{"id":6349,"date":"2021-05-26T11:11:28","date_gmt":"2021-05-26T15:11:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/?p=6349"},"modified":"2021-05-26T14:00:49","modified_gmt":"2021-05-26T18:00:49","slug":"distorting-the-holocaust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/distorting-the-holocaust\/","title":{"rendered":"Marjorie Taylor Greene Has Company Distorting the Holocaust"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Marjorie Taylor Greene is at it again, comparing mask mandates in the pandemic to being a Jew in Germany headed off to the gas chambers.\u00a0 I wonder if her dismal understanding of the Holocaust is based on reading bad novels like Kate Breslin’s For Such a Time<\/em> which features a bizarre romance between a Nazi and his Jewish prisoner.\u00a0 Breslin’s attempts to root the book in the Holocaust are clumsy at best and her knowledge of Judaism and Jewish culture is way off.\u00a0 The book’s editor also seems to have been AWOL.<\/p>\n

Examples abound.\u00a0 Why does she use the word Hakenkreuz<\/em> rather than Swastika?\u00a0 The latter word is one most readers would be familiar with.\u00a0 Hakenkreuz<\/em> is a feeble attempt to make the book feel historically accurate.\u00a0 So is using Sturmabteilung<\/em> rather than SA or Brownshirts.\u00a0 Both of those are much more familiar to readers of historical novels or thrillers set in Nazi Germany\u2013and more understandable.<\/p>\n

Why field the obscure word G\u00e4nsebraten <\/em>when “roast goose” would do just as well?\u00a0 Surely anyone picking up this book will understand after the first few pages that it\u2019s set in Germany.\u00a0 Breslin doesn\u2019t need to keep reminding us, as when she substitutes the word Kaffee<\/em> for coffee over half a dozen times. But Kaffee<\/em> isn\u2019t italicized, which it should be since it\u2019s in a foreign language.\u00a0 Page after page, you feel she\u2019s just overdoing it and the publisher is careless and clueless.<\/p>\n

That’s unfortunate, given Breslin\u2019s weak grasp of German and Germany\u2019s history with Jews.\u00a0 Breslin\u2019s heroine is addressed as \u201cJude<\/em>.\u201d\u00a0 That\u2019s the masculine for Jew in German, not the feminine, which is J\u00fcdin.<\/em>\u00a0 But more egregious than that, the Nazis had many terms of abuse for Jews, and simply calling her a Jew is not pejorative enough\u2013given the period.<\/p>\n

Breslin\u2019s understanding of Jewish culture and religion is also grossly off-base.\u00a0 In a glossary at the book\u2019s end, she defines a yarmulke<\/em> as a \u201cprayer cap.\u201d\u00a0 No it isn\u2019t.\u00a0 It\u2019s a skullcap that’s not just worn at prayers by observant Jews.\u00a0 More incorrectly, she thinks a shtetl<\/em> is a \u201csmall town or ghetto.\u201d\u00a0 That\u2019s flat-out wrong.\u00a0 It\u2019s the Yiddish for a small Jewish or heavily Jewish village or town in Eastern Europe\u2013not remotely the same thing as a ghetto.<\/p>\n

If that inaccuracy isn\u2019t enough, the glossary says that Jews in the Holocaust wore a \u201cgold\u201d star to identify \u201ctheir Jewry.\u201d\u00a0 (MTG also thinks the stars are gold).<\/p>\n

Breslin further makes a hash of history when she says that \u201cSarah\u201d was \u201ca term that Nazis used for Jewesses.\u201d\u00a0 That makes it sound like a synonym.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t.\u00a0 What she seems to be fumbling with is the legislation<\/a> in 1938 which forced Jews with \u201cnon-Jewish\u201d names to add \u201cSara\u201d [sic] or \u201cIsrael\u201d as middle names to their identity papers so that there could be no doubt they were Jewish.\u00a0 She and her publisher also seem oblivious to the fact that the word \u201cJewess\u201d isn\u2019t just dated, it\u2019s widely considered offensive.<\/p>\n

All these errors come from an author who claims <\/a>to love the Jewish people. As the Erasure song goes, \u201cWho Needs Love Like That?\u201d<\/p>\n

Lev Raphael is the author of 27 books in many genres including Rosedale in Love<\/em><\/a>, set in New York during The Gilded Age, which is also available as an audio book.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Marjorie Taylor Greene is at it again, comparing mask mandates in the pandemic to being a Jew in Germany headed off to the gas chambers.\u00a0 I wonder if her dismal understanding of the Holocaust is based on reading bad novels like Kate Breslin’s For Such a Time which features a bizarre romance between a Nazi … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[162,2105,321,1011,455,473,474,2398,2397,2399,2396,1015,19,2400,467],"class_list":["post-6349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-anti-semitism","tag-debut-novel","tag-fiction","tag-holocaust","tag-holocaust-fiction","tag-holocaust-novels","tag-holocaust-romance","tag-jew-hatred","tag-jewish-star","tag-majorie-taylor-greene","tag-mtg","tag-nazis","tag-novels","tag-romance","tag-romance-novels"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6349"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6349\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6361,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6349\/revisions\/6361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}