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In Case You Forgot To Remember

Some post-Yom HaShoah reading

by
Marc Tracy
May 02, 2011
The railroad track leading to Birkenau.(Wikipedia)
The railroad track leading to Birkenau.(Wikipedia)

Yesterday was the day we learned Osama bin Laden was killed. It was also the 66th anniversary of the day the world learned Adolph Hitler was dead and anniversaries of, um, several other things. And it was also Yom HaShoah—the day when we commemorate the Holocaust. Here is some reading to help you remember if you lagged yesterday:

• More than one-fourth of the more than 200,000 survivors in Israel live below the poverty line. [Ynet]

• Edward Rothstein has a brilliant essay, on the occasion of a visit to Los Angeles’s Museum of Tolerance, on the intellectual flimsiness of connecting the Holocaust to other “issues,” or even to other genocides. [NYT]

• In a speech not apparently timed to Yom HaShoah, on Saturday Rep. Michele Bachmann, a putative Republican presidential candidate, compared America’s debt crisis to the Holocaust (though she disclaimed that her analogy was, in fact, “no analogy,” so, phew!). [JTA]

•Moshe Landau, a former president of the Israeli Supreme Court who presided over the Eichmann Trial, died, fittingly, on Sunday, at 99. [JPost]

• In a speech at Yad Vashem, Prime Minister Netanyahu argued that not enough of the rest of the world has fully learned the lessons of the Holocaust. [JPost]

• Friend-of-The-Scroll Rabbi Andy Bachman found a swastika keyed into his car parked in Park Slope, Brooklyn; he reflects on it. [Water Over Rocks]

• John Demjanjuk, 91, will likely be the last living person held accountable for Holocaust-related crimes. [JPost]

• All about “Gathering the Fragments,” a Yad Vashem initiative to collect survivors’ artifacts. [AP/WP]

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.