

George W., now to respond to the meat of one of your comments - on the related threads a commenter quotes a Romanian dissident who went through the Holocaust and Ceaucescu's prisons - suffering corrupts, suffering with publicity corrupts absolutely. Unfortunately, yes. In Survival in Auschwitz Primo Levi says that the best people died quickly, only the most rascally survived. Tadeusz Borowski's et. al We Were in Auschwitz described survivors' shenanigans. Alas, both writers ultiimately did themselves in. In terms or Rosenblat's fabrication, you raise an interesting point that perhaps he's still in survivor mode.

George responds:

What often confounds the most introspective among us is puzzling out whether Levi's conjecture above is the cart before the horse or the horse before the cart.

In other words, is the Holocaust largely a reflection of human nature or was human nature twisted groutesquely out of shape by the Holocaust?

Just how "banal" is the evil....the butcher shop, the bloodbath....that human history cascades down upon us over and over and over again?

We are hoping it is the latter, of course, but we fear [or at least some do] that Levi might have fallen to his death because he could not shake a primal resignation it is the former instead. As Elie Wiesel speculated at the time, "Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years earlier."

We can never forget because it is always just a matter of time before the next human slaughterhouse forces us to remember that the Holocaust may well have been just be a matter of degree and not of kind.

george walton

George, could you at least stop quoting the parts of posts or comments you're responding to in full? There's no need. We've all read the same post and the same comments, and we're smart enough fellows to gather what you're responding to without you quoting the whole darned thing over again. Just a line at most should suffice, if any at all.

(Also, comparing yourself with Mozart is a bit much. Mozart was one of those rare geniuses who didn't need any invocation to cut down on his excess. The other 99,999% of us, and that includes you as well as me, can all well use the editing tips.)

Is this George Walton the GWalton who was friends with Jack Kennedy/ If so, he must be over 90 years old!  

If this is the 90 year old friend of Jack George Walton, you rock on Old Dude with your brick sized posts. If you aren't that George Walton, well, rock on too buddy. You're long winded and a bit of an intellectual show off but really, I don't mind. If I get tired reading your stuff, I just skip over it.

jobeek2 said:

George, could you at least

george responds:

Like this?

gw

jaunty writes:

You're long winded and a bit of an intellectual show off but really, I don't mind. If I get tired reading your stuff, I just skip over it.

George responds:

Thank god!! I have finally found someone in here who, when tired of reading prolix loquacities, thinks to himself, "why don't I just skip this verbosity and move on?"

In the philosophy venues I frequent volubility is the norm. Indeed, many become quite irritable if you leave something out. It is construed to be taking another's point of view out of context.

george walton

Noam

Here is the media baCkstory: straight from the horse's mouth:

QUOTE: “Over at The New Republic blog The Plank, the magazine’s editors offer a helpful recap of  *how*  their reporter successfully exposed a Holocaust memoir as a hoax.”

It’s true, Gabe Sherman did a terrific reporting job exposing how that hoax memoir came to be. He deserves a Pulitzer award for that kind reportage, really, because he took material supplied to him by several sources and went even deeper and found amazing quotes from people directly involved in the backstory, inforamtion that nobody—nobody—ever knew for certain before—and certainly never said in public before.

But there is one thing you should know, Sara, and I am sure Gabe won’t mind me telling tales out of school. Gabe never heard of Herman or his cockamamie backstory before a reporter who had been investigating the matter for 2 months, based in Taiwan, go figure, called Gabe up at midnight and badgered, pestered and cajoled him for three days and nights into agreeing to take on this “assignment”.

What the TNR does not mention, not anywhere, I guess it is natural and for promotioanl reasons of their own, is that their TNR reporter had no idea about this “story” before he was contacted by me. And at first, for the first two days of my barrage of emails and phone calls, Gabe resisted, said he was busy with other things, and besides, how did i know all these things—I knew, Sara, I knew, but according to my promises to my sources deep with the investigation, I could not go public with what I knew, and that’s okay, from here in Taiwan, I did not have a platform to publish what I knew anwyays.

So I spent 8 weeks trying to find a reporter in the USA who would listen to me, and believe me, and act. Gabe, who didn’t know me from Adam, at first was skeptical of this unknown blogger in far away Taiwan calling him at all times of the day, and badgering his email box with over 5o emails of names, tips, addresses, phone numbers, the whole megillah, and at one point, Gabe—and I love the guy, he is salt of the Earth and an ace reporter and he did the perfect job, nobody else in US journalism could do what he did on this story, and I deeply respect and admire him—Gabe at one point in our phone chats told me to stop bugging him, stop calling him, stiop emailing him, and to go away.

Go away? No way. Not when I had the goods on Herman, and took it on as my self appointed mission to try to stop that book from coming out before it was published. Against the advice of those who were advising me in the ongoing investigation group.

They told me to “chill” and “give it a rest, Danny” and “we aren’t ready yet to go to the media, our reserach wont’ be ready until the end of January”—and i understood their concerns, but i knew instinctively, Ben that if the book was published, once it was out of the warehouse and into the bookstores, the damage would be done, the book would be very hard to stop, what with all the coming Oprah PR and the book tours and all the AP and Reuters stories about this lovely couple, so I acted alone, on my own heartfelt instinct, that the time to act was ASAP.

I didn’t know Gabe from Adam either. Never heard of him before. Of course, I have been out of the USA for 20 years or so, so I am not familiar with the new names in NYC and DC journalism, so I didn’t know him.

How did I find him? Good story, Sara, and glad you asked. ...[SMILE]

I was carrying out my investigation here in Taiwan of the Herman hoax case using the internet and the blogosphere as my tools, plus my hunch from the get go that the BLIND DATE part of the book was impossible, not in this Universe, but a sweet touch, but completley off the wall, so i was googling every search window I could find about earlier hoaxes.

And i found one item about a book by a child soldier nbamed Ishamel Beah, and there was a big to do about this in Slate magaizne, writteny by, are you ready?—drum roll—Gabriel Sherman!

I think YOU were quoted in that story, too, Sara. Small world, getting smaller every day.

So i emailed him in a jiffy, found his website and emailed him, and he wrote back in Internet time, “Danny, sounds interesting, Call me or I will call you.”

Well, of course, he didn’t call me. Nobody ever calls me back. Story of my life. So I called him.... the very next day, and dished. I told him everything I knew in a one hour phoen call,—My dime my time. He said “all this is very interesting, Danny, but how do you know? It’s some people’s word against Herman’s word, and who are you? Why are you so obessed with this story?”

So we said goodbye on the phone, I told him I would email him more damning news tip I had in my files, from top historians involved in the case, and he said, Okay, keep me informed.

I thought I had landed my fish, my big fish. The fish i needed to land the final punch somewhere in thte USa media landscape.

The top reporters at the NY Times and your own PW would not answer my emails at all at first and then eventaully the Times reporters just said , Yeah, we know about this issue, but we are mulling it over. “Mulling it over”? It will take too long to mull it over. We need to act now. Before the book is out. stop it in its tracks. PW never answered at all. Shame on PW! Fire them all! Kidding.

So I kept up my badgering campagn with dear ol’ Gabe, who must be all of 30, and here I am , all of 60, oi, and I never gave up. I knew he was the guy to do this story, to pull the rabbit out of the hat, so to speak, to lift the lid on this Pandora’s  Box of fabircations by a sweet old man. I like Herman. I never had any animostiy against him. I just wanted to epose the blind date thing.

That was my sticking point. that is was got me invovled in this, when i read a newspaper acocunt from the AP on October 12 about Herman and the applkes and Roma and the blind date. Impossible, i said. I called the AP reporter in Miami who wrote the AP story and said Matt, this could not be true.  

He said,”Danny,  it’s what they told me. Who are we to question their story? Until a smoking gun can be found, the media cannot report what you are saying, Danny. Sorry.”

So i started looking for the smoking gun. I found many. Not on my own. I am no historian, no forensic expert, i am a nobody. Just a lone blogger with a mission. So ....I alerted the media in the USa all of October and November and early December. The entire USa media force, including PW, ignored my emails and phone calls. The Miami Herald, too. I spoke the features editor there, he said, "thanks for calling, interesting news tips: but he never acted.. Just sat on this story..

anyways, back to gushing narrative of this story: I knew by Dec, 19 , i had to find a reporter , soon, do or die moment, so i kept bugging Gabe until he finally said, “Look, Danny, you sound like a nice and sane man, but please, enough of this calling me and emailing me already...go away. leave me alone. I will make some calls, like you suggested, using your leads and contacts, and let’s see if there is a story here.”

The rest is history, cultural history of our times, sad tragic Holocaust history, too, and GAbe made it happen. The man!

So that’s the backstory of the backstory, and if you don’t beleive a word I typed, because most people never believe a word I say — I don’t know why, I am always right —.kidding -- in fact, i am often wrong -- ....ask Gabe!.

He’s on CNN and NPR and Canada TV now and it;s great. More power to him. He helped expose a very sad and tragic episode in Jewish life. And in American life and Oprah life. And in the publishing world. And in Holocaust history.

I salute his groundbreaking reportage, and consider him my brother for life! OKAY, enough of this tale told out of school.—Danny, checking in from a small village in southern Taiwan where nobody ever heard of Rosenblat and has no idea what I am doing in the Internet cafe every day, moving on to other things now......

How’s   that for an interesting story,Sara, typed in a ligtning speed,, typos and all, mis-spellings and all?