Attacking dead Jews

P. David Hornik on the rise of anti-Semitism, the desecration of Jewish cemeteries and Holocaust denial.

The attack on dead Jews occurs on the largest scale, of course, regarding the Holocaust—as most recently manifest in the Iranian government’s simultaneous sponsoring of a Holocaust-denial conference and a Holocaust-cartoon contest. For contrast’s sake, today, as far as I know, there is no effort to deny that the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s happened or to humiliate the memory of the victims. The Jewish genocide, however, continues to evoke a strange mix of feelings in the anti-Semite in which aggression at live Jews for supposedly deriving too much political, economic, and moral power from the event coexists with aggression at the victims for their innocent status, or perhaps just for not being dead enough.