Comment on the Belmont Club: "Memory and Survival"

What is the group whose protection can lay claim to an individual’s sacrifice? All change happens at an interface, so defining just where those boundaries are is always the bedrock problem.

In a prior post I began to explore how different draw competing boundaries around something as basic as the Constitution, result in different loyalties. On the last thread I noted how American Jews, one among many immigrant groups, can be divided by their history into smaller groups with differing patters of political, exploitative or altruistic behavior.

In 2008 the grandchildren of assimilated Liberal American Jews went to Florida to urge their elders to vote for Obama. In 2010 Rahm Emanuel is in Jerusalem for his son’s bar mitzvah, and is subject to public castigation. The reckless and feckless descendants of the survivors of the Shoah did not rest content with transferring their loyalty from the shtetl to America, a thing worthy of their altruism. They further offered their loyalty to an aspirational international order. It is secular or Islamic in content, universal or Gaia base in scope, Socialist in origin, and Totalitarian or genocidal in its consequences.

What will the bright sincere children who traveled from Brandeis University to Florida do when the dead cry out to them? Perhaps they expect that Jennifer Love Hewitt will come to them as The Ghost Whisperer and make the problem go away. After all the advertising says, “Love is kind.”